Goldbergian Linguistics Proves English and German Related

[Moose-tache]

I have been studying alongside the greats of the Ruhlen-Goldberg school of linguistics, and I want to share with you all my amazing new discovery. The English and German languages do, in fact, share a common ancestor, spoken roughly 8500 years ago when the speakers of English and German were last in contact, before the inundation of Doggerland.

Let us use a single sentence to demonstrate how we can know these languages are related.

You drink the water that comes from the pond.
Du trinkst das Wasser, das aus dem Teich kommt.

Just from looking at these two sentences we can notice several commonalities. For example, the words water and Wasser look similar. We can reconstruct the original word as *vwaster, with cluster simplification in each language. Similarly, the second person pronoun was originally *dju. We can reconstruct the active-voice verbal marker *-st, with assimilation after nasals in German, and loss in English except after nasals.

A particularly interesting area of comparison is the syntax. We can see that the relative clause has a verb immediately after the conjunction in English, but at the end of the clause in German. This clearly points to a unique pattern of verb repetition. It is hardly surprising that each language simplified this unusual arrangement in its own way, English keeping only the first verb and German the second. With this analysis in mind, we can reconstruct the sentence in Proto-Anglo-German:

*dju dtrinkst thedas vwaster, thedas komst fraums thedas ptoinxt komst.

This theory is obviously perfect, and anyone who fails to agree only betrays their jealousy.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Just from looking at these two sentences we can notice several commonalities. For example, the words water and Wasser look similar. We can reconstruct the original word as *vwaster, with cluster simplification in each language. Similarly, the second person pronoun was originally *dju. We can reconstruct the active-voice verbal marker *-st, with assimilation after nasals in German, and loss in English except after nasals.

No, no, no, no, no, English is clearly a radically innovative language that fortified its protolanguage */s/ > /t/, then lenited */v/ > /w/, note that /v/ was originally graphically "w", hence the more conservative German preserves the earlier use of the letter, and the protoform should be *wasar or *wassar.

[Moose-tache]

Just from looking at these two sentences we can notice several commonalities. For example, the words water and Wasser look similar. We can reconstruct the original word as *vwaster, with cluster simplification in each language. Similarly, the second person pronoun was originally *dju. We can reconstruct the active-voice verbal marker *-st, with assimilation after nasals in German, and loss in English except after nasals.

No, no, no, no, no, English is clearly a radically innovative language that fortified its protolanguage */s/ > /t/, then lenited */v/ > /w/, note that /v/ was originally graphically "w", hence the more conservative German preserves the earlier use of the letter, and the protoform should be *wasar* or *wassar.

Bro. Do you even Greenberg?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Just from looking at these two sentences we can notice several commonalities. For example, the words water and Wasser look similar. We can reconstruct the original word as *vwaster, with cluster simplification in each language. Similarly, the second person pronoun was originally *dju. We can reconstruct the active-voice verbal marker *-st, with assimilation after nasals in German, and loss in English except after nasals.

No, no, no, no, no, English is clearly a radically innovative language that fortified its protolanguage */s/ > /t/, then lenited */v/ > /w/, note that /v/ was originally graphically "w", hence the more conservative German preserves the earlier use of the letter, and the protoform should be *wasar* or *wassar.

Bro. Do you even Greenberg?

I know better than to do that!

[Raholeun]

There is another mystery that lies hidden in the sunken ruins of Doggerland: a mystery hundreds, if not thousands of years old. These languages, once spoken by ancient and mystifying races, might in fact share a common heritage. Can you demonstrate a relation between these languages using the Ruhlen-Goldberg school of linguistics™?

gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer
Geloof je in God de almachtige Vader?

[Moose-tache]

There is another mystery that lies hidden in the sunken ruins of Doggerland: a mystery hundreds, if not thousands of years old. These languages, once spoken by ancient and mystifying races, might in fact share a common heritage. Can you demonstrate a relation between these languages using the Ruhlen-Goldberg school of linguistics™?

gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer
Geloof je in God de almachtige Vader?

