History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[Flying Pig]

English somehow become a rather conservative language (in terms of spelling) even though the closest thing to a governing body are the Oxford & Webster's Dictionaries for the UK & US

It depends on how you look at it. Scots has completely different spelling than English, though there's a strong case for calling it just a dialect. In the Early Modern period, English spelling was hugely variable - I remember hearing about people using his spelling to reconstruct Richard III's accent, for instance. Even today, you have different spellings in US English, British English, and occasionally in other subsets, and the odd word (focused/focussed, disk/disc) where two spellings are common within a single dialect. In the age of mass media, it isn't surprising that the written language should be reasonably uniform and conservative, when people are understanding and trying to be understood by people all around the world.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Scots has completely different spelling than English, though there's a strong case for calling it just a dialect.

The Scots/English debate is similar to the Croatian/Serbian debate in that politics and nationalism tend to overtake the academic discourse on the subject.

Even today, you have different spellings in US English, British English, and occasionally in other subsets, and the odd word (focused/focussed, disk/disc) where two spellings are common within a single dialect. In the age of mass media, it isn't surprising that the written language should be reasonably uniform and conservative, when people are understanding and trying to be understood by people all around the world.

Agreed, but I would argue that the conservationist aspect of English spelling and grammar began in 17th/18th century England. Particularly the efforts of those like Samuel Johnson and friends to categorize the language and make it more like Latin, a "proper language". (personally I think there's a special circle of H#!! for those guys, there absolutely no bloody reason for the silent s that follow many English I's !!!)

Many of English's notoriously confusing & nonsense elements (gh = f ) originate from this era. As do many of the self-imposed "grammar rules", such as split infinitives and dangling participles.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, isle is the same as the French île, which comes from Latin insula. That one seems fairly straight forward to me.

 

[Flying Pig]

I always found the split infinitive rule a bit ridiculous - as you rightly say, it comes from people reading too much Latin, where it's physically impossible to split an infinitive.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

Well, isle is the same as the French île, which comes from Latin insula. That one seems fairly straight forward to me.

You're on the right track.

While the word isle comes from French as you state, island is a Germanic word. The word was generally spelled iland or igland until the insertion of a Latin-ish s. The thought was as you said, insula has one, so why not the English word despite it not having the same origin.

English's two closes "relatives", Frisian & Dutch, write it eilân & eiland while pronouncing it quite similarly to English, further making the insertion feel arbitrary and silly.

The silent s 's insertion into other words like aisle just serve no purpose and would have probably been removed (or never inserted in the first place) centuries ago if there was some sort of governing body for English

 

[Arakhor]

There's already a governing body for French and they seem to struggle a lot as it is.

 

[Flying Pig]

I wonder whether the s in island comes from a mistaken belief that isle and island are related. I'm thinking here of the spelling hiccough, which comes from the mistaken belief that a hiccup (which is simply the noise it makes) should have something etymologically to do with cough.

 

[Arakhor]

I believe that that's the reason, yes.

 

[Flying Pig]

You could get a number that way - get each imaginary peasant to walk until he can't understand anyone, then pick up a new peasant and convince him (let's not go into how you'd actually do that, given that you've reached the limit of mutual intelligibility...) to do the same, and then count how many peasants you end up recruiting. However, you wouldn't get any sense of what or where the language groups were. Imagine a line of villages, each numbered. Somebody from 1 could walk to 10 and find that the limit of intelligibility. However, someone from 2 could probably walk to 11 and just about understand people. There's no way to use mutual intelligibility to divide them up into languages without 1 and 2 apart, who are as close as anyone.

 

[sophie]

I mean, lack of evidence really hampers things too. Essentially our knowledge of historical languages comes from two places:

1) Direct contemporary manuscripts, which, above being a very specific form of the language spoken, often exclusively, by rich, educated, literate male elites, also may not even be representative of the way the language is spoken. The way I speak and the way I write are indeed very different, and it's not very hard to imagine this would have been the same in Classical Roman times.

