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beautiful-basque-country · 5 months

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ON BASQUE AND ITS TIES WITH GEORGIAN, ARMENIAN, AND TAMAZIGHT.

American linguist Morris Swadesh (1909-1967) created a world map of current languages according to comparative linguistics, taking into account their common origin. The lexico-statistical or glottochronological Swadesh method is based on taking 215 words in two groups of 100; key words such as personal pronouns, low numerals, parts of the body, kinship names, some action verbs, some adverbs of time and place, objects of nature, very common actions, bodily actions and questions.

Swadesh claimed that in the basic vocabulary the rate of change is so regular in languages, that he had been able to create a system of measuring the elapsed time in which two languages were related in the past and that today are separated geographically.

According to Swadesh, that basic vocabulary of 100 or 215 words changes less than 20% per millennium in each language. These variations in vocabulary leave a common ground between two or more languages related to each other, which is measured chronologically, thus establishing the time distance between a language and its more modern relatives. If the number of words with the same root between two languages in these two groups of 100 is less than or equal to 5%, it is considered a similarity by chance (the figure does not respond to anything specific, the method has many random parts), and if it is greater it would be the result of some common past.

There is a formula to know the time elapsed between the period in which the contact occurred and the current moment, and the result with Basque was the following (with the rest of the languages with which Basque has been compared by this method the result is inferior and not significant):

list 215 list 100

Northwest Circassian Caucasian:

6.62% 7.52%

Northwest Avar Caucasian:

3.80% 5.37%

Georgian, South Caucasian:

4.73% 7.52%

Rift Tamazight (northern Morocco):

6% 9.67%

Southern Tamazight (southern Morocco)

7.38% 10.86%

Many of the similarities considered good are more than questionable, since the evolution of words and languages is not taken into account, some borrowings from other languages are considered good, etc.

Nor can we forget American linguist R.L. Trask, that compared Hungarian and Basque and found in 2 hours of searching 65 similar words that could only be the result of chance, but that lead to question many investigations: this exercise tested by other researchers with other unrelated languages has given the same surprising result. R.L. Trask said “I can't understand why some linguists get so excited when they find two dozen Basque words that look like two dozen other Berber or Sumerian words.”

Basque and the languages of the Caucasus

The Caucasus is located 4,000 kilometers from Garonne-Pyrénées-Ebro where the Basques live. In the Caucasus, about 50 different peoples coexist with almost 22 languages. The main difficulty in establishing the Basque-Caucasian relationship consists of this lack of unity.

Swadesh's lexico-statistical ratio of Circassian and Georgian to Basque is 7.52%, higher than any other language in the world. The supposed contact would have occurred in the Magdalenian, about 10,000 years ago. With the rest of the languages of the Caucasus, current Basque is similar in typology (verbs, the ergative, etc.) and in the etymology of some words, but its lexical-statistical relationship with all of them is less than 5%.

There are also parallels between Basque and Georgian in syntactic aspects, such as the use of the ergative (transitive-intransitive verbs, “Nor-Nork” forms) that do not occur in any other European language, the reflexive way of making sentences such as: “I have seen my head in the mirror” (nire burua ispiluan ikusi dut), and not: “I have seen myself in the mirror”, the use of base twenty to count, etc.

But many current or recent renowned linguists are skeptical about the relationship with the Caucasian languages. Basque linguist Koldo Mitxelena (1915-1987) said that: “In summary, there are some Basque-Caucasian lexical similarities that cannot be demonstrated to be possible, but on the other hand there are a large number whose extraordinary implausibility can be demonstrated (…). Even if Basque and the Caucasian languages go back to a common origin, the number of missing intermediate links must be so high that it is to be feared that, due to not knowing them, the ancient ties of kinship will not be established."

If there is a relationship, for both Koldo Mitxelena and Xabier Kintana, it has to go back to the fifth and sixth millennia or earlier.

Basque and Armenian

Armenian linguist and Basque philologist Vahan Sarkisian, creator of the Basque-Armenian Dictionary and a Grammar of the Basque Language in his language, is the main promoter of the "Basque-Armenian theory" and the one who has done the most work in recent years on ethnolinguistic kinship between both peoples.

This prestigious Armenian linguist affirms that "the best promoters of this theory were neither Basques nor Armenians and, therefore, they had no direct interests in the issue. I am referring to the Englishman Edward Spencer Dodgson and the German Joseph Karst. The former knew well Basque. In Paris he began to study Armenian and quickly detected the similarities, which he initially summarized in a list of 50 words. Karst was an Armenianologist and, when he came into contact with Basque, he compared issues related to anthropology, the phonetic system, the grammar and the lexicon and extracted more than 400 similarities. (...) We understand without problems, for example, what Zabaltegi, or Ormazabal means, because it means exactly the same in Armenian. We feel at home, and that already means something. Armenian is considered an Indo-European language (Basque is the only pre-Indo-European language in all of Europe, prior to the invasions of these peoples), but if we bring to light the twenty most important regularities of the language we will see that they coincide more with Basque than with any other neighboring languages such as Georgian or Persian. And not only referring to the lexicon. In Armenian, for example, words are not formed with an initial -r, our throat has a hard time pronouncing it. The same thing happens to the Basque language, to the Basque throat.

