Linguistic Discussion Of European Languages of Obscure origin

And my confusion over Celtic languages was caused by the controversy over the origin of Pictish. Some claim Pictish was indeed a P-Celtic language (and therefore Indo-European after all) while others tried to claim that it was more like Basque and therefore not Indo-European at all.

Are all these non Indo-European languages total mysteries to the linguists or is there an explanation for their origin?

Didn't know Finnish was an obscure language either.

(They're not actually "obscure" - o.O.o. is a term for words which I jokingly applied on the other thread to non-Indo-European European languages.)

http://www.danshort.com/ie/iecentum_c.shtml

(I see that site has a discussion board, maybe I should go there and ask about the Pictish-Basque link, but I'd be told off for being off topic, probably.)

Does anyone still speak Etruscan?

I don't really know anything about this at all, but it's fascinating.

No one speaks Etruscan any more, no. But it was another weird non-connected language. Apparently there used to be a lot more of them before the Indo-Europeans overran everything.

Now the only languages left in Europe of non-I-E origin are Finno-Ugric languages, Basque, and ... erm ... Maltese, I think?

(An interesting article actually pointed out that the blonde-haired blue-eyed-ness of the so-called "Aryans" of Europe was probably more likely to be caused by interbreding with the indigenous peoples of Europe, anyway...)

A nice quote on Basque:

The languages of the previous inhabitants of Europe, with the exception of Basque—a non-lndo-European language with possible remote relatives in the Caucasus—were crowded out by the Indo-European dialects.

A complete side-track (resulting from some google-research), but look how cool the numbers one to ten are in Cornish:

onan dew tri peswar pymp hwegh seyth eth naw deg

Which makes my Welsh dream somewhat slightly more sinister...

Hebrew is part of a completely different family of languages altogether!

The most respectable long-term fallacy was actually the one that eventually brought the field to its current position, with Kenneth Jackson's radical theory (1955) that there were in fact two languages used concurrently by the Picts, one Celtic and one non-Indo-European. This is not a ridiculous suggestion, as even today there are many cultures which use two or more languages or dialects in the course of daily life (this situation is called 'diglossia' if you are more interested). But current thought has completely dismissed Jackson’s idea, though it did help to bridge the old school (who are convinced that Pictish was non-Indo-European) and the new school (who believe that it’s Celtic).

From this interesting site about the Picts:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/10964/95224

(What would that make Finnish and Maltese? Safari and Netscape?)

Also Q-Celtic = Manx

Not sure where Sarkese fits in

Trying to remember what Maltese was... I think Arabic. There was another Mediteranean (island?) language which was basically Turkish, but I can't remember where that was.

Will look it up!

a few words in English have recognisably Sanskrit origins - apple is 'apul' in Sanskrit.

talks about the Central Asian languages and their possible links to both Finno-Urgic languages and East Asian languages like Japanese and Korean.

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/larryt/basque.html

A quote from this site:

Q17. Are the Basques genetically different from other Europeans?

A17. Apparently, yes. It has long been known that the Basques have the highest proportion of rhesus-negative blood in Europe (25%), and one of the highest percentages of type-O blood (55%). Recently, however, the geneticist Luiga Luca Cavalli-Sforza has completed a gene map of the peoples of Europe, and he finds the Basques to be strikingly different from their neighbors. The genetic boundary between Basques and non-Basques is very sharp on the Spanish side. On the French side, the boundary is more diffuse: it shades off gradually toward the Garonne in the north. These findings are entirely in agreement with what we know of the history of the language.

Q18. Does this mean the Basques are directly descended from the earliest known human inhabitants of Europe, the Cro-Magnon people who occupied western Europe around 35,000 years ago?

A18. Nobody knows. This is possible, but we have no real evidence either way. The only evidence we have is negative: the archeologists can find no evidence for any sudden change in population in the area for thousands of years before the arrival of the Celts and later the Romans in the first millennium BC.

1 bat
2 bi ~ biga
3 hiru ~ hirur
4 lau ~ laur
5 bost ~ bortz
6 sei
7 zazpi
8 zortzi
9 bederatzi
10 hamar

As a footnote, the football club Athletic Bilbao will only field Basque players and yet, miraculously have won the league a number of times. Real Socieded (based in San Sebastian) will only field Basques or foreignors and not Spanish players. The other Basque teams are not so selective.

Knew I could work a football reference in somehow.

Another weird language: Celtiberian!!!

