LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.11 (03) [D/E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 11 March 2006 * Volume 03
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From: Elsie Zinsser <ezinsser at icon.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Phonology" was "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (05) [E]

Hi all,

>>From a purely academic point of view I can understand why Ron writes:

>>not putting a lot of money on stories about Hungarian and Turkish
sounding alike. [snip] ...about Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Finnish
sounding alike and being "closely related."

However, I can also understand why people, especially those who do not know
a language well, erroneously believe that one language sounds like or is 
related
to another. An ex-Rhodesian tried to convince me once that Afrikaans 
actually
developed from English, and then she mentioned a few related words and 
sounds.

I have no doubt that languages do rub stuff off each other and had the 
interesting
experience donkey years ago (1969, to be exact) that my Namakwaland cousins,
with not much exposure to English, thought that my siblings and I were 
speaking
English.

It was only years later that I realized that our Stad Afrikaans was 
gradually rounding
a few vowels, and changing its t's and k's that are typical in English, and 
which must
have sounded like English to our country cousins.

Is this not perhaps the case with the perceived 'similarities' between 
Finnish and Estonian?

In Afrikaans the following phonological changes is typical amongst young 
(pre 30's) and small
people, and I use the speech of my two daughters and 5-year old grandson:

gaan -> gôn
kyk -> kaaik
wyd -> waait
wat -> wot
maar -> môr
ma -> mô
ja -> jô
ek - aek

Groete,
Elsie Zinsser

----------


From: Felix Hülsey <felix.huelsey at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties"

Hallo Ingmar en allemaal,

na een drukke week nu pas een kort antwoord op de Hamaland-mail.

In de jaren tachtig, als tiener, heb ik een paar jaar in het Hamaland
gewoond (in Reken, Groß(!) Reken om precies te zijn); we gingen toen
regelmatig naar Winterswijk, uiteraard om op de markt vis en kaas te
kopen maar in mijn geval ook om mijn Nederlands te oefenen.

Volgens mij leeft de benaming Hamaland bij de mensen helemaal niet. Is
dat aan de Nederlandse kant anders? De enige keer dat ik die naam toen
ooit hoorde was in verband met het Hamaland-museum in Vreden.

Wat je zegt over de dialecten komt precies met mijn ervaring overeen: de
mensen die ik indertijd Nedersaksisch heb horen spreken (vooral tijdens
mijn Zivildienst in een bejaardenhuis in Ramsdorf), deden dat inderdaad
met een vocaalsysteem dat min of meer met het Nederlandse overeenkwam,
een opmerkelijk verschil met de familie van mijn vaders kant uit
Oostwestfalen (Wiedenbrück en omstreken) of met de (zeer zeldzame)
dialectprogramma's bij de WDR-omroep die qua taal meer op de stad
Münster georienteerd zijn (waren moet men bijna zeggen). Het is wel zo
dat in Borken en omstreken het dialect toen nog relatief levendig was,
zelfs bij sommige jongere mensen.

