Re: Odp: joatsimeo-Loan Words

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 593
Date: 1999-12-16

 
----- Original Message -----
From: JoatSimeon@...
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Thursday, December 16, 1999 4:10 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Re: joatsimeo-Loan Words

>brentlords@... writes:

I don't mean to sound impatient, but it would save you and everyone else a 
lot of trouble if you'd simply read a few introductory works on historical 
linguistics before you tried to critique the field.  You're in the position 
of someone who has no calculus trying to offer alternatives to General 
Relativity.

You don't have the knowledge-base to _understand_ the theories you're 
criticizing.

>THE SOUNDS ENTER BEFORE THERE IS EVEN AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THERE TO BE AN 
EVOLUTION IN THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE.

-- this is easy to detect because different languages don't undergo the 
_same_ sound changes.

Eg., Proto-Germanic had a word for "king", roughly *kunningaz; from this are 
derived our "king", "koenig", etc.

The same word was borrowed from Proto-Germanic into Finnish, where it 
survives as... kunningaz.  You can also trace a series of very early PIE 
loans into proto-Finno-Ugrian.

>Maybe the relationship being found between the earliest languages does have 
more to do with adjacency and interaction than an expansion of a culture and 
its diversification into subcultures. 

-- the way languages develop through differentiation of dialects and thence 
into a language-family of related tongues has been historically observed 
(with Latin ==> Romance, for instance, and Proto-Germanic ==> Germanic 
languages.) 

It always happens this way.  Language expands territorially, dialects diverge 
because innovations are no longer shared, separate languages emerge.
 
Dear Joatsimeon,
 
Why lose your patience and try to browbeat people who may be amateurs but can think critically and ask interesting questions? Do you mean you're the sort of person to whom General Relativity is bread and butter? I don't think so, or you'd be better informed on how night was pronounced "back three or four centuries". What you allude to above is a dogmatic version of the family-tree model, so dogmatic, in fact, that it out-Schleichers Schleicher. The case of Latin > Romance is in fact one of the most famous cases showing that the evolution of language does not consist merely in the bifurcation and differentiation of lineages. I can't explain it all to you in a single posting; I recommend that you should read some intro on areal linguistics first. As for Germanic, there are quite a few "shared" (actually, parallel) innovations which took place AFTER the territorial expansion and the divergence of the Germanic dialects. Palatal umlaut is one of them; it looks for all the world like a Proto-North-West-Germanic change and only its occasional interaction with other vowel changes happens to show that it's a more recent development.
 
Furthermore, languages don't borrow their basic vocabularies.  More than half 
the English vocabulary is loan-words (mostly from the Romance languages) but 
the _basic_ vocabulary, things like kinship terms, body parts, and common 
objects, is almost all Germanic in origin... and, in fact, mostly PIE.
 
----------SIGH. This is patently untrue. Sister is a loanword from Old Norse (or it would be *swester now), so are leg, egg and many other basic words, including get and give (which replaced their Old English cognates with an initial palatal). The pronouns they, them and their came from Old Norse too. Aunt and uncle are French, stomach is ultimately Greek via Latin and Old French (what a chain of borrowings for a familiar body part!), and countless "common objects" (table, chair), foodstuffs (pork, beef, mutton, bacon) and natural features (lake, mountain, river) have French names as well.
 
Yours,
 
Piotr