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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Our cousins John and Mary are cognates because they also have the same parents (as one another, not as us). And the four of us are cognates because we all have the same pair of grandparents |
If you can turn down the analyticity, megaDon, you should find all this a piece of piss. In your example, you and your cousins are clearly not cognates; and at the same time, in another sense, you clearly are. Keep hold of such Fuzzy Logic concepts.
I realised quite recently that I thought cognates were recognisable in each other: that we have come to know them as related, they look the same or "the same". No matter: that is compatible with the accepted meaning of cognate as born together, having shared roots, a Family Resemblance.
We all agree (?) that languages evolved from ancestral forms and equivalent words in different languages range from being identical... through being pronounced/spelled their respective ways... to settling in different parts of a spectrum of meaning. We typically distinguish loanwords as being fairly consciously used as foreign words, even though "born together" clearly applies.
We refer to cognate sounds because they have Family Resemblances, too: they're generated in similar ways, are easily mispronounced or mistaken for one another and so on.
And we refer to letters as cognates when they represent cognate sounds, which is sometimes reflected in their shapes. The relationship between letters and sounds lies at the heart of the problem with historical linguistics.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| 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? |
It is because 'complicating' the grammar decreases the number of letters and words required -- important when scribes charge by the word when sending letters, when stone masons charge by the letter when incising monuments, when sailors have only limited flag space when signalling at sea etc etc. Thus We shall have overcome the Sabine women becomes overcomerbiminis Sabinae.
| How did all these inventors of ancient artificial languages conspire to agree on -a to mark the plurals of neuter nouns? |
This is stark evidence in our favour. Related natural languages don't normally agree to this degree of detail so it must be a case of a new artificial language deliberately adopting a well-known convention of an existing artificial language.
| Come to that, given that the Romance languages only have masculine and feminine genders, why did they give Latin a neuter gender in the first place? |
Since German has a neuter (das mädchen, which tells you all you need to know about German girls) it is reasonable to conclude that so did Italian at the time Latin was segued from it.
| Why (how) did they make the cases at least work in exactly the same way as Hittite, Sanskrit, and Old Persian, to which surely they had no access? |
You jest, surely? The links between Italy, Greece, Anatolia, Iran and the Indus Plain at the time of alphabet-adoption were positively frenzied. They were conquering one another half the time.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| I would like to return to the serious point that I was trying to make at that time but which was carefully ignored. |
| 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. |
I haven't given a direct answer, but can you see that there can't be a direct answer while our perspectives are so at odds? If we can reach a common ground, you guys can probably flesh out matters of simple letters vs arrays of sounds, dissolving ambiguity over imperatives vs declaratives and stuff like that, just as well as we can.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Something else to bear in mind is that simple utility is not the only factor. Our position is that these alphabet-cultures arose as patrician/ trading/ colonising elites, so that mere complexity is not necessarily a drawback. Those of us who learned Latin and Greek at school will testify that having the ability to learn such difficult languages marked us out as natural leaders of men. And indeed of websites.
But, on the other hand, and pace Dan, for all I know it is easier for babies to learn to speak Latin and Greek than natural languages.
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Bernie, quoting Dan again, wrote:
| The origin of Greek, Latin, Sanscrit etc. remains a mystery. |
No more than the origins of any one of the 6000 languages still extant and the (probably) 6000 that are now extinct. Why do you feel that the origins of these particular languages are particularly mysterious? |
I think that's Dan's point, Bernie.
However, I don't at present feel that "The origin of Greek, Latin, Sanscrit etc" is particularly mysterious, given that philologists have been able to infer a lot more about them (and the other IE languages) than about most of the rest of the 6000. Of course, it is "only" inference: apart from the case of the Hittite laryngeals, there's little direct evidence.
Which is not the same as "none". There have been other predictive successes, like my own (limited) ability to "predict" word-forms in one IE language, based on a knowledge of the word in other languages and a knowledge of the laws of sound-change between the languages. I can do the same to some extent for Polynesian languages, though in both cases I run the danger that the word might have been lost from the target language. On the same basis, however, it was possible for early 20th-century philologists to predict vocabulary elements of the recently-discovered Tokharian languages, from what was already known, before those elements were found in manuscripts.
