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Before Babel: In Search of the First Language is a documentary about language families and the attempt by linguists to reconstruct the earliest root languages. It's made by the BBC, producer of the best television in the history of the world, so you know it's gonna be good. You can watch it on your computer at your convenience if you have no friends, or you can sit in front of the telly with your mates and wait for it go show up. If you are short of time skip ahead to 45:39 and listen to the reconstructed words of Neolithic Proto-Nostratic. | ||
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I didn't have time to watch more than a couple of minutes of it but it looked interesting. No doubt packed full of mistaken journalistic assumptions and false simplifications and only showing one particular theory, though, without giving any time to any counter arguments, if other similar documentaries I've seen are any guide, though. I was slightly surprised I hadn't heard of this before. It seemed to have been shown on BBC2 but when I searched the BBC site I couldn't find any mention. A Google search brought up a several links to various sites with versions of the same video, but no more information. When I looked at the closing credits I found it was a copyrighted 1992! Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. | |||
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It's about the fringes of historical linguistics, the Nostratic and Proto-World hypotheses. The first linguist they talk to is Merritt Ruhlen. A little later on they spend some time with Joseph Greenberg, the founder of the technique of mass comparison. Bill Poser says, about Ruhlen's and Greenberg's work, "NO EVIDENCE WHATEVER IS PRESENTED." There's also a bit about the "mysterious" and "very old" Basque language. No language is older than any other. They talk to Don Ringe, who is awesome.This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy, | |||
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So you mean I've wasted all the hours I've spent learning Proto-Nostratic so that when I travel half-a-billion miles to another star I'll be able to say a few words to the Engineers? Bummer. | |||
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You've probably seen this, neveu. The comments include an interesting discussion of the Proto-European phrase used in Prometheus: its structure and exactly what it means. | |||
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Thanks for that link to LL, goofy. I vaguely remember that post, but I must have read it soon after posting as there was nothing like the number of comments then. I particularly liked the addition of the remark made by a denizen of the 4chan forums:
Coming from someone on 4chan, that is praise indeed! Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. | |||
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What does "brofist" mean? It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bro-fist
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. | |||
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 Richard English | |||
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From that site:
I wonder what the Basques, Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, Maltese and Turks think of that. | |||
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Well, not exactly. What Poser says is "What is the evidence for the 11 subgroups of Amerind, and more generally for his family tree? There isn't any. Really. NO EVIDENCE WHATEVER IS PRESENTED." It's referring to a specific claim Greenberg makes in LIA (although Poser may hold that opinion of all their work).
Wait a minute. English clearly didn't exist, say, 2000 years ago, and Greek did. It's not the same as modern Greek, but it's Greek. In biology it's inaccurate to say that, for example, homo sapiens are more evolved than the Coelacanth, as they have both been evolving for the same amount of time, but as a species the Coelacanth has been around a lot longer than homo sapiens, or even primates. It seems to me that this would apply to languages as well. Finally, I think that whenever you have a field called Historical X, different rules are going to apply than for standard X, because of the nature of history. Historians try to establish what really happened in the past, which is usually difficult or impossible to verify since we can't go back in time. They piece together bits of evidence, which get more sparse the farther back you go, and make their best guess at what really happened. Different interpretations of the evidence can lead to different opinions, and new evidence can be more consistent with one reconstruction or another, but until someone invents a time machine that's the best you can do. | |||
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In a way, Classical Greek and Modern Greek are different languages related to one another historically. (Based mainly on their mutual incomprehensibility.) Also, all living languages exhibit change. There's no evidence of a living fossil language. When some non-linguist says that Basque or Lithuanian is "older" than English, the only way I can make sense of that statement is that Basque or Lithuanian exhibits some kind of archaism. It doesn't help their argument that examples of Basque and Lithuanian are only recorded during the past half millennium or so. —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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If Greek is older than English, then where did English come from? Did it just pop into existence out of nothing 1000 years ago? All non-creole languages consist of an unbroken line of speakers stretching into the past. English was spoken 2000 years ago. We don't call it English, we call it Proto-Germanic, but it's the same language. We give the language different labels for different periods, but that's just for convenience. People think Greek is older than English because the language now and the language 2000 years ago are both called “Greek”, but that's an accident of terminology. This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy, | |||
