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Grimm’s Laws - the half-baked kind | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| saywhatyousee Newbie Australia Joined 5207 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes | Message 1 of 9 29 September 2010 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello!
I would like to collect a set of rules to convert words from one language to another - simply by swapping around the letters. Unfortunately, linguists that investigate this kind of thing seem to be more concerned with how languages have developed historically rather than how current languages are related. I've had a look at Grimm's laws and P and Q Celtic. But the rules aren't really laid out the way I want them. I want to cheat! I want to learn the words of one language in a language family and then use a set of half-baked rules to understand other languages in the family. So, for instance, I know some Spanish. How can I convert a Spanish word to words in other Romance languages? I know these slacker rules must exist. Where can I find them? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ubik Senior Member United States ubykh.wordpress.com/ Joined 5317 days ago 147 posts - 176 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Latin, Arabic (Egyptian), German, Spanish | Message 2 of 9 29 September 2010 at 6:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, of course you realize that there is no foolproof way of doing this, right?
Im too tired to put as much thought into this exercise as Id like (this is a topic that I REALLY love as well) Here are some examples that are neato: verloren in German means lost. We get forlorn from there. Forlorn of course means to feel lost and to be sad. So its safe to say (and there are other examples too such as vergessen -> forget) that the V got mutated into an F along the way. A V is pronounced as F in German so they almost sound exactly like English. Ch (German ch-sound) -> just H sound Im guessing Im sounding more like the former of your two examples. I cant really think of what the major differences would be in the approach though... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 9 29 September 2010 at 8:53am | IP Logged | ||
Just get the classic The Loom of Languages. It contains the rules for the major Romance and Germanic languages. Edited by Doitsujin on 29 September 2010 at 9:52am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 9 29 September 2010 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||
You may be satisfied with a subset of rules that may or may not apply. But the reason that soundlaws fit historical linguistics like a glove is that it isn't just just one set of rules that govern the relationship between a parent language and its offspring (and thereby between siblings). Soundshifts happen in a specific sequence, and the result depends on the order of these changes. This means that one sound shift may change a number of words in a way that make these words either immune or susceptible to another soundshift. And in between a language may have received loan words that would have been hit by earlier rules if they had arrived a few centuries before. But now they arrive in a form that makes them immune to a subsequent soundshift. Languages do have a history. Edited by Iversen on 29 September 2010 at 10:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 5 of 9 29 September 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I can give some examples. As Iversen points out the usual way of handling these matters is by looking at the history of a language, so my point of reference here is Latin and her child Spanish: Latin ct becomes Spanish ch :pectus -> pecho; dictum -> dicho; (Latin pt becomes Spanish t (tt) -> no example, sorry); Latin pl and cl become ll: clamare -> llamar; plorare -> llorar; Latin l becomes Spanish j: melior -> mejor; folium -> hoja (only between vowels): Latin p becomes Spanish b: opera -> obra (only between vowels); Latin e (short) becomes Spanish ie: certus -> cierto; celum(=caelum) -> cielo; Latin d gets lost: cadere -> caer; credere -> creer; (only between vowels); Latin o becomes Spanish ue: mors,mortis -> muerte; Latin au becomes Spanish o: aurum -> oro; Latin st, sp, sc become Spanish e~: stare -> estar; spuma -> espuma; Latin f becomes Spanish h: facere -> hacer; folium -> hoja; (I am taking this from a list I made many years ago, it may be taken from "The Loom of Language", a fantastic book indeed, but I don't have it at hand to check.) Then another step, compare Spanish and Portuguese: vowel+m/n: Spanish lana -> Port. lã; Spanish pan -> Port. pão (= Nasalisation); l between vowels: Spanish cielo -> Port. ceu;Spanish salud -> Port. saúde (-> thrown out); ll -> ch: Spanish llave-> Port. chave; Spanish lleno -> Port. cheio; Spanish llama -> Port.chama; h (initial):Spanish hijo -> Port. filho (conservative regarding Latin); ue: Spanish puerta -> Port. porta (conservative regarding Latin); ie: Spanish pierna -> Port. perna (conservative regarding Latin). Well, I hope one can get the picture, and not always things are so easy, of course, but for a first impression this may do. Edited by lingoleng on 29 September 2010 at 2:05pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7104 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 6 of 9 29 September 2010 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||
You post reminded me that I haven't read this book since I was about 14/15 and have been meaning to look for a copy for ages. I was just doing a quick google since it's bit difficult to ascertain the exact condition of some of the available copies on Amazon UK and to my surprise there is a copy of this book available at the Internet Archive: The Loom of Language Download the ".djvu" version and then a desktop reader from here: http://djvu.org/resources/ I got the WinDj one. Works a treat. Edited by Andy E on 29 September 2010 at 2:34pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| saywhatyousee Newbie Australia Joined 5207 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes | Message 7 of 9 01 October 2010 at 5:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Awesome!
Ive been reading the online "loom of languages". Useful stuff -particularly Romance and Germanic (but he's making me work for the information!) Maybe there isn't a book showing sound changes between languages. And for some languages who would do it? lingogeng - after reading your post I went straight to wiki Portuguese. It works! I'm now Portuguese! (well almost...) 'Falar' completely stumped me. It must be from 'fabular'(Latin 'to talk to'-which I hadn't heard of). So the f goes to h in the Spanish 'hablar'. Also Spanish ng/ni/ñ going to nh confused me for some reason. Dental fricatives seam particularly useful in changing German to English. German D and T tend to become TH(vater - father). Final or middle word S in German could be an English T(waser - water, das - that) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5448 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 8 of 9 01 October 2010 at 7:55am | IP Logged | ||
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saywhatyousee,
fabulare - to tell a fable > Sp. hablar and Port. falar parabolare - to tell a parable > Fr. parler and It. parlare One of the trickier parts of the language correspondence bit is that a lot of Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary comes from pre-classical and early classical Latin whereas French and Italian adopted the later classical and vulgar words. The Latin verb for to speak was loquor (source of loquacious and locution). As a deponent verb, its conjugation was difficult, so it dropped out. But notice that Portuguese and Spanish chose a different way of avoiding it from French and Italian! To find out about how Latin turned into Spanish, I'd recommend Spanish Vocabulary: An Etymological Approach by David Brodsky. Put this with Bodmer's Loom of Language and Routledge's The Romance Languages (ed. Ball), and you can get a really good picture of how the Romance languages fit together. Of course it's a lot more work than a cheat sheet, but you'll find that you develop a built-in mental cheat sheet where even Catalan, Occitan and the northern Italian languages, among others, somehow seem familiar. Note that in all cases, of course, because of false friends, words whose meanings evolved in different directions, etc, both lingoleng's excellent cheat sheet and this more in depth approach will only aid your study and acquisition of individual Romance languages, not substitute for it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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