LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (07) [E]

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10 March 2006 * Volume 07
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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (01) [E]


  From: R. F. Hahn
  Subject: Language varieties

  Native American people tell me that they experience this a lot with
  indigenous North American languages, especially within the area of the
  Pacific Northwest (ca. from northernmost California to Central Alaska).
  This occurs between languages that are not even genealogically related
  Regards,
  Reinhard/Ron
That's particularly interesting. All I know about indigenous American 
languages is from books, and a display in Victoria museum (Vancouver I.) 
with sound-bites for each tribal group in the Northwest!  I can understand 
related languages sounding familiar - I remember reading that some Alaskans 
can understand bits of Apache and Navajo, as they are Athapaskan languages 
only a few centuries removed.  That's on a par wit! h English and Jutish I 
guess.  But to learn that unrelated languages sound similar is strange, that 
would be like me finding Indonesian or Mongol familiar.

Paul

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From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (05) [E]


  From: R. F. Hahn
  Subject: Language varieties

  Hi, Ingmar!

  I suggest not putting a lot of money on stories about Hungarian and 
Turkish
  sounding alike....
  .. The old assumption that Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian
  ...) and Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic) are related (in today's 
limited
  terms) has been debunked in the meantime, though some people still try to
  prove that they are related. So far, no reasonable systematic vowel shift
  scheme has been presented. ...

  Cheerio!
  Reinhard/Ron

Ron, what's your opiniion on Nostratic, the supposed North European/Asian 
proto-language?   A few years ago I met a lady who did her PhD on Nostratic, 
and she concluded that "it's real, but not obvious".  The works of R! uelen 
and Greenberg were convincing to an amateur like me, but I don't know how 
they stack up against serious analysis.

Paul

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

Hi again, Paul!  It's always a pleasure to hear from you.

First, apologies re my error:

> Also, in the Uralic languages vowel length differentiation is very
> strictly observed (which, together with initial stress, makes Hungarian
> sound somewhat similar to Czech and Slovak from a distance), while in 
> Uralic
> they are not (or only in certain vowels in Irano-Arabic loans).

This was supposed to be " while in ALTAIC they ..."

Paul, linguistic areal features are a commonly observed phenomenon. 
Grammatical and/or phonological features can be geographically distributed 
to be shared even by unrelated languages that share a certain geographic 
area.  Obviously -- or so I believe -- this is due to language contacts, 
especially to substrates.

An example is a group of Bengali (and thus Indo-European) dialects of the 
northeastern mountains being tonal, as are the adjacent Tibeto-Burman 
languages, an they share other features with them, even though the inherent 
structures are very different.  I assume this is due to Tibeto-Burman 
substrates.  In the Americas, such areal features are often very widely 
cast.

Besides the above-mentioned ones there is the usual requirement of currently 
or formerly geographically contiguous distributions.

It doesn't apply to "Mongol and Indonesian" because the necessary conditions 
are absent.  However, you do find such areal features for instance in 
Chinese and Vietnamese, even though Vietnamese is not related to Chinese. 
(One theory has it that the southernmost Chinese dialects have ancient 
Vietnamese (Anamese) substrates.) Then you find some far northwestern 
Mandarin Chinese dialects without tones and with suffixes, sharing areal 
features with adjacent Mongolic and Turkic languages, and this also applies 
to the Tibetan Amdo dialects of the same area (while all other Tibetan 
dialects are tonal).  Bear in mind that Sino-Tibetan and Altaic languages 
are structurally about as far apart as you can imagine.

Nostratic? Huh?  I won't go into that long story, except to repeat what I 
said earlier:

> I believe that, at least in theory, all languages are ultimately related 
> but
> that it is impossible to prove this because we have no means of tracing 
> them
> back that far.

Unfortunately, linguistics doesn't have the equivalent of DNA evidence, and 
DNA research is a vague, rather unreliable auxiliary indicator (hampered by 
the fact that people have intermarried and adopted unrelated languages).

However, Nostratic and similar (more "farfetching") theories may offer some 
glimpses at the likelihood of all languages going back to the same, very 
ancient source (though at the moment trying to prove this may be a futile 
effort).  Ilyitch-Svitych was a very bright guy who thought outside the box, 
just as Noam Chomsky did (and remember that "It's easier to tear down than 
to build", a proverb just created).  Ilyitch-Svitych came up with Nostratic 
at a time when most people in the world still believed in separate origins 
of "races" and languages.  He was lucky in that he published this stuff in 
the Soviet Union where his theory was politically kosher and convenient. 
Too bad he died so young!  Who knows what else he would have come up with?

When we enter this arena, science begins to overlap with belief.  Remember 
that people tend to try to prove what they believed in the first place. 
However, in our time DNA evidence has propelled us forward quite a way, and 
migration theories are being revised all over the place.  Good thing, too! 
We do need a good rattling (_kloetern_ ;-) ) once in a while, don't we?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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