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Well you live and learn. At least I knew it was a smell!
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I was checking out the M-E Corpus whose link Mick posted. Awesome resource, I must say. Is there an "Old English" equivalent? Of course, the passage you chose, Mick, is English but to someone who has only recently learned to spot a paradym fracture, couldn't this be taken as halfway between Anglo-Saxon and ("Middle") English?
GIET ich habbe ma vnþeawes beuolen. Ic habbe beswiken min emcristen mid faire wordes þe ic to him habbe ȝespeken, and oþerlicor mid weorkes him ȝekydd, and uppe mine lahfulnesse ofte him behet, þat ic n�ure eft him neȝel�ste. Gif ich at him ani þing bouhte oþer him sealde, þure me was leuere þat ic biȝate and he forlure, þanne unker chepinge bileafde. Godd us forbett þat we ne sculen habbe twifeald w�iȝe ne twifeald imett, ac þat we sculen bliþeliche ȝiuen and leanen, wiþ-uten erþliche mede, alle þe niede habbeþ and us for his luue besecheþ of þan ilche gode þe he us haf� il�nd. Soþ to seggen, ic not ȝif ich* auerȝete ani þing dede þat ic nolde habbe sumes kennes lean, oþer* of þouhtes
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Of course, the passage you chose, Mick, is English |
I don't know which passage you are referring to but I never 'choose' these things. I take the first passage at random and, unless it is horribly unrepresentative, I use it. My idleness wouldn't permit going beyond two passages...three if it was really important. (I'd rather drop the whole theory than have to do any kind of actual work.) The Chaucer passage was, from memory, the first I looked at.
This happened to come up recently on the Time Team forum when we were accused of 'choosing' the Chaucer verse in question. Our opponent then proceeded to give a different verse in support of the orthodox version whereupon we swiftly demonstrated that it was exactly as English as the one we had given! Needless to say he remained unmoved even though we banged him thoroughly over the head with his own petard.
| but to someone who has only recently learned to spot a paradym fracture, couldn't this be taken as halfway between Anglo-Saxon and ("Middle") English? |
It's important to learn to spell paradigm if you want to be well-respected in this business but you have come up against a problem we always suffer from. As you know, we rely on The Academy for all our data but The Academy is so hopeless that the data they tend to give us is at best half-witted. For instance, it is obvious that if linguists want to be taken seriously as rational-purveyors-of-truth they must come up with some kind of mathematical model (or at any rate a quantative model) to compare languages.
But they won't. They prefer to sit around saying things like, "Ooh, look, the word for a cart in Upper Bengal sounds a bit like the word for a sleigh in Old Jurassic Devonian" and as long as peer-review (aka mutual backslapping) is the only criteria, so it will always remain.
I'm afraid, unless you want to suggest something, I'll have to leave whether language A is 'halfway' back to language B on the shelf. Fortunately we rarely have to decide on any such relativistic basis anyway. Chaucer is two-thirds the way back to Anglo-Saxon (in time) but no-way-back (in linguistics). So draw your own conclusion.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Oops. Dredged up an unfinished response...
| Geoff wrote: | | the Danes believe their language, which is clearly Norse, to be 'Celtic' |
Chalk up another point to me on the Will the Real Cynesians Please Step Forward? thread.
Do tell more.
| The word Celtic should be dropped. |
That's what I was beginning to think, but please see the Cynesians thread. The archaeo industry has got its knickers in a twist.
| Caesar says the people who called themselves 'Celti' lived in the Aveyron, so, on Mick's principles, spoke Old Occitan. |
Actually no, a) because he abhors 'Old This' and 'Old That' in linguistics and b) because, as he makes clear, where you live and what you speak is not a simple equation.
| I am happy to agree with the Irish and Welsh scholars that 'lenition' is something different from mutations such as 'roof' and 'rooves', as lenition is determined by certain letters, not merely ease of pronunciation. |
Isn't ease of pronunciation determined by the letters? Are you saying lenition sometimes produces a more difficult pronunciation because the spelling rules demand it?
| An earlier query on this thread was why place names in the Scottish Highlands are Norse around the Coast but Gaelic inland. A little thought suggests an explanation. The servants of the Ordnance Survey no doubt wandered around the glens with Gaelic speakers, who gave them names in Gaelic, probably inventing them on the spot. |
Are you being serious?! Or just trying out an alternative to the observation that the Highlands/west side is generally Gaelic, the same as for the rest of the island(s), while the Vikings came from the north and east and remained coastal? (Of course, in northern and eastern England, 'coastal' conditions extend quite far inland.)
| Whereas in most places the place names reflect the oldest language spoken in the region, in the Highlands they reflect a more recent one. |
I haven't got my head around Dalriada and Kenneth MacAlpine and whathaveyou, but Gaelic Highlands are consistent with western Celtland in general... and I would even go so far as to put their arrival in Scotland back at or before the erection of the first megaliths. That's a long time dominating/populating the region and giving Gaelic names to things.
| Now that we have good evidence the Picts spoke Norse/English, we can see that the Norse names predate the Gaelic invasion, and are not the result of the Viking incursions. |
Thanks for reminding me that so-and-so translated Pictish engravings as Norse. I've been inclined to think the Picts were "Vikings" for ages, but it's hard to disentangle them from the lowland English-speakers.
