Unity of languages

[thinkandmull]

I have a book that says “deva, the Sanshrit term for god, is related to the English term divine, to deus in Latin, to theos in Greek…” Theos doesnt use the same letters as deva so it would seem to be proper to say that theos replaced deva (and maybe that the religion of the Sanshrit people influenced the Greeks). But doesn’t this also imply that there was an authority that changed the words for a population? How do languages have unity throughout history without an authority going around telling people what words to use. Wouldn’t it seem that there would be a different language for every small village? History as reported by historians doesn’t seem to make sense.

 

[BartholomewB]

I have a book that says “deva, the Sanshrit term for god, is related to the English term divine, to deus in Latin, to theos in Greek…” Theos doesnt use the same letters as deva so it would seem to be proper to say that theos replaced deva (and maybe that the religion of the Sanshrit people influenced the Greeks). But doesn’t this also imply that there was an authority that changed the words for a population? How do languages have unity throughout history without an authority going around telling people what words to use. Wouldn’t it seem that there would be a different language for every small village? History as reported by historians doesn’t seem to make sense.

Grimm’s Law provides an explanation of the kind of shifts that can be identified when comparing older with more recent languages. For instance, German zwei to English two : a German z often appears where we have a *t *in English, and similarly a German ei where we have an o. There’s really nothing mysterious about it. You don’t need to postulate “an authority going around” like that.

 

[Mintaka]

What you want to look up is “Indo-European languages” and “Proto-Indo-European.”

The basic postulation is that several groups of languages were originally all one, but it was several thousand years ago. That’s plenty of time for family words and local accents to turn into separate languages. The process continues today, although there are also processes that keep things the same.

Linguists (people who study linguistics, the social science of language) think it’s very likely that all languages were one in caveman days, but that was even more thousands of years ago.

The story of the tower of Babel was actually quite useful in early linguistics research, so I’ll make a little mention here. You would be surprised how many people who aren’t linguists don’t want there to be a single language ancestor, just because it might possibly sound a little like the Bible.

Of course, there are tons of different guesses as to where people were living when different languages came into play, but at the moment, it’s all just guesses. The action is in trying to find some definite connection between the Indo-European languages and other language families. (As opposed to just a lot of loanwords or coincidences.)

 

[thinkandmull]

Looking at animals of today, evolution for example looks fishy. And (stepping away from the evolution example) all the more does this language thing sound perplexing though. In inbetween between one language and the one that supplants it, there would have to be thousands, maybe millions of new languages that pop up until one is agreed upon, and I don’t see how one is ever even agreed upon. I just find this all strange

 

[Mintaka]

There’s a reason linguists talk about “families” of languages, or “language trees.”

For example, right now, there are huge differences in pronunciation between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal’s Portuguese. Why? Because a lot of different people moved to Portugal several hundred years ago, and both Brazil and Portugal have been living their own separate lives. Neither country speaks the language the same as they did in AD 1500. Same thing with the UK and the US and Australia and New Zealand.

Let’s go with something a little older in separation. Back in the early Middle Ages, Ireland colonized Scotland. It was very common for Irish and Irish Scots to visit back and forth, and they spoke Gaelic the same way. But then it got a little harder to travel back and forth, and both countries were busy living their own lives.

Also, both Scotland and Ireland adopted modernized spelling systems in the last century, but each system reflected different pronunciations that had developed. (Irish say Gaylik, Scots say Gal-ik.) You can tell at a glance whether you’re reading a modern Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge) poem or a modern Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig) poem. You can’t tell much difference between medieval Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems.

Anyway, nowadays you have a pretty similar Gaelic in the Irish parts of Northern Ireland and the close-to-Ireland parts of Scotland, because there was more visiting. The grammar and pronunciation is a lot similar.

Southern Ireland has very different grammar and word choices. Since Dublin is in southeast Ireland, and since a lot of influential writers come from southwest Ireland, the southern Irish Gaelic is what you usually find taught as “Gaelic.” Much the same thing happened in Scotland.

And then, almost every area in Ireland that is a Gaelic-speaking area has its own unique dialect with its pronunciations and words, many not mutually intelligible, because small town people in remote areas without good roads or sea access don’t travel much. Same thing in Scotland. (Same thing with the Isle of Man, since Manx is pretty much also Gaelic. But it’s further away and has more Norse words glommed into it.)

Ireland is tiny, but this happened in just a few hundred years. That’s how a single language can turn into multiple languages.

 

[Mintaka]

If languages weren’t all once one language – well, it’s barely possible that, if humans split up and traveled a bunch before they developed languages, you might possibly have had different populations develop language at about the same time.

But yeah, it’s not real likely. Mostly popular with racists and anti-Bible fanatics, or people who think agglutinative languages or tonal languages are way more different from how other languages work, than they actually are. (All languages use tone for added meaning. All languages use affixes to add meaning. Agglutinative and tonal languages just exploit the heck out of those.)

