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It was semantics that killed it for me, but I'd had my share of "deep structures," sentence trees and the like by that point, too. Phonetics was really interesting, but that's probably because so much of the historical work is based on it in a way.
― the krza (krza), Thursday, 29 April 2004 23:40 (twenty years ago) link
even though it is a slavic language ... and, hence, indo-european (and outside of this thread's purview) ... there are still about 100K people in the middle of the former east germany who speak sorbian (or wendish). sorbian is a western slavic language (more akin to polish or czech, as opposed to russian or serbo-croatian), and even though there are barely 100K sorbs there are at least TWO sorbian dialects -- east sorbian and west sorbian!
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 30 April 2004 01:20 (twenty years ago) link
Cool! I didn't realize any other language had the Polish ³, but there it is. Weirdly, in Sorbian they call themselves "Serbs." I wonder if this has a similar meaning to the Serbian "Serb"...
― the krza (krza), Friday, 30 April 2004 02:07 (twenty years ago) link
um, that ³ should be the Polish (and Sorbian, I guess) crossed l
― the krza (krza), Friday, 30 April 2004 02:08 (twenty years ago) link
The Great Vowel Shift probably didn't have a proximate cause. It can be explained by the fact that languages exist in a state of flux. Drastic changes like the GVS are the rule for language, not the exception.
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.
― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Friday, 30 April 2004 02:14 (twenty years ago) link
twelve years pass...
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.
― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Thursday, 19 May 2016 21:45 (eight years ago) link
three years pass...
My immediate thought was Jake Thackray, that's how I knew about this. I really like the song, too.
― emil.y, Tuesday, 9 July 2019 22:34 (four years ago) link
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!).
― Uptown VONC (Le Bateau Ivre), Wednesday, 10 July 2019 10:20 (four years ago) link