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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Since the original purpose was to change the infinite number of sounds of organic languages into the twenty-plus sounds of an 'alphabetical' language, this is correct. However, if the original reason for doing this was specifically to write the language then presumably the orginators might think it a good idea, while they're on the job, to simplify/compress.
It would be interesting to examine parallel text lengths (using my constraints, please, otherwise it's a relative waste of time) between the following
a) English and German (German famously forms compound words)
b) English and a randomly selected natural language
c) two randomly selected natural languages
d) English and Greek, Anglo-Saxon etc
e) English and Esperanto.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| the original purpose was to change the infinite number of sounds of organic languages into the twenty-plus sounds of an 'alphabetical' language ... However, if the original reason for doing this was specifically to write the language .... |
Confusing. What else would you do with an "alphabetical" language? Sit round in spelling bees, spelling words out loud to one another?
Re the "infinite number of sounds": in total seriousness, how many different sounds can you hear yourself make in normal English speech (not counting interruptions like coughs and burps)? As an experiment, take a week listening to other native English speakers, and make a record of how many different vocal sounds you can hear. Yes, it's true they're a very large number (if you can successfully distinguish them)--but as part of the experiment, note how many of them make an actual difference in the meaning of what's said. If your hearing is sufficiently discriminating, you'll find it's about 45, and about 10 of those (diphthong vowels and some consonants) are combinations of others. So we're down to about 35.
Granted, this is more than our alphabet provides for, but that might be because we borrowed someone else's alphabet rather than inventing our own. And the languge we borrowed it from (effectively, Latin, which we're arguing over) borrowed it from someone else.
So the purpose of the inventors of Latin was not "to change the infinite number of sounds of organic languages into the twenty-plus sounds of an 'alphabetical' language", but to be able to write. And to do this on the basis of an existing model, an alphabet of twenty-something letters, originally designed for someone else's language.
| if Don assures me he has consulted a parallel textbook of the Loeb kind (ie one in which a normal Latin text was translated by a normal English speaker without any intention to compress or in any other way change the plain meaning of the text), and my memory plays me false and every damn page (like 200 pages) in every damned book (like dozens) which I read all those years ago, noticing that the writing on every page on the right was half (or nearly so) of the writing on every page on the left, then naturally I will withdraw the notion. |
Seems a bit of a change in story there, Mick, but I might have misread your earlier posting:
| All this arises from my initial perusal of a Loeb's Classical Edition of something or other ... |
Be that as it may, take a look at this text and translation of Tacitus, which comes from the Modern Classics Library edition (1942 originally):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/tac/a01000.htm
The Latin text of Chapter I is 1523 words, or 11,231 characters, including spaces. The parallel English text is 2729 words, or 15,777 characters: an increase of 4546 characters, or 40.48%, over the Latin.
Will that fit your criteria?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Will that fit your criteria? |
It proves my point. Phew! I presumably counted the words and, using your figures, come up with 2729 as compared with 1523 which is, for polemical purposes, close enough to 'double' to use in argument.
As for the rest of your post, all this is covered elsewhere in painstaking detail so I won't go back over it. But let me know if anything still remains after you consulted the various threads.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Re the "infinite number of sounds": in total seriousness, how many different sounds can you hear yourself make in normal English speech (not counting interruptions like coughs and burps)?... note how many of them make an actual difference in the meaning of what's said. |
You still seem to be holding the telescope the wrong way 'round. This is an invalid thought experiment since we are already so trenchantly alphabetical, as is everyone else, and we have a long tradition of proper speech versus colloquial/dialectical speech, etc. What we discriminate in the speech of our countrymen and the methods we share to resolve ambiguity and make ourselves understood are inadmissable.
You make the point, in fact, which is that when you try you can distinguish a very large number of variations in sound, while acknowledging that they can be grouped together in not-materially-different clusters. But now you must determine what the clusters are and which letters are to stand for them, whether different meanings deserve different spellings, which utterances to ignore... and all that without being able to say "speak more clearly" (since you're in the process of inventing what "speaking clearly" means). Much easier said than done. Hence the proliferation of spelling conventions in Middle English that were subsequently standardised.
