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The effects of environment on language | ||
Tags: Surroundings | Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6259 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 1 of 5 03 May 2010 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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What are the effects of environment on language? For example I heard that the last 'e' in many English words like 'crime' or 'vase' was not silent but pronounced as a vowel like in German or Romance languages, but due to the cold climate, people prefer to end their speech with sounds that make their mouths closed so cold air could not enter! I remember once reading that the Northern European languages tend to have very hard, pronounced and robust consonants, which is taken to be an indication of the cold climate. The further south you go (and the hotter it gets), the more vowel based the language. One theory is that countries with a hot climate have words with a great many vowels, as these cost less effort than consonants to pronounce, whereas countries with a cold climate have pronounced language rich in consonants and liberally spattered with diphthongs and triphthongs. Is this true? Do you know any resources, links, articles talking about this topic? I found some articles like this one but I can't access it: http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/43/2/123 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5523 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 2 of 5 03 May 2010 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Also Finnish is vowely, and I heard that Finland gets pretty cold 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hashimi Senior Member Oman Joined 6259 days ago 362 posts - 529 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)* Studies: English, Japanese | Message 3 of 5 03 May 2010 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know, but I noticed that words in that sentence end with consonants (like 'k', 't', or 'p'), or with "closed" vowels like 'u' or 'i', not "open" vowels like 'a'. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sik0fewl Newbie Canada Joined 5494 days ago 31 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 5 04 May 2010 at 7:53am | IP Logged | ||
Not to mention the fact that there only are three vowel phonemes: "The Greenlandic three vowel system, composed of /i/, /u/, and /a/, is typical for an Eskimo-Aleut language." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenlandic_language#Vowels) Finnish does seem to be quite vowelly and have lots of diphthongs, too. Although it stands to reason that since it's not Indo-European, it didn't necessarily evolve the same way as, say, Swedish or Eskimo-Aleut. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| quendidil Diglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 6312 days ago 126 posts - 142 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 5 04 May 2010 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I remember reading somewhere that northern languages tend to have a distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants while southern languages tend to have a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants. They were basing that mostly on Germanic dialects, but said it didn't seem to apply in Asia, which frankly IMO, highlights the absurdity of the hypothesis.
Among Asian examples, Sanskrit and IIRC most of the modern Indic languages distinguish all those consonants; Thai as well I think. Mandarin distinguishes betweeb aspirated and unaspirated consonants despite being a "northern" language while some of the southern topolects like Minnan distinguish voiced and unvoiced. Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction similar to Sanskrit (without the retroflex consonants). Of course, if they were just talking about Germanic languages I take back some of the above, but it's been a while since I read that and I'm quite sure they used the fortis and lenis distinction between German dialects as just one of a few examples. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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