Language, evolution, etc.

[Lily]

 
Thank you ! Do other RW share this laudable opinion ?

  where do I sign? Tinto Brass used to be one of my favorites moviemakers 

[SANDRO43]

the usual methods involve learning how pottery evolved and was distributed as populations dispersed regionwide.

Quite so, also due to a couple of facts: pottery is a hard material that resists aging/weather quite well (as opposed to other, more informative, organic materials like written fabric/pelts/etc.), and garbage disposal was not a sensitive issue then, therefore ancient people just tossed broken cups and plates not too far away from their dwellings, to the subsequent delight of archeologists .

I wonder how close modern day French is to the language of those people we read about in Cesar's Gaul.

Not very much, except for about 30% of their vocabulary and a few distinctive phonemes, like their nasal Us. Their Rs are the same as the Germans', and were probably brought over by the Franks, who also gave the country its current name.

We know that about the same time, English and German were the same language. Isn't it interesting to see how the two have evolved so separately and distinctly as they were divided over 2,500 years and a few thousand miles, and how much influence did the later occupation of the British Isles by the Romans have on the evolution of the modern English language?

Caesar's not totally successful attempts to conquer Britannia and subdue its Celtic populations (arrived there presumably around the VII century BC) were made in 55-54 BC, and ended with Cassivellaunus giving hostages and agreeing to pay an annual tribute. The island finally became (mostly) a Roman province almost a hundred years later following Aulus Plautius's campaign  in 43 AD during the reign of Claudius. The Germanic Anglo-Saxons arrived there in the V century, in the period of the fall of the Roman Empire (Rome having withdrawn all its legions for more pressing engagements elsewhere).

The Latin influence on English comes after the Norman conquest in 1066, which also accounts for the discrepancies between written English and its pronunciation. The Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate, and when the Normans eventually set down to the task of writing down that "barbaric" language, they were obviously influenced by their Norman French habits. Hence the resulting mess.

The influenced area is the English vocabulary, two-tiered as I mentioned some time ago in another post (which I can no longer find ). I may elaborate further later on, in case of interest.

[SANDRO43]

where do I sign? Tinto Brass used to be one of my favorites moviemakers 

Hmm, this opens up interesting new avenues of inquiry . Non-Italian sex tourists beware, you're wasting your time with RW, they made their minds up otherwise .

[Lily]

Hmm, this opens up interesting new avenues of inquiry . Non-Italian sex tourists beware, you're wasting your time with RW, they made their minds up otherwise .

afraid the conclusion is not quite correct 

On Italian land, with Italian temperament, using Italian actors, Tinto Brass made very exciting films to watch, yes.. .but some prefer watching them in company of a non-Italian man in flesh and blood 

[Daveman]

This thread took on a  life of its own, didn't it?

Okay, Sandro, (and JB if you are familiar with some Native American languages)..

What I am thinking about here is something like phonetic 'breadcrumbs'.  Of course there will be quite a bit of shaking and stirring from conquests, slave importation, cultural assimilations, empire dominance, etc..

If we take the most basic of language, maybe not reducing down to the level of OWWWW but close (though, in America at least, we can string together some combinations that will melt a sailor's ears and continue for as long as the pain lasts).  For example, the words which would have meaning to the most primitive peoples...  I, you, he, she, fire, food, die/death, sun, moon, hunt, skin, cold, warm, rain, you get the idea... are there regional similarities for the basic everyday words..  another example of what I'm getting at, Spanish 'Yo', Russian 'Ya', and English 'I' are all phonetically similar (I simply being pronounced backwards in a sense)...

I also thought that many of the old and middle English words had a very Scandinavian sound to them (though probably completely incorrect there) which would seem to come from migrations from those areas...

If you think about language histories.. the most basic words, which would seem most likely to be the oldest, what correlations do you see phonetically in geographical regions?

Maybe there's no connecting that way at all. There is a vast difference in pronunciation between the west, south, midwest, northeast, with distinct dialects within the NE, (e.g. New York vs Boston) And add on to that the difference in pronunciation between different dialects in the United Kingdom, and Australia, perhaps regional phonetic sound patterns really can't leave breadcrumbs at all.

Thoughts?

