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My language theory. | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4987 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 1 of 15 26 March 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are 4 language families, when it comes to culture:
European (Latin and Greek) Islamic (Arabic) Buddhist and Hindu (Sanskrit and Pali) East Asian (Chinese). For example: Vietnamese belongs to East Asian language group, because they borrow advanced vocabulary from Chinese. Spanish belongs to European group, since they borrow advanced vocabulary from latin and Greek. Thai is Buddhist. Mongolian is Islamic (or Buddhist, I am not sure). Turkish is Islamic. Tibetan is Buddhist. For example: The word كتاب (book) is used in Kazakhstan, Turkey and plenty of others. 战争 (war) is the same in Vietnamese and Korean. Of course the language relationships are not so simple. But I think we can generally classify them like this. Do you have other ideas? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5951 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 2 of 15 26 March 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about African and Native American languages?
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6965 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 15 26 March 2011 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Classificatory schemes are ultimately derived from criteria that the classifer deems to be important.
I suppose that the cultural angle espoused may not be applicable to languages which are used by people who manifest characteristics or merely believe to be different from people nominally associated with that language. Think of the following: English - used natively in mongolots all over the old Commonwealth. Think also of the people whose heritage is definitely not Anglo-Saxon or Judaeo-Christian but are monoglots of English. Hindi-Urdu (Hindustani) - they're not identical but their similarity is very high and also remember that both forms derive from Sanskrit. Of course there's an obvious difference in the cultural orientation of native speakers with those listing "Urdu" a mother tongue often being Muslim, while those listing "Hindi" as a mother tongue often being Hindu. Also how would your model account for Hebrew and Arabic? Both are Semitic languages but would Hebrew be part of Europe's generalized Judaeo-Christianity while Arabic would be part of the Middle East's generalized Islamicism? Comparable situations can be seen with other "large" languages such as Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish. A lot of people who would never identify themselves with the region where these languages originated as distinct forms are monoglots in these languages all the same. In addition, I often take most classificatory schemes of languages with a grain of salt (apart from those built up entirely on observed characteristics in phonology, morphology and lexis). There's often an element of trying to extend cultural perceptions/biases/judgements under cover of linguistic "analysis". An example of such conflation would be when I hear some Croats insisting that Croatian must be a "western" language because of Croats' long association with Catholicism (including a Roman script) and domination by Catholic Austrians, Hungarians or Venetians. On the other hand, these Croats insist that Serbian must be an "eastern" language because of Serbs' long association with Orthodoxy (and traditional use of Cyrillic - the Serbian Latin alphabet came about much later) and domination by Islamic Ottomans. It aligns with a type of Westernized snobbery of the "civilized" West vs. "the barbaric/mysterious" East. These cultural judgements make no sense linguistically since Croatian and Serbian are much more similar (indeed nearly identical in their expression) than what the cultural orientation or consciousness of native speakers would lead an impartial outsider to believe. By the way, Mongolian is usually associated now with Mongolian Buddhism (an offshoot of a type of Tibetan Buddhism) or Shamanism. Islam made little headway in Mongolia. However Mongolian shows the most similarity to the Turkic languages whose native speakers can range culturally from the "European" Turks and Gagauz in the Balkans to the "Asiatic" Dolgans and Yakuts who live in northern Siberia. P.S. I don't mean to be a jack-ass with my comments in repsonse to the original post, It's just that there is a reason why the classificatory schemes of languages that minimize or ignore completely cultural markers have lasted the longest. They simply don't get undermined by the shifting cultural orientation of native speakers. Edited by Chung on 26 March 2011 at 7:01pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5627 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 4 of 15 26 March 2011 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Chung. I couldn't agree more.
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| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4987 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 5 of 15 27 March 2011 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's not so important about whether they feel attached to the culture or not.
It's only linguistical classification. I mean mainly vocabulary. Thais may not feel attached to the Indian culture, but they use a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit. Mongolian, well, I don't know much about it. As for Hebrew, African languages (south African ones, the Northern like Swahili have a lot of Arabic words). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5505 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 15 27 March 2011 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
So what you're saying is all languages in the world can only have loanwords coming from a set of four (no more no less) possible sources? But what about all the languages that don't have such a pedigree, e.g. Amerindian languages, Austronesian, Australian, Eskimo-Aleutian to name a few? You're proposal seems a bit tautological in that you only consider languages that are known to have significant amounts of vocabulary from those four sources, and not surprisingly, it turns out that they have significant amounts of vocabulary from those four sources... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 4995 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 7 of 15 30 March 2011 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Besides what was said above, how are you defining loanword? Much like most English words of French origin have been in the language long enough to no longer be considered loanwords, most Japanese words of Chinese origin are now just considered Japanese. The loanwords are now mainly European. Would that somehow make Japanese fall in the European category?
This isn't really related, but I have a language theory involving areas of the world too, only it has to do with languages with speakers that share a common culture/history/geography(Chinese/Japanese or English/French) being translated between more often than ones that don't(Japanese/French). I hope to increase the frequency of translation between ones that don't, eventually. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5617 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 8 of 15 31 March 2011 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Indian:
The northern Indian languages are Indo-European (along with European languages) while the southern Indian ones are Dravidian. Both borrow from Sanskrit but are structurally very different: northern Indian languages being fusional while southern being aggulnative. Islamic: Mongolian is Altaic, Arabic is Afro-Asiatic, Farsi is Indo-European. What about Hebrew? Hebrew is closely related to Arabic (Both are in the Afro-Asiatic major family) but far from being Islamic. Chinese: Japanese and Korean are Altaic and far from Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) despite loan words. Japanese and Korean are aggulnative and non-tonal, Chinese is isolating and tonal
The Major Language Families: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_fa milies#Major_language_families Edited by ChiaBrain on 31 March 2011 at 12:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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