LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.12 (01) [EN]

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=========================================== L O W L A N D S - L - 12 October
2009 - Volume 01
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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.11 (03) [EN]

From: Holger Otto ANDRE <hjoab at yahoo.com>
Subject: English vs Romance languages
"Hello there.
Is it correct to consider a language which has a 90% or so of Latin words,
as Germanic?Â
This is the case with modern English..."

Well, it depends how you count it.  Of the total million or so words, 90% or
so are non-Gernainc (though I dispute purely Latin; a huge amount of the
borrowings are Greek).

However, if you count the words used in everyday sentences, especially
spoken ones, the numbers are very different.

That sentence has 12 out of 17 Germanic, and if I wanted to "fiddle" the
answers a bit:

"However, if you look at all the words used by folks in their day-to-day
speech and writing, you'll find that far fewer come from the Romans"...

..you can make it nearly 100% Germanic (can't do much about "Romans"!).  On
the other hand, with a genuinely Romance language like Spanish or Italian,
you couldn't cook up a sentence that wasn't overwhelmingly Latin-derived.

The vast majority of the famous "million words" are never used by anybody
other than specialists; I'm a geologist and I tend not to say "ijolite" and
"jacupurangite" in dinner table conversation.  I do say "chocolate" though,
and that's neither Germanic or Romance!

Paul

 ----------

From: Brooks, Mark <mark.brooks at twc.state.tx.us>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.11 (03) [EN]

Ron wrote:  “Perhaps it is a sign of sophistication to get rid of the
"clutter" if you can say the same thing in a simpler way.”

Hi Ron:

That brings to mind a question for me.  I remember from my linguistics
classes in college that languages follow a pattern of moving from highly
inflected morphology to a more “analytic” structure.  I think that means
changing from highly inflected noun and verbs to indicate the function of
the word in the sentence to one that depends on word order.  For example,
English went from noun declensions to more or less none, and depends on word
order to indicate subject and object.  I remember the professor saying this
happens when a language comes in contact with other languages.

Okay, now my question.  Do you (or anyone else) have an idea why languages
“begin” with a highly inflected morphology?  I mean why not start from the
other extreme?  Do some languages actually have an analytic structure that
don’t seem to have had contact with other languages?

Regards,
Mark Brooks

----------

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

Holger, first let me say in the way of a postscript that I totally agree
with you that it is nonsense to say that Spanish is in any way inferior to
English. Such nonsense comes from ignorance, usually paired with prejudice.
Fortunately, the number of people subscribing to such nonsense in the US is
dwindling, in part no doubt because so many Americans learn Spanish as a
second language. At the same time, saying that Spanish (or any other
language for that matter) is superior or inferior to other languages is
something I simply cannot subscribe to. It's like comparing apples with
oranges.

Mark, I don't think languages *start* with complex inflection. I personally
believe (and I base this on my own observations in comparative Altaic) that
affixing is an advanced stage of fusing strings of words of which some
became bound morphemes used to mark grammatical function (word > bound
morpheme > clitic > affix). Among the Turkic languages, for instance, you
find suffixes that in related languages are enclitics and in others are
separate words.

I don't think there is such a thing as a language free from contact with
other languages, at least at some time in the past. For instance, some
Australian languages have been isolated for a long time as far as Westerners
can tell, but they all share certain features, especially phonological
features (such as extensive use of retroflex sounds). Are such areal
features inherited (i.e. do they represent common ancestry) or are they due
to contacts? Shared features among unrelated American languages certainly
seem to be due to contacts.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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