 

[BartholomewB]

Thinkandmull

Language is for communication. What would be the point of having so many different languages that there was nobody left to communicate with?

 

[ThinkingSapien]

But doesn’t this also imply that there was an authority that changed the words for a population?

No, it doesn’t. There doesn’t need to be any authority for word usage to change. Semantic drift happens all the time and continues to happen in semantic languages. A discussion on this came up in another thread. A slightly modified version of what I said overthere follows.

Check out the book “Bad English” or take a look at the process by which dictionaries update definitions. It seems that definitions in dictionaries are the result of how people use the words. It’s why “literally” is now also defined to mean virtually/figuratively, which is the opposite of how it had been used.

It traces through the history of semantic drift for a lot of words and their changes in meaning. Ammon Shea has also got another book called “Reading the O.E.D.” in which he writes about the experience and his findings of deciding to read a complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from start to finish where many of the findings for “Bad English” seem to have been found. He’s also now a dictionary consultant for Oxford University Press.

"…]Almost all words change their meanings. This is one of the aspects of language that is firmly established. It ought to be evident to all of us that words will take on new meanings as we generally find it confusing to read writing that is more than a few hundred years old. Many of the words carried a different significance than we give to them today…]"

In modern times people tend not to use the word Egregious to mean “remarkably good” or “awful” to express positive attributes. “Girl” is no longer used to indicate a young person irrespective of their sex. And if I use the phrase “gay guy” the first thing that comes to your mind probably is not a very happy Guy Fawkes. The language that you and I speak and write with is derived from previous forms. Those forms continue to evolve.

Changes in language is it’s own field of study and it has it’s own typology. Narrowing, widening, metonymy, synecdoche, meiosis, degeneration,and elevation are all terms for types of semantic changes that occur.

Individuals and groups make words and assign meanings. In response to this others might ignore, reject, or adopt (possibly with modifications) the term or usage. With enough popularity of a usage the word or usage ends up in dictionaries and other references. If you’d like to ignore or reject that’s fine. But that may also be the source of a communications barrier between you and others.

[Try] to read something that was written by people hundreds of years ago (try reading the original Beowulf). You might have trouble understanding English dialects from an area outside of the one in which you live. Ignoring the regional variations in word usage without your home country you’ll find that English nations outside your country will have evolved some words, phrases, and idioms differently. I’m sure some you’ll recognize and can translate without seeking references (ex: football). Some might cause confusion such as “table” (which could mean to remove an item from discussion for now, or open it up for discussion now). Others, such as “naff” will probably have no immediate meaning to you. Language changes within a culture don’t tend to be the huge problem that they’ve been rumored to be.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Looking at animals of today, evolution for example looks fishy. And (stepping away from the evolution example) all the more does this language thing sound perplexing though. In inbetween between one language and the one that supplants it, there would have to be thousands, maybe millions of new languages that pop up until one is agreed upon, and I don’t see how one is ever even agreed upon. I just find this all strange

There probably never is universal agreement on the semantics of the entire vocabulary of a language. There tend to be sectors and social groupings that will repurpose or reinvent words for there own usage while there are people that will openly refuse to adopt or accept such usage. Examine the lexicon of a teenager communicating using text based messaging on a phone. Their vocabularies may include words and idioms that many others either don’t understand or don’t want to use. Or, for a more drastic example, there are differences in the usage of some words in the USA and the UK. If someone wants to table something in a meeting that may mean bring it up for immediate discussion or to postpone discussion of it until later (the typical usage varies by geography).

Ofcourse individuals can make up and repurpose words too. Some of them become popular some don’t. For example Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” and was among those trying to repurpose the term “bright.” the rebranding of bright didn’t catch on. meme seems to be the goto word for describing contagious behaviours,messages, and other fads that spread through the Internet.

 

[thinkandmull]

What’s the key or mechanism, so to speak, that makes a variation started by a small group overcome all the others and because national?

 

[oldcelt]

As a poor student of languages I can declare that there is no unity. Ever tried Gaelic or any of the Eastern languages?

 

[Bob_Crowley]

For example, right now, there are huge differences in pronunciation between Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal’s Portuguese. Why? Because a lot of different people moved to Portugal several hundred years ago, and both Brazil and Portugal have been living their own separate lives. Neither country speaks the language the same as they did in AD 1500. Same thing with the UK and the US and Australia and New Zealand.difference between medieval Irish and Scottish Gaelic poems…

…And then, almost every area in Ireland that is a Gaelic-speaking area has its own unique dialect with its pronunciations and words, many not mutually intelligible, because small town people in remote areas without good roads or sea access don’t travel much. Same thing in Scotland. (Same thing with the Isle of Man, since Manx is pretty much also Gaelic. But it’s further away and has more Norse words glommed into it.)

