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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Now come on Messrs Harper, Crisp et al just explain why common sense did not prevail. Because for your thesis to stand up for sure common sense did not prevail. |
While we do that, can you explain the contrary thesis that while it is natural for grammatical complexity to arise, it is also natural for it to be shed?
Where is the logic in holding to both of these propositions, as historical linguists do? Where is the common sense in either ramping up or cutting down on grammatical complexity? No one's mother tongue is beyond them.
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| Ishmael wrote: | | berniegreen wrote: | | "'Ere Tiberius, this reading and writing is a good idea but why do you want to bugger around with this daft language. Let's just do it the proper way, the way that we talk" |
And what way is it that we talk? |
The sentence above that you quote is a joke. A JOKE. Think about it.
But I have this distinct feeling that you don't do jokes and that I am wasting my time so - don't bother.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Ishmael wrote:
The origin of Greek, Latin, Sanscrit etc. remains a mystery.
There are some here more committed than others to defending a particular thesis but no one here is utterly committed to a specific idea. The notion that these languages are artificial, and the idea that phonetic language in its genesis requires artificiality: These proposals are interesting and novel and (if for no other reason than that novelty) are worth the defending. I am persuaded that these ideas have a lot more merit than would seem at first sensible. |
However, there doesn't seem to have been a lot of defending going on recently.
Linguists (philologists) have created an enormously detailed set of mechanisms in explanation of how the known Indo-European languages, living and dead, were derived from a common ancestor. I find these explanations reasonable, given my own observation (not original!) of similar sound-correspondences in a different language family, Polynesian. Many of the (alleged) sound changes that we find in the IE group are also found there, and can have similar reasonable explanations.
Take loss of consonants. We know that Italians find it difficult to pronounce consonant clusters such as 'pt' and 'ct'. An Italian saying the English word 'optimal' is likely to say op-@-tee-mahl, where @ represents the neutral vowel known as 'schwa'. We know also that, where the Italians write sette, the French write sept (but say sett), and that the Latin word is septem. It seems to me more likely that septem became sette (and sept) through normal erosion of consonants ('t' simply requires less oral energy than 'pt'), than that people who habitually said sette decided to write (but not say, it appears) septem. Once the ability to pronounce particular sounds (such as English -th-, now pronounced by only a minority of English-speakers) is lost, it is very difficult to get it back.
The same's true for grammar. It's easy to imagine how a complex system of nominal declensions, with three grammatical genders, became simplified into a system with no declensions and only two genders. Of course, it's not impossible to imagine how a grammatically simple language acquired complex inflexions (and an extra gender)--they have to have come from somewhere. But it's harder to see how so many 'artificial' (written) languages all acquired essentially the same complex grammatical apparatus, when in some cases at least it was so utterly alien to the simple speech patterns of the supposed inventors of these languages. Copying from one language to another is not an adequate answer; the numerous differences of grammatical detail from written language to written language, within the overall similarity, actually argue against it--plus the fact that one of the languages concerned (Hittite) had totally disappeared by the time any of the others were written down).
As I say, the mechanisms of sound change and grammatical simplification worked out by linguists for PIE are very detailed and precise, though not without the odd gap (aha!). In many cases, the same sound changes can be heard occurring in modern languages, including English. But a scientific theory that has predicitve power is more valuable than one that is successful only in its descriptive element. How does the PIE theory do in this regard?
The philologists' reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European made it clear (to them) that PIE words included a set of consonants they called 'laryngeals', resembling sounds found in Semitic languages. First proposed by Saussure in 1879 (he called them something different), these laryngeals are not found in any living descendent of IE, but their prior existence in particular positions of particular words seemed to be the only way to explain certain differences between clearly related words in the daughter languages.
The triumph of IE linguistics came with the decipherment of the earliest-preserved (written) Indo-European language, 'Hittite', over 20 years later. Hittite was written in both home-grown hieroglyphics, and phonetically using the Akkadian alphabet (technically, a syllabary), and was found to have Akkadian laryngeal letters in the very words, and in the very positions within those words, where laryngeal sounds had been predicted for Proto-Indo-European.
