How Fast Do Languages Change? (Linguistics)

[Hatty]

There's a (Romanian?) proverb 'May you be involved in a conflict in which you know you're right'. But presumably each side thinks or 'knows' they're right.

The trouble with the TT site is that it is a conflict rather than an exchange of ideas and most of the opinion-holders are entrenched in their positions.

[Mick Harper]

I mostly disagree, Hatty. It's a liberal shibboleth that peace-and-tranquility is the way forward. I happen to believe that sturm-und-drang is actually a much more effective cutting tool. But perhaps we can return to this during our debrief when the whole thing is finished.
PS Remind me to wax lyrical on my famous dictum "Might is Right only because Right is Might". Or my equally famous dictum "Right is Might only because Might is Right".

[Hatty]

In Andrew Marr's programme on modern British history, he referred to an incident in North Korea in 1950 when a British officer told his American counterpart in typcially laconic fashion that he was in a "sticky position". It was in fact an SOS but misunderstood completely and therefore ignored.

Unlike the example that Harry A on the TT thread cites of 'shag' and 'dance, this was not a linguistic but a cultural misunderstanding. After all the meaning is clear enough, "sticky" equals 'difficult', but the significance wasn't conveyed. Would such a mistake occur now? I suspect that there is still a huge gap between the cultures which sometimes goes by the tag of 'British humour'.
(If the officer had sent a written message, he would doubtless have put 'urgent assistance required' and made himself more comprehensible)

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

This is a not unimportant matter, Ishmael. If you believe in your dictum (and I don't necessarily since it looks, unvarnished, to be either a truism or a circularity) then you must link it with might and/or right. You will find it instructive to do so.

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

No it isn't. You have essentially expanded on a truism. The point about "right" is that there's a moral dimension that people claim has a place in the equation. It's no use claiming you're saying the same thing without the moral dimension. You have to establish a link (clue: whether in reality or in men's minds).

[Ishmael]

I don't follow you. But we are way off topic.

[admin]

From Komorikid (keeping on track)

I believe that language is so ingrained it takes a lot to change it. A common language may evolve over time into another language but it would still have a common thread, a linguistic DNA of its progeny.

English shares a DNA with several other languages; French, Spanish, Italian, German, Norse, Kiswahili and Indonesian. The DNA I believe is the natural way someone speaks; how they put a sentence together. English and its relatives is structured with a SVO typology -- Subject > Verb > Object.
I played a game of Football yesterday.
In this, I is the subject, a game of Football is the object and played is the verb

This is the natural way we speak and if English evolved into French > Italian > Spanish, etc the SVO would be a marker. I don't see how people would logically start putting the verb at the end or the object at the beginning of a sentence if it wasn't their natural way of speaking.

The basic assumption is that Britain was the end of the line of languages heading West. What if it was the FIRST in a line of languages heading East in the earliest time period. This language Timeline continued East until it met another DNA chain; the SOV typology Subject > Object > Verb
- Japanese, Korean, Persian, Turkish, and Latin heading in the opposite direction.
I yesterday a game of Football played

The SOV strain kept heading west affecting but not supplanting the earlier SVO languages. Where it spent the most time (Central and Northern Europe) it warped the former tongue to the point where both types fused. This is exactly what happened with the Germanic strain: it became an agglutination of both SVO and SOV. It eventually returned to its beginnings in Britain as something different but it was never able to replace the original strain.

Linguists have only followed half of the trail because, until the two strains met, neither was a written language. Maybe that is why writing was invented; to bridge the gap between the two most common language types. They met where East has always met West; the middle-east where writing was born.

[Mick Harper]

A nice idea, Komo, one definitely worth pursuing. (And I thought of pursuing something similar at the end of THOBR but got daunted and wrote The End instead.) Though I don't think I would have been quite so radical as you in proposing Latin as being a Turkish off-shoot.

But you may have finessed at least one problem. Linguistics is

a) so incredibly complicated and
b) so incredibly riddled with error

that any true revisionist normally has to be prepared to re-invent the entire subject from the boot-straps up. Your idea of using JUST BASIC SYNTAX to sort out the evolutionary path is quite seductive because it is:

a) potentially scientific and
b) completely boot-straps.

Boot the buggers out!

[DPCrisp]

[Peter Harper]

I have never heard the SVO-SOV distinction considered so fundamental before. But oddly I yesterday heard a Japanese businessman (promoting Sri Lanka as the cheap place to manufacture components) remark to an audience how quickly Sri Lankans can learn Japanese precisely because (he thought) they both spoke SOV languages. And he actually put up some examples of sentences in Sinhala, Japanes and English for comparison to make his point.

But surely Sinhala is related to English and Japanese is not? I asked my daughter, recently returned from Sri Lanks, to count 1-10 in Sinhala and there is no question this is Indo-European stuff.

