MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
How Fast Do Languages Change? (Linguistics)
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 40, 41, 42 ... 48, 49, 50  Next
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Possibly true but you do have to be aware that there is a common starting point and act on it to be even in with a chance of understanding the overall situation. It's called 'bottomless pit syndrome' in THOBR and refers to people's determination to know where they came from even when they cannot know where they came from. Human beings will either ignore it or make it up and rely on academics (or priests previously) to provide them with the necessary theories to allow them to do whichever is more comforting.

Or, when it comes to politics, whichever is more advantageous. As we shall see in the case of English and Welsh.
Send private message
Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Mick Harper wrote:
Possibly true but you do have to be aware that there is a common starting point and act on it to be even in with a chance of understanding the overall situation. It's called 'bottomless pit syndrome' in THOBR and refers to people's determination to know where they came from even when they cannot know where they came from. Human beings will either ignore it or make it up and rely on academics (or priests previously) to provide them with the necessary theories to allow them to do whichever is more comforting.

Or, when it comes to politics, whichever is more advantageous. As we shall see in the case of English and Welsh.


Disagree.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Quiet in the ranks!
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Clearly, wherever the Welsh and the English came from (I’m assuming the British Isles wasn’t either the Garden of Eden or where language was first invented) they were speaking proto-Welsh and proto-English when they arrived, and the one found the other on arrival. Orthodoxy holds to two 'paradigm' theories, both of which are questionable but we’ll go along with them for the moment:

1) Welsh and English are Indo-European languages which means both Welsh and English originated in the Indo-European heartland wherever that was
2) English is an evolved form of Anglo-Saxon which means the Welsh were here when the English arrived.

For some reason which I’ve never quite fathomed, both groups draw comfort from these creation myths, which is presumably why they are orthodoxy. The Welsh are – or at least were back in the eighteenth/nineteenth century – anxious to have their language placed on a par with English and since Indo-European was the most prestigious language family to belong to at that time they opted to be members too. Linguistics is such a pathetically unscientific pursuit nobody has felt moved to challenge this assumption.

If it were being decided today the Welsh would probably go for something more exotic especially as Indo-European has got itself such a bad name (Aryan for one) and is fast becoming a much less prestigious group to belong to. I suppose in the near-to-middling future that depends on whether India or China comes out on top. Also whether the Indo-part of the title stands the test of time.

more/
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Who arrived first can be a very combustible element in linguistic strife. In Britain we are ironically lucky because the dominant group, the English-speakers, are held to be the late arrivers and you can’t be racist about the dominant group. I say 'ironic' because about three seconds reflection will tell you that this is unlikely to be the case. Having minority groups ‘clinging on’ in the western margins of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland could hardly arise if the English-speakers are such successful late-arrivers they are able to replace the native-speakers over 90% of the territory in about two hundred years but not 100% in fifteen hundred years.

Admittedly English-speakers have managed to do something similar in the somewhat larger territories of North America and Australia but I doubt the Celtic-speakers (we’ll have to use the term for clarity) would take much comfort from being compared to Red Indians and Aborigines (we'll have to use the terms for clarity). The better model is that the Celtic-speakers arrived last and expanded from the west.

But the Celtic population presents linguistic difficulties of their own. There are two of them. Welsh and Cornish vis à vis Irish and Scots Gaels. We don’t know, possibly I don’t know, enough about Cumbric and Manx to say where they fall. (Breton is Welsh bar the shouting, Celtiberian is anyone's guess.) How fast languages change is something none of us know but we can make one or two preliminary sketches as to what happens before literary languages arrive to present us with a whole new set of conundrums.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The tiny differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic are easily accounted for by the one being the product of ordinary migration from one area to the other. Most likely from Ireland to Scotland but it could have been the other way round. Or they are separate groups, both coming from 'Gaelia', settling in different areas of this new archipelago they've found (the British Isles). Notice though that the Irish would not take kindly to being told they are a Scottish offshoot whereas the Scots Gaels are fairly relaxed about coming from Ireland, indeed it is their orthodox assumption that they did even though there is in fact no sound evidence for it.

This situation in turn has an effect on Gaelic history. The Irish are always coming up with stories of how they arrived long, long ago with extravagant names; the Scots Gaels are content with stories about how they came from Ireland and are shorn of extravagant names to the point of declaring that Scotland is named for the Scotii, an Irish tribe. They must have moved lock, stock and barrel because there are no Scotii in Ireland.

