Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[hwhatting]

Fair enough - compared to SAE, Bahasa Indonesia looks foreign, but you may be right that compared to other local languages it looks positively European.

What European features does it have that Classical Malay did not? I am not aware of any language in Africa or India picking up European features other than vocabulary

Don't ask me, I don't know Classical Malay. And it wasn't me who stated that Bahasa Indonesia took over grammatical features from European languages.

[keenir]

Fair enough - compared to SAE, Bahasa Indonesia looks foreign, but you may be right that compared to other local languages it looks positively European.

What European features does it have that Classical Malay did not? I am not aware of any language in Africa or India picking up European features other than vocabulary

Thats not what Hwatting said. Hwatting said it looks more European-looking than its neighbors.

[hwhatting]

Thats not what Hwatting said. Hwatting said it looks more European-looking than its neighbors.

Well, not even that - I said it may be correct that it looks more Europenan than its neighbours*1), as Creyeditor and bradrn quoted a scholar saying. I have no way to judge whether that's true, as Bahasa Indonesia / Bahasa Melayu (more or less the same language) are the only language in the region that I've ever looked at in detail.
*1) As opposed to my perspective who can only compare it to European languages, Turkic, and Arabic, compared to which it looks quite different.

[Kuchigakatai]

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...

Also serious is Arabic gaining a high use of a preposition meaning "by X" with passive verbs (من قبل min qabli X, literally "from before") as a recent influence from English/French. Classical Arabic didn't even have a preposition to indicate the agent of passive verbs, and the use of من قبل min qabli before this recent influence was uncommon.

Frellesvig in his A History of the Japanese Language (2010, pages 410-411) also mentions three syntactic influences of Dutch/English onto Japanese:
- a higher use of 3rd person pronouns; he mentions that in the late 19th century even the use of kanojo 'she' for ships can be found
- a higher use of the passive, including a novel use of に因りて ni-yorite ~ に因って ni-yotte 'because of' to express agents (cf. Arabic!)
- the [near-]obligatory use of the case particles は wa, が ga, を o to mark core arguments in written Japanese, with (usually) unambiguous identification of the object vs. the subject or topic. Pre-Meiji written Japanese, much like how today's spoken Japanese remains, often omitted the particles. However, Frellesvig notes that the pre-existing genre of 訓点語 kuntengo, fairly literal renditions of Classical Chinese, also had obligatory use of argument case particles.

[Creyeditor]

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...

Also serious is Arabic gaining a high use of a preposition meaning "by X" with passive verbs (من قبل min qabli X, literally "from before") as a recent influence from English/French. Classical Arabic didn't even have a preposition to indicate the agent of passive verbs, and the use of من قبل min qabli before this recent influence was uncommon.

[...]
- a higher use of the passive, including a novel use of に因りて ni-yorite ~ に因って ni-yotte 'because of' to express agents (cf. Arabic!)

Standard Indonesian 'oleh' by is similarly not found in colloquial varieties where reintroduced passive agents are either unmarked or marked by other more general prepositions such as sama with, like.

[Richard W]

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...

I think Moose-tache was referring to my citation of the Swahili loss of tone. More precisely, I suspect the influence of Arabic, but in the larger picture, Semitic isn't so far from European, even if I can only name one European Semitic language.

I have a strong feeling that the word 'English' in 'English passive' comes from a Thai name of the construction in Thai, but I can't lay my hands on any reference.

[Moose-tache]

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...

You're all ignoring the null hypothesis, or "pulling a Taskubilos."
There are three ways that a non-European language exposed to European languages might change.
1) language becomes superficially more like SAE, due to causal influence
2) language becomes superficially more like SAE by sheer coincidence
3) language becomes superficially less like SAE
Now let's say we have a non-European language; we'll call it... Phrench. Phrench used to have SOV sentences, but now it has SVO. Obviously, this can only be the result of Europeans, right? The only form of internally-motivated change that could possibly happen is away from SAE, right?

Actually, that's wrong. Phrench could simply have developed SVO order on its own, by coincidence. To prove that there is a causal connection, you have to address the null hypothesis: "But what if not that though," and disprove it. It's weirdly Eurocentric to assume that anything that could be about Europe must be about Europe.

[KathTheDragon]

At any rate, I’ve heard that at least Standard Indonesian is very heavily influenced by IE (especially Germanic) languages, but I’m not sure to what extent that’s true for Papua Indonesian.

Do you have a source for that? I'm now doing advanced lessons of Bahasa Indonesia, and while there are lots of Dutch loans (often corresponding to English lo loanwords in Malaysian), the syntax and verbal morphology look totally un-Germanic (and un-SAE) to me.

As mentioned by Creyeditor it was a comment of David Gil’s, in his (excellent) chapter Escaping Eurocentrism: fieldwork as a process of unlearning. Alas, my saved link seems to be dead and unarchived, so you’ll have to try find it yourself.