[Komorikid]

What is Indo-European?
A linguistic invention.

The entire Life Sciences were created by 17th and 18th Century English gentleman with nothing better to do on their summer holidays in the Far and Near East. Comparative Linguistics is a case in point. Its author, William Jones, being an English gentleman in the Sub Continent's tropical climate had rather longer hols than most.

He found striking similarities between Sanskrit and the classic languages he had studied as a diligent student at Harrow. He proposed that they were linked in some way. But the mere idea that Greek, Latin and heaven forbid English were daughter languages of those spoken by the indigenes of the Sub Continent, whom he and other Europeans considered racially inferior, was untenable. So he and others proposed an Arian invasion of Caucasians into the Sub Continent in pre-history who brought with them a Proto Indo-European language that then migrated back through the Middle East and on to Europe.

The fact that no textural or archaeological evidence has been found to support this hasn't stood in the way of linguistic licence. In fact the evidence, especially that uncovered in Pakistan and India in recent times, suggests a continuity of local settlement with no significant additions over time that would give any credence to the Arian invasion theory.

The most recent proposal, know as The Continuity Theory, correlates genetic evidence with archaeological evidences to suggest that 80% of the inhabitants of Europe go back to the Paleolithic. Therefore the languages Europeans speak today have developed in situ and have not been transmitted by a massive influx of PIE (Proto Indo-European) races from the southeast.

The PCT (Paleolithic Continuity Theory) has become a very controversial subject in linguistic circles and has few adherents but its evidence is compelling and vastly superior to the hotchpotch of Proto languages and Sub Sets created by linguistics to explain away the glaring anomalies.

There is no such thing as an Indo-European language. The entire corpus of Comparative Linguistics is built on a Creation Myth of their own making. Mysterious race from somewhere no one can determine invades and changes the language of dozens of countries. Sounds dreadfully familiar.

[Mick Harper]

Oh dear, we're now up against Nature
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/10.11/99-verbs.html
Notice the hysterically funny (if it wasn't so tragic) situation we are now in. These mathematicians have taken the linguists' word that Anglo-Saxon is Old English and have computed their law by measuring the differences between Anglo-Saxon and English. They then go on to extrapolate this error into tens of thousands of years (they are trying to make language change comparable to genetic change).

Of course when the detailed arguments die down (and the ANSAXnetters are all on their high horse at the moment because the mathematicians have slightly misapplied a coupla their fave labels) the linguists will claim scientific validation of their position. And if anyone argues, they've got the hallowed back copies of Nature to back them up.

Mind you, it's a two-edged sword getting powerful outsiders in. Like the Romano-Brits calling in the Anglo-Saxons. We shall await developments. I don't think a letter to the editor of Nature is called for at this stage.

[Geoff Gardiner]

I am a new boy and must start with a confession to Mick. I was once 'a public school classical scholar', albeit a rather plebeian one as the City of Birmingham paid my fees at King Edward's School, and indeed a maintenance grant. Poor boys today are not so lucky.

It was at school in about 1944 that I noticed that French was French however far back one went, and very different from Latin. I surmised that French was probably a descendant of a sister language of Latin and like Mick decided it was not Latin's bastard son. That sister language will have presumably been Gaulish, and from the two bilingual inscriptions that Barry Cunliffe prints in 'The Ancient Celts' one can see they are mutually intelligible. So Julius Caesar had good reason to write to his legates in Greek so that if his letters fell into Gaulish hands they could not be read.

The known words of Gaulish, culled from inscriptions, are available on a web site. Similarities to Old Irish and other Indo-European (IE) languages are noted there. I have gone through them all and added some of my own. One gets the impression that, besides other similarities, Gaulish might be intermediate between Proto-italic and Old Irish, but Irish surely split off at a very early stage, probably when the sea cut Ireland off from Wales 6000 years ago, and if it is derived from Proto-italic, it has departed from it a vast distance. Continental scholars point out that Gaulish does not exhibit lenition, a distinctive characteristic of Irish and Welsh. I also see no evidence of thick and thin vowels and consonants, the unique (?) feature of Irish and Gaelic. But a difficult problem comes when one looks for IE roots in Irish. My copy of Lewis's Latin Dictionary for Schools (a cut down version of the full Lewis and Short) lists at the back the roots which have been deduced from many IE languages. One struggles to find Irish words which clearly make use of these roots.

With fervid imagination one can find a few. The root for 'speedy' is found in the word for 'horse'. That is equus in Latin, equos in Gaulish and allegedly in Old Irish. It is 'each', pronounced 'yak', in modern Irish and its daughter language, Gaelic. But there were no horses when Ireland was settled or when it was cut off from Europe, so the words for horse in Irish and Welsh are doubtless borrowings.