Now, I'm prepared to contemplate alternatives to the 'standard theory' for just about anything, including the state of affairs regarding 'Indo-European' languages. But to be an equally convincing explanation of how things are, the Applied Epistemology 'artificial languages' theory needs to be at least as detailed and realistic in its explanation of how things came to be as the Proto-Indo-Europeanists' explanations. And preferably, it should have at least their predictive capability. If we 'are not committed to a specific idea' (and I've referred previously to Mick's alternative notion that Latin developed out of English), we should at least be able to defend it with rational argument based on evidence, not merely assert it as unsubstantiated opinion, e.g.: 'English can't have changed that fast'. My opinion would be that it can; except I think there's evidence that it didn't change as fast as AE writers seem to think.
Time to put up or shut up? How does AE explain the 'invention' of complex Latin grammar out of a language, or languages, that lacked even the vocabulary to describe such complexities? Rather than assertion, I'd quite like some details of how it could have happened.
_________________
-- Don
"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Why would you bother?
Think of all the extra effort that you have to go to. Just for starters, you have to teach loads of other people how to
1) Understand this new language
2) READ, and then
3) how to read this strange language that they don't normally use. |
Ishmael indicated the difficulty with the question -- that our perspective is already thoroughly literatised -- and you illustrate it here. These are not 3 points but one. Learning to understand an artificialised language is not separate from learning how to use it; it's not a question of learning to read "normally" and then to read "abnormally". There is no extra effort, just the effort to learn to use the technology.
Note that we do regularly write in a way that we do not speak and we do have difficulty rendering natural speech and utterances in writing. And that's even when we speak RP. In the absence of a standard written language, there is no such thing as "the language they normally use" because it's a myriad {to which Ishmael was alluding when he said "And what way is it that we talk?"}.
"Why bother?" and "why not let common sense prevail?" make it sound like capturing natural speech in writing is a simple task. But if it were so simple, why haven't we managed it yet?
It's precisely because the world is a fundamentally workaday, practical place that writing has evolved from the extremely-abstract to the really-rather-expressive.
It's too easy to lose sight of the nuts-and-bolts of literacy and how, f'rinstance, pronunciation guides work.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Nick:
| So, Don, you're suggesting that Derby was a English Midlands version of Mostar. I wonder if they blew up the bridge over the Derwent at any point? |
Prolly using "Greek fire," I guess.
(I don't think either of the settlements that amalgamated to form Mostar was called "Mostar", though, so the case isn't quite parallel.)
_________________
-- Don
"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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| Ishmael wrote: | | You must not confuse ignoring you with ignorance of your question. |
| The origin of Greek, Latin, Sanscrit etc. remains a mystery. |
| The notion that these languages are artificial, and the idea that phonetic language in its genesis requires artificiality |
| Our civilization and our spoken language is post-alphabetical. We can't conceive of language apart from its written form. We imagine ourselves speaking distinct "words" with almost visible spacing between them when non-random sound emerges from our throat. |
| Yet how accurately does this model of speech reflect the nature of spoken language? |
| It is possible that much of the way we conceive of language is itself the effect of literacy. How much is the sound of a post-alphabetical language itself altered by the influence of phonetic symbolism? |
My own personal guess is - not very much. I'll give you one example (and any Kiwis feel free to correct me if I have got it wrong). In the Maori language there is consonantal phoneme which sounds sort of like "fw"and then the vowel comes next. The Welsh parson who alphabetised Maori speech used "wh" for this sound. Written Maori has been like that for over 100 years but spoken Maori is still the same as it always was, totally uninfluenced by the phonetic symbols. And don't forget that all Maoris are bi-lingual and can read and write in both Maori and English
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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D.P.Crisp wrote:
| "Why bother?" and "why not let common sense prevail?" make it sound like capturing natural speech in writing is a simple task. But if it were so simple, why haven't we managed it yet? |
The point's been made several times that none of us was around when Latin was (or wasn't) invented, or when Koine Greek was (or wasn't) spoken. Still, a look at the Greek of Mark's Gospel should convince just about anyone who can read it, and who has also read the polished (but still Koine) Greek of (say) Paul or the evangelist John, that Mark writes in the vernacular "as she is spoke", and not in literary language. It's difficult to capture the vocabulary differences (definitely non-standard at many points), but the breathless use of short clauses in the present tense, tumbling over one another in urgency, reads almost like something taken direct from dictation: "And they [Jesus and the disciplies] come into a house. And a huge crowd comes together again, so they can't even eat a meal. And the scribes have come down from Jerusalem, and say, "He's possessed!" and "He casts out demons by the ruler of demons" ... Then his brothers and mother come up ..." (and so on).
