where "words" come from?

[Sodak]

Originally posted by fredlc
...One of the major problems that I think that we Brazilians have as we study English is that in many words the letters simply appears to have pronunciations that are totally different from how they sound in the alphabet, or different from other words of the same language.

Example: “bookmark”: the “a” have a sound that doesn’t match what it sounds like when alone, and certainly different than in the word “family”.

I don't know Portuguese, but am familiar with Spanish - this may apply to your tongue, as well. The main problem is that Spanish has 5 vowels and uses 5 letters to represent them. (I know nothing about dialect variations that would add to the the total number...) English, other germanic languages, Finnish, etc, use about 14 vowel sounds - but adopted the 5-6 vowel alphabets from the mediterranean. So the problem is simply one of numbers. Padma's examples show how some of the ambiguity is worked around.

As for the 'h' - good luck. The silent h is also trouble for young native speakers, as it is left over from about 1200 years ago. The combination 'gh' represented a sound no longer used in the language. Under some conditions (e.g. tough) it changed to 'f', under other conditions (e.g. night) became silent.

Romanian is generally considered the derivative most closely related to Latin. Isolation from other related dialects often results in slower changes to a language. For example, Afrikaans is very much a modified version of 18th? century Zeeuws (Dutch of Zeeland), American english is more closely tied to 18th century english than the english spoken in England today.

Regarding the German "insel/eiland" question: Isn't the latin word for island "insul"? If so, I would bet my arm that "insel" is not even germanic. That would explain why it differs from the neighboring languages.

 

[Sodak]

In my last post I brought up the numbers of vowels in some languages. Others have talked about how knowing a geographically close language often gives insights into one's own tongue. So what about language contact and interaction?

Linguists suppose that the large number of vowels in germanic languages is the result of borrowing. (Does anybody here know how Celtic languages compare?) Most of the vowels that are not shared by other indo-european languages are front rounded vowels...

(Quick lesson: Imagine a cross section of a mouth with 9 equally spaced portions, 3 rows and 3 columns. The columns are front, central, back, the rows high, mid, low. (tho I might have mid and central mixed up ) Rounding refers to the lips. Almost universally with this alphabet, 'o' is a mid back rounded vowel.)

... These vowels are a common trait of Finno-Urgaic languages. For instance, Finnish has always had them, iirc. Apparently, by at least 2000 years ago, the interaction of germanic and finnic peoples had led to the expanded number of vowels used by the germanics.

Ahem... I must attend a meeting. Damn job keeps interfering with posting... More later...

 

[Vrylakas]

Sodak wrote:

In my last post I brought up the numbers of vowels in some languages. Others have talked about how knowing a geographically close language often gives insights into one's own tongue. So what about language contact and interaction?

When I took some Hungarian friends to Krakow once, I remember one slowly looking around at the train station and mumbling, "How do they keep all those consonants in their blonde heads...?"



Apparently the Slavic languages are in no danger of joining the "too many vowels" club....

Linguists suppose that the large number of vowels in germanic languages is the result of borrowing. (Does anybody here know how Celtic languages compare?) Most of the vowels that are not shared by other indo-european languages are front rounded vowels...

Hungarian borrowed much from medieval (c. 10-14th century) German and Latin, and it has twice as many vowels as German. I can't replicate the fonts here (unless you all download a Hungarian keyboard), but all of German's umlauted o's and u's are doubled with long and extra-long o's and u's. Hungarian also has short and long versions for the rest of its vowel set. It also has something that I suspect may be a feature dropped by the older Indo-European languages, vowel harmony, because I think I recall reading once that Lithuanian - the Indo-European language that has retained the most of all the old archaic features of this language family - also has vowel harmony. Now, it's a Finno-Ugric language so it is not subject to the same vowel rules as the Indo-European/Indo-Germanic languages, but again its lexicon and grammar have both been significantly influenced by German and Latin.

Both the Slavic and (western) Germanic languages have been significantly influenced by early Iranian and other unknown influences. One such example would be the Venedi (German "Wenden"), a mysterious people who appeared in modern northern Poland c. 700 who interacted with the Slavs so closely that the Germans assumed they were Slavs, and refered to all Slavs for centuries as "Wenden", but modern archaeological evidence points towards a very different culture and one that impacted Slavs, Balts and Germanics alike.

(Quick lesson: Imagine a cross section of a mouth with 9 equally spaced portions, 3 rows and 3 columns. The columns are front, central, back, the rows high, mid, low. (tho I might have mid and central mixed up ) Rounding refers to the lips. Almost universally with this alphabet, 'o' is a mid back rounded vowel.)

