Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2

[marconatrix]

Gaeilge is the indigenous Celtic language of Ireland. One of the oldest languages in the world!!!!!!!

Even the ancient Irish knew better than that, according to their legendary history the Gaels, and so presumably Gaelic (or its precursor), came from 'Spain' (read far off semi-exotic overseas place). I've always thought there must be a grain of truth behind that story, since most nations want to claim that they've lived where they live now for ever and ever, so when you get a 'founding canoe' type story isn't there a chance that it may be credible?

[WeepingElf]

Gaeilge is the indigenous Celtic language of Ireland. One of the oldest languages in the world!!!!!!!

Even the ancient Irish knew better than that, according to their legendary history the Gaels, and so presumably Gaelic (or its precursor), came from 'Spain' (read far off semi-exotic overseas place). I've always thought there must be a grain of truth behind that story, since most nations want to claim that they've lived where they live now for ever and ever, so when you get a 'founding canoe' type story isn't there a chance that it may be credible?

Perhaps the notion that the Gaels had come from Spain came from an observation by travelling bards, back in the days when Continental Celtic was alive and well, that the Celtic of Spain was similar to that of Ireland in having labiovelars ("Q-Celtic") where Gaulish and British had labials ("P-Celtic"). Of course, given the fact that the preserved labiovelars are merely a retention from Proto-Celtic and that both Ireland and Spain were outliers in the Celtic world where things could survive that were lost in more central areas, there is no reason to assume a special relationship between Gaelic and Celtiberian.

[marconatrix]

Of course, given the fact that the preserved labiovelars are merely a retention from Proto-Celtic and that both Ireland and Spain were outliers in the Celtic world where things could survive that were lost in more central areas, there is no reason to assume a special relationship between Gaelic and Celtiberian.

That's right. However there seems to be no trace of any sort of Q-Celtic in Britain prior to the post-Roman expansion of the Irish, to Scotland, the IoM and for a while parts of Wales and Cornwall. Afaik there are no Roman place names etc. that look like anything other than P-Celtic (British and Pictish). When the Irish ogam inscriptions were first studied it was thought by some that they were a very archaic form of Welsh, which may be where the idea that you'll still sometimes see came from, that the proto-Irish moved first to Britain and then on to Ireland when the next wave of migration displaced them. But I don't think there is any hard evidence for this. I read somewhere that the archaeologists thought the linguists had proved it, and the linguists thought the archaeologists had proved it Anyway in that light, the idea that they came more or less directly from the continent is maybe not quite as silly as it sounds. The stories suggest that they had to come to some sort of arrangement to co-exist with the people(s) who were in Ireland before them, but that over time they became the dominant faction. There are apparently suggestions of other languages being spoken in early Ireland, but it's hard to know if they were real languages or just secret codes etc.

The most curious thing to me about Irish is the way between ogam Irish and Early OI it developed a really heavy initial stress accent, which led to all other vowels becoming reduced or lost (syncopation), with consonants taking on some of the quality of the former adjacent vowels. This doesn't look spontaneous, it looks like a contact effect. But contact with what? Nothing similar happened in British, at least not until much later, and then only final and composition vowels were lost, more or less as in Romance.

Anyway, I've some nice quackery to report in the next post ...

[marconatrix]

It seems impossible to find a sensible video on Sumerian without finding yourself up to your eyes in duck faeces ...

First a terrible warning ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYdWRenfk50
My conclusion : Religion rots the brain.

This vid is so pathetic I'll take you straight to the comments which are more fun http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=QnLgt8IFY0M. Look guys, you can't all be neo-sumerians, they can't be Turks, Japs, Dravidians and goodness knows what else all at the same time ... can they?? [Edit : If they're shape-shifting reptiles maybe they can language-shift too]

Anyway here's a nice Indian gentleman telling it as it is ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt3kexbG0_I

Would it be possible to fit the computer with a BS filter, along the lines of a spam filter? Or would that just make life too boring

[Legion]

My conclusion : Religion rots the brain.

