| View previous topic :: View next topic |
|
|
|
 |
|
Yesterday I was talking to a retired Australian academic who had taught German and Dutch at Melbourne University. He told me that in his youth he did an M.Phil at a Dutch university on the history of the Germanic Language family.
I told him about THOBR and the "Harper Mob", to which he responded by telling me that there was an "abrupt disjuncture" between the "Old" and "Middle" forms in all Germanic languages which took place between, say, 1000 and 1300. English simply fits the pattern but is a little more extreme in its "appearance" than its continental cousins owing to the Norman influence.
All comments would be most interesting, except "He would say that, wouldn't he?"
|
|
  |
|
 |
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
| In 180BC the Oscan city of Cunae applied to the Roman Senate for permission to use Latin as its official language instead of Oscan. I have no idea what Oscan was actually like but we can reasonably assume that it really existed. |
Of course it existed! Everybody speaks a language and that language has a name and that name tends to be also the name of the people who speak it. So Oscans speak Oscan. We would recognise it as a form of Italian, and (I don't know the state of the Italian Philological Industry) locals would recognise it as the Neopolitan dialect. Which, for all I know, might be sufficiently different from Italian (I think modified Florentine?) to be accounted a separate language.
Latin is a quite different language which has to be taught. The Oscans appear to want Rome to send them teachers-of-Latin. If what you say is accurate, the Oscans wanted this as their 'official' language ie it would be taught to the governing classes and would (in the normal course of events) cement Cunae in the Roman System. Everyone else would go right on speaking Oscan, as they continued to do until at least the nineteenth century.
| Sicel is mentioned by either Herodotus or Thucydides in the context of (I think) the founding of colonies by Corinth at Syracuse or Catania |
Sicel is mentioned by a whole bunch of ancient commentators because (unusually) there were three different sets of foreigners (Romans, Greeks and Carthaginians) vying for supremacy over a long period of time. It was therefore worth everybody's while to get the locals onside. They therefore appear in the historical accounts.
The normal situation is that one literate nation occupies an area and the (illiterate) locals are reduced immediately to the status of helots, slaves, rustics, whatever and don't get mentioned in historical accounts. This leads to wondrously fanciful accounts by modern historians who say things like "the whole of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) was Greek-speaking.
| c) Raetic (Rhaetic), Venetic and Umbrian are all recognised today as Italian dialects but I cannot comment on the degree of relatedness between the new and the ancient |
I think you should go back to your sources then. Since Italian is held to be derived from Latin then it follows that all these languages must date from after Roman expansion. Yet these labels (certainly Raetic and Umbrian) are habitually used on pre-Roman language maps. Of course it is true that Orthodoxy understands the pickle it is in by (nowadays) using the word Italianate and hoping nobody will ask them exactly what they mean by that.
It is interesting that the previous paradigm theory (that everybody spoke a Celtic language) has tended to disappear under the weight of its own contradictions. Perhaps you might report on this (to AE-ists) highly significant process.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bernie, I'm busy today, but I'll answer you in the next days. My answer will entirely be inspired by "History of the Origins of the French Language" by Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac (1872). I won't pretend he has resolved the whole question, far from it, but he grapples with it as the Applied Epistemololgists should do and the result is very satisfying given the difficulty.
Moreover, we must not ignore the importance of the religion for the Etruscans. They were the initiators and the possessors of the theological science among the Italians and they surely had a discrete sacred language, unknown to the laity, just as the Salian Priests (see "Carmen Saliare") and the Arval Brothers (see "Carmen Arvale"). I have written "unknown to the laity", but I can add: "and sometimes unknown to the priests themselves".
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
We don't say "He would say that", we say "He has to say that because he is trapped in a false paradigm".
| he did an M.Phil at a Dutch university on the history of the Germanic Language family |
There is simply not enough known about this to warrant the (necessarily detailed) attention of an M Phil student. I point out in THOBR that university subjects exist on the basis of what people would like to know, not what they can know. Germans (especially but it applies to everyone) have a perfervid need to know their own origins. Academics should be man enough to say, "Sorry, but we can't tell you. And as far as we can tell, we'll never be able to tell you -- unwritten languages leave no evidence and written languages don't change enough to warrant linguistic analysis."
| "abrupt disjuncture" between the "Old" and "Middle" forms in all Germanic languages which took place between, say, 1000 and 1300 |
Ask him why these abrupt disjunctures always happen just before a language becomes a written one but never afterwards. Give him the standard AE test. "You are a professional linguist with qualifications in the history of languages. Out of the, shall we say, ten thousand languages available M J Harper will give you a hundred pounds (or the equivalent in local currency) for each one that underwent an abrupt disjuncture. Maximum of a hundred thousand pounds (his funds are limited). You may be asked for evidence to substantiate your claims."
