origins of Indo-European languages

I've always been obsessed with languages (Romance ones preferably, but will also consider others), so it's only natural to take any opportunity to write about science-language interface. There haven't been all that many (the 2012 feature on the evolution of writing and my ancient paper on the linguistics of protein folding spring to mind), but recent work on ancient DNA has yielded a good excuse to revisit the family tree of Indo-European languages, comparing results from archaeology, genetics, linguistics and cultural history.

The resulting feature is out now:

The Indo-European ancestors' tale

Current Biology Volume 28, Issue 12, 18 June 2018, Pages R679–R682

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Statistical analyses can show that ancient fairy tales have likely evolved from common ancestors of the Indo-European language groups or even from the culture that spoke the Proto-Indo-European language. (Image: From The Folktales of Bengal illustrated by Warwick Goble.)

how Romanian lost its romance

I taught a workshop at Bucharest recently and just before the trip I discovered an old French book about the Romanian language at an Oxfam store, so I read much of it on the way there, and found it really intriguing. As the book is probably out of print, I’ll summarise some of the points I found interesting.

Latin heritage: The area was only under Roman control for a century and a half (106-275) – and the Latin derived language only became prevalent after the Romans left. The invasion of the Huns in 375 and destruction of the towns drove the Latin-speaking townsfolk out to the countryside, where they mingled with the peasants who spoke a Thracian language related to modern Albanian, and from this encounter Romanian was born. Then, the language was fairly isolated from the other Romance languages, and thus kept old-fashioned terms when medieval Latin changed and passed those changes on to Italian and French. Intriguingly, the Iberian languages, on the other end of the continent, retain some of the same old-style expressions, so they sometimes resemble Romanian more than the geographically closer languages Italian and French. For instance, when Latin, French and Italian switched from mensa to tabula for table, the peripheral Romance languages in Iberia and Romania didn’t get the memo, so we have mesa in Spanish and Portuguese and masӑ in Romanian.

German influences include cartof (Kartoffel) for potato, and halba (Halbe) for half a measure of beer, and a word derived from “Schmecker” for their argot. The name of the region around Bucharest, Wallachia, derives from the Germanic word for non-Germanic people, as in Welsch, Wallon, Welsh, etc.

Alphabet: Romanian used the Cyrillic alphabet until 1860, which it had originally adopted from Bulgarian for complex reasons linked to the shared orthodox religion.

Romance language that lost the romance: Again as a consequence of being isolated from the Romance languages in central Europe, Romanian lost Latinate terms from the area of love, romance, relationships. While most areas of Western Europe got their romantic ideas from the troubadours, Romanian lost the words derived from Latin amor, amare, carus and sponsa, and replaced them with the Slav words iubi, dragoste, drag and nevasta, respectively. So it became a Romance language that loves in Slav terms.

Later however, Romanian reconnected with French and got many words from modern French (eg bej, ruj, coafor, creion …), as well as lexical and grammatical influences from Hungarian, Turkish, and Slav languages, often even within the same word. So it ended up as a unique mixture not just of several language influences but also of languages from unrelated families, and with connections all across Europe.

Source:

Gilbert Fabre: Parlons roumain, langue et culture Editions L’Harmattan 1991

PS - a quick check on French amazon revealed that it is available as an e-book as well as second-hand. Plus, from the same series there are books about dozens of other languages, mainly those not so commonly taught, so this is a huge temptation. (Lots of them have the same title with only the name of the language exchanged, so you find them easily with the search terms: parlons langue culture. However, there are also recent deviations from the pattern, eg Parlons slovaque, une langue slave, from 2009)

cultural history of geek speak

review of Netymology, by Tom Chatfield

Over the last two decades, the world-wide web has rapidly evolved to become the focus of a world-wide super-culture shared by several billion people using it. This culture has developed new standards of communication and civility, virtual communities (some with their own distinctive cultures), and terminology.

Just with a brief discussion of the etymology and usage of 100 of the termini of the internet age, Tom Chatfield has achieved much more than just creating an annotated list of fancy new words. While one could use it as a reference to look up words that have remained unfamiliar or puzzling (though an index would help with this kind of use), a cover-to-cover reading conjures up a cultural history of the internet age. Each of the words and concepts discussed also serves as a mirror reflecting the behaviour of web users and online communities from a different angle.