But aside from a native vowel set, language groups aften develop unwritten and quite sophisticated rules for incorporating foreign vowel sounds - leading to strange results, like the Polish agoneks (the nasel vowels that make Polish sound like French, so the Russian word for hand, "ruka", is "reka" in Polish, sounding very naselly like "renka".

... These vowels are a common trait of Finno-Urgaic languages. For instance, Finnish has always had them, iirc. Apparently, by at least 2000 years ago, the interaction of germanic and finnic peoples had led to the expanded number of vowels used by the germanics.

Hmmm, I hadn't heard this. Would this be a phenomenon specifically-related to the eastern Germanic peoples? Otherwise, it would have had to have happened very early in the Germanic "invasions" of Europe, as they became very fragmented and decentralized (linguistically-speaking) very quickly.

Ahem... I must attend a meeting. Damn job keeps interfering with posting... More later...

Damn bosses!

 

[Sodak]

Originally posted by Vrylakas


Apparently the Slavic languages are in no danger of joining the "too many vowels" club....

The Onion once ran a brilliant article about how Clinton ordered an airlift to drop thousands of vowels into Bosnia.

Originally posted by Vrylakas
Hmmm, I hadn't heard this. Would this be a phenomenon specifically-related to the eastern Germanic peoples? Otherwise, it would have had to have happened very early in the Germanic "invasions" of Europe, ...

I only know about the germanic example. All germanic languages except English still have them. (tho some dialects of English do, too...) So does French, which is a latinized language of the germanic Franks. This points to their early adoption, likely before they pushed the Celts out of the way when occupying europe. If it also applies to other indo-european subgroups, it would be news to me! Does anybody know?

Good tidbits about Hungarian, by the way. Sound duration is often used to differentiate letters. For instance, 'a' and 'aa' are different - man and maan mean different things. Dutch uses vowel length this way; Italian has long consonants; Spanish a long r; Finnish has long and short everything, iirc.

Tonal languages (e.g. Chinese) are actually more numerous than non-tonals. No indo-euro languages are tonal. Tonal differentiation supposedly developed to distinguish syllables (consonants in particular) -> instead of g - k - k', they may use k(rising) - k(falling) - k(other). (A phonetic font would be very handy right now... ) I know there are east asians prowling the boards, maybe one will enlighten us with more than I could tell...

Padma described another major clue to putting language development on a timeline. He mentioned how some words for new objects or actions are merely descriptive additions to old words. This has been very useful for linguists to learn where words originated - often revealing where an object was originally invented, or a food was first grown. In my agriculture thread, I mentioned the spread of the sweet potato. Much of the evidence for its origins is linguistic. When it is called 'spud-like root of that bushy plant', it usually means those people were not the original cultivators...

A proto-indo-european dictionary (also for other language groups) has been created using this sort of 'least common denominator' approach. Once loan words are rejected, pronunciation changes accounted for, etc, a base word that was the likely word of thousands of years ago emerges. So we can guess what Joe Indo-Euro called grass in 2000bc. Cool stuff, if you ask me.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Originally posted by Sodak
Tonal languages (e.g. Chinese) are actually more numerous than non-tonals. No indo-euro languages are tonal. Tonal differentiation supposedly developed to distinguish syllables (consonants in particular) -> instead of g - k - k', they may use k(rising) - k(falling) - k(other). (A phonetic font would be very handy right now... ) I know there are east asians prowling the boards, maybe one will enlighten us with more than I could tell...

Residing more likely. Anyway I am no language expert but I don't think there're division into vowels or consonants in Chinese.

Basically, you're correct. Each sound will have 4 'tones'. Usually, in hanyu pinyin, will be denoted by /, \, V, _ signs (on top of the 'word') to signify which 'tone' it is. Like /, will mean a 'rising' tone.

To add to the confusion, each sound in each tone can mean many characters depending on the context in which it is used. But on the whole, probably less complicated than English.

 

[Vrylakas]

I apologize for double-posting, but I tried to reply and apparently it posted my answer twice. When I tried to delete this duplicate post, I got a message saying I wasn't logged in - but it said next to this that I was logged in, and would I like to log out?

 

[Vrylakas]

Sodak wrote:

Romanian is generally considered the derivative most closely related to Latin. Isolation from other related dialects often results in slower changes to a language.

