[HN Gopher] Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace o...
___________________________________________________________________
Hand of Irulegi: ancient artefact could help trace origins of
Basque language
Author : benbreen
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-11-16 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| Jun8 wrote:
| A funny myth about Basque:
|
| " An old myth says that since there weren't any Basques going to
| hell, the devil decided to learn Basque, so he could talk to
| them, lead them to the wrong path and send them to hell. But he
| was to be disappointed, as after several years, the devil still
| couldn't understand what the Basques were saying! Myths are just
| myths, but a study conducted by the British Foreign Office did
| conclude that Basque is the hardest language to learn in the
| world. As an isolated language, it has no syntactic parallels in
| English, Spanish or French and its grammar is exceedingly
| complex. "
| (https://omniglot.com/language/articles/whylearnbasque.htm)
|
| In Linguistics the notion that a language is more
| difficult/complex than another is not accepted. However, Basque
| grammar does have some less common characteristics such as the
| ergative case (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergative-
| absolutive_alignmen...).
|
| Here's an interesting study on how Basque speaker brains process
| the language (https://phys.org/news/2006-05-basque-grammar-
| brain.amp), biggest takeaway is the confirmation of SOV
| processing order.
| germandiago wrote:
| Yes, basque also has around 20,000 borrowings from spanish.
| Because it was reconstructed with political goals.
|
| I tell you this as the son of someone who used to work in the
| basque country (I am spanish). A vulgar basque was spoken in
| the rural areas only. They were desperate at the end of the 70s
| to find teachers for it.
|
| Nowadays there is a myth built on top of a language that, it is
| nice to not make things disappear, but it is basically a
| reconstruction. It is called "euskera batua".
|
| I can say with confidence that we can speak more correct latin
| or catalan than basque when thinking about real language
| heritage. Basque is just a reconstruction.
| oersted wrote:
| I mean, I can understand Basque medieval writings, and also
| the first word in the discovery the article highlights.
| Claiming that it didn't exist before the 70s is rather a
| stretch.
|
| Yes there was a large effort during the 60s to recover the
| language and unify it in order to use it in education and
| governance, comparable to the unification of Mandarin
| Chinese. Not because the language wasn't there but because
| there were, and still are, significant differences between
| the dialects of each province, to the point where it can be
| very hard to understand each other.
|
| And it had to be recovered because using the language was
| literally criminalized during the dictatorship, so yes, it
| had to go underground and was forgotten to an extent for a
| generation. But still, it was spoken in homes in both rural
| and urban areas. My father's family attended an illegal
| basque school during the dictatorship, as well as having to
| bribe officials to give basque names to their children.
|
| It is definitely true that basque has many many loanwords
| from spanish and other romance languages. There is in fact
| significant evidence (including this latest discovery), that
| this intermixing dates all the way back to the Roman
| occupation with original Latin, before spanish existed, so it
| makes sense that there is significant shared vocabulary.
| jhncls wrote:
| You make it sound that at one point in time there was a true
| basque language. But isn't language an evolving matter? It is
| slightly different from one village to the next, changes
| continuously over time, words get a different feeling, mixes
| as family members marry someone from a different village,
| etc.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There are lots of actual reconstructions of nearly-lost
| languages, though. Language certainly evolves, but there
| are people, that you can name, that sat through committee
| meetings putting together and voting on some of these
| reconstructions; for example Modern Hebrew and Hindi (to
| name probably the largest ones.) Modern Greek also seems
| like a bit of a disaster of historical reconstruction
| committees arguing with farmer observation committees for
| ages. Even English got clumsily rebased onto Latin and
| Greek from the 16th century on as its spelling was being
| standardized by prescriptivists.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language_question
|
| So regardless of whether there's a "true" Basque language,
| it certainly could have gone through a period of conscious,
| top-down reconstruction after some period when middle-class
| academics (and politicians, usually) who would be
| interested in either _rediscovering_ or _purifying_ the
| language, or just plain looking for a nationalist project
| to rally around _couldn 't find anyone left who spoke the
| language at all, spoke it purely enough for them, or even
| spoke it prettily enough for their image of what the
| language should be._
|
| I don't know that this happened to Basque, but it happens
| all the time.