_________________
-- Don
"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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In response to Dan's lastLet us keep the main point in focus. Here we are in Central Italy in about 400BCE. We have a language that we use every day of the week. Along comes a fellow who offers to give us a hand with this writing lark which we have heard about - them Greeks an Etruscans got it already, innit.
Right. The question is: what do we write?
As Don has pointed out previously it is one thing to give something a bit of a polish up, but what do you start with?
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| DPCrisp wrote: | While we do that, can you explain the contrary thesis that while it is natural for grammatical complexity to arise, it is also natural for it to be shed?
Where is the logic in holding to both of these propositions, as historical linguists do? Where is the common sense in either ramping up or cutting down on grammatical complexity? No one's mother tongue is beyond them. |
Perhaps languages behave like other organic things. They have a period of rapid growth and immature development followed by a long period of maturity and then gradual decline. (Although many of us might feel that Estuarian English indicates a significantly rapid decline.)
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Dan wrote
| Learning to understand an artificialised language is not separate from learning how to use it; it's not a question of learning to read "normally" and then to read "abnormally". There is no extra effort, just the effort to learn to use the technology. |
A thought experiment for you: You are an intelligent adult male living in a oral-only culture. The missionary white-fella appears and offers to teach you to read.
He can either teach you the letters that make the sounds and words that you use in your own language. Or he can teach English writing. Which will you choose? And why?
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Bernie wrote, quoting Dan:
| It is possible that much of the way we conceive of language is itself the effect of literacy. How much is the sound of a post-alphabetical language itself altered by the influence of phonetic symbolism? |
This is a very good point worthy of a doctoral thesis - if it hasn't already been done.
My own personal guess is - not very much. I'll give you one example (and any Kiwis feel free to correct me if I have got it wrong). In the Maori language there is consonantal phoneme which sounds sort of like "fw"and then the vowel comes next. The Welsh parson who alphabetised Maori speech used "wh" for this sound. Written Maori has been like that for over 100 years but spoken Maori is still the same as it always was, totally uninfluenced by the phonetic symbols. And don't forget that all Maoris are bi-lingual and can read and write in both Maori and English. |
Oh well ... Actually, the pre-European sound of Maori /wh/ isn't at all clear. Corresponding words in Samoan have [f] (e.g., Samoan fale for Maori whare, "house"), and that pronunciation ([f]) is now almost standard amongst young urban Maori (i.e., the majority), who learnt Maori at school rather than at home--often from teachers who, themselves, learnt it as a second language.
It's quite possible that what the Welsh clergyman (actually, an English linguistics professor) heard was the lip-rounded -h- that some English-speakers (myself included) still use in words like what and why, but there are other possibilities. No-one knows because (sorry, bernie) no-one was recording the sounds of the speech at the time--only a written transcript of what they thought the sounds sounded like.
(And sadly, BTW, many Maoris don't speak or read the Maori language.)
