Linguistic Discussion Of European Languages of Obscure origin

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!).