Along the way there are lovely little factoids waiting to be picked up. My favourites include: Thomas Edison writing about “bugs” in his inventions; the patron saint of the internet (St. Isidore of Seville, apparently); the use of “OMG” in a 1917 letter addressed to Churchill; and the fact that there is a Wikipedia entry on the gender of connectors and fasteners.

In some cases, the the 3-pages standard length of the chapters left me yearning for more, but then again, the book might have easily become unwieldy, and for those who want to investigate further, there’s always the internet …

PS: on a related topic, also see my recent feature on the evolution of online culture.

20 años de Ecos

Ecos de España y Latinoamérica, the magazine for learning Spanish, is 20 years old this month (as is a member of my family). Funny that. I've already praised the magazine here, so I'll just add "many happy returns" to that. Our household does in fact have a subscription at the moment, so long may it prosper.



Ecos Online


PS in other Latinamerican news, biochemist Alberto Granado, Che Guevara's travelling companion of Motorcycle Diaries fame, has died aged 88. There is an interesting obituary in the Guardian

the train ends here

Linguists in Germany are very excited these days: they have the unique opportunity to witness the birth and evolution of a new language, known as Bahn-Englisch or Railway English (RE):

http://schplock.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/we-arrive-berlin-spandau/

http://www.wissenslogs.de/wblogs/blog/sprachlog/sprachstruktur/2010-03-08/die-deutsche-bahn-bewahrerin-der-englischen-sprache

This language is consistently used by people making public announcements on DB trains and stations. While it uses English words, RE has no similarity to real English, typically using word-by-word translation of German idiomatic expressions.

For instance, the UK announcement "This service terminates here." translates to RE: "The train ends here."

Now I could spend hours reminiscing and making fun of this (I think there are even books dedicated to this pass time), but what really puzzles me is that RE still continues to thrive even though the announcements must be entirely useless to their target audience, i.e. to those rail passengers who don't understand German.

The only way of decoding RE announcements is to translate them back into German (word by word), which, of course, anybody who actually needs announcements in English wouldn't be able to do. Also, all place names (and a few English words) are pronounced the German way, so many foreign passengers may not even recognise the name of their destination when it is announced.

Thus, somebody in rail management should have realised that by now and either have the announcements scrapped or arranged for the relevant people to be trained in announcements in proper English.

I'm wondering whether anybody who has travelled on German railways without knowing much German has ever managed to make sense of these announcements. Do let me know.

PS oh, and talking about all things German and badly translated, happy 50th birthday to Gabriele Susanne Kerner, widely known as Nena. Her breakthrough song "99 Luftballons" actually has very nicely crafted lyrics in German, but you wouldn't be able to tell from the English version "99 red balloons".

numerically confused

I'm getting the impression that the English language is getting increasingly mixed up at its interface with maths, i.e. the use of numbers, singular, plural, etc.

Examples:

* Nobody agrees what speciation means (quote from a news feature highlighted in a read box, Nature last week, page 867). "Nobody" means: Not a single person, mathematically: 0 Surely, to disagree, you need at least two people, so every single person on his or her own would be in agreement with the rest of the set, i.e. him or herself. So the smallest possible level of agreement, if you have as many opinions as people, would be: No two people agree ...

* often heard in speech and also seen in print: She's one of those people who ... If you deconvolute that, it means: "She's one people out of the number of people who ..." As there is no singular to the word people as used here (as opposed to people meaning population), I find this usage completely unacceptable.

* One thing that is common usage and seems to be insisted upon by editors, though I find it highly illogical, and it is not found in other languages I know: "He's one of the writers who doesn't ..." The verb in the relative clause is, of course, attached to the "who", and who refers to "writers," and is thus plural. I have no idea how this got into the rule books, but it's just stupid and wrong.

* Why does the media hate me? asks Martin Amis in the Guardian. I would argue that media is the plural of medium, so it should be used as a plural. Although I can see what Amis is trying to do - he wants to present "the media" as a sinister power that has decided to ruin his career by writing bad things about him. The alternative view, which I find factually and grammatically more satisfying, is that "the media" are many different institutions and people who have separately come to the conclusion that he is a ...

* Often heard and read: "The amount of items ... " When I learned English many years ago, I believe I was told that countable items should be referred to as "number of items", while bulk materials that aren't countable may be referred to as e.g. "the amount of water". There is of course a further complication in that we tend to speak of amounts when talking about money, which is countable, but if a specific unit is used, we could still say the number of dollars, or the amount (as measured) in dollars.