[Corpora-List] English is close to Sandinavian languages: diachronic studies please

[John Goldsmith]

No need to rant. Two syntacticians, Jan Terje Faarlund and Joe Emonds,
have recently made the case
that English is closer to Northern Germanic than it is to Western Germanic:

http://ktwop.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/modern-english-derives-from-scandinavian-rather-than-from-old-english/

best,
John Goldsmith

On 12/02/2012 04:53 PM, Charles Hall wrote:
> ah, yet another example of a misguided use of computational approaches
> based on simplistic understanding of language. and especially
> diachronic linguistics Historically, there wasn't any language we
> might call Danish until ca 1100 [i.e. after the Norman Conquest] or so
> when the Old East Norse dialect started to split into Danish and
> Swedish. Since that development is well documented historically, any
> analysis that posits a "closer" relationship between "English" and
> "Danish" that fails to explain why that would not then also be the
> case for English and Swedish is just another  lovely "correlation
> proves causation" fallacy of which we already have quite enough.
>
> In other words, [attention, rant follows], you have to do heaps of
> background research before you toss innocent data  into the hungry
> maws of the compunaut....
>
> and just to remind, genetic background, genetic distribution doesn't
> have to have anything to do with what languages are spoken. Ethnic
> groups routinely add, dump, or replace languages with wild abandon. As
> the Endangered Language Fund points out, about 50% of the worlds' 7000
> languages will disappear this century.
>
> and on that happy note,
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Charles
>
>
>
>  
> *************
> Charles Hall, Ph.D., dr.h.
> University of Memphis, Department of English
> Applied Linguistics and EFL/ESL
> 901.313.4496
>
> www.charleshall.info www.l4law.org
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Nicholas Sanders <nix at semiotek.org>
> *To:* corpora at uib.no
> *Sent:* Friday, November 30, 2012 5:46 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [Corpora-List] English is close to Sandinavian languages
>
> On 30 Nov 2012, at 14:34, Patrick Juola <juola at mathcs.duq.edu
> <mailto:juola at mathcs.duq.edu>> wrote:
>
>> There's a well-attested history of English and the rest of the
>> Germanic languages that puts English fairly firmly in the West
>> Germanic family along with Frisian and Saxon, and at a greater
>> distance, Dutch and standard German.
>
> I make no claim to be fit to enter this debate, but I feel it
> worthwhile to mention Stephen Oppenheimer's "The Origins of the
> British" which
>
>
>   ... demonstrates that the Anglo-Saxon invasions contributed just a
>   tiny fraction (5%) to the English gene pool. Two thirds of the
>   English people reveal an unbroken line of genetic descent from
>   south-western Europeans arriving long before the first farmers. The
>   bulk of the remaining third arrived between 7,000 and 3,000 years
>   ago as part of long-term north-west European trade and immigration,
>   especially from Scandinavia - and may have brought with them the
>   earliest forms of English language.
>
>
> Whether it does so demonstrate, I (as noted) am not not qualified to say!
>
>
> -- 
>
> Nicholas J A Sanders
> ___________________
> semiotek
>
> +44 [0]7092 153 409
> nix at semiotek.org <mailto:nix at semiotek.org>
> ___________________
>
>
>
>
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