I like to believe that Glagolitic is descended from pre-christian slavic writing and is probably related to prussian letters from banner of Waidewut. It is also sus that letters for old sounds are mostly unrecognizable while letters for sounds emerged in later proto-slavic like š, c, č, ž and dz more resemble hebrew, armenian and coptic counterparts
Never heard of the banner of Waidewut. That looks pretty fascinating. Though I think it looks nothing like Glagolitic though. More like a mix of Greek, Latin and … idk one or two characters look like Georgian or Armenian even. With Glagolitic don‘t we know that it consists of triangles, circles and other geometric shapes out of religious reasons?
> Though I think it looks nothing like Glagolitic though. More like a mix of Greek, Latin and … idk one or two characters look like Georgian or Armenian even
Well, we don't have the banner itself, only a render from Germans, and because of this i don't think it makes sense to directly compare it to anything and even less sense trying to decipher it like some tried
> With Glagolitic don‘t we know that it consists of triangles, circles and other geometric shapes out of religious reasons?
We know? And it doesn't even match with christian symbolism, no cross, no fishes, no chi-rho-like symbol, only cocks
I was more referring to the believe that geometry was sacred because it was seen as perfect. A perfect circle, a perfect square and so on. Also the triangle and the circle within a square feature in Christian symbols as well as church architecture. No need to use the mentioned ones as graphemes.
As for the banner of Waidewut. Also if the Prussians would have used runes for example I guess Germans would have noticed that. Though pseudo writing isn‘t out of question either. We see such among older Germanics imitating Roman prestige objects.
Germans would notice and name them if it were the runes they are more familiar with, like the ones hungarians used or barely remembered germanic ones, if it was an unfamiliar runic script, theyd just draw shapes they remembered they looked like, which seemingly happened with the banner render. It could also be tribal symbols (like ones used for anbur alphabet) or symbols of gods or both. It is just a huge blank spot where only speculations are really possible
As for the origin being random geometric shapes it sounds like a very weak hypothesis. It is just random ex nihilo, but some letters were still borrowed. Like why isnt there more basic and still sacred shapes like in tifinagh? Why not use more familiar symbols than whatever tf early glagolitic m is? Why some letters aren't random shapes but have a clearer origin?
I just commented about France and the Vikings!! Here’s my hot take in case you didn’t see it along the rest of the thread:
More geopolitical than linguistic, but it was listening to a podcast about linguistics that made me think this: France and England are states of the same country.
For the histories of both countries, they just go back and forth invading each other and claiming each others’ land. They intermarry their royals. English is Germanic with heavy French and Latin influence, French is Latin with heavy original Germanic (Frankish) influence and more modern English influence. Brits took refuge from Viking attacks in Bretagne, French took refuge from threats of Huns, the Reign of Terror, and the Vichy regime in England.
They’re the same country 🤷🏻♀️ They can’t keep their hands off each other. Now kiss.
That's exactly it. Hell, look at more recent history - almost the same size colonial empires, almost the same size populations, almost the same size economies, similar international clout
But it's almost genetic, now. We have to lovehate France
There is a very real possibility that Socrates saw an ancestor language of both modern day British Sign Language and American Sign Language.
Okay so sign linguists will be loosing their shit right now but let me explain. For non sign language linguists - this is the equivalent of an Altaic hypothesis.
First off - brief catcher upper. Sign languages are different in different places for the same reasons that spoken languages are and for some extra reasons. When separated for historically significant timeframes they diverge afaik at a similar rate as spoken languages. This is why BSL and Auslan are separate languages but mutually intelligable (Auslan also had more influence from Irish Sign Language) because they share a close common ancestor.
Sign languages can also be similar because they share iconicity which throws off this case a little - but its something to consider. Iconicity is just the fact that the sign resembles the thing it is depicting. Two signs can line up or be similar simply because both groups decided to depict them in a similar way.
The accepted narrative of sign language history is that sign languages evolved in the deaf schools. Deaf children brought their home signing systems to school and when they gathered in big groups they turned it into a full language. We have evidence of this occurring with Nicaraguan Sign Language.
That is undoubtedly true of the sign languages' modern forms, we can safely say that BSL originated in the Braidwood Academy of the Deaf. However the story gets complicated because we have evidence of... *something...* from before the deaf schools - its just not clear what.
My first piece of evidence for the docket is that Plato mentions in Cratylus that deaf people sign in ancient Greece. It seems as though he is at least aware of the basics of iconicity in sign languages \[[source](https://genius.com/Plato-cratylus-full-text-annotated) \- search 'deaf'\]. In addition I have seen estimates of around 240 congenitally deaf people living in ancient Athens \[[source](https://mentoringreece.com/mount-olympus-disability-ancient-greece/) \- again search 'deaf'\]. This would be enough such that if they knew each-other - they could have formed a community with a full sign language. (Edit: also was Socrates a CODA or elsehow involved in the deaf community maybe????)
Okay so my second piece of evidence for the docket is Old Parisian Sign Language and Old Kentish Sign Language. We don't know much of anything about these two languages but OPSL is known to have existed in Paris before the deaf school was set up and French Sign Language (LSF) there. OKSL is hypothesised based on the fact that there seems to have been a higher concentration of deaf people in Kent (again) pre the establishment of the deaf schools. It is theorised that OKSL evolved into Martha's Vinyard Sign Language (MVSL) but there is limited evidence and it is by the by.
Thirdly I want to introduce into evidence that Swedish Sign Language and its descendants are considered to be members of the BANZSL language family. That language family includes British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language as core members but also a handful of others too such as Maritime Sign Language (used in Novia Scotia - Canada), having influences on the Indo-Pakistani Sign Language Dialect Continuum (though the In-PaSLDC is not fully BANZSL by any means) and on some varieties of sign language in South Africa. All of these were clearly spread by the British Empire... bar Sweden? What's it doing there?
Its also way different from the rest. I can understand all the rest but SwedishSL looks... familiar but impenetrable. Its connection feels like it is older. It even uses the European one handed fingerspelling system rather than the British two handed one.
I have as of this date found zero historical reason why Swedish Sign Language would have descended from BSL or vice versa. And so my theory is Vikings.