_________________
-- Don
"Eveything is deeply intertwingled" (thankyou, Danny Faught)
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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A bit of leap-frog here.
| What puzzles me here is that when the Italian- (or French-) speakers who invented Latin from their grammatically much simpler language, and the Germans invented Gothic, and the Hindus invented Sanskrit, why did they all go for such extremely complicated grammars, nothing like their own? And how did their complicated grammars come to resemble one another in so many respects? |
Is this less easy to comprehend than the scholars' view that the grammatical complexity of these supposed ancestral languages evolved entirely naturally, somewhere in a shared formative phase; then for all the daughter languages to shed the compexity because there is an equally natural trend to simplification?
What is so special in the million year history of language evolution about the last few millennia? And how did anyone (everyone) know that this special time had arrived?
I'll tell you what is special about th last few millennia: writing.
| the Latin endings in -us and in -um have been borrowed from the Greek ones in -os and -on. |
See, this is typical. For written Latin and Greek, there may well be a case for saying Greek came first and Latin borrowed things. But the linguists assume this is a faithful reflection of the situation with the spoken languages. How can it be determined, on linguistic grounds, which came first?
Even in the written form, how can we tell that there is any derivation or corruption here, as opposed to merely different-but-equally-valid spelling conventions for the very same sounds?
| And how did their complicated grammars come to resemble one another in so many respects?... Why also Sanskrit -as and -am? Why Old Persian -a and -am? And how did these all come to resemble Hittite -as and -an? |
I would add to Nick's response that writing is a technology that is spread and adapted consciously like any other.
Furthermore, when you say "Sanskrit -as and -am" you have already distorted the picture by transcribing into the English alphabet, based on decades/centuries of scholarship.
Is A the best letter to use, considering it might come out as "uh"? Is the M very distinct from N, or was that an arbitrary choice? Did they pronounce the S strongly, or was it hit-and-miss as in French, making -AS identical to -A?
I'm not asking for years more research to sharpen the focus on such details. I'd rather they acknowledged the limitations of the technique and admitted the picture is necessarily blurry.
| But this leads to another important question: Italian, French, and Spanish have no declensions at all: no accusative, no genitive, no dative, no instrumental, no locative ... So why did 'they' put them into Latin when 'they' created it? |
You could almost be arguing against Romance deriving from Latin.
As a software QC guy, it should be especially clear to you that natural, colloquial language can/should have useful extensions for businesslike purposes. And you just learn to use them as part of learning the techniques of writing.
| Another important question: Why did they discard their common word for horse (caballo, cavallo, caval, cavall, cheval ...), and choose equus instead, not used in any of their languages?... Why use ignis for fire...? |
You could almost be arguing against Romance deriving from Latin, or against the Romans coming from Italy.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| 'The notion that these languages are artificial' is not a totally original idea. Linguists have known for a very long time that Latin is an 'artificial' language in the sense that its formality of expression and relative regularity of grammar do not reflect the spoken language of the time... As for Sanskrit--its very name means 'regularised'... i.e., a language 'made uniform'. Complex as its grammar is, like Latin, it was consciously and deliberately 'refined' from the rather more chaotic state of the spoken prakrits (prÄkrta-, 'made before'), for the written (and spoken) use of an elite. |
So where's the argument?
The linguists are papering over the cracks, of course, since they still believe Latin and Sanskrit begat others. But Vulgar Latin is still merely hinted at, identified by the little bits that don't conform, as opposed to being directly evidenced as anyone's natural language. It's the same with the Prakrits, I expect.
