Re: Related languages (Re: A China-Sumer connection)

From: Neeraj Mathur (neemathur_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/22/05 

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 23:55:41 -0000

"Comm" <tjsrno@spampost.com> wrote in message
news:KMZ%d.1858$H06.1146@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>> Getting back to the topic at hand though, I will point out that a lot
>> of linguists do point to similarities in vocabulary to demonstrate that
>> languages are related. I know when I've done searches on the internet
>> for "Indo-European" I find tables showing how you can find similar
>> words in most Indo-European languages. The suggestion is, of course,
>> that these words all descended from proto-Indo-European. To layman
>> though, it seems as though the main criteria for classifying languages
>> is vocabulary so, yes, I think it would surprise a lot of laymen if
>> they were told that English, while a Germanic language, is not related
>> to French beyond the fact that they are both Indo-European languages.
>
> I think they'd say that French is more closely related than Sanskrit.
> Btw, is Greek also a Romance language?

Well about Greek first then: it is not genetically a Romance language, but
rather a separate branch of Indo-European. To an historical linguist, a
Romance language is one which is descended from Latin and the Italic branch
of Indo-European. There are nevertheless strong links between most Romance
languages and Greek: Latin borrowed a lot of Greek vocabulary all through
its history, and much more recently Modern Greek has borrowed an awful lot
of Modern Italian vocabulary. Then, as a sort of freak co-incidence, the
phonology of Modern Greek has ended up evolving in such a way as to be
remarkable similar to that of Spanish - they seem to have many of the same
vowels, and their former voiced stops have all yielded spirants (well, the
Spanish situation is a bit more complex than that). So superficially, Modern
Greek can look a lot like Romance. Classical Greek, on the other hand, is a
lot more like Vedic Sanskrit than Latin, despite the vocabulary Latin
borrowed from it.

Now, a more general point, for Martin. He points out that linguists use
similarities in vocabularies to determine relations, and offers the tables
as evidence. This is true, but it is not the correct approach. What
historical linguists and comparative philologists actually do is trace the
history of any given word through the language. If you do this, you will
find that there are basically two possible scenarios: first, the word can
have been borrowed at a given moment from some other language. If this
happens, your tracing of the word's history ends at the time of the
borrowing (to trace it further would mean tracing it in a different
language; if you are a specialist in English, you might get 'jungle' as far
back as the moment it enters Hindi but you may simply not have the resources
or knowledge to trace it further within Hindi itself). On the other hand, if
the word is not borrowed, then essentially you are tracing it back to the
end of your records. Your search ends at the point when your records for the
past run out. Comparative philology now provides the opportunity to go one
step further back. It is at this point, and this point only, that comparison
tables between different languages become relevant. If you make a large
enough table, then if two languages offer regular sound correspondences, you
can go further back and posit that they are all the descendants of a given
form and you can say that the word you were tracing is 'inherited' from that
parent source. If you cannot set up these regular correspondences, then your
search ends in mystery.

This is much more sophisticated than simply drawing up a table of words that
look similar. If you were simply comparing vocabulary, you might be tempted
to posit some sort of connection between Latin 'deus' and Greek 'theos',
both of which mean 'god'. However, there is no way to draw up a regular
sound correspondence to account for these two words that is consistent with
all the other words of the language, and so we cannot say that there is any
connection between them.

All of the trees that linguists draw up are based on patterns that arise
from tracing the histories of the individual words of a language. They
exclude borrowing because that would make things too complex: you can only
have one source from which to 'inherit' words, and you can only 'inherit'
them at one point in time, while you can borrow words from as many sources
as you like and in as many moments in history as your fancy takes. The tree
diagrams are simply shorthands for showing the inherited relationships; the
vocabulary comparisons that you will see philologists make are specifically
of those words that are inherited, not borrowed.