| akolbe wrote:
| There is actually a potential trace of an ergative system in
| Latin. A fundamental rule of Latin is that neuter nouns have
| the same endings in the nominative and accusative cases. For
| example, bellum is nominative and accusative singular, bella is
| nominative and accusative plural.
|
| This can be explained as a continuation of an old rule that
| said that only living beings (marked by endings such as -us,
| -a; -i, -ae) could be "active" subjects.
|
| A "thing" doesn't have agency; it can't "do" anything to
| something or someone else - in other words, it can't be the
| subject of a transitive verb. It can only be either the subject
| of an intransitive verb, or the object of a transitive verb -
| and thus in Latin takes the endings -um, -a in either event.
|
| Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves what is good. (Meaning
| 1)
|
| Bonus amat bonum: The good (man) loves the good (man). (Meaning
| 2)
|
| Bonum est bonum: What is (a) good (thing) is good.
|
| This is exactly the same pattern as in ergative grammar: the
| object of a transitive verb has the same case as a thing that
| is the subject of an intransitive verb.
| mc32 wrote:
| One lingering question I have regarding linguistics is how did
| languages build complex grammars to then see their grammars
| simplify over time?
|
| Do we in modern times see languages with simple grammars
| develop complex grammars over time?
| asherah wrote:
| essentially no grammar change is a "simplification". every
| language has the same complexity in it's grammar, it mostly
| depends where that complexity lies
|
| you might just be confusing complexity with big words or
| large tables of grammatical affixes. over time, languages
| tend to either get more synthetic (closer to a 1=1
| correspondence between words and morphemes) or agglutinative
| (many more morphemes per word), and it wraps around at the
| end - premium synthetic languages then start tacking words
| together, some start making other constructions, and suddenly
| you're on the agglutinative side!
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe... but some language requires more context for one to
| understand the utterance or sentence in order to give the
| statement the proper understanding. Why do some languages
| have a decrease in inflective grammatical cases (where
| English has now 3, whereas Hungarian retains 15 or more?
| And some languages are in the process of losing use of some
| cases; however, I'm unaware of languages gaining case
| complexity. Pidgins are simplified languages that allow
| communication between unintelligible languages. I would
| suggest they use simplified grammars.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Pidgins are almost a completely different thing. Since by
| their nature, every speaker of a pidgin is a fluent
| native speaker of at least one other language, the pidgin
| doesn't have to meet _all_ of the communication needs of
| all of its speakers. Once they cross over into creoles eg
| have native speakers, they fall into the same structures
| as all other languages.
| asherah wrote:
| context is a part of language! pragmatics is essentially
| context as it relates to language, and pragmatics is a
| part of linguistics. languages gaining case complexity
| largely happens by affixation of prepositions - i can't
| think of any examples off the top of my head but you'll
| have to take my word on it occurring.
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's a theory in linguistics that languages tend to
| complexify if they're used by a small, insular group, but
| tend to simplify if they're used as a trade languages.
| Evidence for this theory can be found in languages like
| English and Swahili, which are grammatically simpler than
| their Germanic and Bantu cousin languages. You can also see
| in Caucasian languages that the languages spoken by higher
| altitude speakers (who were more protected from the various
| waves of conquest in the area) being more complex than the
| lower altitude speakers.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe... Spanish and Portuguese ware used in trade a lot
| and they don't seem to have simplified much. On the other
| hand, like English Danish has simplified even further, but
| it was never a great trade language --it may have been a
| language of trade in the Baltic basin many centuries ago
| but not in the last half dozen centuries.
