Non-IE Schleicher's fables

[Raholeun]

Schleicher's fable is of course quite well known. It has been 150 years ago since it was first conceived for Proto-Indo-European and has often been revised since. Do equivalent narratives exist that are worked out for other Proto-Languages, preferable non-derivates of PIE?

[Pabappa]

There is a poem in nostratic :


http://www.suduva.com/virdainas/nostraticist.htm
But it's highly speculative because it doesn't assume inflections.

[Nerulent]

This paper reconstructs a Proto-Polynesian text based on similar versions throughout Polynesia. It is a magical incantation used by a demon to restore a felled tree:

*Lele mai nga lau
*Pili nga mala
*Tuʔu te raʔakau

Fly the leaves, adhere the chips, stand the tree!

[Raholeun]

There is a poem in nostratic :

This paper reconstructs a Proto-Polynesian text based on similar versions throughout Polynesia.

Thank you both for the examples. The Nostratic one was unexpected, Proto-Oceanic on the other hand has lots of well established reconstructions. That is why I asked in the first place. Take language families like Uralicor Austronesian. My impression is that many etyma are reconstructed with a limited amount of controversy, and that academia is fairly certain on the essentials of its original grammar. Why then is it hard to find equivalents to Schleicher's fable?

[Salmoneus]

I would guess it's just that 21st century linguistics has different priorities from 19th century philology. Linguists could make up fables for various reconstructed austronesian languages... but why would they bother?

[gach]

If you are interested in translations of the actual Schleicher's fable, there's this recently published manuscript,

https://www.academia.edu/38068156/A_Son ... ndouralica

It collects attempted translations into a wide selection of reconstructed proto-languages, some way more hypothetical than others, centered mostly around Indo-Uralic. Many of the versions are necessarily adaptations due to the lack of such words as "horse" or "wagon" in the reconstructions. Make of it what you will, it's in any case a nice thing to casually skim through.

[Raholeun]

If you are interested in translations of the actual Schleicher's fable, there's this recently published manuscript,

This is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon! Good find, gach.

I would guess it's just that 21st century linguistics has different priorities from 19th century philology. Linguists could make up fables for various reconstructed austronesian languages... but why would they bother?

Isn't that a silly question? Why would they bother to conjure up a sound inventory for an extinct language and put those sounds in a algebraic mold for 5 other experts only to study anyway?

When you create a fable for your conlang it serves as an check up of the language (do I know enough about all the bits and pieces of grammar to make this work), but it also forces you to explore the culture attached to the language; who are the speakers and what shared concepts would they speak about? These same reasons are valid for a scholar studying proto-Choco or proto-Trans-New-Guinea.

[Vijay]

I think part of the problem is probably that we don't know nearly as much about most language families as we do about Indo-European.

[Raholeun]

Surely it is possible to concoct a sizeable narrative from what we know about Proto-Austronesian. Many lexical items have had stable reconstructions for a long time (although the position of stress is an unresolved issue) and many points of its grammar are subjected to less controversy than Indo-European has been since the Schleicher's first version in 1868.

I know there are some Uralicists here. Maybe they can vouch for the feasibility of creating a narrative or fable for PU.

[Salmoneus]

I would guess it's just that 21st century linguistics has different priorities from 19th century philology. Linguists could make up fables for various reconstructed austronesian languages... but why would they bother?

Isn't that a silly question?

No, which is why I asked it.

Why would they bother to conjure up a sound inventory for an extinct language and put those sounds in a algebraic mold for 5 other experts only to study anyway?

Because they're linguists, and describing languages is what they do. Reconstruction the phonology of a proto-language is a big part of what historical linguists are paid to do.

Creating fun stories in proto-languages is not part of what they're paid to do, because that's no longer seen as within their purview.

When you create a fable for your conlang it serves as an check up of the language (do I know enough about all the bits and pieces of grammar to make this work), but it also forces you to explore the culture attached to the language; who are the speakers and what shared concepts would they speak about? These same reasons are valid for a scholar studying proto-Choco or proto-Trans-New-Guinea.

When you create a fable for your conlang, I presume you create it as a fable told by speakers of that conlang. Schleicherian fables, however, reveal nothing about the culture of the speakers of the reconstructed language (other than the very base level of including a few names of animals and tools and suchlike), because they're invented by the philologist, not the culture itself.

[gach]

We mostly have very limited knowledge of the syntax of reconstructed languages and constructing stories in them is in itself unlikely to provide new insight on the matter. It can be used to demonstrate how much of the basic grammar you have figured out, or think you have, which has its pedagogic uses.

Such fables are good outreach, though, and that's a worthwhile effort even if it only affects your funding in an indirect way.

[zompist]

I think there's been a revolution in this area, and the cycle may turn yet again.

The early 19C linguists were also philologists, and often folklorists. (Cf. the Brothers Grimm.) It didn't seem outlandish that syntax and rhetoric of a protolanguage could be reconstructed along with the words.

But then a more rigorous and concentrated style took over. The idea seemed to be that once you'd done the phonology and morphology, you were done. As I've mentioned, Whitney's great Sanskrit grammar has no syntax section, much less any consideration of rhetoric.

(Also, it seems that the linguists and the folklorists were no longer the same people. But an increase in specialization should not be mistaken for an increase in understanding.)

Yet linguistics has changed since that time. There's been over half a century's intensive work in syntax, plus excursions into semantics and pragmatics. (Not too much rhetoric, so far as I know.)

You're not done if you haven't looked at syntax. You should be able to write a sentence in the language; otherwise you can hardly say you know how it works! Lehmann's Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics has two chapters on syntax, and Lass covers morphosyntax, at least.

Of course, reliability goes way down in this area, mostly because there's so much less data. If you (say) look at two dozen syntactic facts, that's going to be far less convincing than looking at 500 words. But when historical linguists are happy to work on pre-proto-languages, or highly speculative cross-family reconstructions, they're obviously comfortable with a high number of stacked hypotheses.

In short: the feeling around 1900 may have been that Schleicher Went Too Far. (It's probably telling that no one dared to update the fable for 71 years.) But the idea isn't inherently risible, and it's certainly far less out on a limb than, say, later linguists' bold work on Proto-World.

FWIW, Schleicher's original intro recognizes the difficulty of the task, and says that it was done partly animi causa, that is, for the fun of it. And quite a few modern IE-ists, bless them, have gotten in on the fun.

Theils um dazuthun, daßs, wenn such mit mühe, zusammenhangende sätze in indogermanischer ursprache gebildet werden können, theils animi causa, machte ich den versuch in dieser erschlossenen sprache einege zeilen zu schreiben. Mit übersetzungen glückte es mir nicht, so mußste ich denn wohl oder übel zu eigenem machwerke mich entschließsenden worten, vor allem aber der fast gänzliche mangel an partikeln, erschwert die bildung von sätzen in indogermanischer ursprache sehr. In der folgenden kleinen fabel habe ich mich, wie der leser leicht erkennt, drücken und schmiegen müssen, um die worte für das zu finden, was ich sagen wollte.