Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Richard W]

By my count, if you include all the initial clusters, diphthongs, tones, etc., Thai has 59,400 syllables. Probably some of those are disallowed and certainly many of them are unattested. But that's hardly a limited syllable inventory.

I've seen an official figure, which I though was lower. But one can boost it again by including marginal/denied initial clusters (e.g. /sr/, /thr/, /br/, /dr/, /fl/, /fr/) and finals (e.g. /s/ and /f/, and I've even heard a final clusters in a nickname), and then there are all the initial clusters that include a svarabhakti vowel.

[Estav]

Second question - virtually all languages of East and Southeast Asia have limited syllabe inventory. This is true even for outliers like Japanese or Manchu

Is this such a strong and persistent areal feature? Chinese literary influence on Japanese started in the 600s and was reserved to a small (5-6%) percentage of literati, not larger than the number of people who knew Latin in Europe.

Old Japanese started out with the simplest syllable structure, (C)V, so Chinese influence could not have simplified it any further. If Chinese had any influence on Japanese syllable structure complexity, it instead had the opposite effect of contributing to the more complex modern Japanese syllable structure of (C)(y)V(V/R/N/Q) as Japanese vocabulary borrowed from Chinese frequently had diphthongs, syllable-final plosives which in some contexts gave rise to gemination, and syllable-final nasals.

[bradrn]

I never did get an answer to this question. We’re on a new page, so I’ll ask it again:

I seem to recall reading (possibly on the old ZBB) that case prefixes combined with a large case system are attested only around the Great Lakes region of Africa, particularly Lake Turkana. Can anyone else recall anything like this?

EDIT: The claim may actually have been about VSO word order combined with a large case system; I can’t quite remember. In any case, VSO and prefixes tend to go together, I think.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

[bradrn]

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

Other contenders are Proto-Romance and Proto-Mongolic, since both are basically attested in writing.

[hwhatting]

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

Other contenders are Proto-Romance and Proto-Mongolic, since both are basically attested in writing.

Basically also the case for Proto-Slavic - OCS is only the oldest attested sister language, but it's a pretty close stand-in for Proto-Slavic.

[Kuchigakatai]

Proto-Polynesian must be really up there too.

[Zju]

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

Other contenders are Proto-Romance and Proto-Mongolic, since both are basically attested in writing.

Well, the question was about *reconstructed* protolanguages, and, in the same vein, answering Proto-Slavic feels like almost cheating.
Isn't Proto-Indo-Aryan also pretty well reconstructed, what with Avestan and Sanskrit?

[bradrn]

Is it inaccurate to say that Proto-Germanic is the most thoroughly and confidently reconstructed proto-language there is?

Other contenders are Proto-Romance and Proto-Mongolic, since both are basically attested in writing.

Well, the question was about *reconstructed* protolanguages, and, in the same vein, answering Proto-Slavic feels like almost cheating.
Isn't Proto-Indo-Aryan also pretty well reconstructed, what with Avestan and Sanskrit?

I know that at least Proto-Romance is reconstructed — it’s very close to Latin, but isn’t Latin.

[Zju]

Really? Don't all contemporary Romance languages descend from Latin? And doesn't Latin descend from Proto-Italic instead?

[Travis B.]

Really? Don't all contemporary Romance languages descend from Latin? And doesn't Latin descend from Proto-Italic instead?

Proto-Romance refers to the most recent common ancestor of the Romance languages, which is not Classical Latin but a mostly unwritten close descendent of it.

[Kuchigakatai]

I tend to think of Proto-Romance as basically "spoken Late Latin", as in corresponding to the Late Latin period, roughly 350-650 CE... which would be a form, or collective of forms, of Latin in the end.

There are various wave-like changes anyway, it's not like the development of the Romance family looks neatly like a tree.

[Estav]

Really? Don't all contemporary Romance languages descend from Latin? And doesn't Latin descend from Proto-Italic instead?

Proto-Romance refers to the most recent common ancestor of the Romance languages, which is not Classical Latin but a mostly unwritten close descendent of it.

It depends. Spoken Latin was different from written Latin, but a lot of scholars such as Roger Wright don't think Proto-Romance was a distinct language from Late Latin. Describing it as "unwritten" just because the written form didn't reflect every sound change or grammatical change that occurred might be no more accurate than describing modern English or modern French as "unwritten" languages because the written standards use non-phonetic/"deep" spellings and conservative grammar.

[Moose-tache]

Supporting the idea that spoken Latin was not a separate language is the fact that popular graffiti uses the same spelling and grammar rules as CL. A piece of graffiti in Pompeii says "Talia te fallant utinam medacia, copo: tu vedes acuam et bibes ipse merum." I couldn't find an image of the text (I can only assume it didn't have a colon in it), but it's always spelled the same way in every source I could find, so I assume this is how it was actually written. And you can clearly see the labial accusative, which had very likely disappeared from speech by this point. But the word order is already consistent with later Romance SVO languages, which hints at the fact that people were already adjusting to the disappearance of audible accusative markers.

[Otto Kretschmer]

People usually compare Latin of 1st century BC to Vulgar Latin of 5th century AD which is like comparing modern English to Shakespeare.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How likely would it be for prepositions to become postpositions? It happened in many Indo Aryan languages if not all of them.

[Zju]

There isn't a gap in written attestations of 1st millenium romance vernaculars, is there? Even if writing lags few decades or centuries behind spoken language, my gut feeling is that everything would be attested.

[Otto Kretschmer]

There isn't a gap in written attestations of 1st millenium romance vernaculars, is there? Even if writing lags few decades or centuries behind spoken language, my gut feeling is that everything would be attested.

Is Proto Romance even attested at all? To my knowledge, first attestations of Romlangs are Old French texts of 800s AD.

[Travis B.]

There isn't a gap in written attestations of 1st millenium romance vernaculars, is there? Even if writing lags few decades or centuries behind spoken language, my gut feeling is that everything would be attested.

Is Proto Romance even attested at all? To my knowledge, first attestations of Romlangs are Old French texts of 800s AD.

This is how I understand it as well. There is a gap of centuries between Late Latin graffiti and the earliest clearly Romance language writings.

[zompist]

There isn't a gap in written attestations of 1st millenium romance vernaculars, is there? Even if writing lags few decades or centuries behind spoken language, my gut feeling is that everything would be attested.

Is Proto Romance even attested at all? To my knowledge, first attestations of Romlangs are Old French texts of 800s AD.

As noted above, Proto-Romance is a reconstruction, based on the Romance languages. If we had no Latin texts at all, it would be our guess at what Latin was like. It's a useful exercise to compare the two, and reflect on the limitations of reconstruction.

The first written attestations of Romance language are from the 800s, yes. Not coincidentally, this was also the time of the reforms of Alcuin, an English monk invited to be a scholar at Charlemagne's court. He promoted the reading of Latin literaliter, by the letters-- which would have been how the English read Latin, but was an innovation in Charlemagne's realm, where people had been accustomed to read Latin words with contemporary ("Romance") pronunciation. This started (though it didn't finish) people making a distinction between Latin and the vernacular as separate languages.