Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[jal]

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?

As always, I guess socio-economic factors. For one, German influence on Czech was much earlier than English on Irish. Irish was doing fine up intil the late 18th century, and then the great famine occured, a time of the great exodus to America. Googling a bit, reasons that are given are things like "parents supported the teaching of English to their children because they saw it as the portal to opportunities for economic advancement" and "Families insisted that their children learn English to improve their prospects." Otoh, Czechia in the 17th century would've been a very rural country, and relatively few people outside the big cities would've had contact with the German language.


JAL

[Linguoboy]

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.

I think a big factor is universal public education, which doesn't really get started in most of Europe until the mid- to late 19th century. In the UK, not only were Irish and Welsh completely excluded from the educational system, it became a vehicle for actively extirpating them. Wales, for instance, experienced something known as the "Treason of the Blue Books" (Brad y Llyfrau Gleision), a parliamentary report which claimed that knowledge of the Welsh language made the Welsh backward and ornery and should be stamped out. It was the same story in Ireland--which as others have noted was reeling from the Famine and experiencing mass outmigration (chiefly to English-speaking countries). So you you had generations of Irish- and Welsh-speaking pupils who literally had the language beaten out of them. (You can read about this in the well-known personal histories of the early 20th century, such as Séamus Ó Grianna's Nuair a bhí mé óg and Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's Fiche Blian ag Fás.) Those that didn't often came to see it as their ticket to survival.

Did this also happen in Bohemia? Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with the history of the Czech language or literature of the Czech Revival, but I've never heard of anything similar happening there. Like Mark says, the Hapsburg Empire was multilingual and there was never any concerted attempt to make it monolingual, as occurred in France or Spain. Germanicisation was confined to an elite and when the attitudes of that elite shifted, so did the language.

(It might also be relevant here that a significant portion of the German-speaking population in the Czech Lands were Jewish, and we all know what became of them.)

[Linguoboy]

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.

Yeah, I have to agree with that. Official Irish gets a lot a flak--famously, even some Irish-speaking authors have condemned how it was being taught--but it's really because of Irish-medium education that the language is as widespread today as it is.

What is true is that the way it was taught and the fact that passing grades in Irish were necessary to avoid flunking out has created a lot of animosity over the years. Plenty of folks never want to have anything to do with it after leaving school, but it's not clear to me the majority would have become enthusiastic Irish-speakers in any case.

[Raphael]

I once read a comment somewhere - I don't remember, perhaps it was even on the ZBB - that some Catalan language activists supposedly put some effort into studying historical developments in Ireland, and they came to the conclusion that Irish was probably doomed once it lost Dublin, and they're therefore very keen on making sure that Catalan doesn't lose Barcelona.

[Travis B.]

Did this also happen in Bohemia? Admittedly, I'm not as familiar with the history of the Czech language or literature of the Czech Revival, but I've never heard of anything similar happening there. Like Mark says, the Hapsburg Empire was multilingual and there was never any concerted attempt to make it monolingual, as occurred in France or Spain. Germanicisation was confined to an elite and when the attitudes of that elite shifted, so did the language.

From what I had read, the wholesale replacement of Czech with German in public life in the Czech lands really happened after the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt at White Mountain. Of course, the key words there are public life, so just because the Czech-speaking aristocracy and educated classes were ruthlessly suppressed may not mean that Czech stopped being spoken by commoners. In this way it seems that it was analogous to the Norman Conquest, where for centuries afterwards Old Norman and Latin were largely the sole languages of the aristocracy and the Church, but that put little dent into the speaking of what became Middle English by the common folk.

[conlangernoob]

Just a random thought: About historic areal contact, what ways would there be to divide the world into, for the lack of a better word, linguistic macro-regions, i.e., Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, etc.? Many linguistic categories seem to be shared between most Euroasiatic languages that aren’t shared with African languages, for example (except the Caucasus or Siberia, sometimes).

Sorry if that didn’t make sense.

[keenir]

Just a random thought: About historic areal contact, what ways would there be to divide the world into, for the lack of a better word, linguistic macro-regions, i.e., Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, etc.? Many linguistic categories seem to be shared between most Euroasiatic languages that aren’t shared with African languages, for example (except the Caucasus or Siberia, sometimes).

Sorry if that didn’t make sense.

you mean physically divide, or culturally, or...?

apologies for my lack of comprehending.