| ddalex wrote:
| the relative simplicity of English is pretty much modern,
| if you go back to the way it was spoken ~200 years ago, I
| think you'll find it a lot more complicated in terms of
| expressions and artistic complications, pretty close to
| French actually
| haroldp wrote:
| One common pattern for this is the reason English has a
| comparatively simple grammar. English was learned in
| adulthood by a series of invaders (Vikings, Normans). Adults
| aren't very good at learning new languages so they tend to
| discard the harder parts. Indonesian (Bahasa) is easy to
| learn for similar reasons, while some of the indigenous
| tribal languages of Indonesia are among the most complex in
| the world.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > In Linguistics the notion that a language is more
| difficult/complex than another is not accepted.
|
| Hmm. In computer science, can we say that one language is more
| complex than another based on the size of the BNF needed to
| describe the language?
|
| Even in linguistics, can't you say that one language has 8
| cases, and another only has 4? Wouldn't that make the one with
| 8 more complex, in at least some sense?
| etrevino wrote:
| Speaking as an historian here and not as a linguist: In my
| experience, a language that has only four cases usually has a
| method for expressing all eight, they just won't be
| formalized in the same way. For example, English has no
| formalized second person plural, so you might use "y'all" or
| "everyone" as a kludge.
| haroldp wrote:
| > English has no formalized second person plural, so you
| might use "y'all" or "everyone" as a kludge.
|
| It used to!
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-problem-with-
| you/i...
| jcranmer wrote:
| It still does! It's the second person _singular_ that was
| lost (thou).
| asherah wrote:
| more cases doesn't necessarily make a language more complex,
| cases are just one way to communicate a piece of information
| about a noun. it isn't necessarily more complex to have a
| separate locative case than to say "in/on/at X"!
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Computer "languages" are a metaphor, they aren't languages in
| a linguistic sense, they aren't even writing systems per se.
| They are more closely related to things like musical notation
| or circuit diagrams. You can't communicate arbitrary
| information with them without at least partially embedding
| another language.
| nradov wrote:
| Some programming languages have grammars that can't be
| represented in BNF.
| ftyers wrote:
| Linguist here. In one sense yes, but there are many other
| senses, also maybe in one language the cases are regular but
| in the other they aren't. There is complexity from
| phonetics/phonology to pragmatics, and all languages
| distribute it differently. Basque cases for example are very
| regular, like Turkish or Hungarian, but Russian or Icelandic
| cases are less regular. So it's actually easier to pick up
| Basque at least the morphology than it is to pick up Russian
| or Icelandic.
| ftyers wrote:
| In terms of ease of learning, extralinguistic factors are
| generally more indicative. For example, availability of
| intensive courses, quality of those courses, availability
| of materials/cultural output, willingness of speakers to
| interact with learners (either for reasons of inability of
| communication otherwise or for reasons of ideology),
| similarity of culture or cultural concepts between the
| learner's culture and the one of the language they are
| learning. All of these have as much or more impact on ease
| of learning than any index of grammatical complexity.
| (Edit: Basque has excellent courses run through AEK and
| Basque speakers are usually very motivated to talk Basque,
| so if you want to learn a language I would highly recommend
| it, oh and there is a mass of culture like music and
| films).
| oersted wrote:
| Basque native here, studied in the University of the Basque
| country (mentioned in the article) and most of my family
| teaches there, a few are linguists including my father.
|
| Let me know if you are curious about anything, I am happy to
| answer.
|
| I am obviously biased as a native speaker, but I am surprised
| it is considered the hardest language to learn. Yes sentences
| have an unusual order, and most pronouns and determinants are
| embedded as postfixes of other words, especially verbs.
| However, phonetically it is almost indistinguishable from
| Spanish at this point. The alphabet is latin and each letter
| directly corresponds to a single sound (except for silent h).