They are not to be confused with the Ulster Scots who did go the other way (in modern, historical times) and were speaking quite a different language, Lallan Scots. Now Lallan ('lowland') Scots is English bar the shouting but this raises much more profound difficulties because their version of English is far more different to English English than Scottish Gaelic is to Irish Gaelic, yet all four groups share an orthodoxy that it was the Gaels that separated earlier than the English-speakers.

This is known to every linguist, historian and archaeologist under the sun but the problem is, as per usual, only known to Applied Epistemologists who prefer fact to national fancy. And in any case academics never ever think anything through. But please remember our rule: they are to be pitied not despised.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

When it comes to Literary Languages of the British Isles, the situation shifts from the ridiculous to the bizarre. As you all know, but as all academics are inclined to forget, literary languages are rare in themselves (eighty or so now, throw in maybe another dozen dead ones) and ferociously difficult to construct – and maybe even harder to get adopted since we don't hear about the ones that weren't. When it comes to the Literary Languages of Europe, orthodoxy believes the following (it varies but this is close enough for our purposes)

c 700 BC Classical Greek
c 500 BC Latin
c 300 AD Gothic
c. 600 AD English, Welsh, Irish
c. 800 AD French
c 1200 AD Italian

Of course the last two are complicated because orthodoxy holds that French and Italian are Latin, i.e. evolved forms of it, and since in any case we have not dealt with either the Veronese Riddle or the Strasbourg Oaths, we must set these aside for the mo. Let’s just keep to our own islands. Here the only complication is that what they call Old English we call Anglo-Saxon even though they call Anglo-Saxon Old English. I hope that's clear.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Since the evidence for literary English, Welsh and Irish all comes from forged sources (either illustrated gospel books or law codes) we need not take these dates seriously but the point is the English, the Welsh and the Irish take them seriously so can compete amongst themselves for the First British Literary Language prize. If the Irish don’t mind, I am using ‘British’ here in the sense of the British Isles. But anyway this situation introduces our first rule of thumb

The more desperate the cultural circumstances, the more likely is a literary language to 'appear'.

Thus Gothic suddenly emerges from the vasty deeps of Germania in the guise of the Wulfilas Bible and then promptly disappears again. Sorry about that, Goths, but you should be more careful next time. The English break off from their mead halls when St Augustine arrives in 600 AD and sit down to write Aethelbert’s Law Code, then there’s a pause, then Caedmon starts turning out vernacular poetry, then there’s a pause, then Anglo-Saxon chronicles and land charters start popping up all over the shop.

Meanwhile over in Celtica...
Send private message
Hatty
Site Admin

In: Berkshire
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Mick Harper wrote:
the only complication is that what they call Old English we call Anglo-Saxon even though they call Anglo-Saxon Old English. I hope that's clear.

According to David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language

By the 16th century the term Anglo-Saxon came to refer to all things of the early English period, including language, culture, and people. While it remains the normal term for the latter two aspects, the language began to be called Old English towards the end of the 19th century, as a result of the increasingly strong anti-Germanic nationalism in English society of the 1890s and early 1900s. However many authors still also use the term Anglo-Saxon to refer to the language.

This 'came to refer to' infers an organic, possibly lengthy process though he is actually saying Anglo-Saxon was used in the 16th century onwards.

Old English seems to have started later than the other old languages being promoted across the board.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

The curious thing about British literary languages is that not only do they burst out of the most unpromising cultural milieu known to man or beast (the very depths of the Dark Age) but they emerge simultaneously without reference to one another. Thus while the Anglo-Saxons of c 600 (I forgot to mention they only did this in England -- the Anglo-Saxons who stayed at home stayed in their mead halls) the Irish of c 600 are managing the same remarkable feat without contact, not just with the Anglo-Saxons, but with anyone at all! I expect a dictionary washed up in Galway Bay.

This gave the Welsh a bit of a dilemma...
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

They started promisingly by explaining that the Irish only started on their literary apotheosis because a Welshman, St Patick, went over to tell them all about it but even they could not claim he did anything more than tell them about Latin. Which, let’s face it, anyone could have done. But Welsh claims for Welsh rests on much firmer grounds than saintly fairy stories. It rests on the Lichfield Gospels. You see, for reasons still not clear, the Lichfield Gospels, an illustrated manuscript, made its way around c 800 AD to Llandeillo whereupon a Welsh person wrote some charters into its margins in Welsh.