[bradrn]

Just a random thought: About historic areal contact, what ways would there be to divide the world into, for the lack of a better word, linguistic macro-regions, i.e., Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, etc.? Many linguistic categories seem to be shared between most Euroasiatic languages that aren’t shared with African languages, for example (except the Caucasus or Siberia, sometimes).

Sorry if that didn’t make sense.

I’ve always liked this paper: https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/serv ... tassen.pdf. (Scroll down to the summary map at the end.)

[Moose-tache]

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include:

Australia
Mainland SEA, including South China
Insular SEA
Eastern Siberia and Nearctic
Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa
Subsaharan Africa
Eastern South America
Western South America
Eastern North America
Western North America

[conlangernoob]

Ok, thanks. This seems to be an interesting way to think about areal relations.

[abahot]

It's well understood that tonogenesis in Southeast Asia was probably an areal change. But do we know if it originated in one language family in particular, or did it happen to all involved languages around the same time, before which none of the languages in the region were tonal?

[Starbeam]

I'm looking over the long mid mergers in English (pane-pain/ toe-tow), and wondering if any language has a stable contrast between /e:/ and /ej/ and/or /o:/ and /ow/. I am aware English had the contrast for centuries, but it seems like something that breaks off before other stuff does. I can't think of any language doing so off the top of my head, and both dialects that maintain the long mid contrast seem be special cases:

Norfolk has the pane-pain merger but not the toe-tow merger. The (sourced) Wikipedia article mentions a fronted /aw/, so maybe one of the results could be compensating for that or merging with /O:/ (the THOUGHT vowel)? I'm speculating, but it would explain why only merger went thru.

Rhondda Valley has a complete contrast, but i know they were using English later than many. The trait could be gone within a couple generations.

In any case, is anyone able to clarify one way or another? Thanks so much in advance

[abahot]

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include:

Australia
Mainland SEA, including South China
Insular SEA
Eastern Siberia and Nearctic
Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa
Subsaharan Africa
Eastern South America
Western South America
Eastern North America
Western North America

Where do you place New Guinea in this system?

Also when you say "Nearctic", what do you mean? I've heard it used before to mean much of North America, but I doubt it here.

(I know this isn't supposed to be some super rigorous classification, but I'm just wondering.)

[WeepingElf]

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include:

Australia
Mainland SEA, including South China
Insular SEA
Eastern Siberia and Nearctic
Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa
Subsaharan Africa
Eastern South America
Western South America
Eastern North America
Western North America

Where do you place New Guinea in this system?

Also when you say "Nearctic", what do you mean? I've heard it used before to mean much of North America, but I doubt it here.

(I know this isn't supposed to be some super rigorous classification, but I'm just wondering.)

I'm not Moose-tache, but I'd guess that New Guinea is its own kingdom, and "Nearctic" is the North American Arctic where Eskimo-Aleut languages are spoken, which in many ways are closer to Siberian than to other North American languages.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Question - why did Old Irish change so much relative to Primitive Irish? Was it because of strong initial stress that caused reduction of unstressed syllables?

[Travis B.]

I'm not Moose-tache, but I'd guess that New Guinea is its own kingdom, and "Nearctic" is the North American Arctic where Eskimo-Aleut languages are spoken, which in many ways are closer to Siberian than to other North American languages.

That makes more sense. "Nearctic" normally means North America and Greenland to as far south as Mexico, and I personally would group eastern Sibera with the North American Arctic and Greenland separate from more southerly parts of North America.

[Travis B.]

Question - why did Old Irish change so much relative to Primitive Irish? Was it because of strong initial stress that caused reduction of unstressed syllables?

That is the assumption that I have heard.

[Moose-tache]

I feel like a lot of languages will have many changes in a short time, because they compound on one another. No one would ask why early modern English had so many more radical vowel changes than late middle English, because it's a chain shift. Of course they happened in rapid succession. Similarly, once you start reducing your final syllables, it can trigger a large number of side effects in a very short amount of time, because many aspects of grammar will be affected simultaneously.

[jal]

I feel like a lot of languages will have many changes in a short time, because they compound on one another.

Punctuated equilibrium in linguistics :).


JAL

[Darren]

Punctuated equilibrium in linguistics .

Dixon uses that term to describe Australian languages. In said instance he's a bit of a nutcase though (he basically doesn't believe in any classification of Australian languages whatsoever).