Counterpoint: you.

[hwhatting]

That's right. However there seems to be no trace of any sort of Q-Celtic in Britain prior to the post-Roman expansion of the Irish, to Scotland, the IoM and for a while parts of Wales and Cornwall. Afaik there are no Roman place names etc. that look like anything other than P-Celtic (British and Pictish). When the Irish ogam inscriptions were first studied it was thought by some that they were a very archaic form of Welsh, which may be where the idea that you'll still sometimes see came from, that the proto-Irish moved first to Britain and then on to Ireland when the next wave of migration displaced them. But I don't think there is any hard evidence for this. I read somewhere that the archaeologists thought the linguists had proved it, and the linguists thought the archaeologists had proved it Anyway in that light, the idea that they came more or less directly from the continent is maybe not quite as silly as it sounds.

I don't have anything against the idea that the Irish came directly from the Continent, but I can think of two possible explanation why there are no good Q-placenames in Britain even if the Irish went via Britain:
(1) P-Celts replaced the *Irish before the P-Celts themselves had shifted Q to P, so all *Irish placenames in Britain underwent the shift as well.
(2) As Q-*Irish and P-*British were probably still very close at the time when their speakers would have had contact in Britain, it's possible that the P-*British simply would substitute P for Q in any placenames they encountered, like the Irish substituted /k/ for /p/ in the erliest loans from Latin.
Both explanations would mean that either the replacement of the *Irish speakers happened before the time of our first sources for British geography or that the contacts these sources got the names from were exclusively exposed to P-*British speakers.

The most curious thing to me about Irish is the way between ogam Irish and Early OI it developed a really heavy initial stress accent, which led to all other vowels becoming reduced or lost (syncopation), with consonants taking on some of the quality of the former adjacent vowels. This doesn't look spontaneous, it looks like a contact effect. But contact with what? Nothing similar happened in British, at least not until much later, and then only final and composition vowels were lost, more or less as in Romance.

Let's just keep in mind that initial accent with reduction of unstressed syllables is also typical for Germanic, and that we have attested languages with initial accent (although without reduction) in other parts of Europe (Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Old Polish, Latvian); also Latin is usually supposed to have undergone a period of strong initial accent. So initial accent is an areal feature attested throughout big parts of Northern and Central Europe. The same substrate everywhere? Or perhaps several unrelated languages that shared this specific feature? Or perhaps just languages with very different accentuation systems going to a simple default setting (initial stress) upon contact?

[linguoboy]

English is North Germanic! Because everyone knows languages simply don't borrow syntax from other languages.

[marconatrix]

Here is someone's PhD on Sumerian grammar, presumably (I haven't gone into it yet) a serious work.

https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/16107

Please look at the one page pdf called "Propositions" (link at bottom of page). It's in Dutch and appears to be a summery of the author's conclusions, point by point.

OK, WTF is point #10 all about :

Het Soemerisch gesproken door Buffy the Vampire Slayer behoort tot een
ander dialect dan die beschreven in deze grammatica.

Has academia gone insane too?

[dhok]

It says "The Sumerian spoken by Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs to a dialect other than those described in this grammar."

Does...Buffy the Vampire Slayer in fact speak Sumerian?

[merijn]

The propositions are the things you have to defend during the defense of your PhD thesis. It is quite common, at least in the Netherlands, to have "joke" propositions that are unrelated, or only indirectly related, to the dissertation. Nobody takes them seriously, it just a way of making things a bit less serious.

[marconatrix]

The propositions are the things you have to defend during the defense of your PhD thesis. It is quite common, at least in the Netherlands, to have "joke" propositions that are unrelated, or only indirectly related, to the dissertation. Nobody takes them seriously, it just a way of making things a bit less serious.