Both Irish and Welsh have gender, usually an infallible indicator of an Indo-European language. However for those who want to establish a connection with Berber, I note that Punic, the language of the Carthaginians also had lenition. (Lenition is the mutation of initial consonants before certain letters. Thus the Welsh 'pont' becomes 'bont' in 'Tal-y-bont'.

'Pont', bridge, sounds like the Latin pons, pontis, but were there any bridges in Wales before the Romans came? Another word in Welsh which is similar to the Latin is the word for 'danger', perigyl, periculum in Latin.

Not only do Irish and Welsh have vocabularies very different from accepted IE languages, but also from each other. And Manx and Cornish and Breton are very different from each other and the other so-called 'Celtic' languages. Putting Welsh and Irish in the same language group is pushing it a bit. They are far less similar to each other than the Romance languages are to each other. The great difference between Welsh and English vocabulary (having allowed for the differing spelling systems) is brought home to one when one goes to see Welsh national Opera at Llandudno. The surtitles are in Welsh and English and they rarely show any similarity.

I think one must abstain from being categorical in one's deductions. Too little is yet known. I am just throwing out ideas that to me are more commonsensical than the usual academic theories, and moreover, fit far better the facts and especially the genetic evidence.

During recent years I have had discussions with several distinguished philologists. Anyone who has looked at credec.org will know that I debate economics with Professor Michael Hudson. But Michael is not only a distinguished professor of economics but also a philologist and a Harvard trained Bronze Age archaeologist. Mick will be pleased to know that we have dumped the notion that IE was the language of invaders who brought agricultural technology. (Actually I never bought that one.) And as the IE vocabularies differ so much we agreed that IE was more a matter of grammar and structure that vocabulary. Through Michael I have had contact with a Basque expert, Professor Roz Frank, and have been at conferences with the cuneiformists. Two of the latter, Professor Johannes Renger and Professor Cornelia Wunsch are now good friends.

Punic is supposed to be a development of Phoenician. Who were the Phoenicians? Well this heterodox suggestion holds as least as much water as the standard view.

Some of the Solutreans who occupied South West France during the Ice Age developed great navigational skills at least 20,000 years ago, probably using technology similar to the present day Inuit and/or the Irish curragh. They were so good that a few of them worked their way along 5,000 km. of ice to North America, and that explains the one per cent ratio of the female 'X' haplogroup in North America. Isotopic analysis shows that western Europeans during the Mesolithic Age lived mainly off fish. As the ice retreated the Solutreans moved north, along the coasts. By 6,500 years BC they had occupied 4,000 known coastal sites around the north of Scotland, 170 in the Loch Torridon/Applecross area alone (See notice at Sand archaeological site, just north of Applecross.) Their navigational skills were so great that they were eating even deep sea fish. (Local communication.) Unfortunately their sites around the coast of the rest of Britain are now 100 metres under the sea, but one can safely assume they fished there too as their bones reveal what they ate. The point has already been made that fishing is an easy way to get food, and it enables far higher populations than hunting and gathering. That this point was totally ignored for so long must be the result of so many 'great' archaeologists being landlubbers. The volunteers who look after the tiny museum at Dingwall in Scotland have put up a large notice along one wall that reads, 'The sea was a highway, not a barrier'.

A recently discovered carving in Norway (Picture published in the Aftenposten.) shows that in 500 BC the Vikings were making boats to the same design they made later, and they could have made them much earlier but held together with wooden pegs not iron rivets. Superiority of Atlantic seamanship over Roman is emphasised in the display in the museum at Pons, not far from Bordeaux. The museum also contains examples of European tools over a 500,000 year period. The most important are the needle with a hole for the thread, and the flint spear point which made them the most destructive animal alive. A similar spear point is found in America where it is known as the Clovis Point. A replica of the Solutrean point can be seen at the Kilmartin Museum in Scotland. The Solutreans are noted among archaeologists for their cleverness so it is not surprising they are the ancestors of the peoples of the British Isles, including Ireland, and of the Atlantic Facade generally..

It is much easier to sail into the Mediterranean than out of it. With their superior skills sailors from the Atlantic Facade entered the Med, taking with them the many goods needed in the Med, tin being one of them, and freeze-dried fish (lutofisk in Norewegian). Like later Vikings some of the sailors married the local girls so their descendants spoke Mediterranean languages, Phoenician, a Semitic language, and Greek, an IE language. Thus they became the Phoenician traders and Mycenaean ruling class. This hypothesis explains the existence of people with the Atlantic Modal haplotype in Syria (10 per cent of the population) and elsewhere. (See paper by James Wilson et al. in the March 2001 issue of the journal of the National Academy of Sciences.) There is only tiny evidence of a movement of typical Syrian genes in the other direction. It also explains the lack of Phoenician settlements north of Cadiz (Gadir). From there on they were Viking or Irish or whatever.

Sorry this is so long. There is a lot more to say, and I like to feel that it will all make far better sense than the academic beliefs which have been current so long.