Neither Armenian nor Basque recognize the accumulation of consonants, they are unpronounceable to us, while in other languages neighboring ours, such as Georgian, groups of up to five or six consonants are common. We could mention many other characteristics that separate us from our neighbors and bring us closer to Basque, such as the postponed article, the way of forming the plural, not to mention toponymy, which provides an enormous amount of similarities. (…) I believe that this type of coincidences - which even affect the articulation apparatus, which has a physiological nature - cannot arise from mere contact, they cannot be imported or exported. Karst said that Armenian and Basque are two varieties of the same linguistic stem (…) The only thing I would dare to say with any certainty is that perhaps in ancient times the entire area was occupied by the same ethnic-cultural element, which gave way terrain to other elements, leaving vestiges in Euskadi and Armenia, as survivors of a great and ancient civilization.”

It is curious that Armenian – which does not give any relationship with Basque through the Swadesh method – and Georgian are, apparently, more similar to Basque than to each other when they are neighboring peoples. To conclude this short summary, let's share a toponymic curiosity: in Georgia there is Mount Gorbeya (like the highest mountain in Bizkaia and Alaba), in Armenia is the sacred Mount Ararat (like the Aralar mountain range between Alaba, Gipuzkoa and Alta Navarra), and also a mountain named Gora (mountain in the language of the area and "up" in Basque). The curiosity is even greater because the Araxes River bathes Mount Aralar, and in the Armenian Mount Ararat there is a river called... Araxes.

Basque and Tamazight

Tamazight, by the Swadesh method, is not related to Arabic or Egyptian; nor with Georgian, but with Basque, as well as the Cadmitosemitic languages from which it comes. Therefore, Basque is a language that may have common elements with Georgian and Berber, but they do not have any with each other.

The percentage of lexical-statistical relationship of Swadesh of Basque with Southern Tamazight is 7.38% and with Rift Tamazight is 6% (taking the 215 words because with 100 the percentage increases). Therefore, by this method there would be a relationship or common substrate between both languages. Based on the percentage relationship, contact would have taken place about 8,000-9,000 years ago.

In Berber the names given to animals are very similar to those given in Basque. «Aker» & «iker» (billygoat), «asto» & «ezet» (donkey); They also coincide in the way of saying horse, crow, river, brother, lie, name ("Izen" and "isem"), "I" and others.

Within this analysis we must mention the Guanches, native inhabitants of the Canary Islands before the arrival of the Spaniards. From the writings found (archaeology confirms this) it is believed that the Guanches would speak a Tamazight language that, due to the isolation of the islands, would maintain a greater degree of relationship with Basque. There are those who even see Basque place names in the Canary Islands such as: Los Llanos de Aridane (Harrigane: stone peak), Argindei, Tinizara (Tinitzaha), Tajuia, Tenegia, Jedei (Iedegi) in La Palma and in Lanzarote: Masdeche (Mahats- etxe: grape-house), Haria, Orzola, Guinate (Gainate: high step), Yaiza (haitza: rock), Ajache, Tesegite, Mozaza etc.

An anecdote that is often told is that the first conquerors of the Canary Islands believed that the natives spoke Basque.

Between Basque and Tamazight the similarities are reduced to the lexical or lexicographic level, since syntactically and grammatically there does not seem to be any relationship, both in current speech and in the past; there are just similarities in verbal articulation or in the use of some particles.

Julio Caro Baroja said in this regard: “I must warn in any case that the relationship between Basque and the African languages called Hamitic is not as founded as claimed. On the contrary, the hypothesis of a relationship between Basque and the Caucasian languages, which is perhaps the one that has produced the least interest in the Peninsula, seems to be the most prudent, because it is based on linguistic, morphological and strict observations.

Koldo Mitxelena had the same opinion, and believed it was necessary to study more the relationship between Basque and the Caucasian languages which, unlike the supposed kinship with Tamazight, did cause serious doubts.

[x]

@knario47

#euskal herria #basque country #pays basque #pais vasco #euskadi #linguistics #euskera #euskara #basque #language #armenian #georgian #tamazight

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gustavo-marquerie · 1 year

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PROTO-LANGUAGE¹

By Patrick C. Ryan

The Proto-Language is a hypothetically reconstructed language based on the

comparison of attested speech.

