Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[WeepingElf]

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.

What do you expect from a group which identifies itself as Conservative?!? That word is now pretty much an euphemism for "far right".

[Raphael]

What do you expect from a group which identifies itself as Conservative?!? That word is now pretty much an euphemism for "far right".

To be fair, Man in Space didn't tell us when that interaction took place.

[Ahzoh]

Noticed that recently my pronunciation of /ɑ/ has been retracting my velars, even the nasal.

[Man in Space]

Per A grammar and dictionary of Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ (Cayuga):

SR – as in węhnihSRí:yo: ‘nice day’ – sounds like the SHR [ʃɹ] in shrink. Some speakers pronounce SR as FR [fɹ] instead, for example in words like ganǫ́hkwasraˀ (ganǫ́hkwaFRaˀ) ‘love’. SR syllabifies as two separate consonants, [ʃ.ɹ] or [f.ɹ].

A fronting of [ʃ] to [f]. I never would’ve figured on that as a direct step. ʃ to x and thence to f, sure, but this may be useful to some.

[Richard W]

A fronting of [ʃ] to [f]. I never would’ve figured on that as a direct step. ʃ to x and thence to f, sure, but this may be useful to some.

The direct step is also hinted at in Welsh ffroen 'nostril' from Celtic *srognā and there is a voiced parallel in Latin sobrinu 'related via a sister' from *swesor.

[Otto Kretschmer]

What are the chances that the languages spoken in Europe before IE arrival were Afro Asiatic?

[hwhatting]

What are the chances that the languages spoken in Europe before IE arrival were Afro Asiatic?

We simply don't know. The only Afro-Asiatic languages attested in Europe were brought by settlers / conquerors / immigrants from the Middle East in historical times (Phoenician and Hebrew in Antiquity, Arabic in the early Middle Ages, and a multitude of languages brought by immigrants in modern times). There have been speculations that e.g., the Insular Celtic languages have an Afro-Asiatic substrate based on typological considerations (VSO word order, use of article), but that's nothing more than speculation.

[WeepingElf]

Apparently, a scholar named Rasmus Bjørn has proposed that the Neolithic farmers of Southeastern Europe spoke a language related to Semitic, but I can't say anything about that because the paper is behind a paywall. Myself, I have recently developed the idea that there was a Semitic-related substratum in PIE, about which I posted in the Great PIE Thread last month. I am of course in no way sure about that idea, it may be utter bullfrogs, but it would explain the Semitic-like words in PIE as well as its typological divergence from Uralic and other languages it appears to be related to.

[Raphael]

I'd say it would be just a bit too neat if pre-IE languages in Europe (except perhaps in some of the southernmost parts) would have been Afro-Asiatic. Not sure how to describe what I mean by that.

[WeepingElf]

My idea is that the population from south of the Caucasus that contributed to the PIE-speaking population (as the geneticists have found out) spoke a language related to Semitic, while the other population with Siberian roots spoke a language related to Uralic, and more distantly to the other Mitian languages (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut). However, the Transcaucasians weren't genetically very close to the Levantine Neolithic farmers with whom Semitic probably originated, so I may be barking up the wrong tree. But then, linguistic relationship doesn't go d'accord with genetic relationship often enough.

[Travis B.]

But then, linguistic relationship doesn't go d'accord with genetic relationship often enough.

Consider the case of the genetics of English in North America...

[WeepingElf]

But then, linguistic relationship doesn't go d'accord with genetic relationship often enough.

Consider the case of the genetics of English in North America...

Yes. Genetics allows to trace ancient migrations and population mixings, but tells us nothing about the languages. Language shifts are common enough. So the much-cited paper by Haak et al. from 2015 doesn't show that IE spread by that migration, but it effectively sets a terminus post quem for it: such a migration should have turned over the linguistic landscape of Europe about as thoroughly as European colonialism turned over the linguistic landscape of the Americas. But it still leaves open the possibility that IE spread later by means of language shift. Yet, the degree of diversity displayed by the oldest attested IE languages about 1500 BC tells us that PIE cannot have broken up much later than 3000 BC, so it seems likely that PIE indeed was the language spoken by those steppe herders (if that's what they were; at least in the western part of the Yamnaya horizon, some of them were apparently farmers) who so radically changed the human gene pool of Europe - likely, but not certain.

The idea of a Semitic-related substratum in PIE emerged in my mind when I realized that Semitic was, typology-wise, a better candidate than (or at least, as good a candidate as) any of the three Caucasian families for the closest known kin of the lost "Caucasian" substratum language that had been conjectured by various scholars starting with C. C. Uhlenbeck in the 1930s. But PIE probably also had close contact with Proto-NWC, which quite likely was spoken by the people associated with the Maykop culture who archaeologically have quite some things in common with the Yamnaya culture but is genetically quite different.