Ireland is tiny, but this happened in just a few hundred years. That’s how a single language can turn into multiple languages.

Speaking as an Australian, I think there is more variation in the English language within the borders of England than there is between Australia and England. Years ago I had a summer job and one of the other staff originally hailed from Manchester. Honestly, I could hardly understand a word he said. Mind you I’m hard of hearing, but some of the others also found him almost unintelligible.

I later worked as a Postman and one of the other staff was Irish. Heart of gold, but at first I had a lot of difficulty understanding what he was saying. He even thought i was having a bit of a dig at him, but i wasn’t. Eventually I got used to his accent, and it became a lot easier.

Whereas Australian pronunciation doesn’t seem to have a lot of difference no matter where you go in a country of eight million square kilometres. Sure, there can be a bit more of a drawl or twang in outback areas, but generally we seem to speak in much the same way all over.

But English accents vary considerably within England.

Accents intrigue me. We’re all born with the same basic speaking appartus - lungs, tongue, larynx, lips etc, but we learn these variations in pronunciation from childhood, and in most cases they stay with us for the rest of our life.

 

[BartholomewB]

Accents intrigue me. We’re all born with the same basic speaking appartus - lungs, tongue, larynx, lips etc, but we learn these variations in pronunciation from childhood, and in most cases they stay with us for the rest of our life.

In childhood the muscular development of our tongue, throat, and other speech organs will follow the pattern needed to deal with our mother tongue. When we start learning a new language after a certain age, possibly around 10 or 12, it may be too late for our speech organs to adapt to meet the requirements of the new language.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

What’s the key or mechanism, so to speak, that makes a variation started by a small group overcome all the others and because national?

It sounds like you want one motivation for semantic drift highlighted above all others. I won’t do that, but instead will refer you to a publication that speaks about several motivations or factors. If you want to concentrate on one take you pick from there.
Historical Semantics and Cognition:

Andreas Blank discusses traditional classifications of the motivations for lexical semantic change and develops a comprehensive typology of these motivations on the basis of recent issues in cognitive as well as in modern diachronic linguistics.

Sections of the publication are available for free online through several sources, including Google Play. The information you seek starts on page 61.

Pardon my mistakes. Sent from a mobile device.

 

[thinkandmull]

Does anyone know what was the method, simply put, which led to a reading of the Rosetta stone

 

[openmind77]

I have a book that says “deva, the Sanshrit term for god, is related to the English term divine, to deus in Latin, to theos in Greek…” Theos doesnt use the same letters as deva so it would seem to be proper to say that theos replaced deva (and maybe that the religion of the Sanshrit people influenced the Greeks). But doesn’t this also imply that there was an authority that changed the words for a population? How do languages have unity throughout history without an authority going around telling people what words to use. Wouldn’t it seem that there would be a different language for every small village? History as reported by historians doesn’t seem to make sense.

Here is a interesting map of where different languages came from:http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/6b1/22c/6b122c56-5706-4345-aacc-896cb9f6a05d

 

[oldcelt]

Here is a interesting map of where different languages came from:http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/6b1/22c/6b122c56-5706-4345-aacc-896cb9f6a05d

Thank you for that.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

Does anyone know what was the method, simply put, which led to a reading of the Rosetta stone

Jean François Champollion’s deciphering of the Rosetta stone isn’t something that I’ve seen describe as simple. It wasn’t just a matter of translating, but figuring out if the scripts used were ideogrammatic, ideographic, or phonetic, correlating groupings of symbols in each one of the writing systems on the stone, so on. The process of deciphering the stone is documented and can be found by a search. But keep in mind that if you try to find a simple description then you are finding a description that has a lot of relevant information removed. A simple explanation reminds me of a forthcoming publication “The Explainer.” It’s a book of diagrams of various objects with descriptions composed from a vocabulary of the most common English words. While I’m sure most people would have no challenge in reading it the simpler vocabulary strips out a lot of information that might bring about a better understanding. (example illustration: Saturn V Rocket).

 

[thinkandmull]

It seems to me that it is impossible to decipher a language. Philosophically

 

[ThinkingSapien]

It seems to me that it is impossible to decipher a language. Philosophically

If you received a paper full of symbols from a writing system that shared no etymological roots with the symbols that you use then you would have no reference for correlating the symbols on the paper with their referents. At best you would be able to decipher the grammar for the symbol sequence but not the meaning.

I imagine it’s not often that such languages are encountered in present time like this though. Many languages are derived from or are influenced by other languages. Cultures that leave behind writing may also leave behind other artifacts that may be of assistance in deciphering a language. So there may be some symbol sequences that can be correlated to other physical artifacts.