Press here to view essays on the Proto-Language.

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/ProtoLanguage-1.htm

The Proto-Religion is a hypothetically reconstructed religion based on the comparison of attested beliefs.

Press here to view essays on the Proto-Religion.

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/proto-religion/indexR.html

The Proto-Language was spoken by human beings at a time (100K BPE) before humanity dispersed from some central point over the earth (presumably Eastern Africa); and ethnic diversification began.

The underlying premise of these essays is that

ALL human languages derive from a single ancient source:

the Proto-Language.

Several files, which constitute short essays relating specific languages and language families to the Proto-Language and Indo-European are available for viewing or download as regular .HTM(L) files.

The Indo-European entries in some of the essays have been given without English glosses to encourage readers to fully explore the semantic ranges contained under entries for the roots in dictionaries like

Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch

For casually interested readers, an excellent and inexpensive source of valuable information is:

Morris, William (ed.). 1992. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans by Calvert Watkins (pp. 1496-1502); Indo-European Roots (pp. 1505-1550). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, which can be easily purchased (for $31.50 + shipping) from Amazon.com by simply pressing on the icon to the left.

Indo-European cognates are cited to demonstrate that even though intermediate proto-languages may not yet have been reconstructed (and taxonomies elaborated), (proto-)languages that are currently considered to be unrelated can be shown to ultimately be related when both are viewed in the context of the Proto-Language.

Indo-European roots therefore are intended as a control to demonstrate that the reconstructed Proto-Language roots have not been "designed" to correlate only with the vocabulary of the language(-family) under investigation.

Indo-European citations are not intended to suggest a closer genetic relationship of the language(-family) under discussion with Indo-European than with any other language(-family)!

This is a controversial theory that is not accepted by most experts — at least, at the present time.

The major objection is:

that a "proto-language" cannot be reconstructed.

Because of observed rates of vocabulary loss in historical languages (lexico-statistics), present-day languages 'should have been unable to retain' earlier vocabulary items because of the involved long periods of time (during which, presumably, vocabulary loss occurred at a rate similar to that observed historically), an inference from glottochronology. R. L. Trask has addressed related misuses of glotto-chronology and lexico-statistics.

A concept which is useful here is punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that long periods of "no change", punctuated by short periods of "radical change".

Some linguists have made invalid inferences from "modern" circumstances that exclude a priori the possibility of ancient language reconstruction. A. Vovin has discussed related issues. In my opinion, ethnic and linguistic stability in pre-agricultural societies did not permit the dramatic rate of vocabulary replacement observed more recently.

The proof is in the Comparison Studies presented below. If these studies are able to show cognates among languages now considered to be unrelated --- displaying regular sound and semantic correspondences, theoretical objections must retreat before plainly demonstrated facts.

The reader will be the judge of whether the Comparison Studies have, indeed, accomplished those objectives.

Any critique, positive or negative, will be welcomed.

To validate this theory will take the collaboration of experts from many linguistic backgrounds to reconstruct the taxonomy and intermediate proto-languages, which will ratify the conclusions reached from language-to-language comparison.

Files on Afrasian (Egyptian and Arabic), Altaic, Basque, Beng (Southern Mandé), Japanese, Mon/Hmong, (Sino-)Tibetan, Sumerian, and Uralic are accessible below, I have completed similar essays on Hurrian, and Nama (Khoisan); they will be added as they are converted to .HTM(L) format. Studies that have been begun preliminarily include Blackfoot (Algonquian), Mayan and Hunzib (Tsezic-Daghestan-East Caucasian).

I am hoping that others will want to collaborate in this effort with essays on (proto-)languages in their individual fields of study.

Patrick C. Ryan

[email protected]

view (or download)

AFRASIAN COMPARISON Table(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.AFRASIAN.3_table.htm

ALTAIC COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.ALTAIC.8.htm

BASQUE COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.BASQUE.4.htm

BENG (Southern Mandé) COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.BENG.1.htm

BLACKFOOT (Algonquian) COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.BLACKFOOT.11.htm

JAPANESE COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.JAPANESE.2.htm

draft MON/HMONG COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.MON-HMONG.6_table.htm

PAMA-NYUNGAN COMPARISON(.HTM) (based on available materials)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.PAMA-NYUNGAN.12.htm

(SINO-)TIBETAN COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.SINO-TIBETAN.10.htm

SUMERIAN COMPARISON Table(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.SUMERIAN.5_table.htm

URALIC COMPARISON(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/comparison.URALIC.7.htm

THE PROTO-LANGUAGE(.HTM) [5 essays]

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/ProtoLanguage-1.htm

PROTO-LANGUAGE MONOSYLLABLES(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/ProtoLanguage-Monosyllables.htm