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Mr Harper. Do try to be just a little consistent.
In the post to which I was responding, you were suggesting that the whole of the list of "ancient tongues" set out never existed (with the possible exception of Etruscan and Sicel). I was merely supplying some evidence to the contrary, which you are now reacting to like a drunken sailor in a public bar argument.
But then perhaps this whole THOBR thing, forum and all, is just one gigantic practical joke in which MJ Harper (and intimate associates, perhaps) is having a lend of the rest of us. If that is so it might go some way to explaining some of the exceptionally silly things that I have read on this forum. I should be ashamed, perhaps, that it took me so long to realise that I have been having my leg pulled.
Just admit that it is all a big joke and then we can all have a good laugh and go home.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Mick Harper wrote: | | We don't say "He would say that", we say "He has to say that because he is trapped in a false paradigm". |
Same thing. Both phrases are code for the same thing - "I don't have to deal with this argument because it is a statement made by my enemy/opponent" Anyway, rather than impugning other people's motivations it might be more productive to stick with the actual issues.
| unwritten languages leave no evidence and written languages don't change enough to warrant linguistic analysis. |
His point is that there is indeed excellent written evidence of the "abrupt disjuncture" (my brief paraphrase of his longer explanation). I, personally, have no scholarly knowledge of this. I would be very interested to hear a proper measured discussion on this. If you do not accept his position that the change from OE to ME pretty closely mirrors the change from Old German to Middle German, could you not explain why you hold a different position?
This is, after all, a quite different position from the view expressed in THOBR. If you were aware of my acquaintance's argument, you certainly did not deal with it. You were not guilty, I trust, of a "careful ignoral" in your book?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ishmael
In: Toronto
|
|
|
|
| berniegreen wrote: | | Do try to be just a little consistent. |
The true measure of an intellect is expressed in the number of incomputable but rational notions it is capable of contemporaneously advocating.
| ... it might go some way to explaining some of the exceptionally silly things that I have read on this forum. |
If your appetite for ideas is limited to those which seem to you perfectly sensible then, indeed, this is not the site for you. But sensible ideas can be had anywhere and this is one of the few places where the silly is exceptionally so!
|
|
| |
|
|
|
DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
|
|
|
|
| "abrupt disjuncture" between the "Old" and "Middle" forms in all Germanic languages |
Whether or not this is a self-contradiction is a paradigm matter.
| His point is that there is indeed excellent written evidence of the "abrupt disjuncture" (my brief paraphrase of his longer explanation). |
Quite. But again, what the disjuncture is evidence of is the matter at hand. (Orthodox types are rather good at misunderstanding this point.)
| I would be very interested to hear a proper measured discussion on this. |
I would love to hear the orthodox explanation for these random shifts all in concert.
| If you do not accept his position that the change from OE to ME pretty closely mirrors the change from Old German to Middle German, could you not explain why you hold a different position? |
We need to know more about this disjuncture, but I expect it to be an exact parallel to an English case: either the emergence of the vernacular in writing and the discontinuation of an artificial form (the start of ME); or a standardisation of spelling conventions (the end of ME).
| This is, after all, a quite different position from the view expressed in THOBR. |
How so?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
|
If a historian says there were several languages spoken in twenty-first century Britain and instances Cockney, Queenzenglish and Brummie and then somebody asks me whether these languages exist and I say they don't (they are local variants of English) I expect reasonably intelligent people to understand what I mean. Only somebody very tiresome would point out that all three are in fact languages spoken in twenty-first century Britain.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Ishmael
In: Toronto
|
|
|
|
| berniegreen wrote: | | If you do not accept his position that the change from OE to ME pretty closely mirrors the change from Old German to Middle German, could you not explain why you hold a different position? |
If I may, I'd like to have a go at first response.
Mick agreed with your learned aquaintance: "The change from OE to ME pretty closely mirrors the change from Old German to Middle German." The facts are not in dispute here, in so far as we are discussing an apparent change from one language to another.
Mick argues in THOBR that OE and ME are two separate languages. Your scholarly aquaintance attempts to counter by pointing to a similar linguistic shift in the case of Old and Middle German. He assumes here that Old German is the firmly established ancestor to Middle German and thus, Mick is imagined to be making a special case for English language ancestry.
But Mick is making a general case that sweeps up Old German as well as it does Old English. He disputes the notion that Old German is the ancestor to Middle German. To support his argument, he points to the nature of the time period in which both shifts occur, writing, "abrupt disjunctures always happen just before a language becomes a written one but never afterwards."
