<div style="text-align: center; font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">===========================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 21 October 2009 - Volume 03<br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a></span><br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);">
<span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);">Encoding: Unicode (UTF-08)</span><br style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);"><span style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153);">Language Codes: <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/codes.php">lowlands-l.net/codes.php</a></span><br>
===========================================<br></div><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">From: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI"><span class="gD" style="color: rgb(200, 137, 0);">Sandy Fleming</span> <span class="go"><<a href="mailto:sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk">sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk</a>></span></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Subject: </span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" class="gI">LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.21 (03) [EN]<br><br></span><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">> From: R. F. Hahn <</span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com">sassisch@yahoo.com</a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> Subject: Language varieties</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> Well, Paul, this is where you can run into trouble, at least</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> theoretically. Whenever you are dealing with landmasses you are also</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> dealing with the possibility of contacts and "contamination."</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> Yes, due to European settlements it was mostly the coastal Australian</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> languages that first became threatened and eventually extinct, with</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> the exception of the northern coast. Furthermore, it seems to be true,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> by and large, that after the demise of the theoretical land bridge,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> the languages of Australia came to be cut off from the rest of the</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> world -- "by and large" because I have to add that apparently there</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> were contacts between precolonial Australians and Austronesian</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> travelers from what are now parts of Indonesia. (This seems to account</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> for canoe building and non-percussive musical instruments on</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
> Australia's northern coast.)</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
But what do you really mean by contacts? After all, if all spoken</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
languages come down from one spoken language, we get back to a time when</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
there was no other language to have contact _with_. So why the enormous</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
differences between distant language families these days?</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
If we think that there was one original language, then contacts are</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
simply contacts with dialects of the original language that have changed</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
due internal processes, perhaps mostly phonological? Would there be a</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
limit to this within a given timescale, or is it enough to explain the</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
differences we see?</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
What is the timescale? 60,000 years?</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
If different language groups originated independently, so that there was</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
more than one protolanguage, then there's much more potential for</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
change.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Australian colonisation is under a bit of review at the moment, isn't</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
it? There's the idea that the first people out of Africa followed the</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
east coast and so on down to colonise Australia _before_ they reached</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Europe!</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
I could, however, suggest some other processes that would lead to</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
language contact and accelerated language change. This starts with the</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
idea that homo sapiens could have encountered homo floresiensis on their</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
way down to Australia. Did homo floresiensis have their own language,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
and was this a major contact event? Could it have resulted in all</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Australian languages having some common features not universal in other</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
human languages?</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
On other possible force for sudden language change could, I think, be</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
such things as twinspeak, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Harpin' Boont and other</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
secret languages that somehow spread out into the community. Some of</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
these seem to be individual quirks that can become entire new languages,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
while others seem to be a semi-systematic method for deliberately</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
speaking differently from people you don't want to associate with.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
I'd say there's a lot we don't know and very little chance of coming</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
across the necessary data!</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<font style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" color="#888888"><br>
Sandy Fleming<br>
<a href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">http://scotstext.org/</a></font><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">----------</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> From: R. F. Hahn <</span><a style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;" href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com">sassisch@yahoo.com</a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">></span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
Subject: Language varieties</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Thanks, Sandy. Interesting points, as usual.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">I don't know what the timeline would be, but it would be darn long in any case. ;-)</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">If we do assume one common ancestor, I would further suggest that it was a "primitive" sort of language from which divergence, shifts as well as lexical, semantic and structural innovation, drift and obsoleteness created new varieties from which yet numerous new varieties and groups of varieties were derived ... proto from proto from proto ... if you will.</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">As you can see in the case of Hawaiian, a few centuries of isolation derived strings such as </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">kanaka</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> from *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">taŋata</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> 'man'. Most people without formal phonology training would not suspect the two to be related, and most that do have that training would need to see a larger sample to come to the conclusion that they are related. Now imagine that due to some contact with another language group (let's imagine speakers of another language adopting Hawaiian) the vowels start shifting, say a > æ > e and you get *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">keneke </i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">which causes palatalization to *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">cheneche</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, then voicing between vowels: *<i>cheneje</i>, then </span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">e</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"> elision due to penultimate stress: *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">chenej</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, eventually affricates changing to fricatives: *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">shenezh</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">, and eventually devoicing and then deletion of unstressed non-low vowels: *</span><i style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">shnezh</i><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">. Obviously I made this up, but these are all very common types of phonological shifts. Now add semantic shifts, say, for instance "man" > *"warrior" > *"aggressive" > *"scary", etc. Also add to this gradual morphological and syntactic changes, things that alter the overall structure, and perhaps the development of genders or other types of classifiers. All these things will eventually obscure ancient relationships. In theory then, we might talk about contact between two languages that we cannot identify as related because of numerous strata of divergence. In that case we might as well call them "unrelated (to all intents and purposes)."</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Regards,</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Reinhard/Ron</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">Seattle, USA</span><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><br style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;">
•
<p>
==============================END===================================
<p>
* Please submit postings to lowlands-l@listserv.linguistlist.org.
<p>
* Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.
<p>
* Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
<p>
* Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l")
<p>
are to be sent to listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org or at
<p>
http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
<p>
*********************************************************************