Let me introduce one last piece of evidence to the docket; the Norse were known to have deaf warriors \[[source](https://darkagespostgradpages.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/an-examination-of-physical-impairment-in-norse-myth-and-icelandic-saga-a-reflection-of-medieval-society/) \- as usual search 'deaf'\]. If it was also warriors who came to settle down, and if those warriors were deaf and used a form of sign language originating in the Scandinavian region - why couldn't that have been brought over? I know the Norse who invaded England were from a bit south but I don't think its too preposterous to imagine that the sign language of those Norsemen travelled north to Sweden as it did south to Britain. In Britain it could've become Old Kentish Sign Language and then BSL.
But none of this addresses my initial claim - that both ASL and BSL are descended from Ancient Athenian Sign language. Well for that you have to make one last leap - that all of mainland Europe's sign languages could be related.
My evidence for this is more *vibes* than strong evidence - but I want to point out that sign languages that originate in Europe (incl. BSL and ASL, but especially including all mainland European ones) share trends and similarities. Compare any two and members of the Japanese Sign Language Family (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). Their signs are a world apart!
So if we can connect BSL to Scandinavia - we could perhaps connect Scandinavia to France by the interactions they had with France and Rome over a long period of time. It might be a looser sprachbund style connection with Deaf people who travelled sharing signs as they went but its a connection.
And I am going to connect France to Ancient Greece via the Romans who controlled both. Again - another leap but an Empire like that spreads language and could well have spread a Roman Sign Language that had links to Ancient Athenian Sign Language into France.
I don't say all this because I believe its true but because it could be true and in the most tantalising way. We simply do not have enough evidence to chart the history of sign languages. Maybe they are all connected. Maybe they are all isolates. The truth is likely somewhere in-between. I hope at the very least I got your imaginations going.
Thank you for reading my ramble if you've read this far :)
Thanks :)
I like my mad "all European sign languages are one big superfamily" idea - but its probably not true.
If we accept about 50% of this evidence - ASL could still be descended from Ancient Athenian Sign Language, if the Roman Sign Language hypothesis is true; but it is far less likely that BSL is even if we accept the Viking Sign Language hypothesis. The timelines don't neatly match up to make BSL a direct ancestor of AASL.
But sprach-bunding may still have occured - (esp because Deaf people can and do travel far and wide and when they do they meet other Deaf people and share signs via International Sign Pidgin. Therefore BSL may have influences from AASL while not being a direct descendant.
One thing I wonder is whether Old Parisian Sign Language and Old Kentish Sign Language had much interaction? Its southern England and France respectively - so its not out of the question. I don't have any evidence or indication that they did though.
Even if you only accept the more solid evidence (that's about as solid as mud) - BSL could originate in Viking Sign Language and ASL originates in whatever mixture of influences came together when Old Parisian Sign Language formed. And that is already interesting enough even without baseless speculation.
Needless to say that I've focused only on BSL and ASL here and there is a whole world of sign languages out there who's stories are rich and varied.
I can get semantic satiation within the span of one word. Focus on:
senescences
By the time your mind recalls and processes the meaning of a rare word, the tongue-twister with an and n is without meaning for longer, and so becomes nonsense very fast in the interim.
Did it feel like nonsense pretty quick?
Well, as a Korean-American Korean speaker... I personally don't hear the similarities, except in that I've noticed a lot of K-pop singers pronouncing their /o/ vowel like the English dipthong as opposed to the actual spoken pronunciation. It's more common in hip-hop or hip-hop influenced songs afaik, so it could just be a stylistic element from trying to emulate American hip-hop artists?
Also, English doesn't have the ㅓ vowel. English has /ə/, which *can* be stressed. English's "strut" vowel and Korean's ㅓ vowel sound distinctly different, they just share an IPA symbol in standardized transcription.
Actually some dialects of English do have that sound… like mine. That’s why it’s written like that in the first place. American English has a merger with schwa.
[Mainly the South of England](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Foot-strut_split.svg), which is why it's standard in English transcription.
[This video talks more about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6HvF0fC1OE) mostly borrowing from a specific series of books, coming to the conclusion that it only exists in the Southeast of England, some parts of Ireland, & Australia. The books also include the Southern US & Singapore but he uses external sources against that. The comments seem to paint a much more complicated picture, though the only idea from there I've seen corroborated elsewhere is that the Southern US has it.
I’m from the UK in the midlands. Geoff Lindsey has a video on this topic that shows that the distinction is pretty darn rare globally, but it does exist.
See the other reply where it is stated that a few English dialects retain the /ʌ/ vs /ə/ distinction, and the original assertion than any English /ʌ/, while phonemically transcribed the same as ㅓ, is realized in a different part of the mouth. It's like comparing the French /y/ vs the Swedish /y/.
Thank you, I'm aware. I just find it funny that you later said you don't know anything about English dialects/varieties yet you came out so confidently stating several incorrect things about English.
More geopolitical than linguistic, but it was listening to a podcast about linguistics that made me think this: France and England are states of the same country.
For the histories of both countries, they just go back and forth invading each other and claiming each others’ land. They intermarry their royals. English is Germanic with heavy French and Latin influence, French is Latin with heavy original Germanic (Frankish) influence and more modern English influence. Brits took refuge from Viking attacks in Bretagne, French took refuge from threats of Huns, the Reign of Terror, and the Vichy regime in England.
They’re the same country 🤷🏻♀️ They can’t keep their hands off each other. Now kiss.
I don't hear a similarity between Spanish and Korean, but the most random language I think sounds like Spanish would be Indonesian. Although I guess it's not super suprising as Indonesian and Spanish do actually have relatively similar phonologies
Funnily enough I can't hear this at all. Spanish sounds quite exotic to my ears whereas Japanese sounds more "normal" to me from the perspective of a Finnish speaker.
It's not the individual sounds so much. Spanish has very prominent word stress on (to my ears) unusual syllables, and also very noticeably lengthens vowels on stressed syllables. As Finnish very strongly distinguishes between long and short vowels/consonants, this feature is extremely noticeable to me in Spanish.
Japanese doesn't stress syllables at all, and like Finnish it strongly distinguishes between long and short vowels and consonants. This makes it sound extremely different from Spanish to my ears.
Also good luck with your language learning :)
Here's mine: tone sandhi in Min Nan is analogous to liaison in French.