The many have to be distilled into the one.
And now a new possibility: being correct, proper; forgetting the many and automatically thinking only in terms of the one; forgetting (individually, never knowing) how hard it was and that thinking about words, spellings, pronunciations and changes could not have been done the way it is now; assuming that pronunciation can be read off with great precision and subtlety, even though it is acknowledged that rules for this were not even set.
It's true: they tell us that spelling was unstandardised in Middle English; but they proceed as though a) the spelling rules did exist and b) we know exactly what they were. It's a systemmatic error. And it's compounded by comparing related languages, reconstructing their common ancestor, enumerating the differences that must have taken place, codifying them as laws of language change and using the laws to confirm that the pronunciation of, say, Middle English is as they said it was.
But how do we measure the distortion caused by inventing spellings? P and F are related sounds, but how do the phonemes attached to modern, standard English P and German PF tell us what was on Dark Age lips? Do the different spellings guarantee that the pronunciations were different? Or just that different spellings were adopted? What if the were for exactly the same sound? If Hungarian SZ can be identical to English S, why not PF and P? How do we know whether German has gained an emphasis on the F sound, or English has lost it, due to the spelling? Or that the spellings are a fair representation of an earlier divergence? What was the common ancestor: one, the other or neither?
There are many arbitrary decisions to be made in distilling the many into one. But the result, which is all the evidence we have of historical tongues, is treated as a high fidelity account of an organic evolution.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| They look to have had some sort of relationship with the Roman occupation. |
The Romans bore some relationship to what they were occupying? Well, of course.
Now, is it a reflexive relationshsip? If A = B, then B = A. So how do we tell whether Romans built at population centres, or populations centred where the Romans built?
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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| What we discriminate in the the speech of our countrymen and the methods we share to resolve ambiguity and make ourselves understood are inadmissable. |
I'm sorry to see you write such rubbish, Dan. Let's assume for the sake of argument that "the alphabet" originated with the Phoenicians, and that they shared the human phenomenon of an "infinite" number of vocal sounds. Let's make that a "half-infinite" number, since the structure of their language persuaded them to write only consonants, the vowels being filled in by the reader.
Infinity * 50% is infinity. But they used only 22 consonantal letters. How did that come about? Let's try an example.
When you say "spot", the sound sequence is /spot/. But when you say "pot", the sound sequence is /phot/--not "fot", but initial /p/ with a puff of air. The vast majority of English speakers, including illiterates, are not aware of this difference because it has no meaning in English. There is no English word /pot/ (no aspirate) that's different from /phot/ (aspirated), and no word /sphot/ (aspirated) that's different from /spot/ (unaspirated). If on some occasion you say /sphot/ for "spot", or /pot/ for /phot/, people will usually hear something slightly odd, but not be able to put their finger on it; they'll hear a slightly odd "pot" and a slightly odd "spot", but they'll have no doubt that you said "pot" and "spot".
In other languages it's different. Illiterate Chinese are still very aware of the difference between (e.g.) /pei/ and /phei/; they mean quite different things. Literate Chinese who can only read (non-alphabetised) characters are equally aware of it. Literate Chinese who read alphabetised pinyin are aware of it. But most Britons don't hear /pei/, since /p/ without the aspirate never occurs as an initial sound in English. What they usually think they hear is /bei/ (which is how it's written in pinyin: /pei/ = "bei".
Of the thousands of vocal sounds we can make, most of us (without training) can only "hear" the ones that are significant in our own language. Which is why many people from India say /v/ for /w/ and vice versa, or Japanese speakers learning English intermix /l/ and /r/. It's not a matter of not being able to make the different sounds; they aren't even aware that they are different sounds.
