Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Nortaneous]

Isn't Afroasiatic mostly defined by shared morphology, with hardly any accepted cognates? Sino-Tibetan has a fair number of cognates, unless a lot of things that look cognate are early loans, which is possible. It's definitely older than IE or Austronesian, but I don't think it's as old as Afroasiatic.

[bradrn]

Isn't Afroasiatic mostly defined by shared morphology, with hardly any accepted cognates? Sino-Tibetan has a fair number of cognates, unless a lot of things that look cognate are early loans, which is possible. It's definitely older than IE or Austronesian, but I don't think it's as old as Afroasiatic.

That may be so. I don’t believe there’s any consensus on a reconstruction, but there probably are more cognates than Afroasiatic. But either way, it’s older than PIE!

[zompist]

When is Proto Sino Tibetan dated? Is it younger than PIE?

Certainly not. It’s probably one of the oldest language families we’ve yet discovered, on a par with Afroasiatic. (I think; this is not my area of expertise.)

Dating families is one thing; dating written texts is another.

The oldest texts are Sumerian and Afroasiatic: Sumerian from 3200 BCE, Egyptian from 3000 BCE, Akkadian from 2350 BCE (but Akkadian words are found earlier).

The oldest Chinese texts are oracle bones dated to about 1200 BCE. The earliest IE text is Hittite, from perhaps the 1600s BCE. The Sanskrit Rigveda dates to roughly 1500 BCE but actual written texts did not appear till a millennium later.

These provide a lower bound on when the proto-families could exist, but note that all these languages were already quite distinct from their sisters. Thus the proto-families must be far earlier.

How far? No one knows; there is no way to prove that a particular archeological find relates to a particular proto-language, though we can make and argue about scholarly guesses.

Also note, language families are not born like children, so they really have no determinable age. After all, how old is the Romance family? There's an uninterrupted chain of transmission from one generation to the next going back 6000 years... and probably at least 50,000 more. We find it convenient to assign labels to parts of this chain, but this is more a fact about those labels than about the linguistic reality.

[Travis B.]

And then there is the pseudoscience of glottochronology... as shown by time depth estimates of English versus Icelandic...

[Richard W]

Isn't Afroasiatic mostly defined by shared morphology, with hardly any accepted cognates?

The number of 35 is widely bandied around; I note that Wiktionary has 36 Proto-afroasiatic terms.

[jal]

Also note, language families are not born like children, so they really have no determinable age. After all, how old is the Romance family? There's an uninterrupted chain of transmission from one generation to the next going back 6000 years... and probably at least 50,000 more. We find it convenient to assign labels to parts of this chain, but this is more a fact about those labels than about the linguistic reality.

That would be a matter of definition? Exactly the same goes for biological grouping, yet we're fine talking about "birds" or "mammals" etc. Sure, we could call everything a fish, but why bother? Seems a bit nihilistic. I think "Romance" has been excepted to start with Vulgar Latin, so Classical Latin not included?


JAL

[zompist]

Also note, language families are not born like children, so they really have no determinable age. After all, how old is the Romance family? There's an uninterrupted chain of transmission from one generation to the next going back 6000 years... and probably at least 50,000 more. We find it convenient to assign labels to parts of this chain, but this is more a fact about those labels than about the linguistic reality.

That would be a matter of definition? Exactly the same goes for biological grouping, yet we're fine talking about "birds" or "mammals" etc. Sure, we could call everything a fish, but why bother? Seems a bit nihilistic. I think "Romance" has been excepted to start with Vulgar Latin, so Classical Latin not included?

I didn't say the labels weren't useful. But when you look at them too closely their arbitrariness shows.

E.g., when does Vulgar Latin start? When does it give way to proto-French etc.? There is no natural boundary, and even if you try to apply some criteria, those criteria probably aren't applied to (say) Chinese or Hebrew.

(Both biology and linguistics have a similar criterion-- interfertility and intercommunication. But mutual intelligibility isn't binary and can't really be applied to historical developments.)

[Zju]

I just realised how strange the acc- words are (accent, accident, etc.): in their initial consonant cluster, they first feature the original consonant before the latinate palatalisation, immediately followed by its present-day reflex, i.e. /ks/ instead of just /s/ or maybe /sː/.
I'd have thought that the palatalisation would apply to the whole geminated consonant instead of breaking it into two. What I find puzzling is that e.g. even French has accent /ak.sɑ̃/ (although Old French reportedly had just <acent>). Italian has accento, but then again it wouldn't be Italian if it didn't have wholesale stop assimilation.
Are all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

[Linguoboy]

Are all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

Are you asking about English, about Romance, or about both?