In Spain, the linguistic position was rather complicated. Much of central and northern Spain was occupied by the Celtic people who we call the Celtiberians. These Celts had writing, and they left behind some written texts, including the famous bronze tablet of Botorrita, which we can read only partly. The Mediterranean coast of Spain (and also a small part of southern France) was occupied by a quite different people who we call the Iberians. The Iberians too had writing, and they have bequeathed us a sizable number of written texts in their Iberian language. For a long time we could make no sense of these, but, in the first half of the 20th century, the Spanish linguist Manuel Gómez Moreno succeeded in figuring out the phonetic values of the characters, and so we can now read Iberian to the extent of being able to pronounce it. However, we still can't make the slightest sense of the texts, because Iberian has turned out to be a completely unknown language: it is certainly not Indo-European, and in fact we are confident that Iberian is not discoverably related to any other known language (including Basque -- see below).

I *knew* there was a Celtic language which was non-I-E!

They play bagpipes too and Galician folk music is hauntingly lovely.

How about Galatian, an extinct Celtic language once spoken in Asia Minor (modern Turkey)?

catalan is more like a mixture of french and portuguese than spanish, in my experience. not genetically, but just in terms of what it looks like, it sounds like spanish being spoken by people with no teeth, to my ears. its a romance language though. there's no genetic connection to basque, galician or celtic.

yeah, Catalan's certainly got plenty in common with French and Spanish. But there is a weird Germanic aspect to it too.

Originally 'Goatalonia', Catalonia means land of the Goths, the Goths in question being the West Goths known as the Visigohts. All the western romance languages have some germanic influence due to Lombard, Goth, Vandal, Frank, Burgundian, and others invasions.

'Cause they didn't know how to spell.

i love this thread--and this board, by the way! it's putting my linguistics degree to use.

Hmm, I don't if I'm an expert on linguistics. One thing I can say is that Finnish verbs and nouns have several different forms of conjugation, unlike in English. This is due the fact that are no pro/postpositions in Finnish, instead we have case endings. Also, other "supporting" words can be replaced by endings as well; and, in the first and second person the personal pronoun is included in the verb (like in Spanish), only the third person requires you to write the pronoun. Let me demonstrate it with two Finnish words, "kävellä" ("to walk") and "pöytä" ("a table"):

I walk = kävelen
you walk = kävelet
she walks = hän kävelee
we walk = kävelemme
you walk = kävelette
they walk = he kävelevät

while walking = kävellessään
after walking = käveltyään
without walking = kävelemättä
to walk around = käveleskellä
etc.

a table = pöytä
in the table = pöydässä
off the table = pöydältä
from the table = pöydästä
to the table = pöytään
(it is) on the table = pöydällä
(put that) on the table = pöydälle
without a table = pöydättä
(look) at the table = pöytää
with a table = pöytineen
etc.

Old Frisian is incredibly similar to Old English - your grandparents could have talked to Beowulf quite easily.

Chaucer, however, spoke Middle English. Written Middle English would seem familiar-ish to a reader of Modern English. (Some words seem more obscure than others.) However, the way it was *pronounced* ... ye gads! This was before the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT, so it would have been pronounced in a more "European" way. (Or perhaps more like a West Country Yokel.) Also, the random "e"s on the end of words would have been pronounced. So when I take the piss out of "Ye Old-ie Tourist-ie Shop-ie" that's actually quite close to the way that Ye Olde Shoppe would have been pronounced. (Except Y was thorn, oh how I love thorn, bring it back.)

I am fascinated by the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT. No one really knew why it took place. It just happened over the course of the 16th Century.

(If I wasn't Against the Excelsior threads, I would be putting this in it: "There's a Frieslander come to talk to you, Geoffrey." "Tell them to go away - I'm dead".)

The linguistics book I'm reading at the moment must be very old. It gets into the effect of West African languages' syntax on Black English ("Women be shopping") without bringing up the dread spectre of Ebonics. (Though considering the mistakes it's made about the Finns and Arrowsmithing, I'm not sure I believe it.)

(he also told me that the american accent derives from the west country accent of four centuries ago, and the australian accent from the cockney accent of two centuries ago)

(he also sometimes makes things up by mistake)

Australia = Cockney, this is actually true.

(Why do I always imagine that with really heavy reverb on it?)

I'm sorry, that was a poor attempt at a joke. Cracking thread, Kate.

(The Carribean-West Country connection is actually more plausible. Except, again, with large interference by West African grammar and syntax.)

The Southern US - West Country thing seemed plausible because of the vowels. (Southern US vowels show distinct pre-GVS tendencies, but this was common all over the more backwater parts of the UK at the time, such as the Midlands, where many of the Puritans etc. actually came from) However, Southern US accents do *not* show the consonant shift which is very distinctive of West Country accents. ("Zee" for see, "Zoider" for cider, "Vox" for fox, etc.)

