― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 29 April 2004 09:40 (nineteen years ago) link
― briania, Thursday, 29 April 2004 12:14 (nineteen years ago) link
― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 29 April 2004 12:23 (nineteen years ago) link
JOHN FASHANUJOHN FASHANUJOHN FASHANU
― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 29 April 2004 12:27 (nineteen years ago) link
― briania, Thursday, 29 April 2004 12:38 (nineteen years ago) link
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!)
― Super-Kate (kate), Thursday, 29 April 2004 12:52 (nineteen years ago) link
― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 29 April 2004 13:19 (nineteen years ago) link
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!
― Super-Kate (kate), Thursday, 29 April 2004 14:54 (nineteen years ago) link
― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 29 April 2004 15:00 (nineteen years ago) link
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.
― N. (nickdastoor), Thursday, 29 April 2004 15:02 (nineteen years ago) link
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.
― waxyjax (waxyjax), Thursday, 29 April 2004 17:35 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:12 (nineteen years ago) link
(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!)
― Super-Kate (kate), Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:29 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:35 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:43 (nineteen years ago) link
― Michael White (Hereward), Thursday, 29 April 2004 18:46 (nineteen years ago) link
― waxyjax (waxyjax), Thursday, 29 April 2004 19:06 (nineteen years ago) link
― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 29 April 2004 23:08 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Thursday, 29 April 2004 23:40 (nineteen years ago) link
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Friday, 30 April 2004 01:20 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Friday, 30 April 2004 02:07 (nineteen years ago) link
― the krza (krza), Friday, 30 April 2004 02:08 (nineteen years ago) link
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 (nineteen years ago) link
What the fuck?
― Larry 'Leg' Smith (Tom D.), Thursday, 19 May 2016 21:38 (seven years ago) link
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 (seven years ago) link
The phrases all sound like trading phrases, which makes sense.
― www.ramenclassaction.com (man alive), Friday, 20 May 2016 01:46 (seven years ago) link
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
― calzino, Tuesday, 9 July 2019 22:10 (four years ago) link
See also: Jake Thackray - Molly Metcalfe
https://youtu.be/TiXINuf5nbI
― ShariVari, Tuesday, 9 July 2019 22:22 (four years ago) link
Yeah, that's pretty well known - and not confined to Yorkshire by any means.
― Orpheus Knutt (Tom D.), Tuesday, 9 July 2019 22:33 (four years ago) link
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
... or the North... or England...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera
― Orpheus Knutt (Tom D.), Tuesday, 9 July 2019 22:35 (four years ago) link
a Thackray wormhole on you tube is a very good hour spent.
― calzino, Tuesday, 9 July 2019 23:03 (four years ago) link
Jake was The Man.
― Orpheus Knutt (Tom D.), Tuesday, 9 July 2019 23:22 (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