Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Otto Kretschmer]

Did more transitional IE languages exist in the past?

We have examples of this with Lusitanian being transitionary between Italic and Celtic and Nuristani languages being a group in between Iranian and Indo Aryan.

Did other such languages exist in the past?

[Zju]

There certainly were transitional vernaculars in the stages of one language splitting into several. The question is how do you count them and for how long were they around.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Are there examples of languages that had articles but lost them?

[Travis B.]

Are there examples of languages that had articles but lost them?

Not articles, but Common Slavic had a definiteness distinction in its adjectival paradigms that IIRC has been lost in a number of Slavic languages.

[Zju]

Are there examples of languages that had articles but lost them?

Not articles, but Common Slavic had a definiteness distinction in its adjectival paradigms that IIRC has been lost in a number of Slavic languages.

Has it been retained in any? Proto-Baltoslavic had the same feature and IIRC it is still present in both contemporary Baltic languages.

[WeepingElf]

Did more transitional IE languages exist in the past?

We have examples of this with Lusitanian being transitionary between Italic and Celtic and Nuristani languages being a group in between Iranian and Indo Aryan.

Did other such languages exist in the past?

Surely, the discrete branches of IE we see today evolved from a dialect continuum in which there would have been transitional varieties. These varieties disappeared by innovations spreading through the continuum and isoglosses piling up atop each other (isoglosses tend to attract each other because they often end up at mountain ranges, swamps and other obstacles of communication, and because of the "They speak in a funny way over there anyway, why should we take over that new fad from them?" mechanism) until the neighbouring languages were mutually unintelligible and the continuum had broken up into distinct languages.

And sometimes, a foreign language drives a wedge into a dialect continuum, an example is how the intrusion of Hungarian separated South Slavic from West and East Slavic. Cultural differences also play a role - it is probably hardly a coincidence that the boundary between West and East Slavic coincides with that between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Finally, of course, political entities may alter the linguistic map, see the Romance languages which evolved from the spread of Latin in the Roman Empire.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Did more transitional IE languages exist in the past?

We have examples of this with Lusitanian being transitionary between Italic and Celtic and Nuristani languages being a group in between Iranian and Indo Aryan.

Did other such languages exist in the past?

Surely, the discrete branches of IE we see today evolved from a dialect continuum in which there would have been transitional varieties. These varieties disappeared by innovations spreading through the continuum and isoglosses piling up atop each other (isoglosses tend to attract each other because they often end up at mountain ranges, swamps and other obstacles of communication, and because of the "They speak in a funny way over there anyway, why should we take over that new fad from them?" mechanism) until the neighbouring languages were mutually unintelligible and the continuum had broken up into distinct languages.

And sometimes, a foreign language drives a wedge into a dialect continuum, an example is how the intrusion of Hungarian separated South Slavic from West and East Slavic. Cultural differences also play a role - it is probably hardly a coincidence that the boundary between West and East Slavic coincides with that between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Finally, of course, political entities may alter the linguistic map, see the Romance languages which evolved from the spread of Latin in the Roman Empire.

The West Slavic-East Slavic split is largely artificial. In the past there used to be a dialect continuum with various village dialects changing gradually from Polish to Russian.

[Moose-tache]

That's how most language creation works.

As for definite adjectives, it's not certain that PBS had a fully formed system of definite adjectives. I can't find the paper now, but I've read plausible explanations that they are independent developments in Slavic and Baltic from the pronoun *jos, kind of like how Gaelic and Bryttonic developed consonant mutation independently but with a similar end result.

Loss of articles isn't a common thing in IE languages simply because articles as we know them are a fairly recent trend among IE languages, so you'd need to find one that gained articles, then lost them, which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet, except in pidgins.

[hwhatting]

I can't find the paper now, but I've read plausible explanations that they are independent developments in Slavic and Baltic from the pronoun *jos, kind of like how Gaelic and Bryttonic developed consonant mutation independently but with a similar end result.