Last I heard, it was only about half of the engravings that he worked on, or that his scheme worked on. Do you know what happened to the other half?
Still... plenty of time for the English to arrive at the Year Dot... Celts at Dot plus 1... Picts from across the North Sea {To me, that's good enough to call them 'Vikings': unless they were beamed down from the Mother Ship in the 8th century.} whenever... (more) Gaelic speakers from Ireland, if that's what the evidence really says... (more) Vikings, this time with a capital V...
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What Geoff says makes a great deal of sense. An earlier suggestion that languages had somehow originated in the Americas seems to me completely off the wall when we know as certainly as we know anything that man originated in Africa.
However my main reason for posting is to draw attention to this newsflash received via Alphagalileo about an article in Science which might add to the discussion if anyone wants to check it out:
| Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that languages change and evolve in rapid bursts rather than in a steady pattern. The research, published this week in the journal Science, investigates thousands of years of language evolution, and looks at the way in which languages split and evolve. It has long been accepted that the desire for a distinct social identity may cause languages to change quickly, but it has not previously been known whether such rapid bursts of change are a regular feature of the evolution of human language. The findings show that initially, the basic vocabulary of newly formed languages develops and changes quite quickly, and this is then followed by longer periods of slower and gradual change. |
Hope it may help.
_________________
Oliver
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| What Geoff says makes a great deal of sense. An earlier suggestion that languages had somehow originated in the Americas seems to me completely off the wall when we know as certainly as we know anything that man originated in Africa. |
Which 'man' are you talking about, Ollie? The Palaeo Industry plays fast and loose with this concept but if we are talking about 'our' languages then you must keep specifically to 'our' species which is Cro-Magnon. Anyone who says we certainly know that Cro-Magnon originated in Africa is talking biloxi in any species' language.
| Scientists at the University of Reading....investigates thousands of years of language evolution |
We did chuck this around some while ago. The problem -- and it's a problem that AE is always pointing out -- is that the 'scientific' researchers from one discipline are under the impression that the assumptions they draw on from another discipline is equally 'scientific'. Unfortunately, in this case and as we point out twice weekly, linguists do not have a single example of a language undergoing any great change over thousands of years. So the idea that you can measure the 'bursts' is uttely risible.
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| 'scientific' researchers from one discipline are under the impression that the assumptions they draw on from another discipline are equally 'scientific'. |
Very true - I have found that this has been a big stumbling block in the area of health that I am focussed on. It's no good putting a discipline under the microscope all the time, it is essential to take a broad look or important things are missed.
.. and if you are talking about Cro-Magnons I bow out for now.
cheers, Oliver
_________________
Oliver
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I wish you'd give us the benefit of some of your health research by opening a thread in the Health Section. Which is rather poorly at present.
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I have been rather tied up trying to finish something and haven't had time to log on very often. Sorry.
_________________
Oliver
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Moron... I mean... More on linguistic rectitude:
We have noted the marked tendency of language to change continually in microscopic terms and to be rather inert in macroscopic terms. Both of these are due to the fact that language is a man-made institution that is at once 'merely' the sum of the individual practices of its practitioners -- each with scope for variation and new applications -- and, for each individual, an objective fact of life, separate from whatever they may think about it, with a right and a wrong way of doing things.
{There's nothing funny about this: we still teach our kids that it's right to walk on the pavement and wrong to run in front of cars, even though the pavements and roads could have been built elsewhere. And some of us may have a little influence in how they change and new ones are laid. Where they in fact run right now is the important thing.}
We learn vocabulary and grammar like everything else by emulation and trial-and-error: much of the time, the 'bonds' between what we say and what follows are reinforced positively (sometimes we even receive explicit praise for the form of words and our good manners...); much of the time, we get the wrong result or explicit correction; and together these nudge us towards the use of sounds, words, sentences... as 'agreed' by our Community.
{'Course, this 'buffeting' never stops, but we graduate from errors in pronunciation and grammar into matters of tone and nuance and delivery and emotion and...}
Two things have occurred to me regarding this aspect of inertia-by-error-correction.