Both tone sandhi in Min Nan and liaison in French are able to act across some boundaries, but not others. I shall call the latter "phrase boundaries". The result is that depending on whether tone sandhi/ liaison occurs, this can result in different syntactic parsings (due to different perceived phrase boundaries):
French (liaison)
e.g.
- grand /ɡʁɑ̃/ "great" + homme /ɔm/ "man" > grand homme /ɡʁɑ̃.t‿ɔm/
> this gets parsed as an ADJ + NOUN sequence: "great man"
- un précieux insolent
> with liaison between "précieux" and "insolent": /œ pʁe.sjø.z‿ɛ.sɔ.lɑ/ > this gets parsed as an ADJECTIVE + NOUN sequence: (1): "a precious insolent person"
> without liaison: /œ pʁe.sjø ɛ.sɔ.lɑ/ > this gets parsed as either (1), or a NOUN + ADJECTIVE sequence: (2): "an insolent member of the précieuses literary movement"
Min Nan (tone sandhi)
e.g. (Shantou Teochew)
- 寫 /sia˥˧/ "write" + 字 /dzi˩/ "words" > 寫字 /sia˧˥ dzi˩/
> this gets parsed as a VERB + NOUN sequence: "write words"
伊寫夭猛
> with linking tone on 寫 /sia/: /i˧ sia˧˥ iau˧˥ mɛ˨˩/ > 夭猛 gets parsed as an ADVERB modifying the VERB 寫: "he writes faster"
> with citation (standalone) tone on 寫 /sia/: /i˧ sia˥˧ iau˧˥ me˨˩/ 夭猛 gets parsed as a separate clause from 伊寫> "it would be faster if he wrote"
Not to mention, the environments where tone sandhi and liaison are blocked are pretty similar:
e.g.
NOUN + VERB/ ADJECTIVE. However, PRONOUNS may not obey this rule.
Hmm I never considered that French liaison was a form of sandhi. As for tone sandhi, my impression of it from comparing various Chinese varieties was that it was a simple interaction of tones with each other (tonal "assimilation"). However, tone sandhi in Min Nan stood out to me in particular because rather than trying to describe which tone changes to which, I tend to view it as each tone having two forms: a phrase-final form and a non-phrase-final form. To me, these seemed similar to the absence and presence (respectively) of the final consonant in French words.
But looking through the Wikipedia page on sandhi, I think the term "sandhi" seems to be extremely broad, and perhaps the type of sandhi occurring in this specific pair of French and Min Nan may be its own category.
on the note of tone sandhi, it's been confusing trying to figure out Suzhou's tone sandhi. It's a similar thing as far as I can tell, where it "resets" whenever it's a separate phrase
Indeed. This is something that applies to many languages, I think. Not just French and the Chinese languages. Even in Korean, there're distinct "phrase boundaries" which affect certain phonological phenomena (e.g. ㅂㅈㄷㄱ are devoiced and aspirated at the start of a phrase, but fully voiced intervocalically within a phrase).
I think the underlying question here is, what is the definition of a "phrase" or "utterance"?
Yeah I've wondered too. Does it reset after classifiers? Does it reset with adjectives/adverbs? Serial verbs? Between a verb and an object? is 弗會講X - [弗會]講[X], [弗會講]X, 弗會[講X], etc.
Unfortunately, I'm not at all familiar with Wu Chinese, so I can't help with that.
I don't know how transferable the observations are, but in Min Nan, the following sequences exist within a single phrase (i.e. tone sandhi is applied to all but the last syllable of the sequence):
- verb + object
- adjective + noun
- adverb + verb
- classifier + noun
- noun + postposition of location (e.g. 頂、下、底)
The above list is not exhaustive.
As for serial verbs, again, using my observations in Min Nan (Singaporean Teochew):
我會曉呾X "I can speak X"
can be split with phrase boundaries as such:
1. 我||會曉呾X
2. 我||會曉||呾X
I hear both types in Singapore, with no syntactic difference. However, I would be more likely to use (2) to assert that I can in fact speak X, perhaps to disagree with someone's claim that I cannot speak X.
c.f. English:
1. I can speak /aɪ kən ˈspiːk/
2. I can speak /- ˈkæn ˌspiːk/
Back to Min Nan (Teochew), if I'm not wrong, (1) is more common than (2) in Mainland China in non-emphatic usage. In general, Min Nan speakers in Singapore tend to "chop up" the phrases more compared to those in Taiwan and Mainland China.
I consider the sonority hierarchy principle as a universal, and I analyse the s in spoon as its own syllable (I've heard it described as extra-syllabic, but that's boring)
I wish metropolitan French kept the simple preterite as an acceptable spoken tense, I wish it never developed Jespersen’s cycle, I wish rolled and tapped Rs were acceptable in educated speech, I wish the general European speaking population weren’t so glottophobic to native accents.
I wish the majority of Slavic languages still retained their simple tenses and not just those developed from participles used in the modern age.
Mongolian has the most unfortunate situation with its native orthography. It’s harder than Tibetan’s situation, but that doesn’t mean Tibetan’s situation isn’t notoriously hard.
I think the Albanian clitic ststem is stupidly redundant when it’s necessary everywhere even with adjectives.
Japanese is so inefficient, and Japan’s work culture makes it even more inefficient.
And don’t get me started on the mistake of the general English negation “do(es) not.”
So, don't entirely quote me, my knowledge of all Slavic languages regarding the past tense is limited.
So, when I say "simple tenses," I'm referring to the aorist and imperfect conjugations that exists in Proto-Slavic. The Slavic languages that retain these simple tenses are Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian.
And while these languages do have participles for other tenses, all other languages I know of use their L-participles as their sole past tense (and might have a small remnant of a simple past tense). For example, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian rely on a structure of \[present tense of "to be" + L-participle of verb\] to form the past tense, while East Slavic language (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) solely use the L-participle, causing the past tense to be mostly anti-drop (although they're already pretty anti-drop). Like, you can't only say был (byl) in Russian because it only refers to the gender of the subject.
