LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.15 (02) [E]

Tue Nov 15 16:45:06 UTC 2005

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeeuws)
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15 November 2005 * Volume 02
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.14 (08) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Morphology
>
> Hey, Jonny!
>
> Aren't you just a tad too obsessed with Latin influences?  Do you
> really believe that Latin -- and perhaps Greek as well, and maybe
> Sanskrit -- all the "great" (= written) Indo-European languages -- 
> were originally the only "complex" ones, and other languages aquired
> "complexity" by way of contacts with these?  Why?!  What would be the
> incentive for that among Germanic peoples outside the Roman sphere at
> a time when they were still using runes, i.e., had not yet adopted the
> Latin script along with Christianity?  Do you really believe that a
> few traders and the odd (= rare) returning mercenary or slave would be
> able to change their native languages back home in such a way?

I thought runes were derived from Latin script? The similarities in the
two writing systems seem undeniable to me.

----------

From: jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2005.11.14 (08) [E]

Dear Ingmar and Ronny,

> Exactly, and I think the loss of diminution in certain Germanic languages
> is an example of this change from complex to simple.

> Aren't you just a tad too obsessed with Latin influences?  Do you really
> believe that Latin -- and perhaps Greek as well, and maybe Sanskrit -- all
> the "great" (= written) Indo-European languages -- were originally the
> only
> "complex" ones, and other languages aquired "complexity" by way of
> contacts
> with these?

thanks for your lesson in linguistic developments. Your superiority
convinced me, but there are some questions left which I don't understand
yet.

First: why did the old *Celtix Languagex* nearly vanish in the Western
European areas and became widely substituted by the so called
'Vulgar-Latin', the ancestor of modern French? Wasn't it because of the
great regional and tribal diversity of their language, similar to the
Germanic conditions? Just an event of rationality, because it was easier to
find a Lingua Franca than to change all their dialects?

Second: a similar development, but not thus definitely, of course, we watch
in England, with all those well-known ups and downs. It began, too, as the
language of some upper-class parts of the population, the language of the
winners.

Third: Luther and his helper, Gutenberg, created (more or less) and spread a
new kind of language, 'Neuhochdeutsch' = 'Standard German' in the middle of
the 17. century, and it advanced to the dominating written language in a
breathtaking short time.

Fourth: if looking to LS of today you find lots of French vocabulary. Not
all of it, but a great part was adopted in times of French occupation
(1757-1762; 1803-1815). I don't believe it was written down very often, the
words by verbal tradition got access into the native's language and kept
their place till our times.

All these examples show, for my opinion, how fast and irreversably a
language can be influenced, and this made me believe the same could have had
occurred with Latin's dominance over 'minor' languages.

Greutens/Regards

Johannes "Jonny" Meibohm

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Morphology

Sandy:

> I thought runes were derived from Latin script? The similarities in the
> two writing systems seem undeniable to me.

They are quite likely to be related, and until recently a widespread 
assumption has been that North European runes were derived from Old Latin 
and Etruscan scripts, something with which not everyone agrees.  Again, it 
may well be that this old European _Kultursprache_ hang-up is showing itself 
here.  ("Latin? Scandinavian?  Similar?  Then the Scandinavians must have 
borrowed it from the Romans.")  There are other such scripts and they all go 
back to ancient scripts used in the Middle East, as far as we can tell.  How 
far back?  Who really knows?  The Hungarian and Turkic runes are often said 
to be unrelated to them, but they have some suspiciously similar forms (and 
I'm not only talking about general "look").  We can only go by what has been 
preserved, but we can't really be sure how far back the roots of these 
traditions go.  The ancestors of Italians, Britons and Scandinavians may 
well have introduced these traditions from elsewhere during the great 
migrations.

However, even *if* Scandinavian runes had been introduced from Italy, I 
assume that would have been pretty much indirectly, and it would not have 
involved the types of large-scale and long sustained language contacts that 
would have resulted in mixing and consequently in *structural* changes of 
the morphologies involved.

