Linguistic Discussion Of European Languages of Obscure origin

(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.

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!).