So did anyone find out anything about the Basque-American Indian connection? Off topic - but have they proven where the Native American originally came from, as there is evidence to say they could have come from Russia, Scandinavia, West Ghana and practically anywhere you may care to choose. Someone who knows about these things said they were definitely from Northern Asia via the Bering SStraits but I'm not entirely convinced. Sorry, I know this is kind of diverging from the topic in hand so a quick answer is appreciated to stop derailment.

And what of Luxembourgois?

Is the next great vowel shift to do with Estuary English?

OK, thinking about GREAT VOWEL SHIFTS...

(N.B. I don't actually know anything about this, so this is all theorisation on my part and possibly wildly wrong.)

The current one, I am guessing, has a lot to do with the mass media. The advent of radio, and the "BBC Standard Accent" first did its bit to erradicate local accents. Yet as the BBC has de-stuffified, and culture has changed (especially with the influx of American media) UK accents have "dropped" in class.

HSA was commenting (after listening to a BBC radio programme his grandfather was on) that middle class people of his grandfather's generation spoke in accents that sound to us almost unbelievably posh. A person of the same class today, rather than making a conscious or unconscious effort to sound standardised "posh" makes the same effort to sound "street". Part of this is cultural (reverse classism, social socialism or whathaveyou) but part of this is very definitely down to the media.

Up until 100 years ago, the only accents a person would have been exposed to would be those of their neighbours. For the past several decades, we have had standarising (or de-standarising as the case may be) accents beamed directly into our homes by the media. This *is* going to change our accents.

So... what was going on in the England of the 16th Century to provoke the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT? Culturally, there was a shift away from Europe. England lost its land and its stake in France by the end of the Tudor dynasty. You have English Kings (or, more notably Queen) ruling a country which thinks of itself as distinct from Europe. Hence, the abandonment of "European" style vowels.

And in terms of the media, you have the invention of the printing press less than a century before. The Press (both literally and in its current meaning) had a standardising effect on languages all across Europe. Both regional dialects and spelling were regularised. And in England's case, they were standardised to the London/Southeast dialect.

This change would have happened more slowly than our own Vowel Shift, hence the delayed effect of about a century from the invention of the press. Because, indeed, pronounciation was still changing, even as spelling was being standardised. (Hence why so many English words have such odd, non-phonetical, to our ears, spellings.)

The first generation of people reading printed books, their accents would not have been affected. But their children, their grandchildren, as literacy became more common - as people began being taught English from books, rather than books reflecting spoken English - in 50 to 100 years, you have your vowel shift.

Wow, that was long. Now I need to go to the library and prove myself right or wrong!

(it's also one of the causes of the Civil War! everyone started reading the bible and interpreting it THEIR way)

spelling was as you spoke, but gradually stabilised, meaning that orthography standardised towards a particular (regional? fashionable?) zone, almost certainly NOT one determined "democratically"... i forget exactly when standard modern spelling was established - but once it was, that wd constitute the final end of this pressure towards vowel shift, and a stabilisation until new mass media bumped speech sideways again

Princess Di was edging towards a more Estuary accent, but I wouldn't count this as a vowel shift. Nobody speaks like the Queen anyway as she has some kind of special version of RP reserved especially for her. So really using the royal family as a metre of language isn't really accurate. But yes, the prestige of the Estuary accent in England is growing and may one day succeed RP. It's likely that RP as we know it will cease to exist in the next couple of decades, spoken only by older generations. This is not as dramatic a shift as the original great vowel shift though.

To add to Kate's post - of course the GVS did not affect all English speakers. It was particularly effective in the South of England whereas the North kept most of it's vowels - hence the difference between the long and short "a" in regional variations of the word "bath" etc.

Native American languages are a whole nother kettle of fish - the Americas were settled over an astonishingly long time scale, with various groups getting cut off by various Ice Ages at different times. As with Europe, there were many different waves of settlement by tribes with vastly different geographical origins and vastly different languages. However, the preponderance of evidence does suggest that the continents were colonised from West to East - i.e. over the Bering Straits and down that way. So bad news for those who would like to believe that the Mayans were really Egyptians (I mean, look at those pyramids!) or Atlantaens (hence the Basque connection, clearly!)

And as for French influence on Southern speech - depends which part of the South. I've read lots of things about various influences being betrayed by the pronounciation or non-pronounciation of R's. But I can't remember what they are. (Apart from the fact that Americans are more likely to pronounce them than Posh British.)

OK, x-post, but I've got to get offline now and go do some shopping...

Ah yes! Why, in one particular pop group, the entire changing face of Southern English is laid bare!

Charlie speaks a posh, Public School version of RP so thick that his own bandmates admitted that they could not understand him when he first joined the band. Perhaps he might be able to chit-chat with Chaucer!