Groeten uit Keulen
Felix Hülsey

> From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
> Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2006.02.28 (04) [E]
>
> Great that you're mentioning my home area Hamaland!
> Btw in the Netherlands we call it often Hameland, with an e.
> It's interesting that the old Chamavi were no (Low) Saxons but Franks,
> as in Chamavian Franks. Their language must have been Old Low Franconian
> then, in stead of Old Saxon.
> In the Western parts of the old Hamaland (the Chamavian area) Low
> Franconian dialects are still spoken today, e.g. Kleverlands in Germany
> and the Netherlands. Actually, in the town where I live nowadays, Duiven
> (<Thuvine) a Kleverland Low Franconian dialects is spoken, and it was part
> of Hamaland in Merovingian times.
> In the core Hamaland of today, around my home town of Wenters
> (Winterswijk) a characteristic Low Saxon dialect is spoken, which is quite
> archaic and relatively close to Old Saxon compared to e.g. Northern Low
> Saxon and Westernmore Low Saxon in the Netherlands, e.g. in Salland.
> There is a group of Low Saxon dialects that I call the Hamaland Low Saxon
> group, spoken in the Eastern Netherlands and adjacent areas in Germany:
> the Eastern Achterhoek (Winterswijk etc), Twente (Enschede etc) and
> Southern Salland (Deventer and surroundings)in the Netherlands, and
> Westmünsterland (Bocholt, Vreden etc) and Upper Bentheim (Nordhorn)in
> Germany. It has features of Westphalian but is more original, especially
> also phonologically. E.g. : no diphthongs but monophtongs as in Old Saxon
> long [e:] and [o:], where other dialects, incl. Westphalian, have <ou/au>,
> <ei/ai> etc., or in the Netherlands [u:] and [i:].
> Long <a:> from older lengthened short <a> in open syllables is not long
> <å> from Old Germanic <æ:>, where most dialects have <å:> in all cases.
> Final schwa from old unstressed vowels is not deleted; short <e> and <o>
> are mostly preserved as [E] and [O], didn't become [e:] and [o:] etc., nor
> broken to <ie> and <uo> as in Westphalian.
>
> You can find a few examples of Hamaland Low Saxon at the A-site of the
> LLList: the translations of the Wren story from Bokelt (Bocholt, NRWF,
> Germany) and the one from Wenters (Winterswijk, Gelderland, NL).
> The latter was translated by my grandmother and recorded by her proud
> grandson

----------

From: Felix Hülsey <felix.huelsey at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L: Language varieties

Hallo all,

another reason for some people to postulate a relationship between
Hungarian and Turkish was (and perhaps still is) the fact that in the
Uralic family, the closest congeners of Hungarian are Mansi and Khanty -
the languages of two small peoples in the Ural region leading a
lifestyle that was perceived by a few nationalist Hungarians as
uncivilised or even inferior whereas a relation with the Turks would
have provided a more warlike and heroic ancestry.

I am not an expert on Hungarian, though fascinated by it; I'm just
paraphrasing a theory put forward several times on this interesting forum:

http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=11331

All the best from Cologne
Felix Hülsey

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language varieties
>
> Hi, Ingmar!
>
> I suggest not putting a lot of money on stories about Hungarian and
> Turkish sounding alike.  I have heard this one umpteen times, also
> stories about Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Finnish sounding alike
> and being "closely related."  Listen to them, and you'll find that they
> sound vastly different, even from a distance -- only Estonian and
> Finnish (which are closely related) sharing a certain common sound.
>
> My theory is that these stories come primarily from people's
> (half-baked) knowledge based on the 19th-century "discovery" that these
> languages are of non-European origin and share much in terms of
> (agglutinating) structure. It is also based on the old assumption that
> these languages must be related because of their structural and
> orthographic similarities and because "they have those long words"
> (i.e., agglutinative constructions) very much unlike most "European"
> (i.e., Indo-European) languages.  Furthermore, they have pretty much
> consistently fixed stress, while most European languages have phonemic
> stress (exceptions being e.g. French, Polish, Czech, Slovak and
> Sorbian).  (However, while Uralic languages tend to have first-syllable
> stress, Turkic tends to have final-syllable stress -- but Mongolic has
> first-syllable stress again -- and this alone makes for a very different
> rhythm.)  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).
>
> 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.  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.  Most
> common words are likely to be loans, due to Uralic and Altaic having a
> long history of contacts.
>
> It's too bad we don't have a Hungarian translation and sound file of the
> wren story (http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/).
>
> Cheerio!
> Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: Karl-Heinz Lorenz <Karl-Heinz.Lorenz at gmx.net>
Subject: L-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (05) [E]

Servus, you wrote:
>
> I suggest not putting a lot of money on stories about Hungarian and
> Turkish
> sounding alike.  I have heard this one umpteen times, also stories about
> Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Finnish sounding alike and being "closely
> related."  Listen to them, and you'll find that they sound vastly
> different,
> even from a distance -- only Estonian and Finnish (which are closely
> related) sharing a certain common sound.
>
This reminds me of an account here in Vienna, I've heard about a trainee
from Finland, they had to coach and they didn't know what to do with him
until they found out, he's able do understand Hungarian.

