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My language theory. | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5055 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 9 of 15 02 April 2011 at 5:22am | IP Logged | ||
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A lot of people who make a hobby of studying languages make a big deal about genetic relationships -- what language family a given language belongs to. But for actually learning languages, I think Clumsy's classification is more useful.
In the Middle East, for example, the three most widespread languages, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, belong to different language families. But because they've shared in a common civilization, the languages have influenced each other and share a lot in common. Suppose you take two people, one with a background in German and the other with a background in Arabic. The one with Arabic will learn Persian more quickly. The language family isn't the be-all and end-all of linguistic relationships. And I'm willing to bet a Hindi speaker will have a much easier time learning Tamil than German. Yes, Clumsy's scheme doesn't include African and Native American languages, but that's beside the point. Clumsy's classification is based on literate civilizations, so it's only relevant to languages that were used by cultures that have had writing for a long time. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Miegamice Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Latvia Joined 4799 days ago 32 posts - 27 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latvian*, English, German, Danish Studies: Norwegian, Swedish | Message 10 of 15 04 April 2011 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6762 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 11 of 15 05 April 2011 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||
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This reminds me of Samuel P. Huntington's map which broadly categorizes the world's
"civilizations". The map can be viewed on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clash_of_Civilizations Although I don't agree with the basic premise of his political theory, and am wary of characterizing a diverse range of cultures as one homogenous, monolithic entity, I think this kind of classification can potentially be useful. For example, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian are "genetically" unrelated, and so are Japanese, Chinese, and Thai, but they have a lot of shared vocabulary and culture, and as aldous said, this is a useful classification for a language learner! Professor Arguelles also acknowledged as much when he stated, for example, that Persian is an "easy hard" language for English speakers - easy because of its grammatical simplicity and status as an IE language, but hard because much of its vocabulary and thought is shared with the Arabic world. However, I don't think the classifications are as neat, simple, and all-encompassing as either clumsy or Huntington have suggested. Maybe we could take advantage of the knowledge in this forum to create a map that more accurately reflects the reality, with overlapping spheres of influence, shades of gray, variations within national borders, etc.? It might be educational for those who think, for example, that learning Arabic would give them a bit of headway with Mongolian ;) Edited by Lucky Charms on 05 April 2011 at 5:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6969 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 12 of 15 05 April 2011 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that the sticking point is that clumsy, aldous and others are playing up the most obvious expression of languages, vocabulary. For sure a cultural lingustic classification draws the most strength from languages' adoption of various words (e.g. Hindi and Urdu are variants of Hindustani however an obvious difference between them besides script is that Urdu's vocabulary has a fair share of words from Arabic while Hindi vocabulary draws instead more on Sanskrit, either in neologisms or retention (more or less) of words from that language.) However vocabulary is nothing but a jumble of words. Grammar helps in allowing for those words to be used meaningfully. A language-learner would be seriously remiss if he/she were to absorb so much vocabulary at the expense of downplaying or neglecting understanding the target language's grammar. In the case of Hindustani, a learner would find very quickly that to know one of Hindi or Urdu is to pretty much know the other since the grammar in each variant is codified using the same "prime matter", the Khariboli dialect spoken originally around Delhi and northwestern Uttar Pradesh (~ part of northern India). The lexical differences between Hindi and Urdu only gain much relevance when dealing with higher, clerical or officious registers. Focusing on this cultural divide may not be helpful and if someone were naive enough he/she may think that there's some sort of insurmountable barrier between Hindi and Urdu when the linguistic evidence suggests otherwise.