PROTO-LANGUAGE PRIMER(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/ProtoLanguage-Primer.htm

TIMETABLE OF PROTO-LANGUAGE EVOLUTION(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/ProtoLanguage-Timetable.htm

IE CORRESPONDENCE TABLE {with the principal IE-derived language families}(.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/IECorrespondenceTable.htm

For examples of these comparative principles applied to

current linguistic problems, you might like to . . .

view (or download)

A Slightly Different View of sDm.f(essay-sDm.f.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/essay-sDm.f.htm

Coptic Vocalism([One/Two/Three].HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/Coptic_Vocalism_One.htm

Earlier Essays

Pre-Nostratic Pronouns - Early Noun Substitutions (Mother Tongue 11, September 1990)(PERSPRO1.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/PERSPRO1.htm

Proto-Language "He" and "It" - IE -l/-n Nouns (Dhumbadji! Vol. 1, No. 4; Winter 1994)(PERSPRO3A/B.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/PERSPRO1.htm

Review of Alexis Manaster-Ramer's Some Borrowed Numerals in Proto-Kartvelian (Dhumbadji! Vol. 2, No. 3, December 1995) Review: Dhumbadji! Vol. 3, No. 1, Summer 1996 (critique-PKNumerals.HTM)

https://www.mega.nu/protolanguage/critique-PKNumerals.htm

Sign My Guestbook ?

Guestbook by Lpage

please let me know if these essays on the Proto-Language and the derived languages are of interest

May I have your comments?

the latest revision of this document can be found at

HTTP://WWW.GEOCITIES.COM/Athens/Forum/2803/index.html

Patrick C. Ryan * 9115 West 34th Street - Little Rock, AR 72204-4441* (501)227-9947

[email protected]

1. "The hypothesis of the monogenesis of language is one that most linguists believe to be plausible. Indeed, the appearance of language may define modern Homo sapiens." Philip E. Ross (Staff writer) in "Hard Words", pp. 138-147, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 1991.

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weinercates · 2 years

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Diagnostic features of SARS-COVID-2-positive sufferers: An immediate evaluate along with meta-analysis.

Although heterozygous mutant these animals usually do not present any locomotor phenotypes, additionally they demonstrate an intermediate a higher level hypomyelination weighed against the particular wild-type these animals. Hypomyelination seemed to be noticed in the neurological system, which in turn, even though relatively gentle, used to be significantly different from that regarding the actual wild-type these animals. These kind of information suggest a function pertaining to LGI1 in the myelination capabilities of Schwann cells as well as oligodendrocytes. (D) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.The origin of Malagasy Genetics is 50 % Cameras and 50 percent Indonesian, though the Malagasy words, spoken by the whole populace, is among the Austronesian household. The word what many carefully associated with Malagasy can be Maanyan (Greater Barito East group of the Austronesian family members), but linked dialects can also be throughout Sulawesi, Malaysia as well as Sumatra. For that reason, and also, since Maanyan is actually spoken by a human population which lives down the Barito lake in Kalimantan as well as which in turn does not develop the essential expertise for long ocean going direction-finding, the ethnic composition of the Indonesian colonizers remains unclear. There is a general general opinion that will Indonesian sailors attained Madagascar by the historic travel, nevertheless the occasion, the road along with the obtaining portion of the 1st colonization are common challenged. In this research, we try to resolve these complications and various other versions, for example the famous setup regarding Malagasy 'languages', by varieties of analysis related to lexicostatistics as well as glottochronology that will attract on the particular automated strategy not too long ago recommended from the experts. The information had been accumulated from the very first creator at the beginning of 2010 with the important aid of Joselina Soafara Nere as well as include Swadesh provides of 2 hundred products regarding Twenty-three 'languages' addressing every area of the isle.The actual Trypanosoma brucei exoribonuclease, TbDSS-1, has been implicated inside numerous elements of mitochondrial RNA metabolic rate. The following, we all check out part involving TbDSS-1 throughout RNA digesting and security by simply studying 12S rRNA digesting intermediates throughout TbDSS-1 RNAi tissue. RNA broken phrases akin to innovator string upstream involving 12S rRNA collect about TbDSS-1 depletion. The 5' extremity associated with 12S rRNA is made simply by endonucleolytic bosom, as well as TbDSS-1 degrades resulting upstream adulthood by-products. RNAs using 5' finishes from place 141 as well as 3' concludes selleck compound next to the particular fully developed 5' stop of 12S rRNA are routine as well as inevitably have got oligo(You) tails. 12S rRNAs together with mature 3' comes to an end and organic 5' finishes furthermore gather within TbDSS-1 reduced cellular material, indicating the RNAs symbolize dead-end merchandise normally most likely going with regard to corrosion simply by TbDSS-1 in a RNA security walkway. With each other, these info suggest two tasks for TbDSS-1 inside wreckage involving 12S rRNA maturation by-products in addition to being part of any mitochondrial RNA security process that will gets rid of delayed 12S processing intermediates. We more prove TbDSS-1 degrades RNAs originating upstream of the 1st gene about the modest string with the mitochondrial maxicircle indicating that will TbDSS-1 additionally takes away non-functional RNAs generated from various other parts of the actual mitochondrial genome.