This is because Romanian was very heavily "reformed" and purged in the late 19th century to Latinize it more. Even after these purges, modern Romanian has a large Slavic lexicon: "Da" is yes and "Nu" is no. Romanians' origins are quite controversal; they themselves claim they are the descendants of Roman soldiers and Dacians (the people, not the cars) who co-mingled in the Roman province of Dacia. However, there is much historical and archaeological evidence that suggests otherwise; most compelling is the reality that Romania somehow would have become far more Romanized in a much shorter time than Gaul (France) or Iberia (Spain) and with a far smaller Roman population than either of those regions. A more credible possibility would be that trans-humance shepards in the Balkan mountains, of various nationalities, used Latin as a lingua franca that eventually developed into a Latin-hybrid pidgin language, and eventually a living language. Ancient Slavs refered to all Latin-speaking peoples as "Olah", "Ulah", or "Vlah". (This still shows up sometimes; the modern Polish term for Italy is "Wlochy", pronounced with English phonetics "V'wokhiy".) The first Roanian historical state was known as Wallachia ("V'lachia"), and indeed today in northern Albania and southeastern Greece there is still a minority nationality, the Vlachs, who speak a Latin-hybrid language.

The Onion once ran a brilliant article about how Clinton ordered an airlift to drop thousands of vowels into Bosnia.

Yes, I remember that. Quite funny. I used to tell American friends in Prague that I'd buy them some zmrzlina if they could say it right.... [It's "ice-cream" in Czech.]

Padma described another major clue to putting language development on a timeline. He mentioned how some words for new objects or actions are merely descriptive additions to old words. This has been very useful for linguists to learn where words originated - often revealing where an object was originally invented, or a food was first grown. In my agriculture thread, I mentioned the spread of the sweet potato. Much of the evidence for its origins is linguistic. When it is called 'spud-like root of that bushy plant', it usually means those people were not the original cultivators...

The Hungarians have traced their historical migration across the Russian Steppe from the Urals by just such linguistic comparisons, usually of flora. Birch trees (Nyir) played an important role in this endeavor, as did some technological vocabulary regarding farming and animal husbandry. Interestingly, Hungarian has one of the highest retention rates in modern Europe of a "core vocabulary", with more than a thousand basic core words being traced to what are believed to be proto-Hungarian roots.

A proto-indo-european dictionary (also for other language groups) has been created using this sort of 'least common denominator' approach. Once loan words are rejected, pronunciation changes accounted for, etc, a base word that was the likely word of thousands of years ago emerges. So we can guess what Joe Indo-Euro called grass in 2000bc. Cool stuff, if you ask me.

I'm a little skeptical of re-constructed dictionaries. I've heard of the Indo-European project. The problem is these projects are often influenced by modern politics and nationalism, and require large assumptions to cover vast gaps in our current knowledge. I think I'm with Colin Renfrew on this, that it's more important to understand what we have than to speculate on what might have been. We still haven't settled such basic questions of whether the Indo-European language(s) spread via conquest (Marija Gimbutas) or gradual farming technology spread (Renfrew).

Knight-Dragon wrote:

But on the whole, probably less complicated than English.

Amen to that, brother! What could possibly justify 24 tenses - and to describe what, hot dogs and scones?

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Originally posted by Vrylakas
Knight-Dragon wrote:

But on the whole, probably less complicated than English.

Amen to that, brother! What could possibly justify 24 tenses - and to describe what, hot dogs and scones?

24 tenses!? And I thought 3 (in English (?)) is already a lot.

There're no tenses in Chinese. A verb will always remain in the same form in whatever timeline you're speaking of. No articles too. Sometimes, no need for verbs at all like in "Ni hen peng!" (you very stupid!). Now you see why Chinese novice speakers of English sometimes speak strangely.

BTW, what are scones?

 

[Vrylakas]

Knight-Dragon wrote:

24 tenses!? And I thought 3 (in English (?)) is already a lot.

Consider yourself lucky if you didn't have to memorize all of them. What were they thinking?

There're no tenses in Chinese. A verb will always remain in the same form in whatever timeline you're speaking of. No articles too. Sometimes, no need for verbs at all like in "Ni hen peng!" (you very stupid!). Now you see why Chinese novice speakers of English sometimes speak strangely.

Not just English. Budapest today has a massive Chinese population, mostly Mainlanders. They make similar mistakes in Hungarian, with its piddly 5 tenses...

BTW, Hungarian is gender-free, so for instance there is only one word for the third-person singular, equally meaning "He", "She" and "It". This leads to strange moments when Hungarians speaking English say something like "He forget her glasses", speaking of one person....

A scone is what Americans call a biscuit (not a British biscuit!), a flat ball of greasy baked dough that goes with tea.

 

[polymath]

Sodak,
Latin for 'island' is 'insula', ('a' on the end)
we also get the geographical term in common english 'peninsula' from this, 'paene'= 'nearly' in Latin.

 

[Sodak]

Originally posted by Vrylakas
I'm a little skeptical of re-constructed dictionaries. ... The problem is these projects are often influenced by modern politics and nationalism, and require large assumptions to cover vast gaps in our current knowledge.