2) Reconstructions extrapolated from said direct manuscripts and those from other roughly contemporaneous languages. This is necessarily going to create a fairly narrow idea of how said reconstruction would work, and how it fits into the overall family tree linguists have constructed. PIE isn't an actual language - it's an abstraction, an illumination of the shared features of Gothic, Old and Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. That's 4 data points we're working with, and in the case of things like Gothic or OCS, we're dealing with thousands of years of distance between parent and child language. The discoveries and translations of Hittite and Tocharian texts over the last century have totally changed the way with think about Proto-Indo-European and its larger familial descendants. And that's just two extra data points that did that.

Point is there's just a whole buttload we still don't know. You can't really theorize on language families because language families don't represent anything really objective. They're similar to cladograms in biology - they're graphical representations of the relationship between what datapoints we have: Hund, hound, and hond are all closer to each other than any of them are to canus or kuón, so we can separate them into their own group. That is to say, they're drawn with an endpoint in mind.

As to the other problem - of quantifying something that is essentially unquantifiable, draw me a map for where German ends and Plattdeutsch begins. Now add in Nederland, Bayrisch, Schweizerdeutsch, Alsatian, etc. This is hard enough to do just in a (relatively) tiny country like Germany with a literary tradition of pushing Hochdeutsch going back 500 years to the point where now it is spoken by essentially everyone. Even so climbing down the Germanic tree reveals dozens upon dozens of "languages" (however you wish to define a language) still spoken even today. Countries like France and the UK don't have this problem as much because those countries spent the better part of the past 200 years literally beating the nonstandard variants of their language out of their citizens. But is Scots a separate language? Is Jamaican?

Think about what a linguistic mess India is, in which new "languages" are still being discovered and documented quite regularly, particularly in the rural North and East, and that's essentially what you'd be dealing with, only you don't get the benefit of eventually hitting a wealthier region with a strong educational system that has instilled some degree of linguistic homogeneity where you can say "Ok all these people speak Telugu". It just goes on. Forever. That's the point of the continuum. Yes you can pull back and go "Ok obviously English and Chinese are different languages" but the difficulty, nay, impossibility (particularly given the dearth of evidence we have from non-literate non-elite groups) comes in deciding where English ends and Chinese begins, where to draw the line, whether there are other languages in between, how many, and upon what criteria to use to distinguish when the "language" has changed.

 

[Flying Pig]

1) Direct contemporary manuscripts, which, above being a very specific form of the language spoken, often exclusively, by rich, educated, literate male elites, also may not even be representative of the way the language is spoken. The way I speak and the way I write are indeed very different, and it's not very hard to imagine this wouldn't have been the same in Classical Roman times.

On that specific case, I am almost certain that most Romans had to work hard to learn 'proper' Latin. I know that the Greeks of the Roman period made something of a national sport out of learning Classical Greek.

 

[Cutlass]

Think about what a linguistic mess India is, in which new "languages" are still being discovered and documented quite regularly, particularly in the rural North and East, and that's essentially what you'd be dealing with, only you don't get the benefit of eventually hitting a wealthier region with a strong educational system that has instilled some degree of linguistic homogeneity where you can say "Ok all these people speak Telugu". It just goes on. Forever. That's the point of the continuum. Yes you can pull back and go "Ok obviously English and Chinese are different languages" but the difficulty, nay, impossibility (particularly given the dearth of evidence we have from non-literate non-elite groups) comes in deciding where English ends and Chinese begins, where to draw the line, whether there are other languages in between, how many, and upon what criteria to use to distinguish when the "language" has changed.

When I was working the Census I had a guy from India working for me. Sent him out to households where the people were from India and asked if he spoke the same language. He'd say no, different language, but he could probably manage to talk to them anyways.

 

[Flying Pig]

Again, that will give you a number, but you can't use it to tell what or where those languages are. More to the point, as Owen points out, you wouldn't be able to do that anyway, because the evidence just isn't there. Even then, you have to put boundaries on 'understand'. I would say that I can speak German, but wouldn't trust myself to hang onto every word of a fast speaker on anything more complicated than beer and sausages.