The artificialising of a natural language leaves it at a dead end and there is no problem with that. Acknowledging Latin as not-as-she-is-spoke and still trying to fit it in-line as the mother of modern Romance languages leads to all sorts of nonsense.
| However, it's a long way from saying that the languages were totally made up by a series of arbitrary and, so far, completely unexplained decisions. |
This is a matter of perspective. {Remember, all of these are true at one and the same time: mains electricty does not vary: it's 240V, 50Hz; it varies a lot: back and forth fifty times a second; the frequency and voltage do actually vary with demand...}
"Totally made up" is not what we're saying. There is nothing wrong with "arbitrary". You are only seeking "explanation" as against the "obvious" course of documenting the natural speech, but that was not an available option.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Linguists (philologists) have created an enormously detailed set of mechanisms in explanation of how the known Indo-European languages, living and dead, were derived from a common ancestor. |
Logically, does the size and self-consistency of this set in any way argue for it's correctness? A software QC guy knows the answer.
| We know that Italians find it difficult to pronounce consonant clusters such as 'pt' and 'ct'. |
Sorry, inadmissable: Italian is a literate language.
Still, if it's so hard to say, why is it in Latin? If they could say it, why couldn't the French and Itialians? How do you know the P was pronounced in Latin if the French can make it silent? How voiced and aspirated was it ever meant to be? Praps it's just a stop before the "tem". Praps it wouldn't be there if it weren't for the second syllable. But Latin spelling predated Italian and French spelling, so how can we tell what the natural situation was before anyone had spellings to focus on?
| Once the ability to pronounce particular sounds is lost, it is very difficult to get it back. |
Interesting that you characterise it as loss, like the mispronunciation of "proper English".
Anyway, how do we know how difficult it is? We know that accents are strong, that the muscle-memory of speech typically makes it difficult to replicate someone else's rhythms. We also know that Vietnamese refugees brought up in England have English accents; and that some people are better at foreign accents than others. What does this have to do with the natural evolution of a mother language into a daughter?
| But it's harder to see how so many 'artificial' (written) languages all acquired essentially the same complex grammatical apparatus, when in some cases at least it was so utterly alien to the simple speech patterns of the supposed inventors of these languages. |
Er, we don't know who the inventors were. Cf. the American space programme being a German invention.
| The philologists' reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European made it clear (to them) that PIE words included a set of consonants they called 'laryngeals'... their prior existence in particular positions of particular words seemed to be the only way to explain certain differences between clearly related words in the daughter languages. |
I call this Linguistic Rectitude: the idea that written sources are a faithful rendition of the spoken language. It isn't even true now, but historical linguists have the audacity to reconstruct detailed phonology thousands of years past. And their only test is self-consistency: they make a profession out of circular references.
They don't seem to have any concept of the illusion introduced immmediately by spelling anything.
| But to be an equally convincing explanation of how things are, the Applied Epistemology 'artificial languages' theory needs to be at least as detailed and realistic in its explanation of how things came to be as the Proto-Indo-Europeanists' explanations. |
You're playing the wrong game there. We're addressing paradigm issues here, which show the entire edifice of historical linguistics to be on unsafe ground. It's only when the whole thing is demolished and rebuilt on firm foundations can we tell which bits survive and which bits don't. For the sheer volume of work, you'll have to wait a couple of centuries. They have quite a head start.
| 'English can't have changed that fast'. My opinion would be that it can |
"Can" is not what we're after. We can all think it can, either because we're already conditioned that way (if not armed with detailed arguments) or because we're clever enough to do what the historians/linguists do and think up plausible explanations for outselves.
But can you truly abandon what you think you know {some of us had the advantage of knowing nothing} to fall back on agreed matters of common sense and the plain-as-we-can-make-em facts about what people actually do when learning and teaching to speak; and then see whether what you thought you knew holds up?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Orthodox types have Great Vowel Shift Syndrome: it's so taken for granted and always expounded in such techncial terms (all about IPA and phonology) that even a plain reading of Chaucer is dismissed as misleading because the GVS subsequently changed so much.
Divesting oneself of the detailed preconceptions is the hard part: for Applied Epistemology in general; and for the Great Vowel Shift, on which so much depends, in particular.
Donmillion, do you know of any resources that actually demonstrate the written evidence of the Great Vowel Shift? I haven't found a single one that doesn't just assert it using the IPA.
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