James speaks with a middle class Estuary accent so flat that even his affected Americanisms (ah, the perfidious influence of pop culture and the media) sound exotic by comparison.

Cheeky Cockney Matt provides the lower end of the spectrum, with its social socialism cred of "cool" and "street" (Though, knowing he's been to stage school, it might actually be more Albert Square than Street.)

Matt and James, middle and lower class, are perfectly decipherable to one another. Yet, as far as they are concerned, Posh Charlie might as well be speaking the same Olde French that the Normans brought over in 1066!

JOHN FASHANU
JOHN FASHANU
JOHN FASHANU

Apparently, Finnish is a phonetically conservative language - words tend to be pronounced the same way for hundreds, even thousands of years.

He did not say that it *was* an Indo-European language, but that it borrowed heavily from its Indo-European neighbours. Recently borrowed words were phonetically intact Medieval Swedish, while older words were phonetically intact Old Norse, meaning that the really old borrowings can be counted on to provide likely examples of the original proto-Germanic branch of Indo-European. (Which produced German, Scandinavian languages and English.)

Hence, a non-I-E could provide examples of an ancient and now lost branch of Indo-European!

Finns! Conservative! Well I never!

(No one likes my Busted analogy, boo hoo. Well, it took 92 posts before there was a fart joke! I was good!)

I looked at Sassaure (or however you spell his name) and decided that it looked very dry and academic and slightly too proto-post-modern for me, and then I saw... THE ATLAS OF LANGUAGES which had colour glossy pictures and maps and diagrammes and shaded map diagrammes which showed every language and language family in the world mapped in full colour glossy images of the continents and I fell in love with it before looking at the price, ouch.

I also got Tore Janson's "Speak" and yet another History Of English Words (I am such a sucker for the maps and diagrammes, I am...)

Oh, but this history of English words has a wonderful diagramme of swearing from 1350 to 1909. Odsbodikins!

This is a great little book. I was looking for my copy yesterday so that I could contribute to this thread without getting things wrong.

did you have to read "The Language Instinct" that one was good.....other than that, I didn't pay much attention to my classes. Grammar trees are lame.

(My big atlas of languages has thrown up about half a dozen strange, displaced, languages unrelated to the ones around them. There seems to be one on every continent! Except two near Japan!)

I'm not sure I'd want to say there is any current vowel shift happening in English on par with the Great Vowel Shift. That took about two hundred years and involved a major reshuffling of vowels. Due to widespread literacy and a huge corpus of English texts, modern English speakers have a much stronger concept of our language as being something that exists by itself independent of what people actually speak. This acts as a check against the natural tendency of our language to undergo changes. The 15th and 16th centuries were much less literate. Language has been around a lot longer than writing so the effect of writing on language change isn't something I'd call natural but it's there.

For the past several decades, we have had standarising (or de-standarising as the case may be) accents beamed directly into our homes by the media. This *is* going to change our accents.

Be careful here... the research I've seen about the effect of TV, radio and film on dialects finds it has almost zero impact. Counterintuitive yes but language quite often is.

What books are you reading, Kate?

(the krza)I thought it'd be fun, Kate, but I don't think linguists these days are so hot on historical linguistics (at least my school's department wasn't), which to me is the most fascinating.

I think it depends on where you're studying. At the University of Texas there wasn't a huge emphasis on syntax and semantics. I loved historical, and a big thing in linguistics today is documenting the world's languages before a lot of them go away, and to do that properly you need a pretty good handle on phonology, phonetics, and how languages change.

What the fuck?

The Basque people fished in north Atlantic waters for many, many centuries and may have been the first group to systematically fish for cod and herring off the Newfoundland coast, but they didn't share this information with other groups because of its commercial value. Iceland was probably a good place to do ship repairs and to resupply while out on fishing expeditions.

The phrases all sound like trading phrases, which makes sense.

In many parts of rural northern England, a system of counting sheep based on ancient Brittonic persisted until relatively recently. In the Dales, 1-10 was yain, tain, edderoa, peddero, pitts, tayter, leter, overro, coverro, dix (or variants thereof). https://t.co/F0ZjxB9pXG

— History of Leeds | James Rhodes (@rh0desy) July 9, 2019

See also: Jake Thackray - Molly Metcalfe

https://youtu.be/TiXINuf5nbI

Yeah, that's pretty well known - and not confined to Yorkshire by any means.

My immediate thought was Jake Thackray, that's how I knew about this. I really like the song, too.

... or the North... or England...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera

a Thackray wormhole on you tube is a very good hour spent.

Jake was The Man.

Beautiful song. I never knew there were so many variants of Yan Tan Tether Mether (the version I knew, which according to the wiki, turns out to be the Swaledale variant!).