In another example only about 20% of Hungarian's modern lexicon is demonstrably Finno-Ugric. The rest is either of uncertain origin or has been borrowed from other language families (Slavonic, Germanic and Turkic are the top 3 sources of loanwords in descending order). However very few if anyone (especially speakers of Slavonic or Germanic languages) would insist on or reclassify Hungarian being an Indo-European language rather than a Finno-Ugric one using this focus on vocabulary. When you expand the analysis into grammar, there's no contest and it's not very useful to classify, treat or approach Hungarian as anything but a Finno-Ugric language. What's more is that quite a few of the loanwords in Hungarian aren't always that transparent to people whose native languages may or may not contain the modern reflexes of loanwords' sources given the phonological or semantic changes that have occured since they entered Hungarian. For example, I'm not sure that most Slovaks will instantly have a flash of recognition when seeing the Hungarian "szomszéd" (neighbour) because of it being borrowed from the ancestor of Slovak "sused", nor would most Turks today instantly recognize that "disznó" (pig) is a Turkic loanword (now attested only in Chuvash as 'sïsna'). P.S. I should also mention the case of Romanian to illustrate additional difficulties in allowing cultural criteria (or cultural perceptions) to be invoked in what should be dry exercises in linguistic classification. Some of the comments in this discussion and this one are striking for the snobbery or worse with some questioning whether Romanian should be a Romance language at all given how observably different it is from the majority of Romance languages (which conincidentally or not are in Western Europe and associated with Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy). On the other hand, some Romanians go in the other extreme by not only restating what linguists know (i.e. Romanian is best classified as a Romance language) but that it is actually the nearest overall to Latin (i.e. indirectly more worthy of its Romance status than the other Romance languages as exemplified in this thread) even though this latter point is disputable (see this thread on HTLAL). Edited by Chung on 05 April 2011 at 7:38am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5055 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 13 of 15 05 April 2011 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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If a new concept appears and needs a name, how do you assign the name? In English, we reflexively create a word based on Latin and Greek roots.
We're talking about things like scientific concepts (atmosphere, circulation, hydrology, planet, substrate), religious terms (reincarnation, resurrection, minister), philosophical terms (essence, substance, matter, spirit), and in general high-register synonyms of common words (initiate vs. begin, supplement vs. add, discuss vs. talk, recede vs. pull back). When there's a new concept that we need to give a name to, we don't just pick a word from any random language. We almost always go for Latin and Greek. Since many of the languages of Europe do this, we call that the international vocabulary. Historically, there were four major zones of international vocabulary. Just as western Europeans instinctively looked to Latin and Greek roots to coin new words, the Japanese looked to Classical Chinese, and Persians and Turks looked to Arabic. Nowadays in an era of globalization languages all over the world are borrowing English words, and by extension are absorbing some of Europe's international vocabulary. That's especially true of newer coinages like "television", "telephone", and "Internet". (This webpage by a linguist at Stockholm University is relevant to what I just wrote in the above two paragraphs. http://www.ling.su.se/staff/hartmut/intervok.htm) But the current globalization is a comparatively recent development. By contrast, the four historical international-vocabulary zones existed for over a thousand years, and in some cases as long as two thousand. As a consequence a large stock of vocabulary was borrowed by the vernacular languages in their respective regions. I'm not talking about loanwords in general. I'm talking about certain classes of words - philosophical and scientific terms and educated speech. This is equivalent to acknowledging zones of phonetic influence, like how most of the languages of Southeast Asia, though belonging to different genetic families, acquired the use of tones from each other, or how some Bantu languages in southern Africa acquired clicks from the genetically unrelated Khoi-San family. You could construct a map of various overlapping phonetic families. It would not include all languages, and some languages would belong to more than one family, but the map would still be meaningful. Like probably everyone else on this forum, I bemoan the fact that the average person thinks Chinese and Japanese are closely related, and that all Muslims speak Arabic. Most laypeople have never heard of the Indo-European family, let alone understand that some Asian languages belong to it. To them, emphasizing language families can be instructive. On the other hand, once you learn about language families, you also have to understand their limitations. They aren't meant to explain all linguistic phenomena. They only give us part of the picture. Often when two languages belong to the same family, there is an obvious similarity. But that is not always the case. I see virtually no similarity, in either vocabulary or grammar, between English and Persian. Not only are there almost no words in common, but the grammar and syntax are quite different, too. Their common membership in the Indo-European family is interesting as an item of trivia, but it has virtually no practical significance. (If you have a lot of experience with other European languages, and if you know something about the nuts and bolts of historical linguistics, then you can pick out patterns and see the relationship. But it isn't clear otherwise.) On the other hand, an Arab can sometimes recognize the gist of what a Persian text is about without ever having studied the language. To give an example, I just looked at BBC Persian. In the headlines of the top three news stories there are about two dozen words (depending on how you define a word). A little over half are straight out of Arabic. By contrast, there's only one cognate with an English word: naft (meaning "petroleum", cognate with naphtha and based on the same Greek root. Incidentally, Persian borrowed the word from Arabic, which in turn derived it from Greek.). And the grammar of the sentences in those news stories bears little meaningful resemblance to English grammar that I can see. And speaking of grammar, there's a reason textbooks for Persian, Urdu, and Ottoman Turkish have a long section on Arabic grammar. Arabic didn't just influence their vocabularies. The purpose of identifying genetic language families like "Indo-European" and "Finno-Ugric" is to understand the history of human language, not to show which languages are grammatically similar today.