When I heard that, I said something like: "Oh interesting, that could be",
because I didn't want to offend or even expose the narrator, thinking to
myself: "Finnish is related to Hungarian, but not closer than German to
Irish (that's a comparison in the book "The Loom of Language" by Frederick
Bodmer, which I remember I've read in the early eighties. As I see, this
book is still available: http://www.micheloud.com/FXM/LA/loom.htm).

But what about the following: as a native of Western Austrian I always
found, that our language sounds totally equal to Rhaeto-Romance. You wrote
about it several times before, that it's not only the consonants but also
these falling vowels "oa", "ea", "ia" ..., the stress on words and sentences
as a whole, etc. When I hear Rhaeto-Romance from far, it seems to be
Alemannic and when you hear it clearly it's as if Italian is spoken with an
Alemmanic accent. And further I remember always when I happened to be in
Northern Italy, especially Piemont or Lombardia, that the Lombard accent is
surprisingly Alemmanic sounding. Some of them say "h" in the beginning of
words, for example: "io ho" (I have) is pronounced with the "h", not as "io
'o" as common in Standard Italian pronunciation, so it sounds the same as "I
ho(n)" or "I ha(n)" "I hia (hio)" in Tyrolean, Swiss and other Alemanic and
Alemanic-Bavarian varieties. Northern Italian dialects have about 200-300
germanic words in it, especially from the extinct Lombard language, which
was close to Alemannic and Bavarian (other linguists suppose it more
ingvaeonic and close to LS). And the other way round, our Alemannic and
Tyrolean has a lot of Romance words in it and it sounds like German with an
Romance accent, so I think, there's is a common Alpine sound of Romance
languages and Alemmanic-German.

Just some thoughts about your concept of South-Germanic as a group of it's
own apart from West-Germanic.

Cheers, Tschüss, Ciao or even better: Tgau, sin seveser

Karl-Heinz

----------

From: Thomas Byro <greenherring at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (07) [E]

An interesting subject of discussion might be terms of invective (four
letter words), how they are constructed, why some languages are rich
in them and others not and how they can cross linguistic barriers.  I
worked with a physician from Argentina once who remarked on how poorly
supplied the German language was with terms of invective compared to
Spanish.  He told me that, while working in Germany, his German
friends had picked up Spanish curses and used them even though they
did not know their meaning.  He assumed that they simply liked their
sound.  I am told that Hebrew is also poorly endowed with these tterms
and that Israelis commonly use Arabic ones (the Arabic language
apparently being full of such terms).

Growing up here in New York, my younger son eagerly sought out all the
"bad" words he could in as many languages as possible.  By the time he
graduated High School, he could curse fluently in Spanish, Hungarian,
Japanese and Cantonese.  Not Mandarin though, he admitted with some
dissappointment. They didn't teach curses in Mandarin class and all
his Chinese friends spoke only Cantonese.  Unlike the Germans I
mentioned before though, he knows the full meaning of all these terms.

Tom Byro

----------

From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (07) [E]


Ron wrote:
"Then you find some far northwestern Mandarin Chinese dialects without tones 
and with suffixes, sharing areal features with adjacent Mongolic and Turkic 
languages..."

I knew that one extreme north western Mandarin dialect had lost one of its 
tones and that this was put down to Turkic or Mongolic substrate or 
superstrate influence, but could there actually be a Mandarin variant that 
had become completely toneless?

To bring it back to the Lowlands as well, what Turkic and Mongolic (or even 
Sino-Tibetan) influences were there - if any - on the varieties spoken by 
Soviet German migrants and deportees to Turkic lands?

Go raibh maith agat

Criostóir.

----------

From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2006.03.10 (05) [E]

Well, I do put my money on what my Hungarian friend told me, because he
had this experience himself, it is not just 'a story'. And I can understand
what he meant: Hungary is surrounded by German, Slavonic and Rumanian,
and other languages known there are mainly English, French and Latin;
in fact the Hungarians feel (and actually are) linguistically isolated,
whereas the other languages like Slavic, Germanic and Romance are part of
large language families (and even all related Indo European languages).
The phonology and structure of Hungarian is very different from IE, so
when a Hungarian suddenly hears Turkish, compared to the other languages
he knows (Russian, English, German) can sound quite familiar.
That doesn't mean Hugarian and Turkish are originally related genetically,
but now that I think about it: maybe we can say that languages can become
related later, even though they weren't at first. If we look at language
families the same way as human families: they became related through
intermarriage etc, so maybe we can say that Altaic and Uralian are in-
laws?

