zompist bboard

CatDoom wrote:

Salmoneus wrote:Population sizes are probably important in this regard. Uralic and Polynesian have both historically been spoken by small, non-dense populations. [and indeed, at a glance it looks like the places with the most rapid change in Austronesian are the most populated areas]

This is interesting, because I've actually read a paper that argued (based on some manner of statistical modeling... I don't remember the details, unfortunately) that language change is likely to be more rapid in very small populations. As I recall, the effect leveled out fairly quickly when the group in question got much larger than an isolated village, so it's possible some other factor kicks in at higher population sizes.

That said, if very small, relatively isolated communities are prone to rapid language change, it might help explain the linguistic diversity of regions like pre-colonial California, the Caucasus, and New Guinea, where the topography and/or population density makes those conditions more likely.

It's usually thought, I think, that larger, more connection communities have faster language change - centres change more than peripheries, and isolated areas are more conservative. In English, from my point of view, London is highly innovative, and has been for centuries, whereas rural areas of England can be incredibly conservative, and in general America has been more conservative than England.

But when you have very small, isolated communities, you get a different effect, similar to the founder effect in genetics - it can take only a few key adopters to spread an innovation to the whole community (whereas in a large community most die out before they become universal). In particular, I think you're more likely to see weird sound changes happening rapidly in small groups. The other thing to remember, of course, is that a bunch of small groups can all change in different directions (and then loan and borrow), giving a lot of variety, whereas larger groups are more likely to change en masse.

Soap wrote:Just a few things I thought where interesting:
proto-Germanic was apparerntly pretty conservative of the basic structure of words inherited from Proto-Indo-European, despite at least 2500 years having elapsed since PIE (3000 BC is the latest commonly proposed date for PIE, some people go even further back), and many major sound changes. Basically every word had the same number of syllables as it had had in PIE, apart from laryngeals if those were even syllabic in the first place. e.g. hamiþiją "shirt" (likely the source of Latin camisia), freusaną "to freeze" (with a 2-syllable infinitve suffix), samədaz "sand", fedwōr "four". Then the accent changed to the first syllable and everything fell apart. All of those words are monosyllabic today in modern English and in German if you ignore the retention of the infinitive -en (German has Hemd for shirt), even though less time has gone by between proto-Germanic and today than between PIE and proto-Germanic. However, word-initial stress doesn't always predict sound change chaos, right nearby we have the counter example of Finnish, which has preserved Germanic loanwords such as kuningas "king" in an almost unchanged state for 2000 years, along with other Finnic languages.

I would suggest that the difference could be that in PIE>Germanic, there was a shift in the accentuation whereas Finnic was always accentuated on the first syllable.

Another possible explanation is that Finnish, I believe, is a syllable-timed language, meaning that each syllable is pronounced for roughly the same length of time, while most Germanic languages are stress-timed, meaning that the time between stressed syllables is roughly consistent, with intermediate syllables being pronounced longer or shorter accordingly. Assuming that Proto-Germanic was also stress-timed, there would be a good deal of pressure on unstressed syllables to shorten, reduce, and elide, whereas there would be no such pressure in Finnish.

Incidentally, at least according to Wikipedia, Indo-European was likely mora-timed (which is like syllable timing but with "heavy" syllables that are held for two time units rather than one), based on the apparent prosodic patterns in Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit. The fixation of stress in Proto-Germanic may have been part of a more complex change in prosody that included a shift to stress-timing.

I have to note that you have to consider Finnish mora-timed, otherwise the contrastive vowel and consonant length doesn't work. But other than that your point holds in that there isn't such a pressure to loose information from the unstressed syllables.

I suspect this has more to do with the fact that the various Germanic umlauts amounted to transferring information from unstressed to stressed syllables. Once unstressed vowels had a lower contrastive load, they could be lost without much ill effects for intelligibility. (And of course, as a side effect, Germanic langs ended up with huge-ass inventories of stressed vowels.)

The Finnic languages form a clear cline on how heavily they've concentrated information into the 1st syllable vs. how well they preserve unstressed syllables:
• Finnish, Karelian, Votic: No umlauts or anything of the sort; — unstressed and stressed vowels well-preserved
• Savonian: No umlauts, some medial consonants palatalized; — final *-i lost, vowels otherwise well-preserved
• Estonian: No umlauts, some palatalization, some processes of compensatory lengthening; — unstressed vowels frequently lost, stressed vowel system expanded to three degrees of length and several new diphthongs
• Veps: No umlauts, palatalization of absolutely everything; — unstressed vowels frequently lost
• Livonian: Umlauts, compensatory lengthening, palatalization of some consonants; — most unstressed vowels reduced or lost, complicated stressed vowel system including tone

Ditto the Samic languages, for that matter.
• Northern Sami: A few height assimilations; — unstressed and stressed vowels well-preserved
• Southern Sami: Several umlauts, open-syllable lengthening; — unstressed vowels frequently reduced or lost, fairly large system of stressed vowels
• Skolt Sami: Everything umlauted in some way; — unstressed vowels generally lost, enormous stressed vowel inventory

Interesting observation! I don't think I've seen umlaut linked with vowel reduction like that, but it makes a certain amount of sense.

CatDoom wrote:Interesting observation!

Indeed. I get all inspired to have one of my conlangs have umlauted and vowel reduced offspring :).


JAL

This seems like the cousin of the tonogenesis sound change where final consonants affect tone and then disappear. In both cases certain information is lost after it has been safely stored earlier in the word.

brandrinn wrote:This seems like the cousin of the tonogenesis sound change where final consonants affect tone and then disappear. In both cases certain information is lost after it has been safely stored earlier in the word.

(Fantasizing about a language that does both...)


JAL

CatDoom wrote:Considering that the southern Bantu languages have picked up *clicks* from their hunter-gatherer neighbors and predecessors, I'm not sure there's such a thing as "too radically different" in terms of linguistic mixing.

Their Khoisan neighbours were pastoralists.

Soap wrote:Just a few things I thought where interesting:
proto-Germanic was apparerntly pretty conservative of the basic structure of words inherited from Proto-Indo-European, despite at least 2500 years having elapsed since PIE (3000 BC is the latest commonly proposed date for PIE, some people go even further back), and many major sound changes. Basically every word had the same number of syllables as it had had in PIE, apart from laryngeals if those were even syllabic in the first place. e.g. hamiþiją "shirt" (likely the source of Latin camisia), freusaną "to freeze" (with a 2-syllable infinitve suffix), samədaz "sand", fedwōr "four". Then the accent changed to the first syllable and everything fell apart. All of those words are monosyllabic today in modern English and in German if you ignore the retention of the infinitive -en (German has Hemd for shirt), even though less time has gone by between proto-Germanic and today than between PIE and proto-Germanic. However, word-initial stress doesn't always predict sound change chaos, right nearby we have the counter example of Finnish, which has preserved Germanic loanwords such as kuningas "king" in an almost unchanged state for 2000 years, along with other Finnic languages.

It's not really the position of the stress accent, it's how pronounced the stress accent is. In Germanic languages stress is very strong and this has lead to the elision of unstressed syllables. This process is still occurring, today; in many English speakers unstressed vowels next to stressed syllables are commonly elided, hence "America" becomes [ˈmɛɹkʰə].