Scotttrembls raised an interesting point: “Do you know if there’s any evolutionary relationships between SVO, SOV and VSO languages? The evolutionary explanation never seems to come up- has this already been disporved or do we not understand enough about language evolution?”

There’s no evolutionary relationship in the sense that all SVO languages are genetically related and separate from all SOV languages etc. SOV, SVO and VSO languages are distributed throughout the world and are found in many different language families. But we know that languages can change types over a period of time so, in this sense, there are evolutionary paths from one type to another. For example, Old English and Latin are considered to be canonically SOV languages but their descendants (English and the modern Romance languages) are SVO languages. You might wonder when an SOV language stops being an SOV languages and becomes an SVO language. You have to bear in mind that these types refer to canonical structures, languages may use other structures at the same time but their use will be more restricted (although there are languages which many would characterise as being ‘free word order’ in which case they would not fall into any of these categories). For example, English is canonically SVO, but English uses other word orders for questions, focus structures etc. So the relative frequencies of particular structures within a language may change over time resulting in what appears to be a single type-switch.

Work on implicational universals (universals of the form which says if a language has structure X then it will have structure Y) initiated by Joseph Greenberg and taken further by John Hawkins makes some interesting predictions for language change. Greenberg’s formulations were for the most part tendencies, i.e. if X then Y significantly more often than not, but Hawkins aimed to identify exceptionless universals which often involved adding extra conditions, i.e. if X then, if Y then Z. This places more constraints on the forms languages can take but it also makes strong predictions about evolutionary paths of language change. The reasoning is roughly: if these formulations hold for the present situation and if there is no reason to assume things were any different in the past then languages can only move through allowed ‘states’ as determined by the strong implicational universals.

We understand enough about the evolution of some language families to be able to test these predictions and the predictions have been largely correct so far. However, many would not take this evolutionary picture to be an ‘explanation’, rather it is seen as a ‘description’ of the facts which allows us to characterise possible evolutionary paths of change and distinguish them from impossible ones. Given that each stage of a language is a present-day language in its time, it is still ultimately up to the explanations offered by formal and functional approaches to account for the form a language takes at any particular point in its evolutionary history.

The words for ‘one hundred’ in Indo-European languages exemplify an ancient sound change – the centum/satem split (the Latin and Avestan words for ‘one hundred’ respectively).

Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed as having three ‘series’ of velar consonants – palatal velars, plain velars and labiovelars (*k^j, *k and *k^w respectively). However, in nearly all daughter languages, these three series collapsed into two. Languages on the centum-side of the split merged the palatal and plain series to be left with *k and *k^w and those on the satem-side merged the labiovelars and plain series to give *k^j and *k.

It was thought to be the case that the centum/satem split represented an ancient dialect division of Indo-European languages. Most centum-languages are found in the west whilst most satem-languages are found in the east. However, a number of problems with this view exist. Tocharian is a centum-language but is (or was) the furthest east of any Indo-European language. There is also evidence that some languages kept the three series distinct in certain environments longer than others, e.g. Luvian (an extinct IE language spoken in Anatolia).

This, plus other evidence, suggests that the centum/satem labels are better viewed as descriptive shorthands which are used to label mergers which occurred independently in various Indo-European daughter languages (although this view raises problems of its own as well!).

Hi All,

Apologies again for my lengthy delay in reviewing articles- just one more week till I defend my dissertation proposal and hopefully become ABD in time for 2019! I’ll have to continue my break until I get that sorted in early December, but in the meantime here’s an interesting article on what a linguist can learn from looking at a gravestone.

LL Recipe Comparison:

This article reminds me of the recipe for Linguine al Limone:

Much as you will be surprised to learn the amount of information linguists can glean from gravestones, you’ll find yourself surprised at the simple deliciousness of this easy yet luscious dish! This is a perfect complement to any kind of seafood main course or as a stand alone treat, much as this article will remind you that despite how we are buried alone our words will live on as a complement to our lives, and that’s something to be thankful for! Good cooking!

MWV 11/19/18

couchtaro:

An interesting internet culture thing I’ve never seen discussed is the “shared unstated”, where someone will say an incomplete sentence leaving out the most crucial information and yet it conveys an idea or emotion that everyone just. Gets.