Ingmar

  Wron wrote:
>I suggest not putting a lot of money on stories about Hungarian and
Turkish
>sounding alike.  I have heard this one umpteen times, also stories about
>Hungarian, Turkish, Estonian and Finnish sounding alike and being "closely
>related."  Listen to them, and you'll find that they sound vastly
different,
>even from a distance -- only Estonian and Finnish (which are closely
>related) sharing a certain common sound.
>
>My theory is that these stories come primarily from people's (half-baked)
>knowledge based on the 19th-century "discovery" that these languages are
of
>non-European origin and share much in terms of (agglutinating) structure.
>It is also based on the old assumption that these languages must be
related
>because of their structural and orthographic similarities and
because "they
>have those long words" (i.e., agglutinative constructions) very much
unlike
>most "European" (i.e., Indo-European) languages.  Furthermore, they have
>pretty much consistently fixed stress, while most European languages have
>phonemic stress (exceptions being e.g. French, Polish, Czech, Slovak and
>Sorbian).  (However, while Uralic languages tend to have first-syllable
>stress, Turkic tends to have final-syllable stress -- but Mongolic has
>first-syllable stress again -- and this alone makes for a very different
>rhythm.)  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).
>
>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.  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.  Most common words are likely to be loans, due
to
>Uralic and Altaic having a long history of contacts.
>
>It's too bad we don't have a Hungarian translation and sound file of the
>wren story (http://www.lowlands-l.net/anniversary/).
>
>Cheerio!
>Reinhard/Ron

----------

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

Hi, folks!

I see this one arouses a fair bit of interest.  Before I get to talk to our 
Ingmar's response, first some responses to the rest of the interesting 
postings.

Haai, Elsie!  Good to hear from you, as always.  There's most definitely 
something to saying that languages "rub off on each other."  If this does or 
eventually will lead to areal features is another question (though my theory 
is that it might be able to).

When I listen to "typical," homegrown South African English spoken by native 
speakers, especially when I listen to it from some distance, it sounds 
definitely "Afrikaans" to me, meaning that it seems to have an "Afrikaans 
accent."  I have heard other non-South-Africans say that non-"Afrikaner" SA 
English speakers "sound Dutch."  Furthermore, I do not perceive a clear 
dividing line between native Afrikaans speakers' and native SA English 
speakers' accents in English.  (I could go into phonological details but 
won't try your patience and hope you'll take my word for it.)  However, I am 
pretty sure that things are not as clear to South Africans, certainly not to 
speakers of Afrikaans and SA English, that to many or most of them the two 
sound vastly different.  This is basically what I mean by "relativity."

I'm glad you brought up the case of Afrikaans, Elsie, not only because it is 
Lowlandic. I particularly like the case of your Namakwaland cousins thinking 
that you were speaking English when you were speaking urban Afrikaans.  This 
is an excellent illustration of the point I tried to make for our Ingmar: it 
is a question of relativity, just as much, if not more, a matter of 
intellectual considerations and emotional responses as it is a matter of 
actual aural perception. *And this tends to be subconscious.* Your Afrikaans 
sounded so foreign to your cousins that, in conjunction with their probably 
deficient English and their awareness of you living in the large 
English-dominated and to them probably somewhat scary and rather alien 
metropolis Johannesburg, their first emotional reaction (bewilderment) led 
them to resort to the conclusion that you were speaking English.

Some of you have already heard the story that some Low-Saxon- and 
German-speaking WW II refugees from the far northeast (Northeastern Poland 
and Kaliningrad) to Northwestern Germany believed that the Low Saxon spoken 
there (around the Lower Elbe, I believe) was English.  Well, I guess there 
were those "English sounds" in that region (e.g., /ou/ ->[eU] and /ar/ -> 
[a:] as in Southern England) and other non-eastern sounds, but locals and 
English people would disagree that the two sound very much alike.  I submit 
to you that the newcomers' reaction was more due to not understanding the 
dialects while knowing that they had entered the British occupation sector. 
Again, my point is that our perception does not necessarily come from one 
source but is interwoven with emotional responses and intellectual 
considerations.