[jal]

Are all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

I would think they're just spelling pronunciations of words that have had their spelling adjusted to look more like original Latin words.


JAL

[Travis B.]

Are all /aks-/ words learned borrowings? Is there anyone more knowledgeable to sheld light on the issue?

I would think they're just spelling pronunciations of words that have had their spelling adjusted to look more like original Latin words.

Good examples of that include the English words solder and falcon, borrowed without /l/s from Old or Middle French as souder/soudere/soudur and faucoun/faucon, but had <l>s added under Late Latin influence, and then in many English varieties had /l/s added as spelling pronunciation (but there are Anglic varieties that failed to do so, notably NAE in the case of solder and Scots in the case of faucon).

[Zju]

Right, I guess I was having in mind Romance languages, since English words are borrowings either way. Though they could have been borrowed from French, which has /aks/ as well. Are all French /aks/ words learned borrowings or instances of hypercorrection, too?

Regardless, this is the most striking instance of anachronism that I have seen within a single word so far.

[Moose-tache]

Just because French comes form Latin doesn't mean it doesn't have borrowings from Latin. The internet suggests "Autumnal(e)" is a word in French, despite violating several sound changes. Any French speakers care to confirm or deny?

[Zju]

I had just assumed that French has at least some inherited - and not borrowed - acc words, but then again I don't speak French.

[zompist]

It's not just acc-. Here are some words in French with /ks/ or /gʒ/. (Sorry, the wordlist I grabbed had no accents.)

acceder
accelerer
accent
accepter
acces
accident
occident
succeder
succes
succinct
vaccin

suggerer

These are likely all reborrowings, but that doesn't really explain anything... why is this rule followed for Latin words?

[Richard W]

The precedent for not assimilating the first <c> would be Old French acciun, 'action', if it is truly inherited. A more typical pattern would be for the first <c> to vocalise to <i>, but that seem undependable - compare façon, inherited from factionem - and too deviant to have fed back into Latin.

[Darren]

Synchronically the rule makes sense; <c g> are /s ʒ/ before <i e y> and /k g/ anywhere else. The first <c> or <g> is before an anything else, so it's /k/ or /g/.

There's only one good inherited example I can think of, which is VL *auccidere → Old French ocire, which only later got its first <c> back. So it seems pretty likely that all <cc> /ks/ are learnèd or semi-learnèd. The problem is like 90% of French words have gotten learnèd Latin interference at some time in the past millenium so it's all very confusing.

[Tropylium]

Isn't Afroasiatic mostly defined by shared morphology, with hardly any accepted cognates?

The number of 35 is widely bandied around; I note that Wiktionary has 36 Proto-afroasiatic terms.

There will probably be way more findable eventually, but it's hard to distinguish matches from noise until there are at least tolerable Chadic and Cushitic reconstructions. They probably each go very deep back too, somewhat as old as Indo-European and accordingly diverse. To spitball an analogy, Chadic ≈ Indo-Iranian, i.e. relatively recent diversity but tons of it; Cushitic ≈ modern Indo-European minus Indo-Iranian, i.e. very old basic division lines but splits in several shallow-looking subgroups (and also we have zero old historical records on either).

[Moose-tache]

The Wiktionary entry is pretty sparse, so I went to the source: Christopher Ehret's book from 1995, which as far as I can tell is still the most confident reconstruction of PAA vocabulary out there. I'm not sure why Wiktionary stopped at 37. Ehret has over a hundred entries just for the labial consonants!

But alas, the usual shenanigans apply. Despite promising in the introduction that only obvious semantic connections will be accepted, cognates are listed that have very little in common. Sound corresponces are provided, then completely ignored. There is the usual Nostratic trick of including a list of derivational morphology that is so nebulous that it can render any unexplained element into a perfectly logical one. He even finds time for the Greenberg trick of just adding all the phonemes into a massive ancestral inventory and just merging them as you go along.

Even after all that, it does seem like there are some pretty unassailable PAA cognates. I was only interested in entires that a) were at least three phonemes long and matches the stated sound correspondences exactly, b) were not specific agricultural terms that could be easily borrowed, and c) did not just exist in Semitic and one other branch with a suspiciously identical form. I still found lots to choose from. One day when I have nothing better to do I might try to list the 50 or so top PAA reconstructions, but for now I'll just say "more research is needed."

[bradrn]

The Wiktionary entry is pretty sparse, so I went to the source: Christopher Ehret's book from 1995, which as far as I can tell is still the most confident reconstruction of PAA vocabulary out there. I'm not sure why Wiktionary stopped at 37. Ehret has over a hundred entries just for the labial consonants!

But it’s very likely that they’re almost all chance resemblances.