[Travis B.]

One question I have is how did Czech survive intact being essentially entirely displaced by German for the period of the from essentially the start of the Thirty Years' War to the start of the Czech National Revival, whereas Irish and Scottish Gaelic are severely marginalized today despite the best efforts of the Irish government, in the former case, to promote its usage?

[keenir]

One question I have is how did Czech survive intact being essentially entirely displaced by German for the period of the from essentially the start of the Thirty Years' War to the start of the Czech National Revival, whereas Irish and Scottish Gaelic are severely marginalized today despite the best efforts of the Irish government, in the former case, to promote its usage?

I'm not sure how much to buy this explanation that I read once, but basically Irish was doing reasonably okay up until it was made an Official Language of Ireland. (I'm not sure what the reasoning was, if thats true...maybe individuals en masse thinking "well, if its official and got government protections, then I don't have to learn it - other people can do that")

[zompist]

One question I have is how did Czech survive intact being essentially entirely displaced by German for the period of the from essentially the start of the Thirty Years' War to the start of the Czech National Revival, whereas Irish and Scottish Gaelic are severely marginalized today despite the best efforts of the Irish government, in the former case, to promote its usage?

Good question, and I don't really know, but I'd note that Bohemia was ruled by Austria from 1526 on, and the Hapsburgs were famously a continental, multi-lingual empire. It never had the centrality or cultural unity of, say, Rome; its organizing principle was not Austrian culture but the Hapsburg family interests. I don't think anyone had much interest in making the commoners speak German.

In Scotland, the court and the big cities were dominated by Scots speakers even before the union with England.

[Moose-tache]

Why do you say Czech was "entirely displaced?" The data we have does not support this. Czech was suppressed in the sort of contexts that are likely to leave behind lasting documents, like science and politics, in the 17th century. This was still at least partly true by the outbreak of World War 1. The Austro-Hungarian language census that the Nazis used to show how much of Bohemia was German probably underestimated Czech language use, because it asked respondents what language they used the most, not which one they used natively, in a country dominated by German culture and politics. Occam's Razor would suggest that Czech spent a few centuries as a largely unappreciated home language in a bilingual society, but never became uncommon among the ordinary people of Czechia.

[Travis B.]

Why do you say Czech was "entirely displaced?" The data we have does not support this. Czech was suppressed in the sort of contexts that are likely to leave behind lasting documents, like science and politics, in the 17th century. This was still at least partly true by the outbreak of World War 1. The Austro-Hungarian language census that the Nazis used to show how much of Bohemia was German probably underestimated Czech language use, because it asked respondents what language they used the most, not which one they used natively, in a country dominated by German culture and politics. Occam's Razor would suggest that Czech spent a few centuries as a largely unappreciated home language in a bilingual society, but never became uncommon among the ordinary people of Czechia.

What I meant was that Czech was suppressed in public life as a whole for a few centuries in the Czech lands, yet it somehow managed to not only survive but actually replace German in public life (of course, this was made definitive by the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia at the end of WW2), yet Irish is practically very marginalized (and it is starting to show even in the Gaeltacht today) in Ireland today despite the best (if often incompetent) efforts of the Irish government to keep it afloat.

[Moose-tache]

I see. I don't think that sort of thing (public suppression leading to no practical language replacement) is unusual. The world is full of marginalized languages that survive just fine. I live in Korea, and there was about a ten year period where photographs, school books, radio programs, and other durable cultural products present almost no evidence of the Korean language. But Japan's suppression techniques were ultimately about as effective as a fart in the wind.

Western Europe is an example of anomalously successful language suppression. And some of that, like the collapse of Breton, didn't happen until the 20th century, mostly after the period of suppression of the Czech language. But for every Welsh or Asturian there are dozens like Hakka or Acehnese. The question is what is it about English, French, or Spanish language-culture that allowed them to expand so effectively. I doubt it's simply because of top-down initiatives. I suspect there was a perfect storm of factors that allowed these countries to homogenize more and faster than most other countries.

[Raphael]

I'm not sure how much to buy this explanation that I read once, but basically Irish was doing reasonably okay up until it was made an Official Language of Ireland. (I'm not sure what the reasoning was, if thats true...maybe individuals en masse thinking "well, if its official and got government protections, then I don't have to learn it - other people can do that")

I don't think I buy that. From what I've heard, at the time of independence, the language had already lost most of the country.

[xxx]

In France, the advent of the republic
and the recognition of a single people and a single language
has done much to wipe out regional languages...