With hindsight, Owen said that, but in more detail.

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

UK don't have this problem as much because those countries spent the better part of the past 200 years literally beating the nonstandard variants of their language out of their citizens.

It should be pointed out that this doesn't always succeed. In the early 20th century for example, the Mid-Atlantic dialect was heavily pushed by grammarians & schools on the East Coast, particularly in New York & New England. It succeeded in catching on among the American Elite & theater/Hollywood actors, similarly to RP in England. Mid-Atlantic was at the height of its popularity in the 1940's with every major film star & the president using it, as well as finding it being taught in more middle-class/public schools in the North East. Yet is was at this height that Mid-Atlantic drastically fell out of fashion, to the point that by the 60's those few actors still using it were considered "classic".

In the UK, while the grammar has been well rounded out on the island, there is still a fantastic amount of dialects from north to south that have resisted extinction.

On that specific case, I am almost certain that most Romans had to work hard to learn 'proper' Latin. I know that the Greeks of the Roman period made something of a national sport out of learning Classical Greek.

One of the reason we have a semblance of how Latin was spoken during different eras of Roman history is because of writers using and promoting "proper" Latin complaining about how common people were doing it wrong in specific ways.

For example, if you want to know if there was a greater language diversity in ancient Persia or ancient Greece.

I think from the discussions above, the implied answer to your question is that its a matter of geography. The larger the land mass a specific government controls, the greater the diversity in speech patterns.

 

[Absolution]

Bah, really I'm just kinda lazy right now, but that's really not it either. Basically the paradigm upon which people think about languages is wrong. Well, not wrong; it works to an extent in the modern day, and it works historically if you're just talking about the literate elite class of any given region, but otherwise it is wrong.

So here's how you have to think about it:

1) If you know anything about Germany, think about Germany pre-1950. Essentially there were two "Germans" spoken in any given region. There was Hochdeutsch which was the proper, formal German that was spoken on the radio and on tv, in formal political addresses, and in writing. If you took German as a foreign language, this was the German you were taught. Then there was the local dialect. Every village had a local dialect distinct to the village through which locals communicated with one another, and which you almost never taught to outsiders. This dialect was related to Hochdeutsch, sure, but it was decidedly its own thing, linguistically speaking. And although the village dialects were close enough that someone from, say München could communicate with someone from Nürnberg, once you get further afield to into Styria or Sachsen those village dialects no longer become mutually intelligible.

My comment about Euro-centrism was pointed to this.
Everybody knows how any region in the Italian Peninsula, in the HRE or in Iberia used to have its own language, to a point where nobody would consider arguing that they are actually dialects of a shared languages.
But my question is - was it necessarily the same thing in Ancient Mesopotamia?
Was Akkadian a catch-all term for the different ways people used to speak or write in different cities around those regions?
How was the situation in ancient Egypt?
It also seems more logical to me that Mesopotamian languages have been more of a unified thing per culture/"nation" than Germanic or Romance languages, because the former had been developed by a relatively urban culture, compared to early medieval Europe, right?

-----------------------------------------------

You could get a number that way - get each imaginary peasant to walk until he can't understand anyone, then pick up a new peasant and convince him (let's not go into how you'd actually do that, given that you've reached the limit of mutual intelligibility...) to do the same, and then count how many peasants you end up recruiting. However, you wouldn't get any sense of what or where the language groups were. Imagine a line of villages, each numbered. Somebody from 1 could walk to 10 and find that the limit of intelligibility. However, someone from 2 could probably walk to 11 and just about understand people. There's no way to use mutual intelligibility to divide them up into languages without 1 and 2 apart, who are as close as anyone.

