|
 |
Language Mysteries | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 49 15 April 2008 at 9:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
What you should remember is that speakers of a language don't willfully turn their language from one morphological type to the next just because they make a value judgement that they'd be better off with less inflection. English became more analytic (arguably by default) as English speakers for whatever reason started to make fewer and fewer distinctions with declension and conjugation (in other words, inflection started to be used less and less). However, they still had to make distinctions by other means in order not to let their language become too ambiguous or lose its informative value. For example, Slovak conjugation is such that you don't usually need pronouns when conjugating verbs as you do in English. Slovaks conjugate their verbs in a way that sets each subject apart and adding a pronoun would seem redundant in most cases. However, modern English verb endings have merged a lot since the days of Old English and if you were to have no pronouns in English, you'd often be unsure of the subject of the action. English: I do, you do, he does, we do, you do, they do. (use "do" 5 out of 6 times) Slovak: robím, robíš, robí, robíme, robíte, robia
All languages inflect if they decline nouns or adjectives or conjugate verbs. It's just a matter of degree. English still makes a distinction between "I" and "me", "run" and "ran", or "goose" and "geese". It declines less than some other languages, that's all. As much as I'm a native speaker of English, I'm more keen on the dream that all languages become like Hungarian or Turkish. Their grammars are fairly regular (if not initially the easiest for those unaccustomed to Uralic or Altaic languages). More to the point, I disagree with your idea that the world would be better off if foreigners were to shoe-horn features of English into their respective languages. What is simple or important to you and me as native speakers, is either complicated, unfathomable or unnecessary for native speakers of other languages. In addition, English's spread was helped immensely by the extensive immigration and colonization done by speakers of Middle English and Early Modern English. The languages' characteristics had little to do with the spread. The supplanting of native languages wasn't so much because English had less inflection than the native languages as much as the culture of English-speaking colonists was associated with the prestige of the colonists/rulers. If English were so simple, then English-based creoles wouldn't have emerged. The spread of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and to a lesser extent Dutch and Russian was more attributable to the sheer numbers and physical presence of the colonists/settlers rather than the intrinsic features (simple or not) of their mother tongues.
If you were to say to a linguist that English should be reclassified as a Romance language based on its shared vocabulary with French and Latin (and indirectly with Spanish), you'd be laughed out of the room. No joke. As others here have posted, comparative linguistics goes beyond lexical similarities. You'd consider morphology, syntax, phonetics, phonology, semantics and pragmatics too. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ecroix Tetraglot Newbie United States Joined 6156 days ago 9 posts - 15 votes Speaks: Malay, Hokkien, English*, Indonesian Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 49 15 April 2008 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Hi,
I found the book "The Unfolding of Language : An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention" by Guy Deutscher, ISBN:0-8050-8012-0 an interesting read. It's so full of intrigue and mystery. Basically it's main theme is that languages undergo constant destruction and renewal and it's an inevitable and ultimately beneficial process. Although not explicitly stated in the book, language evolution seems to follow biological evolutionary processes pretty closely. Languages are ever exchanging "genes" with each other and mutating; creating new ones, while languages that fail to adapt to their environment eventually face extinction, leaving only their linguistic "fossils". It's makes quite a lot of sense, whenever languages exchange genes, the humans speaking them would be exchanging genetic material of their own as well. LOL ;-) Edited by ecroix on 15 April 2008 at 10:00am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Alfonso Octoglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 6861 days ago 511 posts - 536 votes Speaks: Biblical Hebrew, Spanish*, French, English, Tzotzil, Italian, Portuguese, Ancient Greek Studies: Nahuatl, Tzeltal, German | Message 19 of 49 15 April 2008 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is -I think- another apparently unsolved language mystery: Some people say that when Mayan Culture collapsed, mayan people fled away. They supposedly used spaceships. This is a way to explain why mayan culture disappeared abruptly just in few years. The point is, this theory sounds to me illogical if not ridiculous. How can we explain that there are until now millions of Mayan languages' speakers in this zone between Southeast Mexico, Belize and Guatemala? The Maya people have been always here. They have gone nowhere. The Maya civilization ended but the Mayas just dispersed into the jungle. It's so simple. Edited by Alfonso on 02 May 2008 at 4:16pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6867 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 20 of 49 30 April 2008 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
My favourite unsolved case is the Indus valley script. We haven't very many remains; mostly small seals that might be no more than owners' marks. The signs looks like no other script in the world.
Some people try to compare it to Easter Island carvings, but the arguments seem to rely on tendentious copying by hand from a limited selection of signs, making the differences less obvious. Anyway, it's just too clear that there are no precursors or descendants to be found in the Indian subcontinent. People from some political factions try to prove that the Indus valley language was Indo-European, others equally fanatically point to Dravidian links. Few language families are spared theories of an Indus connection. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kalyan97 Newbie United States sarasvati97.blogspot Joined 6052 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes | Message 21 of 49 30 April 2008 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Some progress has been made. Indus script encodes mleccha speech. See 5 ebooks made available at http://sarasvati97.blogspot.com thanks and regards. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6868 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 22 of 49 01 May 2008 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Another language isolate is the Piraha language spoken in Brazil. From what I've read, it's tried the theory of universal grammar. Just reading about the language itself is so completely alien from any language I've so far studied/read about.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 6084 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 23 of 49 02 May 2008 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I am not sure if anyone has already mentioned it, but the Rongo Rongo writing tablets on Easter Island.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6867 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 24 of 49 02 May 2008 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
To put it as kindly as possible, I'm not impressed by rebus type interpretations, and maintain that nothing at all is known about the language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
