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Alphabet Soup (Linguistics)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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European languages can be divided into two sorts

a) demotic languages spoken by the present populations where they live now and have been spoken back into pre-history. These were unwritten until after about the 9th C AD
eg French, (Modern) Greek, Italian, English,, Welsh, Swedish, German

b) non-demotic languages, not spoken by anyone today. These were written in alphabets.
eg Punic, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Gothic

It is proposed that these dead "alphabet-languages" were actually artificial languages devised for the purposes of written communication in long distance trade.

PROBLEM: Why alphabets? Why artificial languages? Why not do what had hitherto been the practice and write your own language in ideograms/pictograms like the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Hittites and the rest?

ANSWER: written communication in ideograms can be understood by anyone. For instance, a Japanese can understand written Chinese even though he doesn't understand the language. Hence if French was written in ideograms (and I knew my ideograms) I would merely read a Frenchman's ideogram as "house" even though, as far as he was concerned, he is writing "maison", i.e. people with different languages cannot communicate by speech but they can by ideographic writing.
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Mick Harper
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If you wish to create a "cypher" you simply switch from pictograms/ideograms to an alphabet i.e. you phoneticise your own language and therefore no-one who cannot speak your language can now read that language even though they may know what every letter of the alphabet actually sounds like, i.e. people with different languages can neither communicate in speech or writing.

However, languages typically have more vowel and consonant sounds than is containable in a twenty-odd letter alphabet. So you take your demotic language and you drastically simplify it. This also makes it difficult for anyone who does speak your language to understand its written form.

You can then further "encipher" it by altering the alphabet. This is why Punic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Gothic and Old Norse are each based on but are each decisively different from the one before.

[Alternative explanation for different alphabets: the fact that you will be simplifying different languages and hence requiring a varying set of consonant and vowel sounds means the previous system will be inconvenient.]

Now you have a nascent trading organization that has secure communications. But you also have an "initiation" process. Since it takes years of learning to become fluent in this new language and this new alphabet (and it's something you can't counterfeit) you have the option of breaking out of your old "national" language group. Anyone who is prepared to put in the work (or more practically put their children through the work) will now have access (and a presumptive loyalty) to a ready-made trading group.

This can be observed in the Roman Empire (but can also be dimly seen in Carthage) where "provincials" were accepted as Roman citizens by (essentially) just learning Latin.

The only problem with this strategy is that soon there are other groups using the same strategy. At first, with plenty of territory to go round, colonies could be established that only had to be strong enough to keep the locals at bay (which, since a colony benefited the locals, was not too arduous).

However over time competition between the rival groups meant that each colony had to be strong enough to fend off other groups which in turn meant that the colonies would be strong enough to shake off control of the mother-city. And therefore strong enough to take over the locals and and...and...well, it's all in the orthodox history. It's an observable fact that the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Goths and the Vikings all used various models of organisation.

etc etc
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Cf. Native American tribes (Great Plains mostly?) using a common sign language but not a common spoken one.

You think it started as a deliberate attempt to be cryptic? Protecting trade secrets, sea routes, that sort of thing? Do we know of any non-demotic languages NOT connected with sea-farers?

The neophyte children are more-or-less apprenticed in the trade or its logistical support?

For about 3000 years ALL we know about are alphabetical languages. What happened to ideograms and pictographs in the meantime? Were they suppressed? Is there any reason to think significant "international" trade was not going on before the alphabets? Maybe they were simply less successful before these dedicated "trading organs" appeared and became autonomous. Were the earlier empires -- Egyptians, Sumerians... -- land-farers with armies, rather than sea-farers with navies?

It must be an over-simplification to say we could read each other's pictologue: there's too much grammar, abstraction and depth in real language... but this level of subtlety is irrelevant to commerce's prosaic concerns.

I've never had the impression that Latin, for instance, is anything but a full-blown literary language, but, for all I know, that's an illusion created when the translator renders what he takes to be poetry, say, in a poetic style of English.

Of course, people will ask -- have asked? -- for the evidence for your proposition that these trading languages changed NOT AT ALL over the course of a thousand years. If they say the Latin practised in Britain became petrified after the Romans left because there were no real Latin speakers left; but Latin HAD changed between the rise of Rome and its fall; then what is your answer?
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Tani


In: Fairye
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If alphabets were invented to cypher and make maybe scripture and reading available only for some initiates, that would efficiently monopolise trade. On the other hand: if trade is in the hands of a chosen few who are in possession of the secret, that would automatically restrict and hinder the expansion of trade, wouldn't it?