[Ste]

Working with Indian guys I'm surprised how similar some Hindi words are to Russian and not English:

Hindi - Russian - English

So - sto - thousand

patch - pyat - five

Ok - only two so far......

[SANDRO43]

Working with Indian guys I'm surprised how similar some Hindi words are to Russian and not English

Ste, that sort of similarities was what prompted linguists since the XVII century (sorry you're a bit late ) to come up with the idea of an earlier "mother" language, i.e. Indo-European.

Its descendants were broken into various groups & families (with no unanimous agreement on what belonged to which, as is often the case in human-related "sciences"). One of the various subdivisions proposed was that between the Centum and Satem branches (based on how 100 was expressed in the respective vocabularies).

As you can see from the map, Slavic and Indo-Aryan are both lumped into the second branch (red area), which could account for their being linguistically closer.

[SANDRO43]

This thread took on a life of its own, didn't it?

Glad it did, I like digressing from goal-oriented conversations ("How to ...?") .

If we take the most basic of language, maybe not reducing down to the level of OWWWW but close (though, in America at least, we can string together some combinations that will melt a sailor's ears and continue for as long as the pain lasts). For example, the words which would have meaning to the most primitive peoples... I, you, he, she, fire, food, die/death, sun, moon, hunt, skin, cold, warm, rain, you get the idea... are there regional similarities for the basic everyday words.. another example of what I'm getting at, Spanish 'Yo', Russian 'Ya', and English 'I' are all phonetically similar (I simply being pronounced backwards in a sense)...

Yes and no, I mean it's similarities and dissimilarities in basic words what fuels the taxonomic fire in comparative linguistics, i.e. the debates on where to place a given language in our hazy genealogical tree. 

I also thought that many of the old and middle English words had a very Scandinavian sound to them (though probably completely incorrect there) which would seem to come from migrations from those areas...

Again yes (on similarities), and no (on origin). Both English and Scandinavian languages share a common Germanic heritage (see maps).

If you think about language histories.. the most basic words, which would seem most likely to be the oldest, what correlations do you see phonetically in geographical regions?

See above.

Maybe there's no connecting that way at all. There is a vast difference in pronunciation between the west, south, midwest, northeast, with distinct dialects within the NE, (e.g. New York vs Boston) And add on to that the difference in pronunciation between different dialects in the United Kingdom, and Australia, perhaps regional phonetic sound patterns really can't leave breadcrumbs at all.

Dialects and local accents are variations of the SAME language, with possible influences from neighbouring areas speaking a DIFFERENT language, as often evidenced in border areas.

Whenever a community has no intense intercourse (linguistically speaking ) with their neighbours, its language often starts to vary gradually from the "mainstream" version (if there ever was a homogeneous one), and this can happen on a rather minute scale. "My Fair Lady" may be a London example, and my father used to tell me that, in his youth, he could tell from what area of Milan another fellow Milanese was, based on his slightly different dialect.

On the other hand, a completely cut-off community may cling tenaciously to its original language for socio-political or other reasons, as happened with Afrikaans which sounds very "old" to modern Dutchmen (correct, Bruno ?).

One of the fascinations of languages is that it is a mixed and unruly field, unsurprisingly much like the creatures that use them .

[Lily]

Working with Indian guys I'm surprised how similar some Hindi words are to Russian and not English:

Hindi - Russian - English

So - sto - thousand

patch - pyat - five

Ok - only two so far......

Sanskrit was the common sourse for those languages.

[SANDRO43]

Sanskrit was the common sourse for those languages.

Sanskrit for Hindustani only, Lily (see previous posts/maps).

[jb]

Daveman,

The single greatest impact on language developement usage, over time, and is economonics and trade.  There is no easier way to corrupt a pure language than to throw into the mix traders from from a distant land.  In fact, most language archeaologist I've spoken with believe firmly that this is how language was transported over distance.  Usually it is the trader with the most desirable goods who's language comes out as dominant.  Buyers will seek him out and attempt to communicate with him more so than someone with poorer goods.  In the old trade routes the prime trade goods were things like good horses, slaves, and sturdy camels, secondary items of importance were iron goods, cloth, and spice.  Contrary to the Hollywood version, trinkets and baubles were probably low on the priority list.

