Zompist Bboard Again

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 2:33 pm

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 1:07 pm 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

Otto Kretschmer wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 2:33 pm

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 1:07 pm 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

keenir wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 7:14 am Thats not what Hwatting said. Hwatting said it looks more European-looking than its neighbors.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am And Medieval Korean lost vowel harmony! Man, those Europeans really got around.

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:33 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am 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!)

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:33 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am 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...

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:33 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am 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...

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 3:36 pm

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:50 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 03, 2022 7:55 pm 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.

In 'Escaping Eurocentrism', David Gil wrote: 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.

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:55 pm

In 'Escaping Eurocentrism', David Gil wrote: [snip]

Permainan

NOM-play

itu

DEM:DIST

sangat

very

menarik

interesting

That match was great.

Best

good

la

CONTR

dia

3

main

play

tadi

PST:PROX

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 12:24 am 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

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 6:30 pm

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 11:33 am

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 2:25 am 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.

Zju wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 11:43 am 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.

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 4:46 pm Thai almost qualifies: it has H, M, L, HL, LH.

Richard W wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 6:11 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 4:46 pm 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.)