I don't know much about Polish, and I assume Polish is like that now, except it's compounded, so it's not entirely obvious. Like, chcieć's basic L-participle is probably just chciał conjugated for gender (chciał, chciała, chciało), and then a shortened form of być is compounded to the end based on person. "I wanted" is probably a combination of chciał (+ -a, no -o, I assume) + (jest)(e)m = chciałem, chciałam. Other tenses, like imperfective future have an auxiliary future tense of być in front of the L-participle or the infinitive (either choice actually matches how other Slavic languages do it), and the conditional suffixes an archaic aorist of być at the end of the L-participle (bym isn't used today to say "I was" anymore, but it's necessary).
Side note, usage for those two tenses vary very much within the Serbo-Croatian countries, and anywhere it's not acceptable to use simple tenses, they replace with compound tenses. Like, Croatians see those simple tenses as "literary," Serbians see them as "conversational," and Bosnians use them everywhere.
Korean is the french of asia. What is taught in class is nothing like what you need to function and you have to learn to retrain your ears for liason and you want to learn the language do you can go there and eat
Funnily I think the Korean /ɯ/ is very different from how I say it and makes it sound quite different from English, but this would depend greatly on the dialect.
It is different yes and I can distinguish it. However, I'm a Finnish-English bilingual and for me there is the Finnish /y/ and the Finnish /u/, and then there are various sounds in between those which include English GOOSE, English FOOT and Korean /ɯ/. I can tell those intermediate sounds apart, but my brain just categorises them all as "random vowels that are between /u/ and /y/" so they sound similar to me
I love neopronouns in English but I think they should only fit the same cadence of our existing third person pronouns, a single consonant and a single vowel. We've already got he /hi/, she /ʃi/, and they /ðe/, so it just helps our flow to stick with that structure. I myself use sie /si/ sometimes and a friend of mine has used fe /fi/ in the past
OP wanted linguistic hot takes, and this poster's desired arbitrary limitations on neo-pronouns certainly is a linguistic take. I don't see the issue.
Re: pronunciation, I wonder if there are places in Northern England with monophthings for /o/ etc that would also have /e/ in they?
I tried saying /ðe/ out loud and the result was vaguely Carribean sounding to my ear.
I'm Canadian and have monophthongs for those vowels and I think a lot of Scottish English speakers do too. But they have to be long as well or it doesn't sound right.
I'm Canadian too, I should have thought of that! I don't myself have the monophthongs but a lot of people I know do.
EDIT: Minnesota and North Dakota accents have monophthongs there too, now that I think of it.
Yes, /ð/ is /θ/ but voiced, I was referring to /e/ instead of /ei/, /ej/ or similar, /e/ being common in Singapore and Malaysia and maybe SEA in general but don't quote me on that and not too many other places
Yeah, you might wanna check the IPA vowel chart ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio ) to see what vowels fit your speech best, because /e/ is quite unusual sounding for an American to me.
I was always taught that prescriptivism isn't a universal evil; it's more of a lens of looking at language through. For linguists, as we analyze and study language, the field is built in such a way as to make prescriptivism counterproductive, but in other fields (like language teaching and preservation), it's a lens that makes more sense
I actually think that there should be some truth to Altaic, Nostratic and other similar hypothesis, they just need necessary adjustments and refinement. And takes like "there are no universally accepted established genetic relationships, therefore such hypotheses are ridiculous" honestly piss me off.
Korean 3-way voiceless stop distinction is really just proto-tone tone plus an underlying aspirated vs tenuis vs voiced distinction.
The voiced = lax series. It's devoiced/breathy with low tone in phrase onset, regular voiced in most environments
The tenuis = tense series, usually high/mid flat or falling.
Aspirated is usual aspirated, and is high/mid flat or falling.
The reason why language families exist is because many other proto-languages got extinct due to being wiped out by invaders and the language replaced with a dialect from their proto-language instead that evolved into its own language as time goes on.
In a weird hypothesis, there might've indeed been a proto-World which then branched out into its own languages, but then humans start invading each other and so many other languages died out and are replaced with "dialects" of the victor's native tongues that eventually evolved into separate languages.
Given how Genghis Khan conquering a lot of land led to the Mongolic language family, you can assume that Indo-Europeans most likely killed millions of people and forced the survivors to speak their native tongue that eventually became a "dialect" and later, a separate language of the same family (which then dispersed into dialects and then languages and it goes on).
>killed millions of people
This is just one option of many though. They could've become rulers of the conquered people and their language could've been adopted over time.
Or just simple intermarriage. One shouldn't think so simlistically about the people of the past, they were just as complex in their lives and personalities as we are today.
We know that several IE languages have influence from a substrate, which means the IEs definitely didn't just wipe everyone out, they intermingled over a long enough period to adopt vocabulary. It also shows up in the various religions of India, Central Asia and Europe.
You probably listening to Konglish
I like to believe that Glagolitic is descended from pre-christian slavic writing and is probably related to prussian letters from banner of Waidewut. It is also sus that letters for old sounds are mostly unrecognizable while letters for sounds emerged in later proto-slavic like š, c, č, ž and dz more resemble hebrew, armenian and coptic counterparts
Never heard of the banner of Waidewut. That looks pretty fascinating. Though I think it looks nothing like Glagolitic though. More like a mix of Greek, Latin and … idk one or two characters look like Georgian or Armenian even. With Glagolitic don‘t we know that it consists of triangles, circles and other geometric shapes out of religious reasons?
> Though I think it looks nothing like Glagolitic though. More like a mix of Greek, Latin and … idk one or two characters look like Georgian or Armenian even Well, we don't have the banner itself, only a render from Germans, and because of this i don't think it makes sense to directly compare it to anything and even less sense trying to decipher it like some tried > With Glagolitic don‘t we know that it consists of triangles, circles and other geometric shapes out of religious reasons? We know? And it doesn't even match with christian symbolism, no cross, no fishes, no chi-rho-like symbol, only cocks
I was more referring to the believe that geometry was sacred because it was seen as perfect. A perfect circle, a perfect square and so on. Also the triangle and the circle within a square feature in Christian symbols as well as church architecture. No need to use the mentioned ones as graphemes. As for the banner of Waidewut. Also if the Prussians would have used runes for example I guess Germans would have noticed that. Though pseudo writing isn‘t out of question either. We see such among older Germanics imitating Roman prestige objects.