It is true that a complete description of the history of, say, English would
need to talk about the French influence, the fact that French and Latin were
such large and continuous sources of borrowing. But a tree diagram does not
claim to do any such thing - it is limited to offering a history of the
words that were inherited by a language only. This is much more easily
identified, codified and worked with: since inheritance happens only once,
you can describe it in general rules that will apply to all inherited words;
borrowing happens all over and so a separate description is needed for each
borrowed word. That is why most linguists use the much simpler, easier to
fully understand situation and use 'related' in reference to the tree
diagrams only.

>> It would seem as though linguists are claiming that English is no more
>> like French than it is like Hindu.
>
> Doubt it. French is closer than Hindu.

Hindi, please. In terms of vocabulary, you are correct; you are probably
correct in terms of grammar I'm not as convinced. Hindi has an aspect system
very similar to English (the contrast between 'He runs' and 'He is running'
is as important to Hindi as to English, but does not exist in French);
English use of auxiliaries to colour speech approaches the complex system in
Hindi but is not really like anything in French (contrast 'He was beaten up'
to 'He got beaten up' - Hindi does this sort of thing with many, many more
verbs).

> Certainly English speaking people
>> can decipher a lot of words from Romance languages and very little from
>> Indian languages (meaning languages spoken in India and not meant to
>> imply that there is an all encompassing Indian language group). Again,
>> it would be prejudicial NOT to recognize the relationship between
>> languages in India and Europe just because they sound different. By
>> the same token, however, it is intuitive to think that closely related
>> languages should sound similar and that people who speak one should be
>> able to understand someone who speaks the other.

This argument seems to be confusing two very, very different things. Two
langauges can 'sound similar' and two languages can have vocabulary in
common. It is certainly true that English has a greater percent of its
vocabulary in common with French than with Hindi. However, in terms of their
sounds, Hindi is much, much more like French than either are to English.
Suggesting that 'closely related languages should sound similar' is not
really a tenable argument: Armenian sounds a lot like its close neighbours
in the Caucasus, but is not related to them at all. As for being able to
understand them, I don't see how that argument is meant to work at all. I'm
afraid that, despite having spoken English for my entire life, I still very
often do not understand Scottish people talking - and that is supposedly the
same language! Punjabi and Hindi are extremely closely related, but I can't
understand Punjabi. Nor can I understand Dutch, one of English's closest
relatives.

> I disagree. I know for a fact that SOME DO - and some do not. And some
> languages sound very different, depends on who hears them. One person on
> here thinks Portuguese does not sound like Spanish and sounds Slavic. I
> disagree. All those Hispanic languges sound like Hispanic to me. None of
> them sound remotely Slavic to me.

To me Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese, since that's all I've really heard
as opposed to seen) sounds disturbingly little like any form of Spanish. For
instance, the word meaning 'of' and translating the Spanish 'de', although
it looks a lot like it written, often gets pronounced like the English word
'gee'. I agree with you, Comm, that some related languages can sound very
similar and others terribly different.

> I have a table I got somewhere from the web - it shows Ural-Altaic and a
> lot of other languages related on a similar tree. Of course, I notice
> that THEIR linguists are wholly rejected by the IE-ists. If I find it,
> I'll send it to you.

I talked above about how trees are secondary to racing the history of words
to a common source. The problem most modern linguists have with Ural-Altaic
is that it doesn't seem that there are actually that many words that do seem
to have a common source, nor does it seem that there are reliable, regular
sound changes that allow us to move back beyond the beginning of our
records. The 'Uralic' half of the equation is itself very certain - it can
be set up by tracing word histories. However, the person who came up with
the idea of linking this with Turkic and the others was blown away by
resemblances that are now recognised as superficial (agglutination as the
principal for much syntax and vowel harmony - both of which have now been
seen recognized in several other languages).

Therefore, you will find that someone who talks about Indo-European will
start by telling you a lot about etymologies of given words in certain
languages (the vocab comparisons that Martin was talking about) while people
who talk about Ural-Altaic have a lot more to say about language strategies
than etymologies. The comparisons between Uralic and the other languages are
quite interesting and worthy of study, and as such they are studied not by
historical linguists but by people interested in linguistic typology.

Neeraj Mathur

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