| Spelling is "as it sounds", very consistent and much simpler
| than other languages I have learned. The vocabulary includes
| large quantities of romance (from latin, mostly Spanish) loan
| words that will sound familiar to most Europeans. And the
| sentence structure and vocabulary are often (incorrectly)
| streered towards Spanish/French patterns in casual speech.
| [deleted]
| _glass wrote:
| I know, I know the Vasconic substrate hypothesis is rejected
| by a lot of linguists, but I know some linguists that find it
| intriguing. What do you think?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasconic_substrate_hypothesis
| oersted wrote:
| I don't have a strong opinion on the matter, evidence is
| very sparse. There is a strong consensus that Basque is not
| Indo-European. It is also seems likely that the Basque
| language (or an ancestor) was used in the surrounding area
| before the large Indo-European migration from the east,
| Basque doesn't seem to have been brought by a different
| migration from somewhere else, at least not after pre-
| history.
|
| The Vasconic Substrate Hypothesis suggests that Basque was
| a major language in Europe from prehistory or at least the
| neolithic, and that it influenced most modern European
| languages. That's rather a stretch, modern western European
| languages are mostly a mix between Indo-European variants
| and Latin, to a larger or smaller degree. Claiming another
| pre-indo-european layer under all that, I mean, sure,
| maybe, but it is diluted to an extent that makes it rather
| irrelevant.
|
| The evidence for that is very weak, it depends on how
| literally you interpret the theory. I think it is arrogant
| to suggest that those ancient languages were basque, rather
| modern basque has some distant roots in those pre-indo-
| european languages. In my opinion, the more correct way of
| expressing it would be that this proto-basque was part of a
| large family of related languages spoken in Europe during
| the neolithic. There is no proper evidence that proto-
| basque was widespread, it's just that it is the only
| preserved remnant from that linguistic era at large.
| prox wrote:
| Is there a (reconstructed) "purer" form of Basque that is no
| longer spoken, or is that lost in the mist of time due to
| intermixing of roman/spanish?
| oersted wrote:
| There is some research into proto-basque
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Basque_language),
| although I wouldn't characterize it as purer.
|
| This is mostly a theoretical exercise, extrapolating back
| patterns observed in Latin loanwords changed after being
| absorbed and differences between modern dialects.
|
| Brief parenthesis: There are still significant differences
| in the language within a couple hundred km, to the point
| where it can be very hard to understand each other. An
| effort was made during the 60s to define a Standard Basque
| (Euskara Batua:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Basque) for
| education, bureaucracy and law. It is comparable to the
| unification of Mandarin Chinese at a smaller scale.
|
| Back to the topic of older basque. You have to consider
| that there's a clear record of the basque living under
| roman rule, and the region has been under larger powers
| (but also relatively isolated and autonomous) for its
| entire history. The intermixing with romance languages
| started all the way back with original Latin, and the
| discovery discussed in the article also shows heavy
| influence from pre-roman iberian languages in the use of
| their alphabet, even if the languages probably had
| different roots (iberian is indo-european, basque not).
|
| Nevertheless, the language in this discovery is not really
| considered basque but more of an ancestor. There is a large
| gap in the written record, very little has been found
| between early Roman times and the first writings in modern
| Basque well into the Middle Ages, at which point heavier
| intermixing with the rest of Europe started during the
| 1500s with the pioneering of large-scale whaling and a
| thriving ship-building economy. It's not really clear when
| modern basque started, and it has been heavily influenced
| by other languages pretty much since the neolithic.
| prox wrote:
| Thank you for your in depth reply, it's a fascinating
| language!
| cpp_frog wrote:
| Hello, I'm a Chilean descendant of Basques. I've a question
| regarding basque culture and heritage (of which I
| unfortunately know too little). Have basque authorities
| contemplated the declining population with low TFR and how it
| will impact the continuation of customs and most importantly,
| the language?
| oersted wrote:
| I haven't heard much discussion connecting the declining
| population to the preservation of the culture. Generally,
| since the criminalization of the basque language during the
| dictatorship, most of the focus has been in encouraging the
| existing population to engage in the culture and the
| language.
