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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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Veering away from the concrete stumbling block back toward the abstract linguistics...
Historical reconstructions are sometimes just perverse, I think. Here's a good example.
English SHAME is said to have these ancestors:
Proto-Germanic: *Skando-, with the variant *Skamdo. (The M became an N because of sound-change laws blah blah)
And that proto word came from:
And that came from the root:
Proto-IE: *Skamo- ("shame") By looking at SKAMO, you can see how the pronunciation SHAME came about (also SCAM and SHAM?). A familiar version of this pronunciation shift is SHIP and SKIFF.
And by looking at SKANDO- you can imagine how the slightly altered semantics of SCANDAL came about. A scandal is that which causes shame.
This seems easy enough, if a little difficult to fathom given the timeframes involved. Proto-IE is 7000 years ago, and Proto-Germanic is 3500 years ago. How could two slightly different forms arrive in the modern world when their Ur-forms go back that far?
Well, they can't, say the linguists (and chronologists). It's too far back. So they need something else.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I used the word 'skalding' in a post about immersion heaters just now. It didn't look quite right so I looked it up. Apparently the British spell it 'scalding' even though sc- is ambiguous.
My thoughts then turned to how I could have made such an error. I realised it was because I had been reading too many of your posts lately. This won't stop me but always bear in mind the price I am paying.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Pete wrote: | | They can't, say the linguists (and chronologists). It's too far back. |
The official AE position is that for spoken languages (e.g. Hindi, German, English) there is no 'too far back'. On the AE principle of what is is what was unless there is incontrovertible evidence it isn't, it is assumed these languages have always been around (for practical purposes). Lost in the mists of time etc.
For non-spoken languages (e.g. Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Hebrew*) it is assumed these must be artificial scribal languages--because we wouldn't know what they were if they hadn't been written down. They are assumed to be as old as the earliest surviving evidence (plus a bit). If they were ever both spoken and written, they would still be spoken on the same 'what is is what was' principle.
* Discounting the State of Israel adopting it as a spoken language.
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