LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.12 (04) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 12 October 2009 - Volume 04
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From: Brooks, Mark <mark.brooks at twc.state.tx.us>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.12 (03) [EN]

Yes, Ron and Sandy, an interesting idea.  Let me go on to argue with myself
for a moment ;-).  Let’s take the case of the Romance languages.  We could
say that they descended from the language spoken in the Roman Empire.  That
language evolved into many different ones, but for the sake of my example,
let’s look at the major Western Romance languages and one of the Eastern
ones.  Italian seems to fit into both in some ways, but for the purpose of
my argument, let’s put it in the Western group.



As far as I can tell Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese, et al. lost the
case endings on nouns.  At least let’s say that in a general sense.  But,
Romanian has retained some up until today.  Now, Romanian surely had as much
(or even more) contact with other languages as the Western group.  In fact,
I believe Rome withdrew from Dacia (present day Romania more or less) even
earlier than it did from the Western provinces.  So, what would explain
that?  Of course, each language has its own characteristics just like people
do, but assuming that the tendency to analytic structure applies
universally, it seems to have somewhat by-passed Romanian.



True, Romanian has lost some of the cases and might still have the
“analytic” change going on, but I wonder about the difference.



Mark Brooks

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.12 (03) [EN]

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

> Subject: Language varieties

>

> This is an interesting idea, Sandy, and not an implausible one either,

> in my opinion.

>

> If this is what has been happening, it might explain divergence of

> language groups in the form of “families” that we perceive as being

> unrelated with each other. Oftentimes, these families have features

> that seem “suspiciously” similar on some deeper level or other, for

> instance the Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European language families. But

> then the “evidence” peters out and genetic relationships between them

> seem impossible to prove.



I think that recent advances in sign language linguistics can be

enlightening in this respect.



For one thing, it's been demonstrated that sign languages will arise

spontaneously where there's a need and no other sign language available.

So there needn't be any _linguistic_ reason why different language

families should actually be related. But while it isn't hard to imagine

several Deaf people being born into a community with no sign language

(in fact we know it happens), it is a bit harder to see how a

representative group of humans in the past would come to be isolated

without any oral language (and so develop a brand new oral language),

unless migrations took place before the development of languages as we

know it. Could such language families reflect very early migrations?



Another aspect is that while sign languages share many more universals

than oral languages, some universals are found to be shared between oral

and signed languages.



For example, there is a tendency for phonetic features to spread

backwards in oral languages, eg "can go" and "can be" getting pronounced

more like "cang go" and "cam be" in English. This tendency also occurs

in sign languages, for example in BSL "blood" is signed as a compound

sign "red-flow". Although the signs for "red" and "flow" use two

different handshapes, "red" is often seen signed with the same handshape

as is used for "flow" in this compound: one of the features of the

second sign spreads backwards into the first.



This seems to show that just because two very different and possibly

unrelated languages show various suspiciously similar features doesn't

mean that they're _historically_ related: there are things that happen

across languages not because the languages are related, but because the

same cognitive system (the human brain) is behind them.



I don't know if this just me teaching my grandmother to suck eggs or

not!  :)

•

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