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brynleretu · 4 years

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The complete Middle Ætani Swadesh list (the Middle Ætani period lasting from 815 to the end of Iremu.)

#ade #ætani #conlang #list #swadesh list #vocabulary #satv #essentially a list of one hundred basic words #yeah #bryn out #language #languages #maybe not #glottochronology

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father-of-the-void · 4 years

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To be identified as cognates, two words in different languages should have clear similarities in form and meaning, and sound correspondences that are systematic between the languages, for example, a 'p' in one language corresponding to an 'f' in the other. Glottochronology counts the number of surviving cognates from a list of vocabulary for universal concepts such as 'ear' and 'water' to calculate the age of the common ancestor, assuming that words will be replaced at a regular rate. As with genetic dating, the rate must be calibrated externally ... Swadesh calculated that 86% of the core vocabulary remains after 1,000 years. Yet English shows a retention rate of 68%, while Icelandic is more conservative, with a 97%.

Jean Manco, Ancestral Journeys: the Peopling of Europe from the First Venturers to the Vikings

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roylustang · 4 years

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using the power of Japanese to destroy the idea of ‘culture-free’ words

#writing my essay where i have to destroy the validity of glottochronology #im so fucking tired #also i saw a post earlier about language appropriation and like i get ig but like i live in the south now u cant tell me i cant say ‘yall’#closing in on hr 16 of working on this ling final #i keep getting distracted tho i feel my will draining #just need like 400 more words tho #im dying

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possessivesuffix · 3 years

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Doing some work again on organizing my various linguistics drafts and notes, running back 10 years, and it's noteworthy (ha) just how much of this requires constructing a typology-of-documents, or how choices on this are going to differ depending on their purpose

I keep the papers I have on my computer organized primarily by language family (for anything descriptive or comparative-historical, which is most of what I have around) or subfield (e.g. phonology, history of linguistics). But this is really not workable for drafts. For one, often enough something that starts e.g. as an observation on or examination of Finnish might later end up extending itself to cover all Finnic languages or some larger group still. For two, the majority of the drafts I have around would really end up in a single bin "comparative Uralic phonology", most of the rest also in a handful of similar ones like "comparative Khanty phonology" or "comparative Uralic morphology". Studying a wide range of different languages is important in comparative linguistics, but in research you do have to pick foci (or risk ending up only contributing superficial results in a common mold… e.g. there's a guy who puts out lots of glottochronological analyses of all sorts of language families but seems to know nothing about or be unwilling to use any other methods of classification or absolute dating).

Anyway, some of the document subtypes I've ended up with instead so far, in case this helps anyone else:

"datasets": raw or minimally organized data on a topic, generally spreadsheet-ish formats, sometimes with associated notes files on sources, principles of compilation, or explaining various more esoteric marker columns I may have ended up adding

"data dumps": similar to the above but more incomplete, perhaps pulled from a single source, perhaps not for particularly much later use but just to look over if some or someone's data has any glaring statistical patterns (for better or for worse); sometimes perhaps equal in planned scope to the first but just extremely in-progress (e.g. I have several starts of digitized indexes of old dialect dictionaries that currently cover no more than 5%-ish of their source)

"surveys": selections of data for exploring or elucidating some hypothesis or the other; for me most often of the shape "what are the reflexes of segment(s) *X *Y… across a given set of language varieties {A B…}". Mostly aligned plain text files since these need flexible commenting options and not much dynamic sorting options.

"graphs": fairly self-explanatory, includes things like statistics, family trees, schematic maps (of e.g. areal features), graphical representations of sound correspondences or relative chronologies

"notes": somewhat heterogeneous things, mostly bibliographic things like quotes, collections of references on a topic, my own comments or annotations on lengthy sources; or collections of observations on a hypothesis (possible arguments pro/con, etc.)