In both cases, German and English, the purported language shift occurs under the same circumstance. But, Mick argues, in each case the shift is more simply explained by way of expansion of the alphabetical system. A phonetic system developed for artificial languages (or specialized pidgins) is later adapted to the writing of natural vulgates.
This is what happened in Britain. This is what happened in Germany.
Let's take another look at the competing models.
Traditional explanation:
Widely spoken language A abruptly changes into widely spoken language B. The written record attests to the transition.
Mick's explanation:
"Elite" written language A goes extinct once techniques are developed for transforming widely spoken language B into a written form.
Why is Mick's model superior? Because it conforms to the few facts we do have that truly are attested to by the written word. We know that English (and I presume Middle German?) has changed very little from the days when it was first written down. All supportable direct observation of written language demonstrates its glacial rate of change. The notion that Old English or Old German could rapidly transform into their "middle" forms will find no support from the observed data.
Applied Epistemology insists upon the application of scientific rigour to academic subjects. The use of models that lack support from direct observation cannot be allowed. The rapid change required by the traditional explanation has never been observed to occur.
Hence Mick's challenge. He is requesting evidence from observation that languages can change at the pace required by the popular scholarly model.
(But the challenge is actually greater because, as you yourself point out, the same shifts are said to have occurred in multple European languages -- so scholars need actually to establish that rapid language change is not only possible but typical. Good luck with that.)
|
|
| |
|
|
|
DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
|
|
|
|
| If a historian says there were several languages spoken in twenty-first century Britain and instances Cockney, Queenzenglish and Brummie... |
And if it's on record that people spoke Brummie, but the Brummie itself is not recorded... and then records are found in Birmingham, declared by scholars to be self-evidently Brummie... what happens if one or other group was actually just a Welsh ruling class?
It all depends on the fullness of the picture. (I presume there are no Etruscan inscriptions saying "we, the Etruscans..." since the name is Latin. Is it clear that Romans acknowledged Etruscan forebears and Etruscan wives to be one and the same people?) Any time a language is identified by a historian/linguist sayng "ah-hah, I know what this is!", we are utterly dependent on their model of history and languages.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
| If you do not accept his position that the change from OE to ME pretty closely mirrors the change from Old German to Middle German, could you not explain why you hold a different position? |
Certainly.
1. I do not accept that OE exists so it cannot have changed into ME.
2. I do not accept that ME existed either.
3. I believe Anglo-Saxon existed because I have texts proving it.
4. I believe English exists because I have texts proving it.
5. I do not believe Anglo-Saxon changed into English because I have never seen any intermediate texts.
6. I do not believe Old German exists because I have never seen any texts.
7. I do not believe Middle German exists because I have never seen any texts.
8. But if your friend believes that OG turned into MG then he can provide us with texts in both and some intermediate ones. (Otherwise, as an academic, he has no business believing it.)
9. I have reason to believe he won't be able to produce these things because a friend of his (ie you) has still to produce the intermediate texts for his claim that Greek underwent various "abrupt disjunctures". (Can we stop waiting for this, by the way, or are you still assembling the evidence?)
10. But just in case you were wondering whether this is all a giant jape -- as you occasionally opine -- we can, should you ask, produce reams and reams and reams and reams of documents that will show there has not been a single "abrupt disjuncture" in either English or German for the last half-millennium.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
| And if it's on record that people spoke Brummie, but the Brummie itself is not recorded... and then records are found in Birmingham, declared by scholars to be self-evidently Brummie... what happens if one or other group was actually just a Welsh ruling class? |
This is such a common problem in olden days that I advanced the General Theory of Ancient Languages (Evidence thereof):
| Documentary evidence that a language was spoken in a given country should be taken as evidence that that language was not spoken in that given country. |
This cheery paradox arises because becoming literate is such an advantage that literate people will always be able to conquer illiterate people, and it being such an advantage, they will make damn sure the occupied people never become literate. This will produce a pattern of historical evidence such that if documents written in Language A are found in Country B about whose language we otherwise know nothing, the one thing we shall know for reasonable certainty is that Language A cannot have been the local language. And where the occupation is really lengthy, that evidence will stretch for hundreds of years.
But for Chrissake don't mention this theory to Bernie or his Mate 'cos he'll think we're having a larf.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
|
|
|
|
| ...becoming literate is such an advantage that literate people will always be able to conquer illiterate people, and it being such an advantage, they will make damn sure the occupied people never become literate. |
What happens if an illiterate group takes control, like the Mongols? Would the small but powerful force's language also take over or would it, in time, be subsumed into the larger, literate society to be forever abandoned?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
|
|
|
|
|
hmmm...I'd quite forgotten this dimension. Harper's Rule only applies to sedentary areas.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
The Library Index 
FAQ 
Search
Register
Profile 
Log in to check your private messages 
Log in 