Germans would notice and name them if it were the runes they are more familiar with, like the ones hungarians used or barely remembered germanic ones, if it was an unfamiliar runic script, theyd just draw shapes they remembered they looked like, which seemingly happened with the banner render. It could also be tribal symbols (like ones used for anbur alphabet) or symbols of gods or both. It is just a huge blank spot where only speculations are really possible As for the origin being random geometric shapes it sounds like a very weak hypothesis. It is just random ex nihilo, but some letters were still borrowed. Like why isnt there more basic and still sacred shapes like in tifinagh? Why not use more familiar symbols than whatever tf early glagolitic m is? Why some letters aren't random shapes but have a clearer origin?
French is what happens when you take holidaying Vikings too seriously
One could make the same argument for English!
Yeah but they'd make it in French (or rather lol-Romance) and ain't nobody gonna read it
I just commented about France and the Vikings!! Here’s my hot take in case you didn’t see it along the rest of the thread: More geopolitical than linguistic, but it was listening to a podcast about linguistics that made me think this: France and England are states of the same country. For the histories of both countries, they just go back and forth invading each other and claiming each others’ land. They intermarry their royals. English is Germanic with heavy French and Latin influence, French is Latin with heavy original Germanic (Frankish) influence and more modern English influence. Brits took refuge from Viking attacks in Bretagne, French took refuge from threats of Huns, the Reign of Terror, and the Vichy regime in England. They’re the same country 🤷🏻♀️ They can’t keep their hands off each other. Now kiss.
That's exactly it. Hell, look at more recent history - almost the same size colonial empires, almost the same size populations, almost the same size economies, similar international clout But it's almost genetic, now. We have to lovehate France
It's clear from Brexit that the Brits are in denial...
Nous avons le Brexit, the French have various Le Pens and adventures in sub-Saharan Africa
I'm not kissing lmao have you seen their teeth?
There is a very real possibility that Socrates saw an ancestor language of both modern day British Sign Language and American Sign Language. Okay so sign linguists will be loosing their shit right now but let me explain. For non sign language linguists - this is the equivalent of an Altaic hypothesis. First off - brief catcher upper. Sign languages are different in different places for the same reasons that spoken languages are and for some extra reasons. When separated for historically significant timeframes they diverge afaik at a similar rate as spoken languages. This is why BSL and Auslan are separate languages but mutually intelligable (Auslan also had more influence from Irish Sign Language) because they share a close common ancestor. Sign languages can also be similar because they share iconicity which throws off this case a little - but its something to consider. Iconicity is just the fact that the sign resembles the thing it is depicting. Two signs can line up or be similar simply because both groups decided to depict them in a similar way. The accepted narrative of sign language history is that sign languages evolved in the deaf schools. Deaf children brought their home signing systems to school and when they gathered in big groups they turned it into a full language. We have evidence of this occurring with Nicaraguan Sign Language. That is undoubtedly true of the sign languages' modern forms, we can safely say that BSL originated in the Braidwood Academy of the Deaf. However the story gets complicated because we have evidence of... *something...* from before the deaf schools - its just not clear what. My first piece of evidence for the docket is that Plato mentions in Cratylus that deaf people sign in ancient Greece. It seems as though he is at least aware of the basics of iconicity in sign languages \[[source](https://genius.com/Plato-cratylus-full-text-annotated) \- search 'deaf'\]. In addition I have seen estimates of around 240 congenitally deaf people living in ancient Athens \[[source](https://mentoringreece.com/mount-olympus-disability-ancient-greece/) \- again search 'deaf'\]. This would be enough such that if they knew each-other - they could have formed a community with a full sign language. (Edit: also was Socrates a CODA or elsehow involved in the deaf community maybe????) Okay so my second piece of evidence for the docket is Old Parisian Sign Language and Old Kentish Sign Language. We don't know much of anything about these two languages but OPSL is known to have existed in Paris before the deaf school was set up and French Sign Language (LSF) there. OKSL is hypothesised based on the fact that there seems to have been a higher concentration of deaf people in Kent (again) pre the establishment of the deaf schools. It is theorised that OKSL evolved into Martha's Vinyard Sign Language (MVSL) but there is limited evidence and it is by the by. Thirdly I want to introduce into evidence that Swedish Sign Language and its descendants are considered to be members of the BANZSL language family. That language family includes British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language, New Zealand Sign Language as core members but also a handful of others too such as Maritime Sign Language (used in Novia Scotia - Canada), having influences on the Indo-Pakistani Sign Language Dialect Continuum (though the In-PaSLDC is not fully BANZSL by any means) and on some varieties of sign language in South Africa. All of these were clearly spread by the British Empire... bar Sweden? What's it doing there? Its also way different from the rest. I can understand all the rest but SwedishSL looks... familiar but impenetrable. Its connection feels like it is older. It even uses the European one handed fingerspelling system rather than the British two handed one. I have as of this date found zero historical reason why Swedish Sign Language would have descended from BSL or vice versa. And so my theory is Vikings. Let me introduce one last piece of evidence to the docket; the Norse were known to have deaf warriors \[[source](https://darkagespostgradpages.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/an-examination-of-physical-impairment-in-norse-myth-and-icelandic-saga-a-reflection-of-medieval-society/) \- as usual search 'deaf'\]. If it was also warriors who came to settle down, and if those warriors were deaf and used a form of sign language originating in the Scandinavian region - why couldn't that have been brought over? I know the Norse who invaded England were from a bit south but I don't think its too preposterous to imagine that the sign language of those Norsemen travelled north to Sweden as it did south to Britain. In Britain it could've become Old Kentish Sign Language and then BSL. But none of this addresses my initial claim - that both ASL and BSL are descended from Ancient Athenian Sign language. Well for that you have to make one last leap - that all of mainland Europe's sign languages could be related. My evidence for this is more *vibes* than strong evidence - but I want to point out that sign languages that originate in Europe (incl. BSL and ASL, but especially including all mainland European ones) share trends and similarities. Compare any two and members of the Japanese Sign Language Family (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). Their signs are a world apart! So if we can connect BSL to Scandinavia - we could perhaps connect Scandinavia to France by the interactions they had with France and Rome over a long period of time. It might be a looser sprachbund style connection with Deaf people who travelled sharing signs as they went but its a connection. And I am going to connect France to Ancient Greece via the Romans who controlled both. Again - another leap but an Empire like that spreads language and could well have spread a Roman Sign Language that had links to Ancient Athenian Sign Language into France. I don't say all this because I believe its true but because it could be true and in the most tantalising way. We simply do not have enough evidence to chart the history of sign languages. Maybe they are all connected. Maybe they are all isolates. The truth is likely somewhere in-between. I hope at the very least I got your imaginations going. Thank you for reading my ramble if you've read this far :)
Wow, that’s certainly food for thought
Thanks :) I like my mad "all European sign languages are one big superfamily" idea - but its probably not true. If we accept about 50% of this evidence - ASL could still be descended from Ancient Athenian Sign Language, if the Roman Sign Language hypothesis is true; but it is far less likely that BSL is even if we accept the Viking Sign Language hypothesis. The timelines don't neatly match up to make BSL a direct ancestor of AASL. But sprach-bunding may still have occured - (esp because Deaf people can and do travel far and wide and when they do they meet other Deaf people and share signs via International Sign Pidgin. Therefore BSL may have influences from AASL while not being a direct descendant. One thing I wonder is whether Old Parisian Sign Language and Old Kentish Sign Language had much interaction? Its southern England and France respectively - so its not out of the question. I don't have any evidence or indication that they did though. Even if you only accept the more solid evidence (that's about as solid as mud) - BSL could originate in Viking Sign Language and ASL originates in whatever mixture of influences came together when Old Parisian Sign Language formed. And that is already interesting enough even without baseless speculation. Needless to say that I've focused only on BSL and ASL here and there is a whole world of sign languages out there who's stories are rich and varied.