"draftlets": paper outlines or paper idea outlines, isolated chapters or paragraphs that could be incorporated into a paper, essay or blog-post-ish writings

actual drafts of papers or publishable datasets; these and the documents below not filed in a common subfolder but in their own primary folders. Also, any notes, data, presentation slides etc. directly associated with these will also not be filed in general thematic subfolders but instead together with the draft itself. Actually published works and works I'm aiming to publish next are given running numbers.

as an all-important singular notes file, the list of etymologies I've thought up, with subsections including published / presented / rediscovered / publishable / needs more research / anti-etymologies

under work currently, an index of blog posts I've posted on the main blog, or also the more effortpost-like ones here, over the years (will be put online once I'm done with it). (I should probably eventually have a list of "recognized" publications separate from my CV in general, but you know, those are currently countable on one hand while even just my main blog posts are in triple digits.)

lastly, a general list of planned publications which tracks what the state of any particular ideas of mine are currently (i.e. if there are drafts, draftlets, notes, surveys, blog posts…), independently of more specific publication plans for particular projects such as my PhD studies in particular

#academia #linguistics life

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dedalvs · 6 years

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Heya slengheda! Thank you for all of the awesome work! I started watching the 100 for it because I loved Defiance so much. You said that Azrán is 500 years from Spanish, but Trigedasleng is 100. How do you put a calendar to how fast a language changes? I tried looking at glottochronology for my language family, but everything I read referenced debunked ideas. Thank you!

Languages do not change their sounds at the same rate. Many different factors come into play. In fact, individual sounds themselves also may change at different rates in a given language. Consider what’s happened to /k/ in English over the centuries (very little) vs. all the vowels of English (the opposite of very little). We haven’t gotten it down to a science yet—i.e. x phoneme is y% likely to change to a, b…n in z number of years. As a conlanger, then, you just have to do your best and try to get something you’re happy with. When judging it, a conlanger has to do the same thing: Just kind of take a look at it and see what they think, based on their own experience with studying language change. There may come a day much later where we know a lot more and a lot of the stuff we do now will be all wrong and look goofy, but unless we perfect time travel, we can’t really worry about that. Just have to do our best.

Oh, and don’t worry about glottochronology. Pretend it doesn’t exist.

#sylvanauctor #conlang #sound change #language change #linguistic evolution

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senzacaponecoda · 6 years

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Thinking of scripting out an auto-semantic-shifter for conlangers using some glottochronological nonsense. Probably not tonight and it might take a little while but like the draft i have so far is

some gets

> get an estimated time divergence from the user in years

> get an estimated "phono/semantic complexity" of the source language from the user (less than western europe, about western europe, more than western europe)

> Estimated number of (partial) "dominations" of the culture

>> maybe adjust that to the amount of time of under a particular cultures, so rapid recent colonialization has a different effect than like a 500 year Arab domination???

some calculations

> make drift constant (from rand and time)

> get a "stability" value from phonological complexity, dominations (ln?) , combine with the drift constant

> rate of replace = 2 * ln (rate of retention (=.94) * stability)

> proportion of replace = lambertw(rate of replace * time^2)/(rate of replace * time^2)

I need to play around with those calculations a bit, make sure they spit out real, usable numbers so that the end result is somewhere between 0 and 1.

already have some lists I'll make from the c. 5K or so most common words

p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 115%; }

> statives (~adjectives)

>> stative-inchoative

>> stative-causatives

>> color-chains

> verb

>> sense

>> violence

>> motion

>> communication

>> bodily-functions

>> possession

>> mood

>> weather

> noun

>> natural-duals

>> tools-and-items

>> spacetime

>> animals

>> materials_and_elements

>> body-parts

> misc

>> adpositions

>> demonstratives

>> negation

>> adverbs

> closed

>> pronouns

>> numerals

>> conjunctions

>> etc

>highly-divergent

>> technology

>>> pre-ag

>>> ag

>>> medieval

>>> modern

> affixes

>> abstracting

>> classifying

>> deverbalizing

>> denominalizing

>> to-adverb

>> to-stative

Each of the lists would be wordlists (basically csv files) pairing a start and end step word, with the principle that semantic narrowing dominates language change. E.g. in verb/sense there might be a line "sense > smell"

The script would use the proportion of replacement and a seeded rand() to go through each of the above files and write each line rand picks to an output file. It'd also use some of the info provided to the script to make judgment calls like "skip closed" or "foreach word in technology write word, " > 0 (borrow from [an early/a middle/latest] conqueror". So the user would basically just run the program once, get a file like output-date.txt, with contents like "sense > smell\neyes>eye\nhead>above" etc Then if the user provides a wordlist corresponding to the english definitions in their dictionary (e.g. copied out of a spreadsheet) another simple script could read the output and replace it for them, so they could just copy the list back into spreadsheet (or whatever). Or they could use the wordlist and do things manually.