Military conquest and lengthly occupation aside, the relative simplicity or complexity of a language might also play a part in how easy it is to spread. 

[SANDRO43]

The single greatest impact on language developement usage, over time, and is economonics and trade. There is no easier way to corrupt a pure language than to throw into the mix traders from from a distant land. In fact, most language archeaologist I've spoken with believe firmly that this is how language was transported over distance.

JB, I never heard of cases when a traders' language SUPPLANTED another language entirely, maybe your friends can provide some examples.

What usually happens is one or more of the following:

1. A language acquires new words for the new "technique" (see previous posts), e.g. the derivatives in all languages of banco, the bench used by Florentine open-air "bankers".

2. A MIXED language (lingua franca, pidgin, etc.) emerges gradually to deal with the specific situation, if continuing.

3. The traders' language is used as an ALTERNATIVE to, but not a total REPLACEMENT for, the native language, i.e. bilinguism (e.g. Aramaic in the Middle East, Venetian in the Mediterranean, etc.).
   
IMO, transporting a language (in its entirety, not just bits of it) over distance requires much more than just trade, i.e. settlement, colonisation : a language lives in a given area only when you have a permanent community of people speaking it, the larger/longer the better.

If Great Britain had sent traders rather than settlers to your shores, Lakota, Navajo, etc. would be much more in evidence than English today .

[Ste]

Sanskrit was the common sourse for those languages.

And 'sto' is a hundred not a thousand in Russian - how did I (and Lily) miss that one!

[Shadow]

German is not the only language to assemble different words in to one, the Duth are masters of it as well.

In my studies of languages I have found a lot of striking similarities.
Latin is the base of Italian, French, Spanish and Portugese, all of which are understandable from this one source. 
German is related to Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, and somewhat to English. However while Dutch can et some understading of Danish and Swedish without school English would be difficult.

Turkish is made of 50% Latin and 50% Arabic influences. Russian is in many words also related to Latin, while in grammar some of the Arabic influences show as well.

In Hindi I have found a lot of Latin words. My first experience was when a man told in Hindi to his wife to go to the kitchen, and I understood every word because of my Latin classes.. 

[SANDRO43]

Latin is the base of Italian, French, Spanish and Portugese, all of which are understandable from this one source. 
German is related to Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, and somewhat to English.

Which is why they were grouped into the same "families" (Latin and Germanic).

Turkish is made of 50% Latin and 50% Arabic influences.

I know very little of Turkish, however I have some doubts about such a major Latin component, since it belongs to the non-Indo-European Altaic family from Asia (much debated about some supposed members like Japanese, Ainu & Korean). Structurally, it is an agglutinative language like those of the Ugro-Finnish group, i.e. its sentences are formed using "affixes" rather than "prefixes", e.g. houses=evler, in the houses=evlerda. Any Arabic component has obviously a religious origin.

Russian is in many words also related to Latin, while in grammar some of the Arabic influences show as well.

Could you expand on this Arabic influence on Russian grammar, considering that there were very scarce contacts between them ? As many other Semitic languages, Arabic has a preferred V-S-O (Verb-Subject-Object) word order in its sentences, while Russian uses the standard S-V-O sequence of Indo-European languages.

[jb]

while Russian uses the standard S-V-O sequence of Indo-European languages.

Huh??  I detect no such grammar rule in Russian.

[Ste]

Huh??  I detect no such grammar rule in Russian.

I thought SVO was an airport in Moscow......

Anyway - I thought Russian was rather free of word order, enabling nuances or meaning making the language so rich, as in:


Десяать минут

Минут десять

Different word order, different meaning.

But I think there is sometimes a kind of rule to keep the important bit of info at the end, to sort of keep you hanging and guessing until the last moment. Sort of like Russian Women really.....

[jb]

I was under the impression, probably mistakenly so, that because Russian was not burdened with the articles of speech or with conjunctive words, the rules were rather loose as to where you ordered the words...  The principal reason I, as an English speaker, had so much trouble with learning Russian, was that I was looking for specific sentence structure that wasn't there.  I found that aspect very disconcerting.

[SANDRO43]

Huh??  I detect no such grammar rule in Russian.

