LL-L "Language varieties" 2002.07.07 (01) [E]

Sun Jul 7 18:22:46 UTC 2002

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 07.JUL.2002 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Gary Taylor <gary_taylor_98 at yahoo.com>
Subject: language varieties

Dear Ron

to give in Estuary = t(s)@gIv (as was probably
expected)

Gary

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

Thank you, Gary.  So expected, confirmed, added and posted.

http://www.sassisch.net/rhahn/lowlands/swadesh.htm

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Language varieties"

> From: "Luc Hellinckx" <luc.hellinckx at pandora.be>
> Subject: Swadesh list
>
> Moreover, "claw" for example has no translation (anymore) in Brabantish

It may be that this is also true of Scots, except that
when words fall out of use in Scots one tends to just
take the English when put under pressure by such
intellectual exercises as Swadesh's list. This is bound
to bias the figures quite seriously considering how much
impact a single word has on the calculated timescales.

Oh, wait - "claw" does exist in Scots as a verb, now that
I think of it. Well, whatever, your principle is correct!

> The list can hardly be called "universal" since a "tree" and its "bark"
> are probably quite hard to find on the North Pole *s*.
>
> Maybe a better list could be designed for our set of Languages. I once
> read that most of the vocabulary of the Indo-European languages
> (proto-Indo-European actually) could be traced back to a life in the
> woods and more specifically to the construction of a house there.

We would certainly have to avoid trees for Lowlandic languages
(and blast that IE vocab theory out of the water) because there
are no trees in Shetland. I seem to remember John Magnus saying
that the word "tree" in Shetlandic is used for a porridge-stirrer
or something! Similarly, the lack of trees in the Shetlands leads
to other blank vocabulary items, such as "owl".

> So, in order to create a better list we first have to know what kind of
> a culture the oldest Saxons were living in. Did they spend a lot of time
> on sea or were they rather living deep in a forest ? Was hunting important
> for them ? What about agriculture ? Did war play a big role in their life
?
> Where there any tradespeople or handicraftspeople among them ? And so
> on.

Partly because of what I said above, I'm dubious about this
approach. For the rest, how would examining only "older"
semantic domains tell us how language has changed all the
way down to the present day?

Another approach might be simply to take the most frequent
words in the language, though I suspect certain words would
have to be excluded. Prepositions, for example, don't seem
suitable - it doesn't seem to make much sense to ask "What's
the Scots for the English 'on'?" While the answer seems
obvious, it's not as simple as it looks when you're not
talking about cognates.

You might be interested in my list of the 987 most common
words in Scots (it was meant to be 1000 but the list got
worn down as I discovered and eliminated some spelling
variants!). These are ordered by frequency, most frequent
first (note however, that it's based on actual words found,
so plurals are treated as separate words from singulars,
homographs are treated as the same word):

http://sandyfleemin.org/grammar/semantics/frequentwirds.asp

Working from this list does show an interesting point: when
we work from the Swadesh list we're normally starting with
English and trying to think of the words for these things
in another language. I think there may be a tendency to
assume that English is a huge language and if the word
doesn't exist in the target language, it's a weakness of
the target language. However, the Scots word frequency list
gives the lie to this, many words such as:

108     syne
368     law
499     brae
500     dang
501     redd
507     pow

are very difficult to give in English as a single word,
though there are sometimes cognates, eg law corresponds
to the "lowe" in English "Bigelowe", as was discussed in
earlier postings. Probably a word like "law" would have
to be disqualified, being particularly a feature of the
geography of Lowland Scotland.

One thing that strikes me about the Swadesh list is
that it's very like the "theory" of IQ, where a complex
phenomenon like human intelligence is force to fit a
simple linear scale (or logarithmic, in the Swadesh case),
not because it fits the observed phenomena but because
the creators want to keep it simple at all costs. One of
the reasons this approach can seem to work is that it only
gives a simple scale and so offers nothing to cross-check
it with to show that it really is working (IQ was once
dubiously calibrated giving the Sanford-Binet scale which
is now supposed to be accepted as gospel). I would suggest
taking a more taxonomic approach, classifying lists of
words perhaps in the first instance as Swadesh-like lists
of nouns, verbs &c, then in calculating the time from which
two languages began to diverge we could at least compare
the results from the different lists to see if it makes any
sense.

It would perhaps make more sense to classify the words by
area, however, eg:

Protestant church (limited in time)
Forestry (not applicable to Shetlandic)
Agriculture (not applicable to Cockney, and anyway,
             how do we deal with a dialect which
             has had its rate of change boosted by
             slang-production techniques?)

&c &c. Well, yes, it's pretty much too complicated for
anything but a fully-supported research prokect, but
that's how language _is_ - it's complicated and there's
no magic Swadesh wand that'll make it simple.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org
A dinna dout him, for he says that he
On nae accoont wad ever tell a lee.
                          - C.W.Wade,
                    'The Adventures o McNab'

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