Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Richard W]

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.

Interesting statement. I'd heard tell that inter-war dialectologists working in Poland had no trouble telling West and East Slavic apart, despite the diffusion of sound changes. I've also seen a claim that the West-East division continues on into 'South Slavic'.

[Otto Kretschmer]

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.

Interesting statement. I'd heard tell that inter-war dialectologists working in Poland had no trouble telling West and East Slavic apart, despite the diffusion of sound changes. I've also seen a claim that the West-East division continues on into 'South Slavic'.

Artificial is a wrong word. The division itself is not artificial but current sharp borders are - in the past there used to be a dialect continuum with local dialects changing gradually, this was the case as late as before ww2. When Poland and Rus adopted Christianity in 10th century, people did not suddenly start speaking different languages

BTW Standard Russian is based on the dialect of Moscow with heavy Church Slavonic influence. Traditional western dialects (spoken until mass education and urbanization in 1920s-1960s) used to be more similar to Belarussian/Ukrainian.

[zompist]

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)

Fine, look at Manchu then, which has been spoken next to or in China for a thousand years, and is not monosyllabic or tonal.

A language that is surrounded by Chinese, but is still preserved, would have to have reasons for doing so. If they're simply peasants, they'd probably simply switch to Chinese. If they keep to themselves enough to preserve their language, they are not interacting continuously with Chinese speakers.

Non-Chinese languages in China (outside Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia) are mostly found in the southwest, protected by mountains and difficult terrain, and often not really subject to imperial rule.

[Richard W]

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?

Mostly yes, but I would expect a wider range of final consonants, initial clusters, and limited tonality. My main model for this is monosyllabic Eastern Cham; a similar move to monosyllabicity is seen in Northern Khmer, which has been subject to Tai influence. The tonality would be principally caused by the East Asian tone splitting, which in atonal languages has commonly manifested itself as register, but can also manifest itself as a two-tone system. For the latter, compare Pali, which has a tonal contrast in Tai and Lao mouths. (Shan pronunciation might be exceptional).

[Nortaneous]

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.

Tocharian converged on the Ural-Altaic sprachbund* (if / to the extent that such a thing exists) rather than the Southeast Asian one, so I don't think this would happen. The split is pretty even. If you want to introduce a language from outside the usual Southeast Asian sprachbund families to the traits of that sprachbund, it's pretty surprising that Korean didn't develop along Sino-Tibetan lines - it was at one point tonal and had complex initial clusters suggesting a possible earlier sesquisyllabic stage.

Tocharian also didn't have a phonemic voicing contrast, but it probably did have allophonic voicing.

* at the same time, though, it wouldn't be out of place in New Guinea, which I don't think can be said of Samoyedic

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?

Probably not. Southeast Asian sprachbund languages tend to develop along a certain path. If an IE language showed up, it'd lack the prerequisites for further development along that path - unless it developed them first like Hainan Cham did.

[Moose-tache]

To anyone suggesting an IE language can't become tonal and monosyllabic, you should hear my father-in-law and his cousin when they're out fishing.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How different were Ancient Greek dialects from each other? Were the differences comparable to British and American English or larger?

[WeepingElf]

What IE branch should it belong to?

My idea was that it was related to Tocharian.

Tocharian converged on the Ural-Altaic sprachbund* (if / to the extent that such a thing exists) rather than the Southeast Asian one, so I don't think this would happen.

Of course. My idea was that my language (working title "Quantuan") and Tocharian both descended from the language of the Afanasievo culture, which would still be close to PIE. From there, one group migrated into the Tarim Basin and their language became Tocharian; another group migrated to Gansu and their language became Quantuan; I also had the idea of an Altaic-like third descendant in the Sayan mountains, with agglutinating morphology and vowel harmony.

But the project is currently mothballed, as I have more than enough more important things to wrap my mind around.

[Raholeun]

How different were Ancient Greek dialects from each other? Were the differences comparable to British and American English or larger?

The answer depends on whether we are talking about Greek in the second millenium BC, or whether Koine Greek is still considered Ancient. Also, what varieties may be called dialects, for instance is Mycenaean Greek regarded as an independent language?

[Ares Land]

How different were Ancient Greek dialects from each other? Were the differences comparable to British and American English or larger?

Wikipedia has some nice examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_G ... #Phonology

On the whole, noticeably more divergent than British and American English; by the time of the Pelopponesian war, they'd been diverging for 1300 years.

They always were mutual intelligible though. The Greeks got plenty of exposure to other dialects. Literary genre were tied to specific dialects, so they heard other dialects through poetry; geography probably helped too: Doric-speaking Megara is only 40 km from Athens.

[Raphael]

Doric-speaking Megara is only 40 km from Athens.

Not sure what an Ancient Greek person, if someone had explained the concept of a kilometer to them, would have made of that statement...

[Ares Land]

It's a two days' walk, close enough to see Megarans at Athens (and vice versa) on a regular basis. Megarans who speak funny show up quite a bit in Aristophanes, for instance.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Can anyone recommend a book on the history of English (especially from 1066 to the early modern period)?

[Kuchigakatai]

Can anyone recommend a book on the history of English (especially from 1066 to the early modern period)?

If you're looking for a one-volume monograph, I'd say go for Haruko Momma and Michael Matto's A Companion to the History of the English Language (2008).

[dɮ the phoneme]

Can anyone recommend a book on the history of English (especially from 1066 to the early modern period)?

If you're looking for a one-volume monograph, I'd say go for Haruko Momma and Michael Matto's A Companion to the History of the English Language (2008).

Thanks!

[Otto Kretschmer]

When was final -s and -n lost in Proto Slavic?

[Moose-tache]

When was final -s and -n lost in Proto Slavic?

Unfotunately, this is a tricky question to answer. The cheeky answer is "somewhere between the Baltic split and 500 AD." The problem is that most Slavic borrowings into Finnic happened late in the Proto-Slavic or late dialectal period or beyond, and so already show these changes. And the sound changes involved don't always interact in a way that makes them easily datable relative to other changes. Is there a specific reason you asked this question?

[Raholeun]

Are there natural languages that lack a voicing contrast in their stop series, and all stops are voiced? For example, there are /b, d, g/, but no /p, t, k/?

[Pabappa]

all over Australia, yes ..... you see it all the time ...... e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbainggar_language but that's just one example, and you can see the K in the name .... some of them have voicing of stops not just intervocalically but everywhere

[bradrn]

Are there natural languages that lack a voicing contrast in their stop series, and all stops are voiced? For example, there are /b, d, g/, but no /p, t, k/?

R.M.W. Dixon has analysed Dyirbal like this, given that the voiced stops seem to be far more common than their voiceless allophones. But it’s really just a matter of phonemic analysis; I think most mainstream phonologists would analyse Dyirbal with /p t c k/, for no reason other than a principle that voiceless stops are less marked than voiced stops.