JB, not so much a grammar RULE maybe, rather USAGE, i.e. the habitual construction of main sentences (rules are mostly post-facto deductions made by grammarians having to write a grammar book ).

IIRC, you usually say:
- "я пью пиво"
I don't think that variants like:
- "пью пиво я"
- "пью я пиво"
- "пиво я пью"
- "пиво пью я"
could be considered equally acceptable in normal, day-to-day speech/writing. Or am I mistaken ?

I was under the impression, probably mistakenly so, that because Russian was not burdened with the articles of speech or with conjunctive words, the rules were rather loose as to where you ordered the words...

My knowledge of Russian is too limited to comment on that. If indeed so, I could draw a parallel with Latin and surmise that this would be mainly attributable to its being a highly inflected language (declensions, etc.). I still remember when translating from Latin into Italian at school (say, Cicero), first I had to scan the whole paragraph searching for the main verb, once I found that I could then hunt for its subject, then the object, etc. In other words, a syntactic jigsaw puzzle. Although I still wonder whether Romans actually SPOKE like Cicero wrote (unfortunately, no tapes or DVDs from that period ).

[Daveman]

I thought SVO was an airport in Moscow......

Anyway - I thought Russian was rather free of word order, enabling nuances or meaning making the language so rich

This is my understanding as well.  It was explained to me that the order of the words is used specifically to give emphasis to desired aspects of a narrative, much like we do with spoken English. Our tones rise and fall giving spoken emphasis, but in Russian, the emphasis translates from spoken to written because of word order and minute changes in sentence structure, which I don't claim to even begin to comprehend.  The native Russian speakers would have to verify or denounce this as they are the only ones who would know for sure.

[SANDRO43]

But I think there is sometimes a kind of rule to keep the important bit of info at the end, to sort of keep you hanging and guessing until the last moment. Sort of like Russian Women really.....

How about German women, then ?
"Ich hatte ...... (an unspecified number of lines) ..... gesehen."

[jb]

I still remember when translating from Latin into Italian at school (say, Cicero), first I had to scan the whole paragraph <snip>

During my imprisonment with the Jesuits I had to translate whole volumes of Caesar's Gaul,,, we did it one sentence at a time.  They would never have accepted a consensus or summary of a paragraph.

[BC]

How about German women, then ?
"Ich hatte ...... (an unspecified number of lines) ..... gesehen."

When it comes down to understanding what is said, German is one of my favorites.

Given a choice between a film in original English and one dubbed into German, believe it or not I prefer the latter.

[SANDRO43]

This is my understanding as well.  It was explained to me that the order of the words is used specifically to give emphasis to desired aspects of a narrative, much like we do with spoken English. Our tones rise and fall giving spoken emphasis, but in Russian, the emphasis translates from spoken to written because of word order and minute changes in sentence structure, which I don't claim to even begin to comprehend. The native Russian speakers would have to verify or denounce this as they are the only ones who would know for sure.

I agree.

My point is:
- When you switch from a "basic" mode of expression ("denotative", but let's call it "natural, spontaneous speech" for convenience) to a "higher" mode (emphatic, literary, etc.), you are implicitly allowed a wider freedom, and have more alternatives at your disposal (you can even invent new words for effect).
- A highly-inflected language gives you a degree of freedom also with syntax, since the basic "roles" of words in the sentence are identifiable by their endings, and you can play with their placement to obtain different nuances of meaning.  

[SANDRO43]

During my imprisonment with the Jesuits I had to translate whole volumes of Caesar's Gaul,,, we did it one sentence at a time. They would never have accepted a consensus or summary of a paragraph.

But you had to find the main clause first, and reorder the lot, did you not ?

Ubi se diutius duci intellexit et diem istare quo die frumentum militibus metiri oporteret, convocatis eorum principibus, quorum magnam copiam in castris habebat, in his Diviciaco et Lisco, qui summo magistratui praeerat, quem vergobretum appellant Aedui, qui creatur annuus et vitae necisque in suos habet potestatem, graviter eos accusat, quod, cum neque emi neque ex agris sumi possit, tam necessario tempore, tam propinquis hostibus ab iis non sublevetur, praesertim cum magna ex parte eorum precibus adductus bellum susceperit; multo etiam gravius quod sit destitutus queritur.

De Bello Gallico, Liber I