|
| This effort has been relatively successful. A significant
| majority of students do all their studies, including
| university, fully in basque (>75%, https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Basque_language#/media/File:Ir...). There are many
| families that exclusively speak basque at home. And
| traditional basque public holidays and sports are
| prominent, popular, and frequent throughout the year.
|
| There is a serious concern however, that Basque is becoming
| entrenched into a language only for education, bureaucracy
| and family life. It is much less popular in the streets and
| between friends, especially in the capitals of the
| provinces. This is partially affected by the significant
| reduction in funding for basque TV, films and dubbing,
| especially when it comes to cartoons for young children, as
| well as sketch comedy, which were so influential to my
| generation (funnily enough, basque dubbed anime was quite
| big!).
|
| Nevertheless, the fertility-rate in the Basque country has
| actually been one of the lowest in Europe for the last few
| years. The conversation around it is more about the economy
| than culture. It is already seriously affecting primary
| schools, which are starting to compete a lot more and some
| are closing down. There are bigger problems in the public
| conscience lately (COVID, Ukraine, Energy Crisis...), and
| it will take at least another generation for the
| consequences of the low fertility rate to be felt, but
| there is an awareness of looming demographic trouble.
| wnoise wrote:
| > Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper
| written language - save for words found on coins
|
| That seems to be a pretty ridiculous supposition. Why would they
| only use it for coins?
| oersted wrote:
| The writing in this finding uses the iberian alphabet with some
| minor modifications. The iberian language has different indo-
| european roots, so it seems that indeed Vascones didn't have
| their own writing system, as was common for many languages of
| this era and later in history.
|
| It is also what evidence suggested (until now), pretty much no
| basque writings have been found until well into the middle
| ages, besides a few words in headstones and coins. Although we
| know the language was there because the Romans referred to it.
| Scholars probably assumed that some writing was taking place,
| but there is very little proof of it, so better to stick to
| what we know.
|
| It is intriguing that it looks like this object was a welcome
| message hung on a door, kind of like a welcome doormat. The
| object was found on top of a door, it has clear signs that it
| was nailed in an upright position with a wooden nail, and the
| first word is almost exactly the same modern basque word that
| is used to mean "welcome", "congratulations" or "happy". If
| this theory is correct, it suggests a significantly higher
| level of literacy than would be expected in a small town from
| this era. Why would you put up a welcome sign if guests
| wouldn't understand it?
| rendall wrote:
| > _"... the five words written in 40 characters identified as
| Vasconic, suggest otherwise. The first - and only word - to be
| identified so far is_ sorioneku, _a forerunner of the modern
| Basque word_ zorioneko, _meaning good luck or good omen. "_
|
| How did they know some set of characters meant _sorioneku_? Is
| this not the first time they have even seen these characters?
| msrenee wrote:
| So it definitely descends from the Phoenician alphabet which is
| also what the Greek and then Latin alphabets descended from.
| The Etruscan alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew are all
| related in there as well.
|
| It doesn't seem too far removed from other alphabets in that
| area. I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've
| only got the first word figured out.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Huh, at first glance I thought they were runes, but then
| runes must've had predecessors themselves.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I spent some time looking into this from a post about this
| artifact yesterday. I had the same response to think abut
| runes when I looked at it as well. For anyone curious, the
| characters are evidently from one of several Paleohispanic
| scripts. The origins of those scripts might be Phoenician
| and/or Greek, some are read from left to right and some
| from right to left.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_scripts
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| You can visually see the progression of letters in a
| wonderful "Evolution of the Alphabet" chart from
| UsefulCharts.[0] Really brings home the relationships that
| may not be evident without seeing the intermediates.
|
| [0] https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-
| alphabet
| jng wrote:
| It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a
| derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and
| Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the
| language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three
| ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the
| Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes.
|
| I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and
| makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy
| birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to
| modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in
| 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written
| language, with a ton of external influence.
|
| (The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from
| greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they
| didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)
| gorkaerana wrote:
| > I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've
| only got the first word figured out.
|
| They have figured out the rest of the words, as per the last
| image in the announcement tweet [1]. It's just that they
| don't make sense in modern Basque (source being me being a
| native Basque speaker).