Certainly. I find it interesting, tho. Nobody would ever be able to sit down and learn proto-quechua, for instance - but it does provide valuable information for other historical uses, such as identifying food or tool origins, and other such things. Therein lies my interest. For example, words tell of who their ancestors interacted with, where they must have lived, and provide clues to their lifestyles. Yes, it gets guided by nationalism, which is too bad. Interesting nonetheless...

Thanks, polymath. Do you know if that is the origin of German 'insel'? Or is there some other story behind it?

The word 'beer' would be interesting to trace. In germanic languages it is an almost universally understood word. Tho I know the Danes call it 'ol' (o with the slash thru it... where's that phonetic font? ) Any Danes here to tell if that is just an alternate word? The Dutch will order a 'pilsje', after the Czech city - also the origin of 'pilsner'. What is beer in your language?

english - beer
dutch/german - bier
scandanavian tongues - ol (o with the / thru it)
spanish - cerveza
czech - pivo (Vrylakas, is this a common word in the east?)

 

[Sodak]

Okay, first off, the usual disclaimers when a sensitive issue comes up. This post is purely from a linguistic perpective. No offence is meant, etc etc etc... (I may have to edit this post, as I imagine some words will get screened... ) This is something I once read about. It may be bunk, it may be valid. In either case, don't let it degrade into any sort of name calling, accusations of bigotry, or other nonsense.

Many derogatory terms for homosexuals are used, probably in every society. However, some of these words have interesting historical origins. I'm only a bit familiar with this, so anybody with more knowledge should feel free to jump in. This came up while talking to my cube neighbor about the beer example (she speaks Norwegian). She mentioned some dialect differences and similarities with Swedish, including the word 'flekka', 'girl'. (I have no idea if I spelled that right...) Immediately I recognized the Dutch word 'flikker', a derogatory term for a gay man. It has the same root as English 'flicker', something fires do. In English, a homosexual is called 'faggot', and described as 'flaming'. Now, 'faggot' is also a word for a long burning rod - big ones are like torches, small ones also called matches or lucifers. Why all the connections to fire?

IIRC - and this is where my knowledge gets thin, as I don't recall to whom this applied - gays held an important position in pre-christian religious ceremony, involving the handling or keeping of ceremonial fire. The Maya did this too, maybe it was a common practice in the ancient world. Eunichs come to mind, as well. Anyway, their "ambiguous" gender was viewed as appropriate for religious ceremony, in which men and women usually were given distinct or particular roles. The homosexual would be free of these roles, and was thus given his own spot - maybe performing or assisting rites taboo to either men or women.

Anyway, the fire was apparently where this "ambiguous" role was performed. That role obviously lost any trace of respect or honor it had in the past. (For all we know, it may have been a position of disrespect then, too - "YOU take care of the fire in this ceremony, the gods don't like whoever does that.") The gay was then derided with the brand of his "kind" - as the handler of fire. Eons later, they are still derided with the terms of that ceremonial role.

Any thoughts? Does your language do anything that fits this hypothesis (not my own, by the way)?

 

[polymath]

As I remember the Greek word for beer is phonetically 'mbirra' - but I don't know which way the influence goes, forwards or backwards. I would think it is Greek first, as the Latin for the verb 'drink' is 'bibere', which obviously looks like a strong influence on later names. And we know beer is at least 6,000 years old. Our ancestors clearly had a good set of priorities.
The Spanish word for beer, cerveza, is apparently derived from Ceres, the godess of Agriculture.
Also, in English I believe there was a plant called 'beer' which was used in making the drink.

 

[Vrylakas]

Sodak

czech - pivo (Vrylakas, is this a common word in the east?)

Yes, it is universal among the Slavic-speaking peoples. It is derived from the verb "Pic" (pronounced, with English phonetics, "peetch") which means simply to drink, so "piwo" (Polish) or "pivo" are a euphemism meaning "drink". It only refers to beer though.

This is a common phenomenon with Slavs. There is this nasty clear alcohol that looks like water ("woda", or "voda") that is euphemistically called "Little Water": Wodka or Vodka...

 

[polymath]

Re: faggots, and re-emphasizing this isn't meant to be derogatory.
As I understood it, when they used to burn witches, it was usual to burn a homosexual man in the wood at the base of the pire. Hence faggot.
I do not know if this is true, just what I remember, but I don't have a source for it.

 

[Sodak]

Originally posted by polymath
... when they used to burn witches, it was usual to burn a homosexual man in the wood at the base of the pire. Hence faggot.
I do not know if this is true, just what I remember, but I don't have a source for it.

Sadly, it is equally believable as the ceremonial role hypothesis. People really aren't very kind, if you think about it.