Yes, sirree, there are a lot of mysteris about the origins of all languages. But some are more mysteriouser than others (or most are more mysterious than some ...).
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| Nick wrote: | Frank,
Have you thought about the case of Derby? |
There is also a Little Chester sited right next to the Roman fort, which presumably dates from the Roman period. Even so a farm or two named Derby and Northworthy could already have existed. For example there is Mackworth not far away.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Yes, sirree, there are a lot of mysteries about the origins of all languages. But some are more mysteriouser than others (or most are more mysterious than some ...). |
The AE point is that there is a mystery about the origins of ALL natural languages since we do not know the origins of ANY of them because they are ALWAYS originally unwritten.
This is a point of departure that might engender modesty on professional practitioners but when this functional impoverishment is allied to the unfortunate necessity that they ALWAYS work with non-natural languages (ie written ones) means that they are ALL functionally out-to-lunch. The fact that modesty does not come naturally to academics is another complication.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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On the matter of -by place-names, the AE point is that since -by places mostly occur in Britain and a few in a neighbouring trading-country (Denmark) the presumption must be that -by is a British usage and that the Danish ones arise from British influence. This is just a general application of the What-is-is-what-was principle. This does not rule out the opposite being the case but it requires a little more evidence than the Place-Name Industry telling us it is so.
The THOBR spin on this of course is that if English arrived with the Anglo-Saxons, and by inference English village names, then -by villages by the same inference are Danish.
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| Donmillion wrote: | frank h wrote:
English -by in place-names reflects Old Norse byr, basically meaning 'a dwelling' ..... the Normans were Danish (should look it up, really), given the very large number of toft and especially thorp names, including Yvetot, Lilletot ('Little Toft'?), Hautot and Langtot ('high' and 'long'), and 'tourp, -torbe, and -tourbe names, not to mention "Le Torpe". |
Presumably these mean dwelling in French?
Also there are a number of 'bourg' places in Normandy, perhaps given by the Danish/Normans? But they generally used the term 'castle' for a stronghold.
However the bourg/burg villages are close to Roman roads and forts, so perhaps even go back to the Roman period (maybe forts stationed with such troops or indiginous germanic speakers setting up a vicus nearby)?
If so the 'by' element could then be very early?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Also there are a number of 'bourg' places in Normandy, |
Hate to intrude in a private argument but you should beware the term "Normandy". If you are talking about the eastern half, then you are stumbling firmly into the area where the cline between Flemish and French has gone back and forth (to judge by the vast number of 'Germanic' village names). Thus 'bourg' is almost certainly just Flemish for town (or whatever the term originally stood for).
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Thus 'bourg' is almost certainly just Flemish for town (or whatever the term originally stood for). |
They coincide with the Roman forts from Rouen to Cherbourg along the 'Roman' road, which is more or less the modern one.
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Bernie, if - as I think was suggested at one point - (written) Latin developed as a trading language, it would have given a distinct advantage to those who knew it (as it, "You were meant to deliver four amphora of gentleman's relish. It says so here in the contract").
This would provide the motivation necessary to learn to read and write an artificial language.
Moreover, I still think that if you're writing on wax tablets, bits of stone and bits of wood, the advantage of a pared down, compressed language is obvious.
Think of the artificiality of telegraphese in its day.
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Taking up a point made by Ishmael, has anyone thought about the unusual story we are fed about the development of printing?
First the Chinese invent it, even though it is singularly ill-suited to the thousands of Chinese characters.
Then the Irish invent spacing between words in the 8th Century.
Then Guttenburg does his thing around 1450.
I recently read that at the time (mid-15th Century) Cambridge University had 122 books, each worth a small farm.
This means that written language was barely clinging on for dear life at the beginning of the Renaissance. It's a situation that we can hardly imagine and I totally agree with the point that our viewpoint is very much coloured by universal literacy (i.e. ultimately printing).
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Donmillion
In: Acton, Middlesex
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Mick wrote (quoting me):
| 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? |
It is because 'complicating' the grammar decreases the number of letters and words required |
Well, no, not necessarily. (By 'letters' assume you mean 'letters per utterance' rather than letters per alphabet).
Let's take a fictitious example based on English:
'The man of the house wiped the seats of the chairs in the kitchen with sponges.'
