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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">L O W L A N D S - L - 12 October 2009 - Volume 01</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#999999"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a></font></div><font color="#999999">
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">From: Paul Finlow-Bates <</font><a href="mailto:wolf_thunder51@yahoo.co.uk"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">wolf_thunder51@yahoo.co.uk</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.11 (03) [EN]</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">From: Holger Otto ANDRE <</font><a href="mailto:hjoab@yahoo.com"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">hjoab@yahoo.com</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">></font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Subject: English vs Romance languages</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">"Hello there. </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">Is it correct to consider a language which has a 90% or so of Latin words, as Germanic? </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">This is the case with modern English..." </font></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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). </font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">However, if you count the words used in everyday sentences, especially spoken ones, the numbers are very different. </font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">That sentence has 12 out of 17 Germanic, and if I wanted to "fiddle" the answers a bit: </font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"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"... </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">..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. </font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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! </font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Paul</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">----------<br><br>From: Brooks, Mark <</font><a href="mailto:mark.brooks@twc.state.tx.us"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">mark.brooks@twc.state.tx.us</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">><br>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.11 (03) [EN]<br><br>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.”<br> <br>
Hi Ron:<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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?<br>
<br>Regards,<br>Mark Brooks</font></div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">----------<br><br>From: R. F. Hahn <</font><a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">sassisch@yahoo.com</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">><br>
Subject: Language varieties<br><br>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.<br>
<br>Mark, I don't think languages <em>start</em> 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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Regards,<br>Reinhard/Ron<br>Seattle, USA<br><br></font></div></div>
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