The above is what is called a linguistic continuum. To better envision what this is, consider this second, more relatable example. So let's say today, in the year 2017, you start on the west coast of Sicily. You find some random villager (villager A) walking around, and task him with going to the next town over and talking with somebody over there to see if the version of Sicilian villager A uses is mutually intelligible with the Sicilian spoken by a villager B. Villager A walks to the next town, talks to villager B, and finds that, yes, Village A Sicilian and Village B Sicilian are mutually intelligible. Villager B goes to Village C and finds that B and C are mutually intelligible. Now, you can continue this daisy chain from Western Sicily, across the island, across the Strait of Messina, up the boot, through Liguria, through the South of France, over the Pyrenees, through Catalunya, up through Castille, and end at A Coruña, and at no point would that daisy chain be broken. That is- at no point would any given villager be unable to speak with someone from the next village over. Even though in the macro-scale, the Galician of A Coruña is demonstrably, self-evidently different from the Catalunyan of Barcelona, from the Italian of Florence, and from the Sicilian of Messina; at the micro-scale, you would never be able to point out where exactly the Galician ends and the Portuguese or Castilian begins.

There is another issue with that paradigm, which was not mentioned enough here -
It is not a perfect geographical spread, simply because human culture did not spread in a perfect geographical way.
While there can be a clear chain of minimal linguistic difference between several Romance dialects from one region to anther across large distances, somewhere in the middle of this chain could be a totally different region who speaks some form of a Germanic language, as a result of centuries of historical political boundaries. It is not simply a matter of radius.
Outsider ethnic groups like Magyars could be quite different from any of their clear Indo-European neighbours. Being geographical (or even religiously - another thing to consider) close doesn't make them sound as similar to Croatians as Bosnians do. A similar thing is with Romanians.
Another kind of incidents is the common case where one territorial far edge of a macro-culture / language family meets the far edge of another. Each of them is much more similar to the languages spoken by the inhabitants of its "historical homeland" than to that other one who borders them.
Back to the Persian discussion - the geographical extent of the empire is not the only thing that matters.
The variety of language families (in a certain upper level which couldn't be debated) can really harm the Peasant/Villager measurement. Possibly one could go 400kms eastwards to find himself not able to communicate (in a distinct culture to his own), while the other could go thrice that way to north-west and get along fine. It is a matter of cultural (or ethnic) presence.

 

[sophie]

My comment about Euro-centrism was pointed to this.
Everybody knows how any region in the Italian Peninsula, in the HRE or in Iberia used to have its own language, to a point where nobody would consider arguing that they are actually dialects of a shared languages.

This is not even remotely what the above is saying. It's not a matter of Italian/HRE/Iberia having their own languages. It's a matter of them all being one giant language, or else every insignificant valley having their own totally distinct language, depending on how you want to define the language. It's only Eurocentric inasmuch as I specialize in Indo-European historical linguistics, and Germanics in particular, so that's generally what I'm going to pull from. But the Linguistic continuum isn't a quirk of the European system. It's how languages work. The non-continuum system we have today is a quirk of 20th century developments. Go to India, Rural China, Papua New Guinea, or Southern Africa and it is the reality you'd find there today. I mean, hell, look at a linguistic map of Papua New Guinea today. It's a mess! And it's not a mess because of anything necessarily unique about New Guinean demography or even necessarily geography. That's just what a linguistic reality looks like when you don't get: a) a centuries-long writerly tradition or a strong nationalistic state to rigidly enforce a singular linguistic standard; and plus you do get b) an international academic community with the interest and funding to actually go down and document the incredible linguistic diversity still present on the island. New Guinea today is what Europe, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica - what the entire world looked like linguistically in the pre-modern world.

