[HN Gopher] Agriculture gave rise to one of world's most mysteri...
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Agriculture gave rise to one of world's most mysterious language
families
Author : infodocket
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-11-13 15:38 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| [deleted]
| eterevsky wrote:
| > "It's convincing," says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at ...
|
| Why are they asking an archeologist to comment on a linguistic
| theory?
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| Because those fields are incredibly interlinked, and people
| from archaeology/anthropology often study other fields in
| conjunction as well?
| ummonk wrote:
| > They focused on what Robbeets calls "culture-free" vocabulary,
| including words for basic items such as "field," "pig," and
| "house."
|
| Words for such material goods often jump languages. These aren't
| the terms one should be focusing on if one is actually seriously
| trying to prove the existence of a language family. There is
| nothing in this research to suggest a change to the consensus
| view that the Altaic languages don't constitute a language
| family.
| peter303 wrote:
| Strangest borrowing claim I heard was that Germanic strong verbs
| (hence English) came from Semitic language verb forms. Columbia
| linguist McWhorter claims this his Story of English book.
| canjobear wrote:
| I've never heard the term Transeurasian languages before, but it
| seems to be a rebranding of the Altaic languages[0]. The
| hypothesis that these form a real language family is viewed with
| extreme suspicion by modern historical linguists because the
| sound correspondences are not very convincing.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
| culi wrote:
| This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the
| article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic
| languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin
|
| I think the debate around it points to an interesting issue in
| the quest of trying to taxonomize languages. It's a similar
| problem faced by bacteria and fungi taxonomists. These
| organisms are extremely prone to horizontal gene transfer (some
| even use functional horizontal gene transfer as an adaptation
| strategy to adapt to new environments). Languages can borrow a
| lot from each other and trying to untangle them is always gonna
| take a ton of guesswork. But it's also what makes the field so
| interesting. It forced this type of linguistic work to be very
| interdisciplinary
| canjobear wrote:
| I think the horizontal gene transfer analogy is spot on for
| what's going on in the Altaic grouping of languages. Even
| then, though, it's a weird kind of horizontal transfer that
| is not well understood.
|
| Probably the most common kind of transfer among languages is
| loanwords: think of the many many foreign loanwords in
| English for example. It's easy to see how this happens. You
| learn a foreign word that has some convenient meaning,
| there's no good equivalent in your native language, so you
| start using the foreign word if you think the person you're
| talking to will know it too.
|
| But in the Altaic languages, you see similarities in abstract
| structure, without much apparent sharing of words. Altaic
| languages have a certain strictly head-final syntactic
| structure, where the verb is the final element in the
| sentence, you have postpositions coming after nouns, lots of
| freedom to drop and reorder arguments of verbs, etc. They all
| have agglutinative morphology with case marking that creates
| long complex words. They all have, or show historical traces
| of, some kind of vowel harmony.
|
| All these abstract commonalities happen with only very little
| sharing of words. You can line up a Korean sentence with its
| Japanese translation almost morpheme-by-morpheme, and yet
| those morphemes are all totally unrelated to each other.
|
| It seems really odd that you could have a set of languages
| that share their abstract structure without sharing content.
| And Altaic isn't the only example of this kind of thing: you
| also see it in the North American native languages, which
| share a strongly head-initial head-marking structure, nearly
| the exact opposite of the Altaic languages, despite a lack of
| cognates among their morphemes. It's almost as if what was
| transferred among the languages was an aesthetic, rather than
| individual words.
|
| We don't really understand how this happens. My best guess is
| that it happens in situations of massive multilingualism, so
| that certain habits of articulation and sentence formation
| get shared across languages within the mind of a multilingual
| speaker. It's something I'd like to understand more.
| ummonk wrote:
| While it's definitely an open question as to how this comes
| about, it's not exclusive to the Altaic languages. For
| example, you have multiple unrelated Khoisan languages
| which all have click consonants.
| hcho wrote:
| Multiple layers of creolization is the most likely
| explanation of common grammatic features and distinct
| vocabularies.
|
| There's a language called Gagauz, spoken in Moldova. It has
| a Turkic vocabulary and Indo-European grammar. It was, in
| its infancy, likely to be a Romanian substrate, Cuman
| superstrate creole.
|
| An Proto Altaic substrate with various superstrates must
| have played out quite a few times.
| nanis wrote:
| > Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and
| Turkic languages could be from a common origin
|
| From Wikipedia:
|
| +> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic,
| Mongolian, and Tungusic groups
|
| As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and
| occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version
| made more sense to me.
|
| OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese
| Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and
| I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and
| they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin
| stuff seemed to me a little too far.
|
| Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside
| all the arguments, I am going to note that:
|
| (A) Ben dun mektubu yazdim.
|
| (B) Ben mektubu dun yazdim.
|
| (C) Mektubu ben dun yazdim.
|
| Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by
| dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different
| meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the
| intended meaning the speaker wants to convey.
|
| (A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to
| emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C)
| to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the
| letter and did the the day before.
|
| [1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-
| japane...
| mrbukkake wrote:
| Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there
| was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between
| supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area
| of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between
| biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues
| is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hco
| mmons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The
| authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept
| of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I
| think is particularly cool
| canjobear wrote:
| Cool paper!
| culi wrote:
| Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like
| really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly
| a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in
| different situations
| retrac wrote:
| Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it
| is likely at least a few of the identified language families
| (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But
| this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to
| make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't
| enough data. There probably will never be.
|
| As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a
| valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in
| hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against
| each other, the search space explodes and you start finding
| matches. Dozens. Hundreds even.
|
| A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary
| world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail:
| http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance
| resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)
| georgecmu wrote:
| I think this review [1] put it best: _It goes without saying
| that an etymological dictionary of a non-existing language
| family is a paradoxon, to say the least. One possible way out
| of this is of course the conclusion that the family is after
| all real and that the existence of a work like this is the
| best proof of this fact. On the other hand, a quite different
| conclusion would be that there could after all be such a
| thing as a full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a
| proto-language, which indeed never existed._
|
| The full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-
| language, which indeed never existed can be downloaded
| here.[2].
|
| [1] https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starost
| in_...
|
| [2] http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Staros
| tin...
| ummonk wrote:
| It's not hard to create a fake protolanguage by focusing on
| borrowed terms and accidental cognates.
| sharmin123 wrote:
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| selimthegrim wrote:
| A Sprachbund (extensive borrowing) is not remotely the same as
| being from a common root.
|
| Interesting about millet though, I think theories about the
| origin of the Dravidian language family depend on words for
| different kinds of millet too.
| ummonk wrote:
| Yes, and the existence of regular sound changes does not prove
| anything, since the borrowings could have happened in
| antiquity.
| wbl wrote:
| No, but they can be hard to tell apart!
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Somewhat tangentially, when you say, "no, but ..." and you
| are actually agreeing, what is that called? I expand this in
| my mind to, "no, they are not the same, but ..." while I
| would expect "yes, but ..." to be the actual form of
| agreement.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I think German has a particle (doch) to alleviate this
| karatinversion wrote:
| Early Modern English used "nay" to reply to positive
| questions, and "no" to negative questions, too. And I
| think in French you answer a negative question positively
| with "si" rather than "oui".
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(page generated 2021-11-13 23:01 UTC)