I agree. Some languages might fit in more than one category. That's because in some areas, more than one elite language held sway, either at the same time or at different times. Both Sanskrit and Persian were elite languages in India, for example. Also, to repeat something Clumsy wrote, we shouldn't confuse a language's "cultural family" with the high culture its speakers participate in. Take Icelandic, for example, where the speakers avoid using Latinate vocabulary in favor of neologisms derived from existing Icelandic words. Icelandic would therefore not belong in a "Latin" cultural family. I don't know much Russian, but I get the impression much of its high-register vocabulary is Slavonic-based (whereas equivalent words in English are based on Latin and Greek), which would suggest perhaps a cultural family based on Old Church Slavonic. I'm sure a case could be made for other small families in addition to the big four Clumsy listed, along with perhaps subfamilies. These aren't concrete categories. The criteria for assigning a language to a cultural family would be open to debate. But while genetic relationships are more sharply defined and probably more measurable, it's worth remembering that many of those genetic categories can also be fuzzy and impressionistic, and that doesn't take away from their usefulness. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6762 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 14 of 15 06 April 2011 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
Just so there are no misunderstandings, I think no one here is debating the usefulness of language classifications based on "genetic" relationships, and no one is suggesting doing away with that classification system in favor of one based on vocabulary. I think everyone in here is aware of what a language family is and why genetic relationships are determined the way they are. But the way I interpreted clumsy's posts (and correct me if I'm wrong!) is that in addition to the "language families" system, it might be instructional to have this other classification system, as another layer of information. You read these things on language profiles all the time: "X has historically been strongly influenced by China/France/the Arab world, and this influx of ideas is reflected in the fact that roughly 60% of their vocabulary is composed of loanwords from that language". I think it would be useful to have some kind of terminology (if there isn't already) to describe these "groups of shared cultural influence" and a map to roughly show how far they extend. That way, if I were to begin to study Japanese and wanted to know how much it would help me with other languages in the future, I could check both its genetic relationship to other languages (Ouch... just Okinawan!) and its "group of shared cultural influence" (some shared loanwords, idioms, proverbs, philosophy, etc. with Korean, Chinese languages, and some Southeast Asian languages via Middle Chinese.) Will these languages and cultures be immediately transparent to me? Of course not, but on the other hand, there's obviously more to the story than "the Japonic languages are linguistically isolated, so knowing Japanese won't help you a fig with any other language". Edited by Lucky Charms on 06 April 2011 at 7:46am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4991 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 15 of 15 06 April 2011 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, this is what I mean.
Of coruse I encourage every one to create their own classification. It was just a proposition. For example, I am learning CJKV languages, when they don't have any genetic relationship (except of Japanese and Korean - but this is debated), learning them together is easy due to a lot of shared vocabulary. I am not very knowledgeable of other languages. There are also trends to use native vocabulary only, like in Iceland or maybe Croatia (they have created native word for a plane etc). But as for Thai... I don't think it has any relationship with Chinese... except maybe that it's genetically similar to Cantonese (I don't know if it's only theory or a fact). I know only that Thai word phaasaa (language) is very similar to Hindi bhaashaa and Malay bahasa. Malay - Malaysian/Indonesian has strong influence from India, Arabia and Europe at thesame time,so it's not so simple. Tamil don't like borrowing from Sanskrit - Maybe they are proud that it's them who made the Civilization - Indo-Europeans have only invaded them - the same way uncivilized Romans (no offence, most of people at that time were uncivilized) attacked Greece and borrowed the culture. I don't know much about Mongolian - i only know they use word Defter for a notebook - Arabic people use daftaar(un?). They have once writen they language in Chinese characters, but they have used it in a phonetic way, and for a short time). Tibetan for example uses a script from India. Hebrew - I have no idea about this one. They are Semitic, but they don't study Koran. Their language is taken directly from Bible. The same with Armenians - they have been one of the ancient Civilization. I have read they have plenty of borrowings from Perian - but I don't know if it's "Islamic" vocabulary. The same with Georgia - i have no Idea. What about Ethiopia? Those questions should be answered bu someone more knowledgeable than me. Amerindian languages - I have no Idea, maybe there existed some Mayan or Inka cultural sphere? Northern African languages have been influenced by Arabic - as far as madagaskar, they have used the Arabic script. but what with Zulu? What language do they borrow when it comes to the modern vocabulary? I guess English, but I am not sure. Maye some Bantu Lingua Franca? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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