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Do all languages have a "turning point"? | ||
Tags: Linguistics | History | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3316 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes  Studies: Serbian | Message 9 of 38 21 April 2015 at 6:13am | IP Logged | |||||
While the situation sounds more drastic than it is in English, I'd say that this is also a common issue in English. I find novels from say before the 1850s tedious to read either due to the vastly different style (generally too verbose for my tastes) or a host of unfamiliar vocabulary - the later could be resolved obviously if I read more books from that period, but I have yet to find many books that have caught my interest - at least enough to make that sort of deliberate impact. EDIT: one misplaced digit, 100 year difference. Edited by basica on 23 April 2015 at 4:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4070 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 10 of 38 21 April 2015 at 7:22am | IP Logged | |||||
I read half of a self-teaching grammar manual-book for Dutch that was written for people from the UK who wanted to learn Dutch as a foreign language. It was published in the 1700s, and it reminded me very much of German. It looked like a dialect of German. I think that the declinations were like this (I may have got it wrong): nom/gen/dat/acc masculine sing: den/des/den/den feminine sing: de/der/der/de neuter sing: het/des/den/het plurals: de/der/den/de Then it goes on to decline with other words, like dezen, dezer, mijnen, mijner, zijnen, zijner, harer, eenen, eener, eens, and all sorts of combinations, just like German. It obviously looks very similar to German "einen", "meinen", "deinem", "seiner" and such. I found it on Google Books: A Grammar of the Dutch Language, Baldwin Janson, published London, (1792/MDCCXCII) It is a bit funny that it seems to stress that the reader should learn his or her declinations and verb conjugations because there are many. Of course the modern language is not like this anymore though. Especially funny-sounding is this example sentence on page 44: Den koning heeft eene gunste raad gejont aan mynen vader/The king has granted a favour to my father Verbs also had many conjugations, like German: page 86: (if the "du" conjugation were included, I think that it would be "du aarbeidedst" "I did labour" Ik aarbeidede gy aarbeidede hy aarbeidede wy aarbeideden gyl aarbeidede zy aarbeideden Edited by 1e4e6 on 21 April 2015 at 7:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4224 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 11 of 38 21 April 2015 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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The problem with Chinese is that we don't have any sound recordings until the 20th century. The writing have
gone through over 2000 years of transformations starting with the writing on turtle shells. There were once several types of characters in use until the first Emperor in the 3rd century BCE decided to phase out different types of characters in favour of just 1. When it comes to dialects, there has always been many. Each Chinese province would have a distinctive dialect and a number of sub-dialects. At one time communication was poor that people in different parts of the country would only understand each other by writing Chinese characters down on paper. Now people who are educated in China would be able to speak Mandarin at some level. Communication naturally becomes easier. There are still a lot of expat Chinese who would communicate with each other in English because person A speaks Cantonese & English and person B speaks Mandarin & English. In the mid-20th century, Chinese writing used in Mainland China became simplified. However, the people in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau continued to use Traditional characters while China, Singapore and the Chinese communities in S-E Asia have adopted Simplified characters as well. Between writing 中國 for China and 中国 with the second character 國 & 国 being different is enough to make a block of text unintelligible to a group of Chinese who are used to 1 style of writing over the other. More recently, there are new characters added to dialects such as Cantonese used in Hong Kong and Minnan (a variation of Hokkien dialect) in Taiwan. People do write in the Cantonese dialect which uses would frequently use different words & phrases than standard Mandarin. Like all languages including English, change occur not only with spelling and syntax from old to modern English. There are new words & phrases that would not have existed 100 years ago and things that used to be common a century ago is no longer in use. If you ask somebody what is an automobile a century ago nobody would be able to tell you. Some modern words added to the Chinese language include: 電腦 or 计算机 for computer. There is at least 1 word in the Chinese language like "Android 技能手机" for an Android mobile phone. The word "Android" only came about in the last 5 years and the Chinese simply kept it in the original form without trying to make up a new word in their language. Another loan word I came across recently is UFO (Unidentified Flying Object). The common term is: 飞碟 (fēidié) for a flying disk. The term 幽浮 (yōufú) is also used as a loan word put together phonetically to sound like "UFO". Edited by shk00design on 21 April 2015 at 8:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4487 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 12 of 38 21 April 2015 at 11:31am | IP Logged | |||||
No one uses the subjunctive ever, except in a few fixed expressions ("Lang leve de koning!", long live the King). Maybe if you have studied French or Latin you know what a subjunctive is (we call it aanvoegende wijs or conjunctief though). This verb form is not taught at schools, not present in normal grammar books etc. It's only taught in the context of languages that have it, and the only reason I knew about it was because my French teacher was an excellent linguist (he also taught Latin, but not to me personally) and he mentioned it in French class one day. But it never really came up in Latin class that we have an equivalent. I have read about it online on Wikipedia but would not be able to use it fluently except for the 3rd person singular (because that is the one used in fixed expressions) like "Moge hij" or "Men neme". Honestly I haven't tried to read anything from before 1900 because it is not required that you do (except for Multatuli maybe but I skipped Max Havelaar when we did that topic; I read something more contemporary by van Dis). You study that there is such a thing as older language, but you are not required to read it at all and the texts quoted above by 1e4e6 already look quite strange to me. I would say the use of the subjunctive is really limited to academic texts and the few fixed instances that everyone knows about (and even then it is invoked as an archaism). The cases, however, were in full effect 100 years ago (though had receded from speech in nearly all dialects) and were abolished in 1946 or 1947, depending on whether you ask the Dutch or the Flemish. The reason we did away with them is because they were quite simply not used in spoken language at all, and they were instated to make Dutch sound more "noble" in analogy with Latin and German. Once it turned out that it hadn't caught on, it was thrown away. Edited by tarvos on 21 April 2015 at 11:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4839 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 38 21 April 2015 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Were they really instated or were they just left in the written standard after they had been dropped from the spoken language which presumably had them from Proto-West Germanic? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4487 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 38 22 April 2015 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
They were reinstated, to the best of my knowledge. Edited by tarvos on 22 April 2015 at 12:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4839 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 15 of 38 22 April 2015 at 3:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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Interesting. So, in Dutch schools, do you read many foreign old books translated into contemporary Dutch? Or do
you read few or no old books at all? In American school, I remember reading several 19th century books (which was never a big deal) plus many of the 16th and 17th century works of Shakespeare (which were hard for us to understand, but eventually we either figured it out or relied on notes and translations). Another popular school book which I've read, but not in school, is the 18th century Gulliver's Travels. And of course our US constitution is another 18th century document that we still read. Edited by robarb on 22 April 2015 at 3:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3879 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 16 of 38 22 April 2015 at 8:49am | IP Logged | |||||
I suspect, without much data to back it up, that this fairly common. Languages "simplify" all the time, after all. Swedish is another language that has completely dropped the subjunctive (konjunktiv - "Länge leve konungen!", "Helgat varde ditt namn. Tillkomme ditt rike."), but it remains in fixed phrases and forever encrusted in the brains of those of us who learnt the Lord's Prayer (Pater Noster) in the 1917 translation, rather than the 1999 translation. We discussed the Swedish subjunctive a bit in my Classical Greek classes, in order to explain the subjunctive and the optative, but it was a bit of a lost cause because pretty much only the front row understood what the Swedish subjunctive did, and only one student was confident in how to conjugate the subjunctive in Swedish (a little retired lady who took classical languages for fun, and had just finished a BA in Latin). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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