Similarly, /l/ may be sounded by a variety of different relationships between different parts of the tongue and different parts of the upper teeth and gum. English speakers generally use two positions, which actually do create different sounds (e.g., the first "l" of "little" versus the second; it's the second that changes into /w/ in some accents—which is why Polish “l” is pronounced [w]). But again, most people can't hear the difference because it makes no difference in the meanings of any English words. Nothing to do with how we spell (witness CHinese and Japanese); everything to do with how we hear.
| You make the point, in fact, which is that when you try you can distinguish a very large number of variations in sound, while acknowledging that they can be grouped together in not-materially-different clusters. But now you must determine what the clusters are and which letters are to stand for them, whether different meanings deserve different spellings, which utterances to ignore... and all that without being able to say "speak more clearly" (since you're in the process of inventing what "speaking clearly" means). |
Hold on, I and my ancestors have been speaking clearly for several thousand years; I don't need to invent an alphabet to achieve that. I'm inventing an alphabet so I can write.
I'd be fascinated to know the exact process by which the inventors of the Phoenician alphabet decided their language had 22 consonants. It is, I agree, a considerable feat of analysis. The point is, though, they didn't have to observe the difference between /ph/ in "pot" and /p/ in "spot" (or equivalents in their language) and then ignore it; all they had to do was be like the Neapolitans with their [x] in [six] ("si"), and be totally unaware that the difference was there.
As long as something has no meaning, it need not exist. You only need to know the difference between "Forest Green" and "Deep Ivy" if you're making, buying, or selling paint. If you're not doing any of these—if you’re not educated into the difference, have no need to see the difference—then when you see swatches of Forest Green and Deep Ivy next to one another, you'll be hard put to see that there is a difference unless someone points it out.
However, I'm not sure that any of this is relevant to putting down a new, invented language (Latin), completely different structurally from anything anyone speaks (Romance languages), and which is not intended to be a spoken language in the first place, so my next posting will return to that, via Tacitus.
_________________
-- Don
"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | So how do we tell whether Romans built at population centres, or populations centred where the Romans built? |
Probably both situations occurred but specifically bury, wick, and caer place-names suggest a relationship to Roman towns and forts. Only they exclusively cluster next to the Roman, some with just a single settlement others with more e.g. ports.
The pattern is quite clear if your care to do the plot yourself or see google knoll 'Pre-Dark Age Britain' where I've placed my plot.
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| Hatty wrote: | | The topic of Roman city/town names which didn't remain in use following a 400-year Roman presence is mystifying, does it make sense to you, Frank? |
Observation of the Roman roads network both here and on the continent suggests many Roman towns seem to have continued, many as small villages but also as modern large towns and cities.
Presumably the locals never knew the Latin or Greek names hence few Roman names, perhaps excepting Greece and parts of Italy.
Interestingly Dacia in Romania has no remaining Roman names for the towns and forts as far as I can find, so is a bit of a mystery as place of supposed Roman soldier settlement, given the supposed Latin origin of Rumanian?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| frank h wrote: | | Presumably the locals never knew the Latin or Greek names hence few Roman names, perhaps excepting Greece and parts of Italy. |
Locals don't name their towns.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| frank h wrote: | | Interestingly Dacia in Romania has no remaining Roman names for the towns and forts as far as I can find, so is a bit of a mystery as place of supposed Roman soldier settlement, given the supposed Latin origin of Rumanian? |
DANGER! Paradigm Error. Alert! Alert!
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Observation of the Roman roads network both here and on the continent suggests |
DANGER! Paradigm Error. Alert! Alert!
We don't know of any actual Roman roads. We know only those roads that the Romans 'romanised'. So we don't know which they built for themselves de novo and which were extant when they arrived.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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I maintain we don't even know that!
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | We don't know of any actual Roman roads. |
Possibly so, but my point was the supposed Latin origins of Romanian apparently by settled Roman soldiers. If they spoke Latin then the name of at least one of their towns might be expected to have survived - but none can be found, unless there is an obscure village on the map somewhere.
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Maybe the only places that have names of Roman origin are in or very near Roman.
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| Rocky wrote: | | Maybe the only places that have names of Roman origin are in or very near Roman. |
Like 'bury or wick' in Britain many continental Roman towns and forts have a nearby settlement meaning the same in the native language, such as burg, chatel/chateau, campo, castel , grad, sehri/sehhir. Maybe the town Orastia in Romania plus a couple of camp places are also representative.
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