An example of this is when people are reacting emotionally to something and they just say “I’M” and then leave off any verbs or anything else in general. We started out with “IM SCREAMING” or “IM DYING” and then evolved just into “I’M” which holds almost no information and yet, we get it.

Another example is the recent “one of the most of all time” phrase. The first time I saw it was about a very strange looking little creature, like maybe one of those rodents with the elongated snout, and one of the comments was “one of the most animals of all time.” The crucial adjective is missing but the Vibe is present. Is it one of the most beautiful animals, the best animals, the coolest animals, the weirdest animals? Certainly not. And we all know it’s not. But it definitely is one of the most animals, which is a separate thing. Idk. It just is. We just get it. It’s the shared unstated.

sewickedthread:

animatedamerican:

benito-cereno:

Okay, so:

Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sīc. That shows that the i is long, so it’s pronounced like “seek” and not like “sick.”

You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like “sic semper tyrannis” or “sic transit gloria mundi.” You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone’s mistakes when you’re quoting them: “Then he texted me, ‘I want to touch you’re (sic) butt.’”

It means, “thus,” which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning “in this way,” or “just like that.” As in, “just like that, to all tyrants, forever,” an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. “Everyone should do it this way.”

Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.

Ego: Num edisti totam pitam?

Tu, pudendus: Sic.

Me: Did you eat all the pizza?

You, shameful: That’s the way it is./Yes.

This was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.

In Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when you’re contradicting a negative assertion (”You don’t like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?” “Yes, I do!”). In Romanian, you say da, but that’s because they’re on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than you’re aware of.

But:

There was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We don’t really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyone’s originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning “this” or “that.” (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we don’t know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)

So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, “Yo, did you eat all the pizza?” you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, “This.” Then you would have him surrounded and killed.

Apparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves. “Why should I say ‘in that way’ like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say ‘this’ like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?” So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (That’s called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)

The Latin word for “this” is “hoc,” so a bunch of people started saying “hoc” to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul, “hoc” makes the relatively minor adjustment to òc, while in the more northerly areas they think, “Hmm, just saying ‘this’ isn’t cool enough. What if we said ‘this that’ to mean ‘yes.’” (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)

So they combined hoc with ille, which means “that” (but also comes to just mean “he”: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes oïl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues d’oil and the ones from the south are called langues d’oc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called “Occitan,” which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means “Oc-ish.” They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.

The oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, n'est-ce pas?

Yeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If you’ve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.

I guess what I’m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with “this,” or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying “Yeah, that”: you’re not new

this is all amazing, but I’m now waiting for people to start reblogging posts with the additional comment “SIC”.

SIC

dandelion

I absolutely never noticed this, but now that I’ve seen it, I cannot believe it never occurred to me. Dandelion, the flower of my childhood, is a borrowing from the French name dent de lion, which is literally “lion’s teeth.” 

I think this is the most adorable thing and I love it very much. 

The French came through the Middle English, spelled alternately as dantdelyonordendelyoun.This phrase has also popped up in related languages, such as the Welsh dant y llew, and the Spanish diente de léon.

At the very base of it is the Latin dens leonis, which translates pretty much the same as its linguistic descendants. 

Interestingly, in looking around some dictionaries, I found this entry from an anthology of plants written in 1578: 

The great Groundlwel, hath rough whitish leaves, deeply jagged and knawen upo both sides, like to the leaves of the white Mustard or lenuie. The stalke is two foote high or more: at the top where-of growe smal knoppes, which do open into smal yellow flowers the which are lodenly gone, changed into downie blowbawles like to the heades of Dantdelyon, and are blowen away with the winde.

I’m not sure I transcribed that right, but I really like the last bit: “changed into downie blowbawles like to the heades of Dantdelyon, and are blowen away with the winde.” 

Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language

This is a long read, but definitely worth it. This is an elaborate and more accurate version of what I tell people, who claim that language (any language) is deteriorating: why don’t you go speak Proto-Indo-European?

Words of the week: Coronacoinages

prokopetz:

We say “English doesn’t make any sense” because saying “English is unusual in that, when it borrows vocabulary from other languages, it tends to partially retain the morphology of the originating language group rather than adapting the word in question to English morphology, which is why we have twelve different ways to construct a plural” takes too long.