When the Portuguese and the Dutch came to Southeast Asia, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they found varieties of Malay being used as a lingua franca over wide areas of the Indonesian archipelago. Recognizing the great value of such a common language, they set about to standardize it, to serve their own goals of proselytizing, trade, and colonial administration. As the colonial era drew to an end in the mid-twentieth century, the two major newly-independent countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, resumed the process of standardization with renewed vigor, through the establishment of official language academies, the Dewan Bahasadan Pustaka (Institute of Language and Literature) in Malaysia, and the Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Center for Language Development and Cultivation) in Indonesia. [...]
During the colonial era, Portuguese, Dutch, and then British prescriptivists often distorted the language in order to force it into a more familiar European mould. After Malaysia and Indonesia became independent, one might have expected this particular motivation for linguistic change to have become defunct; indeed, one of the goals of the language academies is the introduction of indigenous lexical items to replace foreign loanwords. However, such linguistic purism is more or less limited to the lexicon - in the domain of grammar, the academies are busy making their language look more and more like English. In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfill the functions of a national language, it must have a well-developed system of grammar. Unfortunately, the only type of grammar that the language planners are usually familiar with is the Eurocentric grammar of European languages. Thus, Standard Malay/Indonesian has had a variety of linguistic features artificially grafted onto it that are reminiscent of European languages, including nominal number marking, verbal active and passive prefixes, and others.

[bradrn]

[snip]

The part I was particularly thinking of was a rather interesting comparison of glosses for Standard Indonesian and colloquial Indonesian, though as I said my link is dead.

[KathTheDragon]

The only bit I can find like this is these two glosses:

Standard Malay

Permainan

NOM-play

itu

DEM:DIST

sangat

very

menarik

interesting

That match was great.

Colloquial Kuala Lumpur Malay

Best

good

la

CONTR

dia

3

main

play

tadi

PST:PROX

[bradrn]

The only bit I can find like this is these two glosses:

Standard Malay

Permainan

NOM-play

itu

DEM:DIST

sangat

very

menarik

interesting

That match was great.

Colloquial Kuala Lumpur Malay

Best

good

la

CONTR

dia

3

main

play

tadi

PST:PROX

Yes, those ones, though I also recall some explanation as to exactly how much the latter differs from standard IE constructions. I’ll have to try find another copy of the paper.

[Creyeditor]

And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

You're being ironic, but Richard W's post is unironic and serious...

You're all ignoring the null hypothesis, or "pulling a Taskubilos."
There are three ways that a non-European language exposed to European languages might change.
1) language becomes superficially more like SAE, due to causal influence
2) language becomes superficially more like SAE by sheer coincidence
3) language becomes superficially less like SAE
Now let's say we have a non-European language; we'll call it... Phrench. Phrench used to have SOV sentences, but now it has SVO. Obviously, this can only be the result of Europeans, right? The only form of internally-motivated change that could possibly happen is away from SAE, right?

Actually, that's wrong. Phrench could simply have developed SVO order on its own, by coincidence. To prove that there is a causal connection, you have to address the null hypothesis: "But what if not that though," and disprove it. It's weirdly Eurocentric to assume that anything that could be about Europe must be about Europe.

I think you're ignoring the historical context here. The null hypothesis (for the claim that Standard Indonesian/Malay syntax is influenced by European languages) is different from your Phrench example.
Let's say there are six non-European languages Phrench, Phinnish, Phlemish, Pharoese, Phrisian and Phriulian. Phrench was in very close contact with European languages and had a change from SOV to SVO. The five related languages did not have close contact with European languages and did not undergo the change. Now, the null hypothesis is that the correlation between close contact with European languages and the change from SOV to SVO is a coincidence.This goes in both directions. The languages with absence of contact and change are also important data points. The hypothesis testing would involve statistics and crunching the numbers, but a coincidence is not per se more likely than causation.

[Zju]

Which language has a tone system of specifically HH LL HL LH? Mandarin comes close, but its 3rd tone is more peculiar than a simple LL and it also has a fifth tone or can have unstressed syllables.

I remember reading the claim that tonal languages have either level tones or contour tones, so I'd imagine the above four way tone distinction would be a clear counter-example.

[Creyeditor]

You should have a look at Bantu tone languages. All have H (and L), a lot have additional HL and some allow LH. Alternatively, you could look at West African tone languages in general.

[bradrn]

Which language has a tone system of specifically HH LL HL LH? Mandarin comes close, but its 3rd tone is more peculiar than a simple LL and it also has a fifth tone or can have unstressed syllables.

Thai almost qualifies: it has H, M, L, HL, LH.

I remember reading the claim that tonal languages have either level tones or contour tones, so I'd imagine the above four way tone distinction would be a clear counter-example.

Where did you see that? Quite the reverse: the presence of contour tones almost always implies the presence of level tones (Yip 2002).

[Richard W]

Thai almost qualifies: it has H, M, L, HL, LH.

Have you an honest source for that oversimplification? Take a gander at the spectrograms at https://slice-of-thai.com/tones/#thaihas5. (Actually, the 'high' tone of dead syllables is fairly steady.)

[bradrn]

Thai almost qualifies: it has H, M, L, HL, LH.

Have you an honest source for that oversimplification? Take a gander at the spectrograms at https://slice-of-thai.com/tones/#thaihas5. (Actually, the 'high' tone of dead syllables is fairly steady.)

I’m going from Yip. But this doesn’t seem to contradict your source at all — it’s well known that level tones can be phonetically varying. (Yip explicitly mentions that most languages have some alternation between level tones and slight contour tones.)

[bradrn]

An interesting coincidence: the first person singular pronoun of Tommo So (Dogon) is mí ‘me’… and its second person singular pronoun is ú ‘you’. (Not that that means anything, of course.)

[Otto Kretschmer]

Any equivalents of the Great Bowel Shift in other Germanic languages?

[Moose-tache]

EDIT: wahn-wahn.