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No, historical linguistics isn't just guesswork where one opinion is as valid as another. We have a methodology, called the comparative method, which has let us reconstruct Proto-Indo-European with some confidence. We have developed rules of sound change that let us make predictions about how languages will be related. Take Latin caput and English head. We can explain, sound for sound, how these words are related. Of course we could be wrong, but the comparative method has been so successful in letting us explain these changes in detail for a lot of words in a lot of languages, that I think we are probably right. The comparative method also lets us say with confidence that Latin deus “god” and Greek theos “god” are not related. So words that look similar are not necessarily related, and related words don't necessary have similar forms. This also lets us distinguish borrowed words from derived words: if a word appears to break the rules, then we can hypothesize that it was borrowed. For instance, "butter" is similar to Latin "butyrum", but it can't be cognate because English b does not correspond to Latin b. So we can hypothesize that "butter" is a borrowing from Latin, and then look for evidence to that effect. As I understand it, Greenberg’s mass comparison consists of simply looking at a bunch of words from various languages, noting similarities, and concluding that the words are related. There is no attempt to explain the sound changes, so there is no way of distinguishing borrowed words from derived words. Also, it seems to me that without explaining sound changes, you have no way of falsifying your hypotheses. Using mass comparison, deus and theos could be related and we have no way of showing that they are not. And we have no way of showing that caput and head could be related. On the other hand, Nostraticists do use the comparative method, but as I understand it the time depth is too great to give us reliable results. This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy, | |||
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We have a methodology, called the comparative method, which has let us reconstruct Proto-Indo-European with some confidence. I'd amend this to say "some parts of PIE with confidence": mainly phonology and morphology. time depth That is my understanding from the few critiques I've read. [Fixed misspelling.]This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd, —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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Goofy's comment makes sense to me in light of the great differences in pronunciation of similar letters in the Roman alphabet among Romance language speakers today. Then there's the case of unrelated, or distantly related letters that look the same. Cyrillic comes to mind as an example. Some letters are pronounced as if they were Roman, some as Greek, and some are neither despite their looking like one or the other. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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The sound changes that differentiate caput and head happened a long time before the Roman alphabet was developed. But you can see some later sound changes in the writing, for instance the letter c has different values in French, Spanish and Italian because of how the sound changed.
Yeah I'd agree with that. | |||
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Thanks, those explanations make sense. With respect to time depth, how do they calculate what is too far back to reconstruct? Do words have a half-life? Also, there was an argument implied in the documentary that certain types or categories of words are more persistent than others; I think "mouse" was the example. Is this demonstrably the case? Are, say, words for pests or vermin more persistent over time in other languages? | |||
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Here's a term for vermin that's lasted for several hundred years: http://blog.oup.com/2008/09/politician/ It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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As Ringe says, there is a limit to how far back we can go, but I don't know if we have determined exactly what that limit is.
Ruhlen used the example of "mouse" as a word that didn't change much in the daughter languages: Proto-Indo-European *mūs, Greek mūs, Latin mūs, Old English mūs. He also mentions "nephew": Proto-Indo-European *nepōt-, Romanian nepot (also Latin nepōt-). However, words like this are rare.
I don't know. If a word remains relatively phonologically unchanged for 3000 years, I'd say it's just because the sounds it contains just happen to be the sounds that haven't changed. It's nothing to do with the meaning.This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy, | |||
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No doubt there is a limit, but is it 5000 years, 20,000 years, 100,000 years? It seems to me you would need to be able to quantify how much of an earlier version of language remains after some period of time, like how much Proto-Germanic remains in modern English, and give it an actual number, to even begin to talk about time depth limits. | |||
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The limit I have seen is 10K years BP. —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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There is glottochronology, an attempt to assign dates to linguistic events. The problem is "the lexical replacement rate is not constant. The rates observed in languages with a known history vary considerably. For example, studies show that English preserved only 68% of its basic vocabulary over a 1,000 year period, while Icelandic preserved 97%."
I would be very interested to know where this number comes from. | |||
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I would be very interested to know where this number comes from. Might've been on Language Log. (You might contact Liberman for more info.) Might've been Joanna Nichol's book on comp-hist method. Or Ringe paper. I'll look around in my library for something. FWIW, it is mentioned (uncited of course) in the Wikipedia article on Historical Linguistics. —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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Is this due to isolation or technology or both? Or some other forces? It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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Is this due to isolation or technology or both? Or some other forces? Probably because of a whole bunch of complex events. —Ceci n'est pas un seing. | |||
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I have my nose in this book: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/...n-all-things/#review The author thinks that ears have played as much a part in language development as speech, since what we hear translates into what we say. So might language differentiation be due to aural change, or due to mondegreens, or both? It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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I think the causes of language change are complex. I've never heard of aural change (change in how our ears work?) as a cause. | |||
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You keep it there for safekeeping, do ya'? | |||
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Nah, Tinnie, my nose dribbles a lot, so when one pair of pages gets snotty, I just turn the page and I've got fresh, dry paper. They printed it on thick, absorbent paper. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -J. Krishnamurti | |||
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