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Do all languages have a "turning point"? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | History | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5213 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 33 of 38 29 June 2015 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Funny, I don't have any problem with the Hobbes. I have to slow down a bit, but otherwise unobjectionable (and quite well written besides, it seems to me).
It would be interesting to see, on average, how far back modern native speakers can read older literature. Obviously it's something you can't really test on an individual level--knowing some Latin and some French and some German all contributes to making Shakespeare easier for me, but obviously not every modern speaker has smatterings of those languages like I do. So even if I can read Shakespeare without too much trouble, I'm not sure how things stand for the average English speaker. If the Danish can't read further back than 1900, then I find that quite surprising. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5044 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 34 of 38 30 June 2015 at 7:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Here is some Danish from the mid-19th century.
Here it is in modern orthography:
I'm not even Danish and I can read that fine even in the old spelling. Though there has obviously been a substantial spelling reform. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5456 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 35 of 38 30 June 2015 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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In Spanish, a fair bit of grammatical simplification has happened regarding verb tenses. There are currently three tenses that are never used (except in fixed expressions) unless one is talking or writing about legal issues or contracts: the future subjunctive, the future perfect subjunctive and the anterior preterite (futuro de subjuntivo, futuro perfecto de subjuntivo, pretérito anterior), as in "fuere", "hubiere ido" and "hubo ido". In other words, these are tenses almost exclusively used by lawyers and accountants.
There are also two forms of the past/imperfect subjunctive ((pretérito) imperfecto de subjuntivo), "fuera" and "fuese", with the second one being less commonly used and, because of that, being more common in writing and very formal registers, as it carries an air of archaicness and ceremony. Also, in most forms of non-poetic speaking and writing, the "canonical future" (futuro) "irá" is only used for hypothetical future, not for regular future (where you use the periphrastic future "va a ir" or the present "va"). Further simplification is underway in some dialects. In my dialect (Buenos Aires, influenced by Rosario by way of both my parents), the present perfect (pretérito perfecto) is restricted to cases having to do with personal experience or strong emotion or opinion like "eso nunca me ha pasado" (I personally call it "the tense of moral indignation"). For some speakers in Buenos Aires, even this restricted use is disappearing, i.e. the preterite "nunca me pasó" is taking it over whole cloth. For speakers like me, it's acceptable to say "el doctor todavía no llegó", whereas in Spain, Mexico, and many other places (including other parts of Argentina) you have to say "el doctor todavía no ha llegado". The subjunctive, on the other hand, is doing just fine. Edited by getreallanguage on 01 July 2015 at 2:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5456 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch | Message 36 of 38 30 June 2015 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Some more change is underway in Spanish regarding hypothetical constructions.
Where normatively people would say "si tuviera más plata, me compraría una Ferrari", some speakers are now saying "si tendría más plata, me compraría una Ferrari" (I don't do this myself but have heard/read it countless times). In a past hypothetical, where normatively speakers would say "si hubiera sabido, no habría ido", some speakers are saying "si habría sabido, no habría ido", and some are also saying "si hubiera sabido, no hubiera ido" (I say the first _and_ the third alternatives, and I have heard/read the second one a lot). Leaving verbs aside, I have also written a little bit on my blog about historical/current change/variation regarding third person object pronouns in Spanish. When it comes to reading an older text in Spanish, I find that the hardest thing is the vast difference in style, followed by lexical semantic drift and archaic words, and finally grammatical differences. To give you some perspective on how hard (or simple) it is to read an old Spanish text, I have read the oldest surviving example of Spanish literature, the Cantar de Mio Cid. It's from the 12th century. It was a difficult read. I read it in college, and I had professors helping me, but it was not easy. I had to learn the different spelling-sound correspondences, read it aloud, and consult the glossary and notes very often. It took me an hour to read the first few pages. There was a learning curve, though, and now I find it relatively easy to read it. In other words, it was probably closer to a speaker of Modern English reading the Canterbury Tales than to one reading Beowulf. To a certain small extent, having an elementary knowledge of Italian helped me in regards to Old Spanish grammar. Here is an example from the beginning of the poem (note: the spelling, including spaces between words, has been somehow simplified. I read a more conservative version closer to the original manuscript. The original manuscript had no diacritics and spelled adverbs with "mientre" as two separate words, among many other differences): De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando tornava la cabeça e estávalos catando, vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados, alcándaras vazías, sin pielles e sin mantos e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados. Sospiró mio Çid, ca mucho avié grandes cuidados, fabló mio Çid bien e tan mesurado, -Grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estás en alto, esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos.- Allí piensan de aguijar, allí sueltan las riendas, a la exida de Bivar ovieron la corneja diestra e entrando a Burgos oviéronla siniestra. Meçió mio Çid los ombros e engrameó la tiesta, -¡Albriçia, Álbar Fáñez, ca echados somos de tierra!- If you're curious as to how this might have sounded, here is a pretty good rendition. Edited by getreallanguage on 30 June 2015 at 8:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5213 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 37 of 38 30 June 2015 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Interesting that the adverbial ending should be -mientre in Old Spanish. It comes from the Latin word "mente" (lit. with a mind) and the Modern Spanish descendant is of course the same, -mente.
Reading online, it seems Old Spanish used both -miente and -mientre (with the source I read speculating that -mientre may have been formed by the influenced by demientre, the ancestor of modern mientras). So apparently there was a vowel breaking and then a smoothing that undid the original breaking. Something similar happened with -s- in Spanish. Started as [s] in Latin, then was voiced to [z] when intervocallic, but then devoiced back to [s] by the time of Modern Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5213 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 38 of 38 30 June 2015 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Very interesting post on laismo, by the way.
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