Would that be what they wanted? I always thought since the invention of trade, people were concerned to increase profits by ever increasing expansion. Then again: your theory would effectively ban competition from other traders/other language groups... very intriguing.

I have had some addled thoughts about pictograms as well: my own pet theory about the megalithic symbols is that they were pictograms, some sort of writing and that they can be deciphered (one day).

I've been working on that deciphering on and off for several years now and may have some symbols cracked - but not all. That's maybe not the issue here, but my point is: if the megalith builders who were trading all over Europe with each other could make do with pictograms - why and who changed that? Why did they feel the need to encrypt everything if it worked apparently quite well before without that?

I think if you want to pursue the theory we should ask ourselves: was the gain by encrypting everything in alphabets and writing in different languages bigger than it would have been by rather developing (or keeping!) a universal language/writing system to profit from more and wider connections? And who profited?

If I were a trader I would rather talk to fellow traders in a language readily understood by all.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Thanx for that, Tani, but you might be wading in muddy water.

You'll notice that even cuneiform writing is written in regular lines and I would think this is a defining characteristic that helps identify it as writing. (Language wouldn't be language if it weren't structured enough to SAY something; nor could writing say anything if it couldn't be followed.)

But that doesn't mean signs can't have meaning at a "sub-grammatical" level. The megalithic symbols may be ideograms -- a bit like the symbols for the Zodiac, maybe, that are loaded with meaning -- that don't necessarily have to be arranged in any particular way with each other in order to do their job.

(And if they ARE specially arranged, I dare say they then express a specialised "astronomical language", for instance, rather than a natural language.)

(Should we discuss propositional language, as opposed to other kinds, such as performative?)

Of course, such ideograms or motifs are sure to resemble alphabetic characters because there are only so many ways to draw simple signs. (I'm in the process of convincing myself here that what looks alphabetic can't count as alphabetic if it's strewn about. Covering an amulet with blessings isn't the same as writing something on it.

Just to confuse things, a symbolic use of letters could be introduced after an alphabet-proper is developed. Just as things that are meant to be handled are all "hand-sized", so signs that are meant to be inscribed will be letter-like.

Certainly the symbols of whatever type get their meaning by being shared by the community of users.

It sounds banal, but that "A is for Apple" thing might really be an ancient technique. Maybe it's the best way for anyone to have come up with cryptic signs they could actually remember. SOMEONE had to come up with the idea of a concise repertoire of signs for sounds. Maybe it really was a deliberate invention for the purposes of controlling communication...
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Mick Harper
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The critical question surely is to try to distinguish these "alphabetical peoples" from the ordinary folk just living around them. And bearing in mind that the alphabeticals used to be the ordinary folk and (who knows?) might well be again when they get home, kick the shoes off and ask why their dinner isn't on the table.

Remember, always, that all contemporary documentation was written by the alphabeticals and historians rely 99% of the time on contemporary documentation. We have to parley the other one per cent into the truth.

Take for instance the Old Testament which gives the impression of Palestine being where the Jews lived. Maybe so but my revisionist whiskers twitch when I notice how careful everyone is to have two kingdoms--Israel and Judah--one of which is the name they give themselves, one of which is used by everyone else.

That's why I asked about the missing bit in between, Sumeria, which everyone is equally careful to ignore.

The OT also blithely gives the impression that, say, Gallillee was populated by Jews but actually we know that the Decapolis--the ten cities of Gallillee--were Greek cities. It may be that Jews were simply a religious cult all the time, but wrote the OT.

But then again there are oddities all around. It's interesting how Phoenician Tyre, Sidon (and even Carthage itself) seem to survive unscathed every time somebody comes along and puts everyone to the sword, sows salt in the ruins and so forth. The Jews are very similar survivalists but using a quite different strategy.

The Greeks of course switched effortlessly between colonies, empires and intellectual diasporas until (with Byzantium) they finally came up against some real pros in the Ottoman Turks.