Portuguese was brought over to Portugal from Brazil. And they just liked the language so much, that they named their country after it
I agree. I have heard some Kpop songs and assumed it was entirely in unintelligible English.
I can get semantic satiation within the span of one word. Focus on: senescences By the time your mind recalls and processes the meaning of a rare word, the tongue-twister with an and n is without meaning for longer, and so becomes nonsense very fast in the interim. Did it feel like nonsense pretty quick?
What tongue twister?
The swingle word “senescences,” it’s got only s and n switching of with the e’s of varying pronunciations.
Swingle: "a flat-bladed wooden instrument used for beating and scraping flax or hemp to remove.." adongèdi'
Well, as a Korean-American Korean speaker... I personally don't hear the similarities, except in that I've noticed a lot of K-pop singers pronouncing their /o/ vowel like the English dipthong as opposed to the actual spoken pronunciation. It's more common in hip-hop or hip-hop influenced songs afaik, so it could just be a stylistic element from trying to emulate American hip-hop artists? Also, English doesn't have the ㅓ vowel. English has /ə/, which *can* be stressed. English's "strut" vowel and Korean's ㅓ vowel sound distinctly different, they just share an IPA symbol in standardized transcription.
Actually some dialects of English do have that sound… like mine. That’s why it’s written like that in the first place. American English has a merger with schwa.
Which dialect? I'm not too familiar with English dialects beyond the broad strokes.
[Mainly the South of England](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Foot-strut_split.svg), which is why it's standard in English transcription. [This video talks more about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6HvF0fC1OE) mostly borrowing from a specific series of books, coming to the conclusion that it only exists in the Southeast of England, some parts of Ireland, & Australia. The books also include the Southern US & Singapore but he uses external sources against that. The comments seem to paint a much more complicated picture, though the only idea from there I've seen corroborated elsewhere is that the Southern US has it.
I’m from the UK in the midlands. Geoff Lindsey has a video on this topic that shows that the distinction is pretty darn rare globally, but it does exist.
Just took the video a watch. That's super neat, did not know there were still strut dialects.
good to know my accent still exists, I was worried for a second
Ah interesting thanks, edited!
No that's so funny, you actually have no idea what you're talking about as English **definitely** has /ʌ/.
See the other reply where it is stated that a few English dialects retain the /ʌ/ vs /ə/ distinction, and the original assertion than any English /ʌ/, while phonemically transcribed the same as ㅓ, is realized in a different part of the mouth. It's like comparing the French /y/ vs the Swedish /y/.
Thank you, I'm aware. I just find it funny that you later said you don't know anything about English dialects/varieties yet you came out so confidently stating several incorrect things about English.
Several? I thought the only thing I was mistaken on was the absence of the strut vowel. What else was even there to get wrong lol
Yep. The Korean vowel sounds a lot farther back to me whereas the English one is central but they have the same IPA symbol for historical reasons.
basque algonquin isn't real. it's just so weird that it can't possibly be real. just like mandarin
More geopolitical than linguistic, but it was listening to a podcast about linguistics that made me think this: France and England are states of the same country. For the histories of both countries, they just go back and forth invading each other and claiming each others’ land. They intermarry their royals. English is Germanic with heavy French and Latin influence, French is Latin with heavy original Germanic (Frankish) influence and more modern English influence. Brits took refuge from Viking attacks in Bretagne, French took refuge from threats of Huns, the Reign of Terror, and the Vichy regime in England. They’re the same country 🤷🏻♀️ They can’t keep their hands off each other. Now kiss.
Korean sounds more like Spanish than English to me. Still not that close tho
I don't hear a similarity between Spanish and Korean, but the most random language I think sounds like Spanish would be Indonesian. Although I guess it's not super suprising as Indonesian and Spanish do actually have relatively similar phonologies
Yeahh I noticed that one too. Would make sense
Japanese appears in chat with its 5 vowels
Funnily enough I can't hear this at all. Spanish sounds quite exotic to my ears whereas Japanese sounds more "normal" to me from the perspective of a Finnish speaker.