( Yes a lot/most of the decisions are of course arbitrary. But that describes conlanging as a whole. )

#this is not what computational linguistics was meant for #or was it #idk #wouldn't surprise me

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afishtrap · 7 years

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Current portrayals of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) over the past 5,000 years are dominated by discussion of tbe Austronesian “farming/language dispersal,” with associated linguistic replacement, genetic clines, Neolithic “packages,” and social transformations, The alternative framework that we present improves our understanding of the nature of the Austronesian language dispersal from Taiwan and better accords with the population genetics, archaeological evidence, and crop domestication histories for ISEA. Genetic studies do not demonstrate that the dispersal of Austronesian languages through ISEA was associated with large-scale displacement, replacement, or absorption of preexisting populations. Linguistic phylogenies for Austronesian languages do not support staged movement from Taiwan through the Philippines into Indo-Malaysia; in addition, the lexical and grammatical structure of many Austronesian languages suggests significant interaction with pre-Austronesian languages and cultures of the region. Archaeological evidence, including domestication histories for major food plants, indicates that ISEA was a zone of considerable maritime interaction before the appearance of Austronesian languages. Material culture dispersed through ISEA from multiple sources along a mosaic of regional networks. The archaeological evidence helps us to shape a new interpretative framework ot the social and historical processes that more parsimoniously accounts for apparent discrepancies between genetic phylogenies and linguistic distributions and allows for more nuanced models of the dispersal of technologies and societies without reference to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis.

Donohue, Mark and Denham, Tim. “Farming and Language in Island Southeast Asia: Reframing Austronesian History.” Current Anthropology. Volume 51, Number 2, April 2010. Print.

Bellwood (1984-1985:109) states, “The question of Austronesian origins is basically a linguistic question,” and while the question is no longer exclusively a linguistic one, “Austronesian” is still essentially a linguistic construct. The Austronesian family comprises more than 1,000 languages spread over a vast area between Madagascar and Easter Island. Overwhelming linguistic evidence shows an origin for the Austronesian languages on Taiwan (Blust !995), and we do not dispute this. On the other hand, we question the nature of the linguistic “dispersal” out of Taiwan and into ISEA. We should note that the “Austronesian dispersal” might betterbe termed a “Malayo Polynesian dispersal,” since nine ofthe 10 primary subgroups of Austronesian are attested to only on Taiwan and only the Malayo-Polynesian branch has members outside Taiwan (and none on mainland Taiwan}. Therefore, we hereafter refer to “Malayo-Polynesian” rather than “Austronesian” where the former is more appropriate.

The standard version of the Austronesian linguistic phylogeny is very hierarchical, with bifurcations corresponding to inferred movements from Taiwan (the Proto Austronesian [PAN] homeland, where nine of the 10 first-order subgroups are found) through ISEA (the various languages designated as Western Malayo-Polynesian, including groups that have since moved to the Southeast Asian mainland and Madagascar) and eastern Indonesia (Central Malayo-Polynesian), across northern New Guinea (the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian), and finally into the Pacific (Oceanic, including Polynesian and Micronesian; e.g., Blust 1995; Tryon 1995; see fig. lA).

In recent years, this Austronesian phyiogeny has been shown to be flatter at multiple levels (fig. Iii). Linguistic subgrouping and the consequent construction of a layered hierarchy rely on the sharing of innovations in the inherited linguistic signal to define phylogenetic subgroups. For instance, the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup, comprising all of the Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan, can be defined asa valid subgroup on the basis of a number of shared innovations, both regular and irregular (see table 1, abbreviating material in Blust 2001). However, it is recognized that the same is not true of Western Malayo-Polynesian, in which languages show the Malayo-Polynesian innovations but nothing unique relative to Malayo-Polynesian languages to the east, namely, those assigned to Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian (e.g., Ross 1995). The Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian branch contains the Central Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subgroups and comprises the Austronesian languages of eastern Indonesia and northwestern New Guinea, as well as those of Oceania. Problematically, the evidence for the Central Malayo-Polynesian and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian sub-groupings is not conclusive, since many of the innovations that have been proposed for each of these subgroups (e.g., Blust 1993) are present in languages in the Western Malayo-Polynesian area and, in some cases, even as far north as in Taiwan (Donohue and Grimes 2008). As a result, while we can group the “extra-Formosan” languages together as Malayo-Polynesian against those groups that did not migrate from Taiwan, we cannot justify^ any large sub-groupings that would link the languages of the Philippines and western Indonesia together, as opposed to the languages spoken near and east of New Guinea. This fact represents a major challenge to computational models that claim success in replicating large subgroups within this nonexistent clade (e.g., Gray and Jordan 2000) and weakens their conclusion that linguistic evidence supports the so-called express-train model of a rapid Austronesian dispersal.