You can see the problem. 800 AD is a lot later than 600 AD. Ah, said the Welsh, but there must already have been a literary Welsh for that bloke to write Welsh into the Llandeillo Gospels. So? said the English and the Irish. Well, said the Welsh, you two have very incautiously claimed historical events and therefore a fixed date for your two inventions, we have done no such thing. Ah, said the English and the Irish with dawning acknowledgement of how cunning the Welsh had been, so you could have invented literary Welsh at any time prior to 800 AD. Welcome to the club.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

As befits our island nation(s) English, Welsh and Irish stand alone (unless you throw in Gothic) as literary languages produced in a Dark Age (unless you throw in the Strasbourg Oaths). All the other eighty or so literary languages were the product of societies that had a reasonably sophisticated literary apparat. English, as befits the World Language, is the only one that was written in a form (Anglo-Saxon) which is totally incomprehensible to people who speak the spoken form (English). Except for that other World Language, Latin, which is officially the written form of languages later spoken by Italian, French, Spanish etc people.

I know, I know, but you'll have to take it up with the eejits. In writing.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I suppose in fairness I ought to set out the actual position, although it is already largely set out in the last chapter of Forgeries. As far as the British Isles go, and in accordance to the "What is is what was" rule, the pre-historic locals were speaking English in the eastern parts and 'Celtic' languages in the western parts. None of the languages were literary ones -- indeed, if Classical sources are to be believed, .the locals took some pride in them not being so because memory systems were used to make a permanent record of useful knowledge. It can be presumed that they had some knowledge of literary languages -- Punic, Greek and Latin -- because of the importance of tin and copper and the consequent trade with the Mediterranean world.

England, Cornwall and Wales were occupied by a literary language (Latin) for several centuries and presumably retained the ability to write in it after the Romans left. This situation continued until around the thirteenth century when French/Norman French became a literary language (using a Latin alphabet) and was used sporadically in England and even more sporadically in Ireland. By the fourteenth century, when the English ruling elite had pretty much ceased any connection with France, English started to be written down, using a modified Latin alphabet. Lallan Scots ditto in the southern and eastern parts of Scotland. This would apply to Ireland and Wales insofar as English-speakers controlled these parts.

The advent of literary Welsh is a bit murky but certainly later. Irish Gaelic later still. Scots Gaelic later still. Cornish was never a literary language except self consciously in the twentieth century when nobody spoke it. All the 'Celtic' literalisations used the English variant of the Latin alphabet but with even more difficulty because these languages were even more distant from Latin than English was.

Literary English has had enormous world success, written Welsh has had and still has a local following but Irish/Scots Gaelic in written form have never amounted to much and only really exist because of artificial efforts to keep them going. The what, when and why (even the whether) of literary Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse remain to be cleared up.

[Written in Standard English, using a modified Latin alphabet, and post-18th century spelling conventions (but not US ones) by a Standard English-speaker. Standard English varies minorly between written and spoken forms and majorly with regional dialectical forms.]
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

I don't know whether this is true but amend the above accordingly

Kevin McAlba Replying to @TheBengwin @Sheilam19534814
English alphabet has 26 letters. Gaelic has 18.
Send private message
Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London
View user's profile
Reply with quote

Anybody know anything about this -- it seems to be quite popular

The aim of Anglish is: English with many fewer words borrowed from other tongues. Because of the fundamental changes to our language, to say that English people today speak Modern English is like saying that the French speak Latin. The fact is that we now speak an international language. The Anglish project is intended as a means of recovering the Englishness of English and of restoring ownership of the language to the English people.

Not sure about any of that but anyway let's see how it pans out in practice by quoting some random passage of this 'Anglish'. Here's a suitable piece

The History of Britain Revealed - the Eretide of Britain Uncovered - is a book that withersays the mainstream belief of the ordfrume of English. It says that English does not stem from Anglo-Saxon but was already spoken in Britain. The incomers would not have been manyful enough to have taken over most of the land. Eventhough there are many French words in Middle and New English, Old English is swith unlike from Middle English and so could not have become the latter. The English tung is unalike from A-S or Old Norse and so is bethought as a standoff tung, eventhough sharing some marks with other rerdes like Frish and lesserly to Danish, Thedelandish and other akin tungs. English, for byspell does not have raised sounds and is the only rerde of its kindred of which r is said as we know of.

It'll never catch on. Unlike the book. Like the book.
Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic Goto page Previous  1, 2, 3 ... 40, 41, 42 ... 48, 49, 50  Next

Jump to:  
Page 41 of 50

MemberlistThe Library Index  FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   RegisterRegister   ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group