The second word of the first sentence, in has a fairly obvious cognate in the second sentence. Since in is in Wackernagel's position, the word je from the second sentence naturally jumps out. Presumably the original form was *ijen.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

There is another mystery that lies hidden in the sunken ruins of Doggerland: a mystery hundreds, if not thousands of years old. These languages, once spoken by ancient and mystifying races, might in fact share a common heritage. Can you demonstrate a relation between these languages using the Ruhlen-Goldberg school of linguistics™?

gelobistu in got alamehtigan fadaer
Geloof je in God de almachtige Vader?

Some things stand out about the language of the first sentence:

• It has shortened the long vowel and dropped the f in the first word.
• It has innovated suffixes like -bistu and -n, the latter possibly being cognate to the word "in" in the second sentence.
• It has simplified the phrase "God de" to "got".
• It has added an epenthetic vowel to break up the cluster -lm- in "almachtige/alamehtigan".
• It has lost phonemic capitalisation.

Clearly, the language of the second sentence is the more conservative of the two.

[bradrn]

More: show

Pshaw! Such trifling puzzles are surely inadequate in showing the true might of the Ruhlen-Greenberg school of linguistics™. Can you prove that these following languages are related using its awesome power?

Ŋu yendémo ŋunoko uni
Cun shubu nantan icosh

(Admittedly I have my doubts as to whether the first sentence is grammatical, especially since I made it myself. But this is assuredly no obstacle when using the Ruhlen-Greenberg school of linguistics™!)

[zompist]

Since I have a page disparaging Greenberg & Ruhlen, I'd like to appreciate this, but it seems kind of weird, for two reasons.

* "Goldberg"? If you're going to make fun of people's names, maybe don't make them sound more Jewish?
* It seems to accuse G&R of doing things they don't do. So far as I know they're mostly known for mass comparison, not for reconstruction. I mean, it would be funny if they were the sort to declare "pond" and "Teich" related, but they're much more akin to people who find "gaijin" and "goyim" suspiciously similar.

[bradrn]

* "Goldberg"? If you're going to make fun of people's names, maybe don't make them sound more Jewish?

Good catch. I assume it was either misremembered or typoed. I know I never could remember his name. (Also, I don’t think the point was to make fun of their names.)

* It seems to accuse G&R of doing things they don't do. So far as I know they're mostly known for mass comparison, not for reconstruction. I mean, it would be funny if they were the sort to declare "pond" and "Teich" related, but they're much more akin to people who find "gaijin" and "goyim" suspiciously similar.

Also true. As such, I have spoilered my post (as phpBB isn’t letting me delete it).

[WeepingElf]

I think Moose-tache just misremembered the name "Greenberg". And as for the methodology, this is more like the Starostins, who invoke gargantuan phoneme inventories and forms significantly longer than any of their "reflexes", such that almost anything can be matched with anything.

[Ares Land]

Oh. I though that was a joke on Rube Goldberg machines.

[WeepingElf]

Oh. I though that was a joke on Rube Goldberg machines.

That one, too, and it was probably conducive to the "Greenberg" → "Goldberg" slip.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I hadn't heard of Greenberg before now, I just thought it was a joke based on silly things that have gone on elsewhere.

[Zju]

I, too, could recall only G- something -berg on top off my head before reading this thread.

[Moose-tache]

Haha, oh crap you're right. My mistake! I actually googled "Ruhlen and Goldberg" to see if I was remembering it correctly, and since Google gave me some hits that included both names I assumed I was on the right track. It turns out, Google was probably sending me to articles that mention both Ruhlen and Adele Goldberg, an American linguist. I think I also switched between -berg and -burg like an idiot.

The original joke was about how Ruhlen and Greenberg would reconstruct words by just combining all attested segments. The most famous example was their Proto-World word for "milk/suck," which came out as some polysyllabic abomonation full of ejective uvulars that could "simplify" into all attested forms.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Thinking of languages as tending to "simplify" over time is rather silly; though structural words can erode, they can erode into inflections, which open up all sorts of doors into new complexities, and then analogical levelling, and the process goes on and on. The Romance languages lose case marking, but often have fairly complex verbal morphology, and have also complicated their phonologies, often having more distinct phonemes than Latin did (French especially comes to mind — it's lost vowel length, though it did re-innovate it for a time — but it has all sorts of wacky vowels Latin would blush to not have enough letters for).