Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Raphael]

I suspect that, even if, through some kind of magic trick or something, we would get a table with accurate numbers of currently spoken languages for each year of the past 30,000 years, it would still be difficult to sum them all up through time, since for that, you'd need some kind of standard for when a living language "turned into" a later living language. For instance, into how many languages do we divide the local vernacular of Rome, Italy from 500 BC to today?

[WeepingElf]

But do we measure diversity by the "stock" or by the language? Is an area less diverse when it's languages have diverged, say, 4000 years ago but there's 100 languages now, than the same area that has 10 languages that diverged over 6000 years ago?

Good point. Of course, 100 languages diverging 4,000 years ago is more diversity than 10 languages diverging 6,000 years ago. My "5,000 years" is just an arbitrary cutoff figure with the usual problems with such figures. But the usual definition of an independent language family, namely "deepest family that can be ascertained at the present state of knowledge" becomes utterly meaningless when considering entirely unknown prehistoric languages.

[abahot]

I suspect that, even if, through some kind of magic trick or something, we would get a table with accurate numbers of currently spoken languages for each year of the past 30,000 years, it would still be difficult to sum them all up through time, since for that, you'd need some kind of standard for when a living language "turned into" a later living language. For instance, into how many languages do we divide the local vernacular of Rome, Italy from 500 BC to today?

That's why I rephrased my question in the end about how many languages have gone extinct. Although still not that well-defined, it seems to be much easier to quantify than language diversity through time,.

[Raphael]

That's why I rephrased my question in the end about how many languages have gone extinct. Although still not that well-defined, it seems to be much easier to quantify than language diversity through time,.

Did Latin go extinct, or did it become the various Romance language? And if it's the former, how many other languages should be counted as extinct, despite having surviving modern varieties?

[jal]

Did Latin go extinct, or did it become the various Romance language? And if it's the former, how many other languages should be counted as extinct, despite having surviving modern varieties?

Lol, I was about to write almost the exact same when reading abahot's post :).

For me, the answer would be that a language goes extinct if its last speaker dies. So languages that naturally evolve into others don't go extinct. Latin: didn't go extinct. But let's face it, even defining what a "language" is is nigh impossible, so it's all very theoretical.


JAL

[WeepingElf]

Did Latin go extinct, or did it become the various Romance language? And if it's the former, how many other languages should be counted as extinct, despite having surviving modern varieties?

Lol, I was about to write almost the exact same when reading abahot's post .

For me, the answer would be that a language goes extinct if its last speaker dies. So languages that naturally evolve into others don't go extinct. Latin: didn't go extinct. But let's face it, even defining what a "language" is is nigh impossible, so it's all very theoretical.

Yep. Like we can't always tell whether two similar language varieties are different languages or dialects of the same language, there are usually no clear boundaries in time between a language and its descendants. When did the people in Western Europe cease speaking Latin and start speaking Spanish, French, Italian etc.? When did the Anglo-Saxons cease speaking Common West Germanic and start speaking Old English? (People often say that Old English began when the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain, but did their language magically change while they were sailing across the North Sea? Nope. Charlemagne sent Anglo-Saxon missionaries to the freshly-conquered Saxons in northern Germany because they spoke pretty much the same language, and thus had an easier time to make themselves understood.)

[zompist]

Like we can't always tell whether two similar language varieties are different languages or dialects of the same language, there are usually no clear boundaries in time between a language and its descendants. When did the people in Western Europe cease speaking Latin and start speaking Spanish, French, Italian etc.? When did the Anglo-Saxons cease speaking Common West Germanic and start speaking Old English?

I agree with all this, but I think the original question was about counting all human languages over time, and for that we just need an upper bound. 2000 years would cover all the above cases, as well as Sanskrit/Indic and Old Chinese/Sinitic. 3000 would cover Ancient/Modern Greek.

The bigger imponderable is how small a hunter-gatherer language can get and remain viable. You're going to get way different estimates if the number is 1000 speakers, 500, 100, or 50.

[Moose-tache]

I think this is an important question. On a technical level, a community can persist with mostly endogamous marriage with a population of around 200 hundred. What's more, even communities that regularly intermarry can maintain separate languages. So theoretically we could have a new languages every few hundred people. But this density of languages among hunter gatherers is not well attested, even when we look at estimates for before 1500. California had a alot of languages, but also a lot of people. Coastal areas like Humboldt County probably had about five thousand people per language. Some of the less hospitable places seem to be around one or two thousand, but unless pre-contact densities were way lower than the current evidence suggests, I can't find any language that didn't have enough elbow room to be spoken by at least a thousand people. The situation is similar in the Kalahari, and worse in Australia, Canada, and Amazonia. Many of these places have seen recent expansions that probably reduced the number of languages, but if we don't have a lot of evidence of "pristine" hunter gatherer populations, it might be safe to assume those were always rare. In other words, sweeping replacements could have been likely before agriculture just as they were in the years since. Maybe.

Either way, it does not seem likely that hunter gatherer languages are cleaving closely to the theoretical minimum viable population for a language community.

[Richard W]

there are usually no clear boundaries in time between a language and its descendants.

That's why counting language deaths is a clever conceptually simpler idea that I believe yields almost the same answer. The only problem I see is whether related languages can merge, which it seems can happen with mutually intelligible dialects.