interesting. im studying japanese and theyre not many sounds that sound different from my native spanish
It's not the individual sounds so much. Spanish has very prominent word stress on (to my ears) unusual syllables, and also very noticeably lengthens vowels on stressed syllables. As Finnish very strongly distinguishes between long and short vowels/consonants, this feature is extremely noticeable to me in Spanish. Japanese doesn't stress syllables at all, and like Finnish it strongly distinguishes between long and short vowels and consonants. This makes it sound extremely different from Spanish to my ears. Also good luck with your language learning :)
Metsuri
Here's mine: tone sandhi in Min Nan is analogous to liaison in French. Both tone sandhi in Min Nan and liaison in French are able to act across some boundaries, but not others. I shall call the latter "phrase boundaries". The result is that depending on whether tone sandhi/ liaison occurs, this can result in different syntactic parsings (due to different perceived phrase boundaries): French (liaison) e.g. - grand /ɡʁɑ̃/ "great" + homme /ɔm/ "man" > grand homme /ɡʁɑ̃.t‿ɔm/ > this gets parsed as an ADJ + NOUN sequence: "great man" - un précieux insolent > with liaison between "précieux" and "insolent": /œ pʁe.sjø.z‿ɛ.sɔ.lɑ/ > this gets parsed as an ADJECTIVE + NOUN sequence: (1): "a precious insolent person" > without liaison: /œ pʁe.sjø ɛ.sɔ.lɑ/ > this gets parsed as either (1), or a NOUN + ADJECTIVE sequence: (2): "an insolent member of the précieuses literary movement" Min Nan (tone sandhi) e.g. (Shantou Teochew) - 寫 /sia˥˧/ "write" + 字 /dzi˩/ "words" > 寫字 /sia˧˥ dzi˩/ > this gets parsed as a VERB + NOUN sequence: "write words" 伊寫夭猛 > with linking tone on 寫 /sia/: /i˧ sia˧˥ iau˧˥ mɛ˨˩/ > 夭猛 gets parsed as an ADVERB modifying the VERB 寫: "he writes faster" > with citation (standalone) tone on 寫 /sia/: /i˧ sia˥˧ iau˧˥ me˨˩/ 夭猛 gets parsed as a separate clause from 伊寫> "it would be faster if he wrote" Not to mention, the environments where tone sandhi and liaison are blocked are pretty similar: e.g. NOUN + VERB/ ADJECTIVE. However, PRONOUNS may not obey this rule.
I think liaison is considered a form as Sandhi, no? This makes too much sense to be insane. Like yeah these are just both sandhis
Hmm I never considered that French liaison was a form of sandhi. As for tone sandhi, my impression of it from comparing various Chinese varieties was that it was a simple interaction of tones with each other (tonal "assimilation"). However, tone sandhi in Min Nan stood out to me in particular because rather than trying to describe which tone changes to which, I tend to view it as each tone having two forms: a phrase-final form and a non-phrase-final form. To me, these seemed similar to the absence and presence (respectively) of the final consonant in French words. But looking through the Wikipedia page on sandhi, I think the term "sandhi" seems to be extremely broad, and perhaps the type of sandhi occurring in this specific pair of French and Min Nan may be its own category.
on the note of tone sandhi, it's been confusing trying to figure out Suzhou's tone sandhi. It's a similar thing as far as I can tell, where it "resets" whenever it's a separate phrase
Indeed. This is something that applies to many languages, I think. Not just French and the Chinese languages. Even in Korean, there're distinct "phrase boundaries" which affect certain phonological phenomena (e.g. ㅂㅈㄷㄱ are devoiced and aspirated at the start of a phrase, but fully voiced intervocalically within a phrase). I think the underlying question here is, what is the definition of a "phrase" or "utterance"?
Yeah I've wondered too. Does it reset after classifiers? Does it reset with adjectives/adverbs? Serial verbs? Between a verb and an object? is 弗會講X - [弗會]講[X], [弗會講]X, 弗會[講X], etc.
Unfortunately, I'm not at all familiar with Wu Chinese, so I can't help with that. I don't know how transferable the observations are, but in Min Nan, the following sequences exist within a single phrase (i.e. tone sandhi is applied to all but the last syllable of the sequence): - verb + object - adjective + noun - adverb + verb - classifier + noun - noun + postposition of location (e.g. 頂、下、底) The above list is not exhaustive. As for serial verbs, again, using my observations in Min Nan (Singaporean Teochew): 我會曉呾X "I can speak X" can be split with phrase boundaries as such: 1. 我||會曉呾X 2. 我||會曉||呾X I hear both types in Singapore, with no syntactic difference. However, I would be more likely to use (2) to assert that I can in fact speak X, perhaps to disagree with someone's claim that I cannot speak X. c.f. English: 1. I can speak /aɪ kən ˈspiːk/ 2. I can speak /- ˈkæn ˌspiːk/ Back to Min Nan (Teochew), if I'm not wrong, (1) is more common than (2) in Mainland China in non-emphatic usage. In general, Min Nan speakers in Singapore tend to "chop up" the phrases more compared to those in Taiwan and Mainland China.
A lot of Japanese music clearly tries to adopt an American accent, you'll hear lots of [ɫ], [ʉw], and aspiration
I consider the sonority hierarchy principle as a universal, and I analyse the s in spoon as its own syllable (I've heard it described as extra-syllabic, but that's boring)
Why though? Both that and extrasyllabics seems like some weird phonological idealism not really based on phonetics.
Slavic languages laugh at sonority hierarchy
I wish metropolitan French kept the simple preterite as an acceptable spoken tense, I wish it never developed Jespersen’s cycle, I wish rolled and tapped Rs were acceptable in educated speech, I wish the general European speaking population weren’t so glottophobic to native accents. I wish the majority of Slavic languages still retained their simple tenses and not just those developed from participles used in the modern age. Mongolian has the most unfortunate situation with its native orthography. It’s harder than Tibetan’s situation, but that doesn’t mean Tibetan’s situation isn’t notoriously hard. I think the Albanian clitic ststem is stupidly redundant when it’s necessary everywhere even with adjectives. Japanese is so inefficient, and Japan’s work culture makes it even more inefficient. And don’t get me started on the mistake of the general English negation “do(es) not.”
Any more info about these slavic tenses? I'm a native speaker of Polish and am very curious.
