LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.22 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 21 October 2009 - Volume 03
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.21 (03) [EN]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
 > Subject: Language varieties
>
> Well, Paul, this is where you can run into trouble, at least
> theoretically. Whenever you are dealing with landmasses you are also
> dealing with the possibility of contacts and "contamination."
>
> Yes, due to European settlements it was mostly the coastal Australian
> languages that first became threatened and eventually extinct, with
> the exception of the northern coast. Furthermore, it seems to be true,
> by and large, that after the demise of the theoretical land bridge,
> the languages of Australia came to be cut off from the rest of the
> world -- "by and large" because I have to add that apparently there
> were contacts between precolonial Australians and Austronesian
> travelers from what are now parts of Indonesia. (This seems to account
> for canoe building and non-percussive musical instruments on
> Australia's northern coast.)

But what do you really mean by contacts? After all, if all spoken
languages come down from one spoken language, we get back to a time when
there was no other language to have contact _with_. So why the enormous
differences between distant language families these days?

If we think that there was one original language, then contacts are
simply contacts with dialects of the original language that have changed
due internal processes, perhaps mostly phonological? Would there be a
limit to this within a given timescale, or is it enough to explain the
differences we see?

What is the timescale? 60,000 years?

If different language groups originated independently, so that there was
more than one protolanguage, then there's much more potential for
change.

Australian colonisation is under a bit of review at the moment, isn't
it? There's the idea that the first people out of Africa followed the
east coast and so on down to colonise Australia _before_ they reached
Europe!

I could, however, suggest some other processes that would lead to
language contact and accelerated language change. This starts with the
idea that homo sapiens could have encountered homo floresiensis on their
way down to Australia. Did homo floresiensis have their own language,
and was this a major contact event? Could it have resulted in all
Australian languages having some common features not universal in other
human languages?

On other possible force for sudden language change could, I think, be
such things as twinspeak, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Harpin' Boont and other
secret languages that somehow spread out into the community. Some of
these seem to be individual quirks that can become entire new languages,
while others seem to be a semi-systematic method for deliberately
speaking differently from people you don't want to associate with.

I'd say there's a lot we don't know and very little chance of coming
across the necessary data!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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

Thanks, Sandy. Interesting points, as usual.

I don't know what the timeline would be, but it would be darn long in any
case. ;-)

If we do assume one common ancestor, I would further suggest that it was a
"primitive" sort of language from which divergence, shifts as well as
lexical, semantic and structural innovation, drift and obsoleteness created
new varieties from which yet numerous new varieties and groups of varieties
were derived ... proto from proto from proto ... if you will.

As you can see in the case of Hawaiian, a few centuries of isolation derived
strings such as *kanaka* from **taŋata* 'man'. Most people without formal
phonology training would not suspect the two to be related, and most that do
have that training would need to see a larger sample to come to the
conclusion that they are related. Now imagine that due to some contact with
another language group (let's imagine speakers of another language adopting
Hawaiian) the vowels start shifting, say a > æ > e and you get **keneke *which
causes palatalization to **cheneche*, then voicing between vowels: **cheneje
*, then *e* elision due to penultimate stress: **chenej*, eventually
affricates changing to fricatives: **shenezh*, and eventually devoicing and
then deletion of unstressed non-low vowels: **shnezh*. Obviously I made this
up, but these are all very common types of phonological shifts. Now add
semantic shifts, say, for instance "man" > *"warrior" > *"aggressive" >
*"scary", etc.  Also add to this gradual morphological and syntactic
changes, things that alter the overall structure, and perhaps the
development of genders or other types of classifiers. All these things will
eventually obscure ancient relationships. In theory then, we might talk
about contact between two languages that we cannot identify as related
because of numerous strata of divergence. In that case we might as well call
them "unrelated (to all intents and purposes)."

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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