[Darren]

Some New Guinea languages have really tiny speaker bases while remaining stable, especially in mountainous regions with fairly isolated, small villages. Most Lakes Plain languages have only a few hundred speakers while remaining fairly vibrant. The same was probably historically true for the Amazon; Pirahã only has about 300 speakers. Both groups are still mainly hunter-gatherers.

If we take 1,000 speakers to be an average speaker base, out of an average world population of 1,000,000 over the past 150,000 years*, with languages replacing each other every 1,000 years, we get a reasonable-looking figure of 150,000. We don't have to place boundaries on when one language changes into another, we just have to find two points in time between which it could reasonably be expected to be mutually intelligible (e.g. modern English is not mutually intelligible with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). Of course where this falls apart is with the post-10,000 BC population boom – it would estimate that there are 8 million languages spoken today – but that's only the end 7% and is probably made up for by the lack of diversity at the beginning. In fact this may well be the way Crystal arrived at his estimate.

* Based on the fact that it was probably around 1,000,000 for 90% of that time

[WeepingElf]

That looks pretty reasonable to me.

[TomHChappell]

I read somewhere that the peak of linguistic diversity was probably around 15000BP (ie 15 KYA) and probably around 15000 languages.
I never saw their methodology, so I can’t criticize nor recommend it.
But 15000BP is about 13000BCE , which is about when the glaciers of the Ice Age retreated far enough that human bands could migrate again.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How it's known that Proto Germanic infinitive had a vowel at the end since none of attested Germanic languages has it?

[Travis B.]

How it's known that Proto Germanic infinitive had a vowel at the end since none of attested Germanic languages has it?

The first thing that comes to mind is that the Old English infinitive ended in /ɑn/ rather than the /æn/ expected from Anglo-Frisian brightening through the influence of this vowel.

[abahot]

Does a similar sort of argument work for the Proto-Germanic a-stem masculine accusative singular?

[Ephraim]

The first thing that comes to mind is that the Old English infinitive ended in /ɑn/ rather than the /æn/ expected from Anglo-Frisian brightening through the influence of this vowel.

Do you happen to known of any sources for this idea besides Wikipedia? Unfortunately Wikipedia does not cite any sources here from what I could tell.

As far as I can tell, there is no concensus that unstressed final short a-vowels (nasalized or not) where kept that long in West Germanic, and especially not in ”third syllables”. For example, Ringe & Taylor (2014) The Development of Old English reconstructs *-an with loss of the final syllable for the infinitive in Proto-West-Germanic. The infinitive, then, is generally identical to the strong past participle in the m.nom.sg. They seem to think that in the development of OE, *a was fronted everywhere except before nasals in the same syllable. This explains the OE infinitive in -an, while the different vowel of the strong past participles could be from a levelling of the paradigm, since some endings contained a vowel. There are possibly other things going on with the participle as well.

Note that the Wikipedia-page for ”Phonological history of Old English” has a note that the factual accuracy is disputed with a link to the talk page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonologi ... estoration

Does a similar sort of argument work for the Proto-Germanic a-stem masculine accusative singular?

I don’t think so, even if you accept it for the infinitive. The accuative of the m.sg *a-stem is, as far as I’m aware, always identical to the nominative in Old English and other West Germanic languages. Proto-Norse runic inscriptions actually retain an unstressed a-vowel here, though (it was only lost in ”third syllables”).

How it's known that Proto Germanic infinitive had a vowel at the end since none of attested Germanic languages has it?

We can at least say that the final -n of the oldest attested forms must at some point have been followed either by a short vowel of by *t, otherwise the n would have been lost.

[hwhatting]

How it's known that Proto Germanic infinitive had a vowel at the end since none of attested Germanic languages has it?

We can at least say that the final -n of the oldest attested forms must at some point have been followed either by a short vowel of by *t, otherwise the n would have been lost.

And the usual reconstruction as *-(a)nan from PIE *-(o)nom is due to *-nom being attested as verbal noun ending in other branches (case forms of verbal nouns being the usual sources of infinitves in the IE languages; PIE didn't have an infinitive).

[bradrn]

zompist’s article on chance resemblances got posted to Hacker News. The comments are, predictably, mostly rubbish. (My ‘favourite’ is the one claiming that Ket and Navajo are mutually intelligible… I did my duty in downvoting it.)

[Man in Space]

Being a linguist on the Internet is a Sisyphean task.

When I was active on Reddit I got into it once with some guys on r/Conservative because they rejected the concept of AAVE. There was one guy (from Texas per his flair) who kept insisting that languages from the Amazon were inferior because you couldn’t talk about quantum physics with them—which is false, you might need to borrow or coin a ton of words but it’s totally possible—and kept moving the goalposts when I refuted him. I remember he brought up something about asking me if Black Americans were equipped to “flourish”, and then tried to gaslight me by saying that I was the one who brought it up (I wasn’t; “flourish” was his words). Strangely, he went silent once I asked him if “y’all” was, by his own metric, “proper English”.

/kbin was more receptive to linguistics but I left that community for other reasons.

[Raphael]

bradrn: Cool! Though I kind of think that article should be read together with the two proto-world pieces. I kind of wonder how and why someone decided to post such an old piece now.

Strangely, he went silent once I asked him if “y’all” was, by his own metric, “proper English”.

*chuckle*