Linguistic Discussion Of European Languages of Obscure origin

'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!)