But it's the Latin-speakers that take the biscuit. After a thousand-year-reich with the Roman Empire, they set up another thousand-year-reich with the Catholic Church. And now they're the Bilderberg Group...no, wait...forget that one.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Was reading a book called "Semites and Anti-Semites" and came across an interesting (to me) tidbit.

The Turks do not speak Arabic. However, all of their religious writing is in Arabic and a lot of official state material and works of scholarship is in Arabic. The veneration of Arabic appears tied to the fact that the Koran is written in that language. This parallels medieval Europe's relationship to Latin -- which was the language of their Bible.

Interestingly, Arabic itself is unknown as a written language until sometime around 300AD when a single inscription appears in the historical record. Essentially, it explodes onto the scene with Mohammed. I think this whole busines with the origins of "Arab" Culture and the rise of Islam is RIFE with anomolies that we can tease apart! Lots of mystery there.

That aside for a moment, I wish to suggest the following working hypothesis:
Written Languages are derived from books of a foreign origin.
How far can that take us?

Mick, you have suggested that written languages were artificial constructs -- an ancient esperanto. That's an interesting notion but I would suggest that, aside from Esperanto itself (which was an abysmal failure) we have no historical example of such a thing. However, we seem to have plenty of historical examples of people who speak one language but write in another derived from a book or books received from alien cultures. Medieval Europe and Turkey of course...but then also (perhaps?) European Jewry's relationship with Hebrew and the Torah!

That last one is a bit controversial perhaps and the origin of Yiddish (German for "Jewish") to me is a big mystery. If your thesis holds, Mick, it seems to me that the Yiddish were speaking Yiddish before they became Jewish. Most certainly, Yiddish could not have begun as a Jewish language. It must have one time been a European Language prior to being adopted by Jewish emigres. To my knowledge, there are no non-Jewish speakers of Yiddish which argues for some sort of mass conversion at some point. The seed of this conversion however must have been a large immigration of Jews. Nevertheless, the entire population of Yiddish speakers must have converted to Judaisim -- seems no other conclusion.

That aside, can we think of any other people who wrote in an identifiable foreign language?
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Ishmael


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Though it isn't identifiable, according to my thesis (and yours) the Sumerians probably spoke Aramaic or Parsi -- or some existing Mid-East language and only wrote in this weird, non-Semitic "Sumerian." While you would suggest Sumerian -- like all written languages -- was artificial, I would argue that it was merely foreign. Same goes for Sanskrit.

Taking my thesis one step further:

Any identifiable population that speaks a language identical to that employed by their holy books, adopted a foreign language from those books. This means Arabs began to speak Arabic in the same way that modern Israelis adopted Hebrew. Will these theses advance our interpretation of philology -- or are they wholly superfluous?

In my defense, I reiterate that we've no historical example of an artificial language gaining any success. We DO have examples of populations using a local language for speech and a foreign language for writing. Where evidence is lacking, I think we have to go with what is known. We have only one type of language adoption in the historical record: the adoption of foreign languages for the written word.

This would mean that the SPEAKERS of Sanskrit and Sumerian did exist but are unknown to us.

Which leaves a bit of a conundrum. If we follow the example of established history, we must postulate unknown civilizations. If we stick with known civilizations, we must postulate unprecedented language invention.

What is the more logical choice?
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Mick Harper
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Well, I have never gone much into Arabic but this is the position in so far as I either understand it or hypothesise it:

1. Time Immemorial: everybody in the Middle East speaking the languages they speak now i.e. various versions of Arabic in the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Berber languages in North Africa. None of these languages are written.

2 From then until 3rd Century AD: Copts, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines come and go...everybody carries on speaking their languages except the various ruling elites who speak and write in their own languages.

3. 3rd century (or whenever): Arab traders of the Arabian peninsula devise a written language for trading purposes based on their variety of demotic Arabic.

4. 7th century: following the established pattern of Punic, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse trading groups, these Arab traders become expansionary imperialists.

5. They naturally use the latest "alphabetical strategy" which is the Roman Catholic one of a Monopoly Religion of the Book plus Only Top People Allowed To Read-and-Write And Only In "The Sacred Language".

6. This new imperialism (i.e. Islam) promotes this "Classical Arabic" but, as with Latin, it does not become a true demotic anywhere except a) in the Arabian Peninsula where it is very close to the original b) on the coastal regions of the Maghreb where the incoming Arabic-speakers push the native Berber-speakers into the interior and c) the administrative classes everywhere.

