John, (01)
You wrote: (02)
> I recommend the following book on clashes among languages and their
> spread across the world over many centuries:
>
> _Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World_ by Nicholas Ostler,
> Harper Collins, 2005.
> (03)
Thanks. It is just my kind of thing... (04)
And now for something completely different: (05)
> As Ostler shows, there are many different reasons why one language
> replaced another, but there are also some common features. Among them
> is similarity in structure -- usually because they evolved from a common
> ancestor not too long ago. For example, Arabic spread quickly with Islam, it
> influenced many languages, but it did not replace them all.
>
> In fact, the only languages that Arabic replaced belong to the Afro- Asiatic
> family. That includes the Semitic languages of the near East and the
> languages across northern Africa. The Arabic writing system was adopted for
> Turkish, Persian, Urdu, Kurdish, and many other languages. But Arabic never
> replaced those languages. (06)
Yes. Arabic was the religious language and the commercial language, but it did
not replace established languages, except those that typically had no written
form and had only small clusters of speakers. Most of those were also Semitic,
I would not doubt. (07)
> Latin belongs to the Italo-Celtic family. Those languages were more similar
>to
> one another two thousand years ago than they are today.
> Therefore, it was easier for Celtic speakers to adopt Latin than for speakers
> of Germanic, Greek, or Semitic languages. (08)
Maybe. But if Gallic France had a written language and an organized central
government and an established body of what we would call culture, Latin
probably would not have displaced the Celtic tongue. In 50 B.C., Gallic France
was a collection of separate tribes, each of which had a handful of fortified
towns as commercial centers. In short, it was Italy in 600 B.C. Latin
displaced the other Italic languages by military and commercial conquest,
largely in fits and starts. It displaced the Gallic languages in the same way,
but "with malice aforethought" -- the Romans deliberately Romanized Gaul, in
much the same way that they deliberately Romanized Spain, which actually had an
established Semitic culture along the coast (the hated Carthaginian rivals for
Mediterranean empire) and a Gaul-like hodgepodge of Celtic and Iberian tribal
centers in the river valleys. And 100 years later, they began the Romanization
of Britain in much the same way, but limited to the parts/peoples they cared
about: Wales, Scotland and Ireland weren't worth the effort, so their Celtic
tongues survived until the English became powerful enough to Anglicize them.
("And the women in the uplands digging praties, speak a language that the
strangers do not know," into the early 20th century.) The reasons for
Romanization were also different -- southern France and southern Britain were
agriculturally rich; Spain was mineral rich and commercially important to
seaborne commerce. None of those was true of the lands of the warlike Scots
and Germans. In Germany, Romanization never got beyond the Rhine-Danube river
frontiers, because it wasn't worth the effort. (09)
> > You may be right that Japanese gave up some of its native linguistic
> > practices and Chinese didn't, but I think that was as much about
> > culture as about linguistics.
>
> The writing system was very significant. You could call it part of the
>culture or
> an aspect of the language. (010)
Agreed. As we have both observed, written languages are pragmatically powerful
in displacing unwritten languages. Japan adopted a writing system because its
culture needed one. As you observed, Arabic writing was adapted for Turkic
languages (after the Turks came to dominate the erstwhile Arab world) and for
others in the scope of Islam. The Greeks adapted a Semitic system; the Romans
adapted the Greek one. Western Europe adapted the Roman one, and the South
Slavs adapted the Greek one. In each case, the cultures and peoples were
powerful enough to adopt/adapt the foreign system (with its cultural baggage)
without giving up much of their identity. (011)
And now for one of those exercises in 'term-meaning' confusion. (012)
> > The Chinese language is older
>
> All languages are equally old. (013)
The language we recognize as modern Chinese has been consistent in a number of
ways for longer than most languages on earth. That all of the diverse
languages on earth are probably (but not clearly) descended from some common
ur-tongue of 40,000 years ago is not really all that interesting. By a number
of exotic techniques, linguists measure the historic divergence of language
groups and individual languages from common stems. (014)
> But some are more stable than others. (015)
For longer, and all are unstable to some degree. It is the "common
consistencies" over time that make a language "stable" and define the
individual 'language', as distinct from its relatives in the language group,
which simply have fewer common characteristics. This is taxonomy a la Linnaeus
-- linguists pick the characteristics they will use to sort out family, genus
(language) and species (dialect). (016)
So, translating my utterance into John's dialect, "Chinese has been stable
longer than Japanese." (017)
> Among the modern Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the most stable
> -- in the sense that its word forms and syntax are the closest to the
> hypothetical reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. (018)
Utterly irrelevant, but interesting. Like Aristotle, I believe there is value
in pursuing knowledge for its own sake. (019)
> > I think you will find that the usage of Germanic and Romance coinage
> > mechanisms is still quite robust in English.
>
> Just look at the word forms: 'insurance' and 'influence'. The choice of -ance
> vs -ence depends on whether the infinitive of the corresponding Latin verb
> ends in -are or -ere. (020)
And thus the Latin present participle ended in -ans/-ant-... or -ens/-ent-... (021)
> That's a clue that those forms were borrowed from Latin when people still
> studied Latin. Today, they are just memorized by rote -- or corrected by
> some friendly (or not so friendly) spelling checker. (022)
The -ce part is definitely French, not Latin per se. French also preserves the
Latin base. In Latin the noun ending is -antia or -entia, and in Spanish you
see the evolution step: -ancia or -encia, after which French dropped the extra
syllables. These terms may have been taken directly from the French of some
time, or they may have been taken from university Latin and 'back-formed' or
'analogized' to match similar English words taken from French. Both of these
phenomena occur in English word formation. (023)
This is relevant to the topic of coinage mechanisms only in that the etymology
of two Romance-derived words, whether from Old French or directly from
scholarly Latin, demonstrates Romance coinage mechanisms. (024)
By comparison, a term like 'endpoint' or 'home insurance' is a purely English
kind of coinage, using a Germanic mechanism to construct a term from a Germanic
word and a Romance word.
The mechanisms are alive and well, and the language is not poorer because one
family came to dominate the other. Rather, the language is richer for the
combination. That was my point. (025)
> * PS about 'full form': A friend of mine, the linguist Frank Anshen, was
> teaching a course on sociolinguistics at the University of Hawaii.
>
> He remarked that ethnic slurs in most languages have guttural sounds, such
> as G or K. But in Hawaiian, the ethnic slur for white people is the word
> 'haole'.
>
> Whereupon a young Japanese woman from the back of the room said, "But
> Professor Anshen, what about the full form?"
>
> Frank innocently asked, "Oh, what is the full form?"
>
> Answer: "F--king haole." (026)
LOL. Thanks, John. (That's better than the ambiguous headline.) (027)
-Ed (028)
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