First thing to note is that Latin, unlike Greek or all the Romance languages, has no articles ('the', 'a', 'an', for readers not familiar with the term), so let's take them out. This will certainly reduce the sentence length, and (given the existence of 'telegraphese' English) is a plausible strategy for creating a 'reduced' language. At the same time, let's pretend we're working with Italian, and add Italian-style endings to the nouns (we'll assume that all nouns are masculine), and to the verb:
'Mano of houseo wipevi seati of chairi in kitcheno with spongei.'
This has immediately reduced the length of the sentence, despite the endings, from 63 letters to 52.
Now Latin, unlike English or the Romance languages, changes noun-endings to indicate the grammatical function of a word in the sentence. These changes allow us to remove 'of' and, sometimes, words such as 'with'. Basing our endings on Latin (and ignoring differences of vowel length), we might find:
'Mano housei wipevi seatos chairorum in kitcheno spongeis.'
This step has decreased the number of letters from 52 to 48 --relatively insignificant, compared with the reduction from removing the five definite articles ('the').
But suppose we go the other way, and drop the endings, apart from the plural marker (Italian i) and tense marker (Italian vi). How intelligible is this?
'Man of house wipevi seati of chairi in kitchen with spongei.'
This results in 49 letters--only one more than the 'Latin' version--with no loss of meaning, and with much simpler grammar. No cases for nouns, just a simple plural marker (as in English). No need to memorise aqu-a, aqu-a, aqu-am, aqu-ae, aqu-ae, aqu-aa, aqu-ae; aqu-ae, aqu-ae, aqu-aas, aqu-aarum, aqu-iis, aqu-iis, aqu-iis; just a simple aqua, aquae would do.
But then, why not stick with Italian aqua, aque (removing a redundant 'c', as our imaginary inventors of Latin must have done)? That's even shorter. This is especially attractive given that, besides the fourteen declensional forms just given for aqua, Latin has more than two hundred other declensional forms to memorise (plus irregular forms--why arbitrarily invent those?), compared with fewer than twenty in Italian. And the twenty could have been reduced to only two (singular, plural, as in most English words) by removing gender suffixes altogether. Instead of which they added a gender, assigning Italian masculine nouns to either the Latin masculine or Latin neuter genders on an apparently arbitrary basis.
(They also did apparently weird things like jettison the Italian word for 'sailor', marinaio, and replace it with nauta--a feminine word for an essential masculine occupation!)
I haven't even begun to approach the complications of verbs. Italian verbs have six personal forms per tense, seven simple and seven compound tenses (including moods), and three conjugations. In principle, that's 252 verbal endings they learn in infancy, not counting irregular verbs. That's hugely complex compared to the three verbal endings in 'regular' (weak) English verbs, but Latin has six personal forms per tense, four conjugation categories, two voices, two aspects, seven moods, and six tenses, a total of over four thousand forms to memorise, again excluding irregular verbs (fewer than in Italian). (Admittedly, reduplicated forms reduce the number of real forms in use; but you still have to know whether to use a reduplicated form or a unique one.)
Since Italian operates perfectly well with only 250-odd regular verbal forms, why multiply an already complex situation--but one easily mastered in childhood--sixteen-fold in a language that is only going to be taught to, and learnt by, people who have already passed the age of easily learning languages?
So far, and despite the argument that complication was desired to prove how clever and superior they were (wasn't just being able to read and write enough?), I am not convinced that any shortening of expression is worth the huge increase in complexity and the learning burden that goes with it. How the seven burning hells did they keep it all straight in their heads while they were inventing it?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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All this arises from my initial perusal of a Loeb's Classical Edition of something or other when the English text is faced by the Latin text, and the Latin takes up approx half the space. For page after page after page. Since English takes up much the same space as all other (modern, natural European) languages, this points to Latin as being expressly compressed. The reasons I have advanced seem to cover this perfectly adequately.
The part you miss out, Donna, is that as well as being compressed, this new language had to be alphabetised ie the three hundred and seventy eight sounds of natural Campanian/Italian of c 600 BC had to be reduced to the twenty (is it? I forget) sounds of the Latin alphabet. Learning a few rules (and remember nobody ever knows the rules of their own natural language) is a peesuvpiss.
But then nobody ever had to speak this new language...did they? Mmm.
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