Jonny, I'm not quite sure if you're now going snitty on me or if you're 
serious.  Let me just say this:

(1) Moveable types and the evolution of "High" German, beginning with the 
late middle ages, did eventually result in structural changes by way of 
general schooling and enforcement of the requirement to use Standard German 
as a second language (if not as a first one).  This involved sustained 
contacts and relatively intensive exposure, more importantly: proficiency. 
It took a long time for Standard German to have any real impact on the 
structural development of Low Saxon.  We see this impact coinciding with the 
era in which schooling has been first more easily accessible and then 
mandatory, schooling in which the use of Low Saxon has been prohibited.  We 
also see it coinciding with the decline of Low Saxon proficiency, resulting 
in forms such as (German accusative _sie_ >) _se_ for _jüm_ 'them', which 
really seriously kicked in as late as in the 20th century.  Before generally 
accessible and mandatory schooling, separation between the German-speaking 
elite and the Low-Saxon-speaking general public was pretty severe, 
communication more or less indirect.  However, can a comparable situation be 
said to have applied vis-à-vis Scandinavian and Latin, especially in the 
pre-Christian era?  I think not.

(2) In what are now France and Southern Belgium, Vulgar-Latin-speaking 
Romans and their Romanized "Barbarian" chattle on the one had and indigenous 
Celts (Gauls) on the other hand had centuries of sustained contacts 
resulting mixing and in the eventual demise of Celtic varieties under 
pressure from official, powerful Latin, while giving the evolving local 
Latin varieties distinct Celtic flavors by way of substrates.  A similar 
thing happened in parts of what is now Switzerland, where Latin varieties 
with Celtic substrates and later sustained contacts and mixing with 
Allemannic created the Rhaeto-Romance  (Rumantsch) varieties.  All this was 
facilitated by the fact that ancient continental Celtic was rather closely 
related to Romance, so much so that the Roman military had to use secret 
codes in their wars against Celts.  Again, this is a matter of drawn-out, 
intensive contacts and mixing.  It can not be compared with anything that 
happened in Scandinavia or pre-Christian Saxon Northern Albingia.

(3) During the two periods of French occupation of Saxon lands, people did 
have direct contacts with French soldiers and in some cases French 
civilians.  It is quite likely that lots of French loans entered Low Saxon 
then, though I believe that most of them entered the language via the 
Standard German of the upper classes in a Francophile culture that began in 
the 17th century.  (Low Saxon, being rather conservative, has just held on 
to "old-fashioned" French terms that have been discarded from Standard 
German beginning with the 19th century.)  Again, this is a matter of 
*lexical* borrowing, not of any *structural*, *morphological* changes I know 
of.

Lexicon and idiom is easily and readily borrowed, even in the course of 
indirect contacts.  It takes a lot more for a foreign language to impact the 
*structure* (i.e., phonology, morphology and syntax) of an indigenous 
languages.

As I said before, going by what we know about Indo-European varieties and 
their earlier and ancient stages, we can observe more simplification than 
the opposite.  Furthermore, looking at languages of supposedly "primitive" 
cultures in the recent past and now, we can observe a lot of structural 
complexity.

For instance, among the Tungusic group (belonging to the Altaic family) the 
structurally least complex variety is Manchu, being the language of the 
"most developed" Tungusic nation, the one that occupied China for centuries 
and by way of that eventually lost its language (safe for some pockets of 
Sibo varieties in Xinjiang).  However, Mancu makes up by way of lexical 
complexity (not unlike Modern English).  If you travel north and visit 
Tungusic speakers whose cultures are of the hunter-and-gatherer and 
reindeer-herding types, structural complexity hits you in the head --  
extremely complex word formations expressing minute details regarding time, 
frequency, intent, ownership, direction, etc., something that has 
counterparts in many of North America's indigenous languages.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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