7. Meanwhile, everybody else just carries on speaking Egyptian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic and so on.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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...certain groups had a pressing need not to speak to one another (they could already do that) but to write to one another. The reason for this was because they were engaged in long-distance trade.

Certain groups had a pressing need not to write to one another (they could already do that) but to speak to one another. The reason for this was because they were engaged in long-distance trade.

They could of course have...simply used an existing writing system--ideograms, cuneiform etc-- (and indeed they did) but these presented a minor but not insignificant problem for international traders everywhere. All these languages used direct substitution of spoken words for the written form and hence, whatever language they were written in, anyone could read them.

They could of course have...simply used an existing writing system--ideograms, cuneiform etc-- (and indeed they did) but these presented a major and not insignificant problem for international traders everywhere. All these languages used direct substitution of spoken words for the written form and hence, whatever language they were written in, no one could understand them unless they knew the substitution code.

That just happens to be a characteristic of ideogrammatic writing....we do not know what Egyptian sounds like....Which reminds me, I may have spelled parri passu wrong, I may not know what it means, but I do know what it sounds like because the French not only use the same alphabet as I do, they use the same letters to denote the same sounds as I do.

Exactly.

And that is why I say that just happens to be a characteristic of phonetic writing....we do know what French sounds like....Which reminds me, I may have spelled parri passu wrong, I may not know what it means, but I do know what it sounds like because the French not only use the same alphabet as I do, they use the same letters to denote the same sounds as I do.

Elementary my dear Watson. The truth is obvious.
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Rocky



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Ishmael wrote:
To my knowledge, there are no non-Jewish speakers of Yiddish which argues for some sort of mass conversion at some point. The seed of this conversion however must have been a large immigration of Jews. Nevertheless, the entire population of Yiddish speakers must have converted to Judaisim -- seems no other conclusion.

Why can't we just say that a long time ago everyone was speaking German, both Christians and Jews? Then, both groups decided to write down the language. The Christians wrote down the language and adopted the Latin alphabet. The Jews wrote down the language but adopted the Hebrew alphabet. (Let's ignore orthodox timelines for now, if necessary.) Over time, the German that was written down with Hebrew characters changed and then became Yiddish.

Suppose some time ago, before English became a written language, but after there was clearly defined group of Protestant English speakers and a clearly defined group of Catholic English speakers, both groups decided to write English down. But the Protestants adopted and adapted the Greek alphabet. And the Catholics adopted and adapted the Russian alphabet. Down the road, wouldn't there be notable differences between the languages?
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Mick Harper
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Quite a nifty idea, Rocky. One of the abiding problems in this area is that one or both sides can develop vested interests in stressing either similarities or differences. Even now I can't get a straight answer as to whether Hindi and Urdu are one language or not. And I think they always wrote in the same alphabet, no?

I once pointed out there is no evidence to show which, out of German and Yiddish, was the mother-language but got no takers.
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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Even now I can't get a straight answer as to whether Hindi and Urdu are one language or not. And I think they always wrote in the same alphabet, no?

No, not the same, based on my very limited knowledge of Aryan languages. Hindi is written in Devanagari script and Urdu is written in a variant of Persian-Arabic script. Urdu has several characters unique to it in order to represent the wide variety of consonants that one doesn't find in Arabic or Persian (especially the plethora of nasalized ones).
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Duncan71


In: Calgary
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With regards to languages that have a vested (in their minds) interest in stressing differences I wonder about the Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. Each group claims a separate linguistic identity. The Serbian and Croatian communities are especially adamant about their language differences. In the opinion of many outsiders the differences are merely those of dialectical variation.

Serbian is written in 'Cyrillic' script whereas Croatian and Bosnian are written in 'Roman' script. It would be interesting to hear a learned opinion on whether Bosnian is closer to Croatian (its co-script user) or to Serbian.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Rocky wrote:
Why can't we just say that a long time ago everyone was speaking German, both Christians and Jews? Then, both groups decided to write down the language. The Christians wrote down the language and adopted the Latin alphabet. The Jews wrote down the language but adopted the Hebrew alphabet.

Brilliant!
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