The linguistic evidence for Malayo-Polynesian presents us with additional methodological challenges. The lexical conservatism ofthe family is remarkable (Blust 2000/?). Outside a Melanesian area, both west and east of New Guinea, where various kinds of “aberrancy” are prominent (Pawley 2006), the languages retain a very high proportion of the reconstructed vocabulary of PMP (fig. 3). The overt similarities between languages are so striking that relationships between far-flung members of the family were recognized 300 years ago (Reland 1708), long before the Indo-European languages were seen as being related. When we compare Austronesian with other language families, it is apparent that the amount of lexical change found in Austronesian is consistent with either a much younger or a much smaller language family (Joseph and Janda 2003; Peiros 2000; Wichmann, forthcoming). Smaller language families tend to be more compact geographically and show less change because of continued contact between the different members of the family. Young language families, on the other hand, have in the main not had the time required to spread and diversify. The Austronesian family, however, is neither small nor seemingly recent, and these discrepancies must be addressed.

Wichmann (forthcoming) offers a metric for comparing internal diversity by evaluating the degree of lexical diversification in different language families, thereby removing subjective judgements from assessments of “conservatism.” The mean lexical cognacy found between modern languages in a family can be determined and then evaluated in terms of the “minimum centuries” (me) that would be expected to have elapsed to result in this level of diversification, assuming that 2% of the “basic” lexicon of a language will change per century, a value that is taken as standard (e.g., Swadesh 1950, 1952, 1955; for Austronesian, Dyen 1965, though see Blust 2000/;).’ When this metric is applied to families for which documentation is adequate (Wichmann’s results are summarized in table 2), large language families, those with more than 100 member languages, show an average me value of 93.5, implying that we expect the initial divergence to have taken place ca. 9,000 years ago (a clearly inflated date, but we are interested in relative values, not absolute ones}. The only exception in this group is Austronesian, with an me value of 35. Regardless of the faith we place in glottochronological methods, this low figure indicates that Austronesian shows the profile of a family with fewer than 50 languages, such as Iroquoian (10 languages), Na-Dene (47), Plateau Peniitian (4), Mixe-Zoquean (16), or Káriban (29), rather than that of a family with more than 1,000 languages. From the degree of retention of common vocabulary, we can state that Austronesian, at least the Malayo-Polynesian branch that has migrated beyond Taiwan, does not exhibit the characteristics expected of a large, ancient language family.

#southeast asia #linguistics #polynesia #research #austronesia

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esoanem · 7 years

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guess who’s currently in an argument in the youtube comments on a linguistics video (about the limits/problems/failures of glottochronology, with particular reference to Dyirbal) with someone who’s trying to argue that the Celtic word(s) for “bear”: *artos (Proto-Celtic), artio (Gaulish), arth (Welsh), art (Old Irish) is actually either a borrowing of or analogy with the Basque hartz (apparently from proto-Basque *ar̄c although I’m not sure what that represents) and not simply the expected reflex of the Indo-European root represented in Latin, Greek, Indo-Aryan, Armenian, and Anatolian, in fact, pretty much everything except Balto-Slavic and Germanic which underwent obvious taboo replacement. The usual suggestion of any relationship between the Basque and Celtic form goes the other way as well, although it’s far from clear, in particular the presence of h in the Basque form would either be an innovation (which seems unlikely) or a reflex of a laryngeal which would be waaaaaaay out of the normal chronology.

Anyway, linguistic nationalism is confusing as ever. Also a secret, water is wet

#linguistics #Proto-Indo-European #basque

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howtopronounceenglishcorrectly · 6 years

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youtube

Learn how to pronounce Glottochronology in English --- GLOTTOCHRONOLOGY Pronunciation of Glottochronology: /,glɑːtoʊkrə'nɑːlədʒiː/ noun Definition of Glottochronology: a linguistic method that uses the rate of vocabulary replacement to estimate the date of divergence for distinct but genetically related languages ★ http://Learn2Pronounce.com ★ How to pronounce Glottochronology | English pronunciation: https://youtu.be/fgSzOgZWMh0

#how to pronounce How to pronounce Glottochronology | English pronunciation #pronunciation of How to p

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pponle · 7 years

Video

youtube

How long can a language last before it's unrecognizable? - Dyirbal Glottochronology 2 of 2 https://youtu.be/akVBtIPOnNI

#IFTTT #YouTube How long can a language last before it's unrecognizable? - Dyirbal Glottochronology 2

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roylustang · 4 years

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anyone want some nouyaki bc my brain is FRIED

#this is literally the worst final ive ever had to do #im 8 pages in and 2/3 of the way done #i think ive been working on this for like a solid 12 hours in the last 29 #im not satisfied with some of ly answers but goddamn theyre not gonna get any better tonight #now all i have to do is write a 2k word essay about glottochronology 🤪🤪🤪 and how it sucks #maddie’s misadventures #im flaming this in the course eval #to think he wasnt even gonna give this to us until today.......#my prof is on CRACK #or maybe adderall if he thinks we couldve done all this shit in 48 hours

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teesturtle · 4 years

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