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/aranzadi/status/1592129224806404097?
| s=20...
| rendall wrote:
| Oh, I see! So upstream quote meant they understood the
| first word, and transliterated the rest without
| understanding. Got it. Excellent, thank you.
| msrenee wrote:
| That makes more sense than them not being able to parse out
| the sounds of subsequent letters after working out the
| first word.
|
| There's been so much work done on reconstructing what the
| proto-Indo-European roots of modern words might have been.
| I'd imagine they've had less luck with Basque since it
| doesn't have the wealth of contemporary languages to
| compare it to.
| oersted wrote:
| The alphabet is shared with other Iberian languages, with a
| couple of unique runes. It is most likely written phonetically
| but the underlying language is very different.
|
| Nowadays Basque is similarly written phonetically in latin
| alphabet, and in terms of phonemes, it has almost the same
| sounds and vowels as Spanish.
| akolbe wrote:
| There is an important omission in that Guardian article. They
| cite a Latin professor said to have helped decipher the artifact
| and then another scholar of Indo-European linguistics:
|
| _" Velaza's colleague Joaquin Gorrochategui, a professor of
| Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque
| country, said the hand's secrets would change the way scholars
| looked at the Vascones.'This piece upends how we'd thought about
| the Vascones and writing until now ... We were almost convinced
| that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn't use writing
| except when it came to minting coins."_
|
| What they fail to tell their readers is that Basque is not an
| Indo-European language at all. It's a language isolate - while
| Latin, Welsh, German, Danish, Greek, Armenian, Persian, Hindi,
| Urdu etc. are all related to each other, Basque is the only
| remnant of the languages that were spoken in Western Europe
| before the Indo-Europeans took over.
| NickC25 wrote:
| IIRC Basque (or a predecessor of it) had been spoken for
| hundreds of years in (what is now the Basque country) before
| the Roman's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
|
| I think it's the oldest surviving language isolate in the
| world. Contrary to popular belief, Korean is actually no longer
| considered a language isolate.
| akolbe wrote:
| If you think about it, all languages and all language
| isolates (there are many others besides Basque, like Ainu)
| are really the same age. At any rate, this applies if you
| assume that people developed language only once. Each
| language then represents an unbroken chain of transmission to
| the language of the earliest humans to develop speech, or one
| branch leading back to the original trunk. Isolates are
| merely branches that have no surviving twigs of recent
| provenance - recent enough, that is, to discern genetic
| relationships with the tools available today.
|
| Language isolates of different ages could only really occur
| if there were several populations of humans developing speech
| independently of each other, and at different times.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Languages have different ages. Now obviously you can't ever
| draw a clean, exact line between when one language becomes
| another, but there are also clearly distinct languages and
| those distinctions can be given upper and lower bounds in
| terms of dates.
|
| Latin is clearly distinct from English, even though both
| languages share a common ancestor and English itself was
| heavily influenced by Latin, both directly and indirectly.
| Yet it is still useful to make the distinction between them
| as separate languages and what we call Latin is _clearly_
| older than what we call English.
|
| I don't think it's at all useful to say Latin and English
| are the really the same age, even if it's _technically_
| true per your definition.
|
| It's a bit like saying all species are the same age because
| we all share a common ancestor and there's no exact date
| when you can say one species became another.
| akolbe wrote:
| I'd say they're complementary perspectives.
|
| Latin is of course clearly older than (Modern) English,
| because it was spoken 2,000 years ago, whereas English is
| spoken today. But Mediaeval Latin was spoken at the same
| time as Old English; while Latin turned into Spanish,
| French, Italian, Romanian etc., Old English turned into
| Modern English.