That's interesting - normally the development of the definite adjective declension using *-yo- is assumed for PBS. Would be nice if you could find that paper.
As for the question on whether it remains functional somewhere in Slavic - the formal distinction is still functional in Russian in predicative position, but it's not about definitiveness anymore; it's now about general or specific validity, e.g. штаны короткие shtany - korotkie with the "long form" (historically definite) "the trousers are long (in general / by some objective standard) vs. штаны - коротки shtany korotki with the "short form" (historically indefinite) "the trousers are (too) long" (for a specific person or occasion).

[bradrn]

kind of like how Gaelic and Bryttonic developed consonant mutation independently but with a similar end result.

Wait, what? I thought consonant mutation was synapomorphic for Insular Celtic.

[Moose-tache]

kind of like how Gaelic and Bryttonic developed consonant mutation independently but with a similar end result.

Wait, what? I thought consonant mutation was synapomorphic for Insular Celtic.

Absolutely no chance.

First, there is no sign of initial consonant mutation in Primitive Irish, or in the bits and pieces we have of Gaulish.

Second, the geminate-to-fricative change in Welsh has no equivalent in Irish, so at least some aspects of each system can only be internally developed.

Third, the mutations don't always happen in the same envirnoments, but those environments usually match up to where we see certain stressed syllables.\\

Fourth, the kw>p sound change of P-Celtic almost certainly happened before mutation, given its reflexes in Welsh (and, for that matter, in Irish), meaning that these two branches were separate at the time.

Every piece of evidence points to mutation being an areal feature that jumped from Welsh to Irish sometime during the late Roman perod. Irish had all the same precursors that would allow mutation to occur: it was also unstressing its articles, leniting its intervocal consonants, dropping its final vowels, etc. All they needed to adopt from the Welsh was the persistence of intervocal consonant lenition even after final vowels disappeared across certain weakened word boundaries. This is supported by the fact that, for all its complexity, Irish mutation has fewer types of mutation and fewer exceptions and caveats than Welsh mutation, which is (like all things in Welsh) essentially a man trap for anyone trying to learn it.

[MacAnDàil]

That is very interesting. Could you point to linguistic articles or books mentioning this please?

[Otto Kretschmer]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

[WeepingElf]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

I don't know, but I have had the idea for just such a conlang!

[Otto Kretschmer]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

I don't know, but I have had the idea for just such a conlang!

What IE branch should it belong to?

[Linguoboy]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

That's what I assumed when I designed a conlang like this for a friend's alternative history where the Celts went east instead of west. (He called the resulting empire "Gal-cwo" which pained me so much that he was like, "Okay, come up with something better!" so I did.)

[zompist]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

Korean and Japanese were deeply influenced by Chinese culture and language, borrowed the writing system and huge masses of vocabulary, and didn't do anything like the above.

[Zju]

I don't know about a highly synthetic IE language, some other IE language lost almost all of its inflectional morphology and a great deal of its native lexicon is monosyllabic, all the while without being influenced the slightest by Mandarin, so it's not entirely inconceivable.

[WeepingElf]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

I don't know, but I have had the idea for just such a conlang!

What IE branch should it belong to?

My idea was that it was related to Tocharian.

[Otto Kretschmer]

If a highly synthetic IE lang showed up in China around the time of early Tang Dynasty (ca. 650 AD)and survived as a minority language until the present day, do you think it could pick up Chinese features like monosyllabic words, tonality and limited number of syllabes?

Korean and Japanese were deeply influenced by Chinese culture and language, borrowed the writing system and huge masses of vocabulary, and didn't do anything like the above.

Not so much I think.

The elite read and wrote in Classical Chinese and some merchants and monks went to China from time to time but vast majority of speakers never interacted with any Chinese person.

By "influenced by Chinese" I mean language spoken by between a few 1,000s and a few 100,000s people in China and surrounded by Chinese. So something like Southern Mongolic languages - which started diverging from Mongolian approx 800 years ago and are mostly completely unintelligible with it (I asked Mongolian speakers on reddit and they said so)