Hi, Felix!  Well, Finnish, Karelian and Estonian do sound rather alike --  
again relatively speaking.  To me, Estonian sounds like "clipped Finnish," 
but whenever I hear one of our coworkers in the office nextdoor talk on the 
phone in Estonian and another in Finnish, I have to listen carefully to know 
who is talking.  This perception, too, may be influenced by my awareness of 
their close genealogical relationship.  But there is "that typical rhythm." 
I wonder how Finnish and Estonian speakers think about that.

>From my reading and listening, too, I got the impression that, when 
Hungarian academics began searching for their people's Ugric roots in the 
Ural Mountains region, the average Hungarian was not terribly excited about 
the closest relatives Khanty ("Ostyak") and Mansy ("Vogul") being spoken 
mostly in small, "primitive," Siberian-looking villages by Siberian-looking 
people far away, apart from the fact that those languages are not mutually 
comprehensible and many of their sounds seem strange to the average 
Hungarian, whose language has had centuries of Ugric isolation under 
influences from Germanic, Slavonic and, yes, Turkish.  (Note also that Ural 
Ugric rubs shoulders with Ural Turkic, primarily Tatar.)

So, lets not forget that Hungary was occupied by the Ottoman Empire for 150 
years (mid-16th - late 17th centuries).  The Ottoman Turkish administration 
was, generally speaking, fairly tolerant toward the occupied nations' 
religions and cultures, and they employed mostly native mid- and low-level 
administrators.  Though after liberation from the Ottomans formerly occupied 
peoples customarily demonized the Turks and only talked about and 
romanticized their own resistance fighters (and still do), many of their 
ancestors under Ottoman occupation had tolerated and even admired Turkey, 
had allowed their music, dance and cuisine to be Turkicized, and not a few 
of them converted to Islam (and their descendants have been persecuted for 
that ever since, as we can clearly see for instance in Bulgaria and in the 
former Yugoslavia).

Turkish is non-European by origin, and it is "un-European" in structure and 
sounds very different from Indo-European languages of the subcontinent.  So 
is and does Hungarian.  You might say they are fellows in that regard, and 
at least the average Hungarian is aware of that.  Even though the two 
languages would sound very different to someone who has no prior knowledge 
of them, I submit that this intellectual awareness, perhaps in conjunction 
with emotional needs, is likely to influence a Hungarian's perception within 
the context of Indo-European surroundings, even though he may honestly 
believe that they sound similar to his ears only.

So there you have my response, dear Ingmar.  I don't doubt that your friend 
truly believes what he says.  However, with all respect to him, I very much 
doubt that his aural perception is the only player here.  What I do 
absolutely refuse to believe is stories like one I read a long time ago, 
where a Hungarian-speaking prisoner claims he and his Turkish cell mate were 
able to converse on a rudimentary level by using their respective languages 
and that they spent their time finding numerous cognate words in Hungarian 
(Uralic) and Turkish (Altaic).  If they did so, they either must have been 
extremely gifted or extremely deluded linguists or they had another common 
language, at the time most likely French, aside from numerous French loans 
in Turkish.

When I visited Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) after quite a few months of 
immersion in the language and culture of faraway China proper to the east, 
listening to local Russian, Oirat Monglian, Iranian Sarykoli and Turkic 
languages like Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur and Uzbek was an almost religious 
experience.  It felt like "being almost back home."  Had you asked me then, 
I might have said that they sounded like European languages, just as many of 
the people (especially some Uzbeks, Uighurs and definitely Sarykolis) looked 
to me like relatives.  That was then, and it sure is different now, but 
perhaps it underlines the point I am trying to make.

Maybe you ought to listen to background conversations in Turkish and 
Hungarian yourself, Ingmar.  But chances are your willingness to put money 
on your friend's words have already influenced your mind.  ;-)

Quae sufficiat addigitasse, amici. Pace tanti viri dixerim, at lacunas eorum 
cum grano salis audintor.

Kumpelmenten,
Reinhard/Ron 

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