There is another issue with that paradigm, which was not mentioned enough here -
It is not a perfect geographical spread, simply because human culture did not spread in a perfect geographical way.
While there can be a clear chain of minimal linguistic difference between several Romance dialects from one region to anther across large distances, somewhere in the middle of this chain could be a totally different region who speaks some form of a Germanic language, as a result of centuries of historical political boundaries. It is not simply a matter of radius.
Outsider ethnic groups like Magyars could be quite different from any of their clear Indo-European neighbours. Being geographical (or even religiously - another thing to consider) close doesn't make them sound as similar to Croatians as Bosnians do. A similar thing is with Romanians.
Another kind of incidents is the common case where one territorial far edge of a macro-culture / language family meets the far edge of another. Each of them is much more similar to the languages spoken by the inhabitants of its "historical homeland" than to that other one who borders them.
Back to the Persian discussion - the geographical extent of the empire is not the only thing that matters.
The variety of language families (in a certain upper level which couldn't be debated) can really harm the Peasant/Villager measurement. Possibly one could go 400kms eastwards to find himself not able to communicate (in a distinct culture to his own), while the other could go thrice that way to north-west and get along fine. It is a matter of cultural (or ethnic) presence.

You still aren't entirely understanding what I'm talking about here. Language families aren't absolute or really at all objective. They are classification systems we have developed to describe languages that we have access to today. Yes the Magyar that we have today - the one descended from a nobility with a written tradition and standard is self-evidently a Finno-Ugric language, and that relationship makes it appear a somewhat isolate because the only languages that exist today around them are Slavic and Germanic languages, but you're commenting on things after centuries of coagulation and language death. Again, if you were to travel down the Danube in the 15th century you wouldn't find such absolute delineations. You'd see a spectrum that flows naturally - imperceptibly even, at the micro-scale - from various Germanic/Alemmanic dialects, to Slavic/Czech dialects, to Hungarian, to Romanian and who knows what else. You the 15th century linguist would have to come up with a completely different classification system to describe what you are hearing.

Our language families appear neat today because it's arranged to fit and describe our modern reality. Those delineations and classifications would be totally different if we were operating with a) the ability to collect more data than just what's here now and whatever random historical documentary evidence we're lucky enough to chance upon (thank god for the Romans or we'd know fudge-all about Germanics pre-800) and b) the academic funding/manpower and interest to go document it. We'd probably be looking at dozens more sub-branches and perhaps even a rather marked re-evaluation of the Finno-Ugric and Indo-European divide. To return again to Papua New Guinea, linguists have documented almost as many language families on the island as they have in the rest of the world combined. Again, this isn't because of anything necessarily unique about that island in particular, it's just because we finally have the resources, technology, and knowhow to actually go in an document non-written languages, and it happens to be one of the very few places left in the world that hasn't seen its linguistic makeup subsumed wholesale to a larger written/broadcast/colonial monoglot.

It's also important to remember that demographics != language. Just because a group of people all describe themselves as Persian, doesn't mean they all speak a Persian language or dialect, nor just because a group of people all speak a Persian language or dialect doesn't mean they all identify as "Persian" or are even aware of some larger interconnected Persian linguistic identity. This goes back to what I was saying above. This is a way of thinking that is common today, because it's generally how language works in our modern, nationally-delineated world. People in France speak French; people in Spain speak Spanish; people in Germany speak German - even beyond the obvious ones: people in India speak Hindi, people in Iran speak Farsi, people in Saudi Arabia speak Arabic. Because of this world organization, it's very easy for us to extrapolate backwards - people in Rome spoke Latin; people in Greece spoke Greek; people in Bavaria spoke Bavarian - and sure that works to some extent when you limit yourself to talking about literate elite males, but it's fallacious as a historian to limit yourself to such a narrow human existence, and it doesn't follow from what evidence we do have for linguistic diversity in non-literate societies.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Why is it that on like old maps from the white-man's-burden era that Serbia is called Servia

 

[Arakhor]

Possibly something related to the B/V shift that occurred in Greek, given the long-standing Orthodox tradition in Serbia?

 

[W|M]

Older dialects of English probably called Serbia ''Servia'', and it's called ''Sérvia'' to this day in Portuguese

 

[Kyriakos]

Older dialects of English probably called Serbia ''Servia'', and it's called ''Sérvia'' to this day in Portuguese

Here as well. Term likely comes from subordinate status in the latin era. Serv means serve, obviously. Isn't a latin phrase "non serviam" (we do not serve)?