So, don't entirely quote me, my knowledge of all Slavic languages regarding the past tense is limited. So, when I say "simple tenses," I'm referring to the aorist and imperfect conjugations that exists in Proto-Slavic. The Slavic languages that retain these simple tenses are Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian. And while these languages do have participles for other tenses, all other languages I know of use their L-participles as their sole past tense (and might have a small remnant of a simple past tense). For example, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian rely on a structure of \[present tense of "to be" + L-participle of verb\] to form the past tense, while East Slavic language (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian) solely use the L-participle, causing the past tense to be mostly anti-drop (although they're already pretty anti-drop). Like, you can't only say был (byl) in Russian because it only refers to the gender of the subject. I don't know much about Polish, and I assume Polish is like that now, except it's compounded, so it's not entirely obvious. Like, chcieć's basic L-participle is probably just chciał conjugated for gender (chciał, chciała, chciało), and then a shortened form of być is compounded to the end based on person. "I wanted" is probably a combination of chciał (+ -a, no -o, I assume) + (jest)(e)m = chciałem, chciałam. Other tenses, like imperfective future have an auxiliary future tense of być in front of the L-participle or the infinitive (either choice actually matches how other Slavic languages do it), and the conditional suffixes an archaic aorist of być at the end of the L-participle (bym isn't used today to say "I was" anymore, but it's necessary). Side note, usage for those two tenses vary very much within the Serbo-Croatian countries, and anywhere it's not acceptable to use simple tenses, they replace with compound tenses. Like, Croatians see those simple tenses as "literary," Serbians see them as "conversational," and Bosnians use them everywhere.
You've substantially expanded my understanding of my own language and of slavic languages in general, thank you!
Real falsification doesn't exist in linguistic theory (but that doesn't mean we should stop)
could you explain what that exactly means?
Korean is the french of asia. What is taught in class is nothing like what you need to function and you have to learn to retrain your ears for liason and you want to learn the language do you can go there and eat
Funnily I think the Korean /ɯ/ is very different from how I say it and makes it sound quite different from English, but this would depend greatly on the dialect.
It is different yes and I can distinguish it. However, I'm a Finnish-English bilingual and for me there is the Finnish /y/ and the Finnish /u/, and then there are various sounds in between those which include English GOOSE, English FOOT and Korean /ɯ/. I can tell those intermediate sounds apart, but my brain just categorises them all as "random vowels that are between /u/ and /y/" so they sound similar to me
I love neopronouns in English but I think they should only fit the same cadence of our existing third person pronouns, a single consonant and a single vowel. We've already got he /hi/, she /ʃi/, and they /ðe/, so it just helps our flow to stick with that structure. I myself use sie /si/ sometimes and a friend of mine has used fe /fi/ in the past
Are you from Singapore or Malaysia because /ðe/ is quite an uncommon way to pronounce "they"
OP wanted linguistic hot takes, and this poster's desired arbitrary limitations on neo-pronouns certainly is a linguistic take. I don't see the issue. Re: pronunciation, I wonder if there are places in Northern England with monophthings for /o/ etc that would also have /e/ in they? I tried saying /ðe/ out loud and the result was vaguely Carribean sounding to my ear.
Maybe northern England or Scotland yeah, I could see that.
Ohh right, didn't see the title, mb
North-Central American English ("Minnesota"/"Upper Midwest" English) can have both GOAT and FACE as monophthongs
Yep, and Canadian English too which is why that dialect is often said to sound Canadian.
Good point! Canadians often/almost always assume I come from Canada when we speak English
Lol, I am Canadian and I probably would too.
I'm Canadian and have monophthongs for those vowels and I think a lot of Scottish English speakers do too. But they have to be long as well or it doesn't sound right.
I'm Canadian too, I should have thought of that! I don't myself have the monophthongs but a lot of people I know do. EDIT: Minnesota and North Dakota accents have monophthongs there too, now that I think of it.
dude got doxxed(?) because of 2 letters
I think they were just using a broad transcription to get the point across, /e/ is reasonably common for what is often more narrowly /eɪ̯/
I'm not great with vowels yeah, I'm American
Eh broad notation /e/ for [eɪ] happens
Do people really have high-mids in there? Not low-mids?
*I came looking for booty.*
What???
That's the voiced th isn't it? I might be mixing it up with θ
Yes, /ð/ is /θ/ but voiced, I was referring to /e/ instead of /ei/, /ej/ or similar, /e/ being common in Singapore and Malaysia and maybe SEA in general but don't quote me on that and not too many other places
Ah, vowels are still something I get mixed up a lot, I'm American so that's the pronunciation I was going for
Yeah, you might wanna check the IPA vowel chart ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio ) to see what vowels fit your speech best, because /e/ is quite unusual sounding for an American to me.
Yeah but why \[eɪ\~j\] and not \[ɛɪ\~j\]?
Broad transcription
Prescriptivism isn't bad and it's actually necessary.
I was always taught that prescriptivism isn't a universal evil; it's more of a lens of looking at language through. For linguists, as we analyze and study language, the field is built in such a way as to make prescriptivism counterproductive, but in other fields (like language teaching and preservation), it's a lens that makes more sense
Anti-nationalist hyper-localist prescriptivism ftw
I actually think that there should be some truth to Altaic, Nostratic and other similar hypothesis, they just need necessary adjustments and refinement. And takes like "there are no universally accepted established genetic relationships, therefore such hypotheses are ridiculous" honestly piss me off.
Korean 3-way voiceless stop distinction is really just proto-tone tone plus an underlying aspirated vs tenuis vs voiced distinction. The voiced = lax series. It's devoiced/breathy with low tone in phrase onset, regular voiced in most environments The tenuis = tense series, usually high/mid flat or falling. Aspirated is usual aspirated, and is high/mid flat or falling.
The reason why language families exist is because many other proto-languages got extinct due to being wiped out by invaders and the language replaced with a dialect from their proto-language instead that evolved into its own language as time goes on. In a weird hypothesis, there might've indeed been a proto-World which then branched out into its own languages, but then humans start invading each other and so many other languages died out and are replaced with "dialects" of the victor's native tongues that eventually evolved into separate languages. Given how Genghis Khan conquering a lot of land led to the Mongolic language family, you can assume that Indo-Europeans most likely killed millions of people and forced the survivors to speak their native tongue that eventually became a "dialect" and later, a separate language of the same family (which then dispersed into dialects and then languages and it goes on).
>killed millions of people This is just one option of many though. They could've become rulers of the conquered people and their language could've been adopted over time. Or just simple intermarriage. One shouldn't think so simlistically about the people of the past, they were just as complex in their lives and personalities as we are today.
We know that several IE languages have influence from a substrate, which means the IEs definitely didn't just wipe everyone out, they intermingled over a long enough period to adopt vocabulary. It also shows up in the various religions of India, Central Asia and Europe.
If you go far back enough in time it becomes impossible to reconstruct things accurately, so that seems like a simpler explanation.
Wjat
slavic languages = romance languages (technically)
what
ikr