|
| Arguably, these are just quirks of nomenclature. It's
| just an accident of history that Old English and Modern
| English are both called "English", because the difference
| between Old English and Modern English is just as great
| (if not greater) as the difference between Latin and
| Spanish.
|
| The verbal paradigm in Spanish for example retains far
| more similarities to Latin verb conjugation than is the
| case with Old and Modern English.
| retrac wrote:
| > if there were several populations of humans developing
| speech independently of each other, and at different times
|
| We already know of instances of societal-cultural upheaval
| or even trauma, so severe, that the language undergoes
| unrecognizable transformation in the form of pidgins. A
| group of young people from scattered tribes after some
| disaster, who speak no common language, and who are barely
| lingual and "re-invent language" for the next generation,
| seems quite possible over the last several tens of
| thousands of years, perhaps in multiple times and places.
|
| The similarity of grammar, in unrelated creoles, descended
| from such pidgin languages, is one of those great
| tantalizing mysteries in linguistics, and in my view, one
| that suggests we might just be wired to make a language if
| we didn't already have one, as do things like the apparent
| spontaneous emergence of sign languages in deaf
| communities. The spanner in the workers for that theory is
| that, of course, those hypothesized people who didn't speak
| related languages still grew up in lingual communities and
| were exposed to the idea of language from birth (even the
| deaf ones, really). Perhaps such events are just a remixing
| of what already was culturally common, and common to all
| humans. Indeed, perhaps no community where the link of
| language transmission has been completely broken, could
| even survive.
| the_af wrote:
| > _is one of those great tantalizing mysteries in
| linguistics, and in my view, one that suggests we might
| just be wired to make a language if we didn 't already
| have one_
|
| Isn't this Chomsky's thesis about humans having an
| ingrained "grammar" (or proto-grammar, or grammar
| machinery) from birth?
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes! There are no primitive languages; all continuously
| spoken languages are modern by definition.
|
| I wonder though how do reconstructed/revived languages such
| as modern Hebrew fit into this picture.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Language isolate doesn't mean that they all belong to the
| same family and are the same age.
| Max-Ganz-II wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I understand it is not the only pre-PIE
| language in Europe.
|
| I believe Finnish and Hungarian are two others, and there are a
| couple more, with much smaller numbers of speakers.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Finnish and Hungarian are non-IE, but they are not pre-IE,
| they are Uralic languages that also entered Europe through
| migration:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages#History
| Max-Ganz-II wrote:
| Ah, so! thankyou. It's all fascinating :-)
| DC-3 wrote:
| His studies probably relate to contact between archaic Vasconic
| languages and Indo-European. It is considered fairly likely
| that languages related to that of the Vascones were spoken more
| broadly in Western Europe in antiquity, and that they likely
| had influence to some degree on the Germanic, Romance, and
| Celtic languages that superceded them.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| My understanding is that most genetic studies seem to indicate
| the Basques likely migrated where they were around the same
| time as Indo-European/Yamnaya culture -- the copper age. Even
| looking at iron and bronze age remains, they are not
| appreciably different in genetic makeup than the surrounding
| populations.
|
| Similar story for the Etruscans, in fact. High rate of R1b and
| associated haplotypes.
|
| It seems likely to me that these populations were co-travelers
| with Indo-European speakers during the copper age. Following
| the same leads on metal and other resource deposits, and
| migrating along similar routes. I suspect if it was ever
| possible to find a "homeland" for these linguistic routes it
| would be along the Black Sea or Carpathians, next-door to the
| origins of the Yamnaya culture.
|
| Maybe the Basques/Euskadia/Vascones are the descendants of the
| Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, an ancient agrarian population that
| the Indo-Europeans passed through and blended with (and maybe
| conquered) on their way west.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-16 23:01 UTC)