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1. We're constantly teaching children to switch from Fursday to Thursday, but this is precisely the level at which cognate words differ from each other (or loan words are corrupted upon being borrowed), so one wonders how cognate words -- and, come to that, synonyms and dialectical variations -- arise at all.
{Consider a pool of numbers -- lottery or bingo balls -- where you can only throw in the number equal to the average already in the pool. That means you will always add the same number and the average will never change no matter how big the pool grows. But that also means you could only ever have added that same number: they must all be the same number as the first one. If a different number is wrong and gets rejected/corrected, how can any other numbers ever get in there?}
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2. Linguistic rectitude has, no doubt, muddied the waters for us all, so let us try to return to first principles. One of which is surely that you only need to correct what needs to be corrected.
Present (here or gift) and present (give) are different words and we have to teach the different stresses. But what about a time before separate nuances had settled on the different pronunciations (or, if there are any, dialects which even now don't make the distinction that RP does)?
Saying "présent" rather than "presént" would go uncorrected if it was not deemed a meaningful difference, whereas saying either in a sense other than give/gived/gift would be corrected.
On the other hand, since we are highly efficient emulating-and-learning machines (and regional accents are perpetuated at all), the location of the stress in 'present' is surely one of the things that would be passed on as faithfully as bath/bah-th.
So I am confused on this point, too, but it strikes me as important to realise that what counts as an error is not necessarily the same for us as for our ancestors, particularly since linguistic rectitude has the language so finely divided. {We can't trust the OED to tell us how 'large' English is!}
{Perhaps the different meanings of present and present are primordial and the difference in stress comes from their intonation at the typical and typically-different places in the sentences in which they are used. Damn this linguistic rectitude: we are all so focussed on the individual words that I don't suppose anyone has looked at "the song of English".}
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My suspicion is that the answers to both of these lie in the invention and dissemination of demotic literacy. Until there is a written form for anyone to worry about or be guided by, it is very hard to say Fursday and Thursday are different at all, let alone to show how to put one right. F and TH huddle together as sounds, but are regulated into different ranks and files as spellings.
For all I know -- for all anyone can tell? -- the differences between cognate words were impressed into, say, English and German, all of a sudden by the adoption of different spellings when written-English and written-German were first invented and only since then have been pronounced differently. That would mean cognates are actually rectograms and the gradual divergence between path/pfad, water/wasser, etc. (in accordance with regular or typical sound-shifting rules) is an illusion.
Linguistics might be even worse off than I had thought.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The general truth of your observations can be found in these regional dialects. They seem to survive unchanged (so far as we can tell) even though each of its speakers is exposed to t'other ways of speaking.
It would be interesting if we could get linguists to demonstrate in some practical way (as opposed to just assuming it happened) an entire population managing (in unison!) to change Anglo-Saxon into English or Latin into French in just a coupla hundred years.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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But just how local is local? If you remember the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, the hoaxer was (it turned out correctly) identified as being from a particular part of Middlesborough. Almost justifying Professor Higgins' claim that he could discern actual London streets. Now of course we normally call this an accent but if you think about it an accent is also by definition a dialect. Unless you care to define a dialect as having a certain minimum of actual discrete unique words, then all it is is a different way of saying every word.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| Now of course we normally call this an accent but if you think about it an accent is also by definition a dialect. |
A Frenchman speaking English will in all probability have a discernible French accent -- not the same as a Frenchman speaking a marseillais or breton dialect, quoi?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Mais oui, clever clogs.
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(I hope it's OK to post this here rather than in the THOBR thread, because the THOBR thread is getting long.)
What historical events could have given rise to the THOBR theory regarding the difference between French and German? I was reading along, all convinced about the THOBR theory of English, but then I got to the part about French and German being different. How could you end up with two populations right beside each other speaking different languages that have no relative resemblance to each other yet each resemble the parent? Especially since there doesn't seem to be any formidable physical barrier (mountains, a sea) separating the two populations.
What could be proposed? I can think of these scenarios. Is either convincing? If I were trying to explain to someone the THOBR theory about the French/German difference, the best I would be able to tell someone is "French evolved first, then German. They are different because it just happened that way."
Scenario 1)
- The whole England/France/German area was initially populated by English speakers
- The French started speaking French at some point.
- The Germans started speaking German at some point.
- The English speakers kept speaking English.
(This would be kind of like how the native languages evolved in North America.)
Scenario 2)
- Everyone settled in England first.
- After some period of time, a group of English speakers left England for France, after which some period of time English turned into French.
- After an even greater period of time, a group of English speakers left England for France, but they got there and the French said "Va-t'en". So they kept walking and went across the Rhine and eventually English turned into German.
Also, why can't English be a creole of German and French in terms of linguistics (regardless of history)? I thought I remembered reading why this can't be in THOBR, but now I can't find that part of the book.
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