Thanks. The translation was pretty much what I thought the Dutch meant. It's a good while since I turned in my PhD thesis, but making a joke would have been very risky IMO. There would have been too great a chance that the examiner didn't get it and thought you'd gone insane, or were taking the piss or something. From what little I know of the process in mainland Europe, I'd always imagined it was far more formal than in the UK. We just get to have a chat with our external examiner(s) basically so that they know you really have done the work yourself, if there was any really serious flaw in the work you'd generally have been warned off long before. On the continent OTOH it sounds like you kinda get put on trial before a jury ... scary. Anyway that why I was stunned to find a joke in there.

What next, a master's on the Egyptian in The Mummy's Return maybe??

[jmcd]

One problem with that is it assumes that all countries in mainland Europe are going to do things similarly when really it's as likely for Britain to do things like Germany as it is for Germany to do things like France.

[marconatrix]

It's the way continentals talk about "defending their thesis", but that could be simply a form of words. How are things done in other English speaking countries apart from the UK?

[Qwynegold]

Here in Sweden the title of your thesis is "supposed" to be a joke, but if you put one in the text I think they would decapitate you.

[marconatrix]

Here in Sweden the title of your thesis is "supposed" to be a joke,

Examples, please

[Zontas]

Apparently English is a North Germanic Language. Be very afraid.

[Pinetree]

English is North Germanic! Because everyone knows languages simply don't borrow syntax from other languages.

I'm sure this has been spoken about on here before, in the dim-and-distant past (rather like the Basque monks), but I thought I would post about it anyway. Within the last few days, an article appeared in the University of Oslo's online newsletter Apollon, claiming that two researchers have concluded English is a North, rather than West, Germanic language.

Have a butcher's.

It doesn't seem to be an entirely new theory, as there was a paper written by Emonds (Faarlund's colleage) in 2010 on the subject (see topmost), and it's probably been around even longer than that, but I have been finding it difficult to come across any more academic sources for it. Naturally, that article in Apollon has been copied, pasted, rewritten and (re-)disseminated over the Web by other journalists as though the theory were widely accepted and gospel truth.

Although I find it compelling, I'm not convinced. The researchers seem to focus only on Old English and modern languages (German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Middle/Modern English) in their comparisons, and only focus on the syntax of these languages. Historical sound changes, morphology and comparisons to languages contemporary with Old English (principally Old Norse) have not been covered.

Despite all that, it does seem an interesting idea, and Emond's article (up to Chapter gives a good socio-linguistic, political and economic account of the changes that were taking place in Anglo-Saxon England after the Viking and Norman invasions... so it's worth a read for that, at least.

Apparently English is a North Germanic Language. Be very afraid.

Already mentioned twice before you.

[Zontas]

I posted it from a different source. It counts.

[marconatrix]

It does raise the interesting issue though, of why some form of norse didn't become established in the Danelaw. Just a look at the placenames shows that settlement must have been extensive, and the Danelaw was almost half of England, not just a small enclave. There are whole areas where three out of every four villages has a name ending in -by. Norse at that time was more of a lingua franca than English, since it was used all over northern Europe and beyond, whereas English was only spoken in England and Lothian. Also England was part of the Danish kingdom for a while, and afterwards many of the powerful people in England were of norse extraction. Would English perhaps have been replaced by Norse if the Norman conquest hadn't happened. Hmm ... alternative timeline, William invades first and is defeated, only for England (or a large part of it) to then be conquered by H. Hardrada

[Drydic]

Not sure where you're coming up with this lingua franca label, or why that would even be relevant to the situation in the Danelaw.

[the duke of nuke]

The propositions are the things you have to defend during the defense of your PhD thesis. It is quite common, at least in the Netherlands, to have "joke" propositions that are unrelated, or only indirectly related, to the dissertation. Nobody takes them seriously, it just a way of making things a bit less serious.

This is going back a bit, but I remember an electronic engineering PhD including "The GDP of the Netherlands is inversely proportional to the number of sunny days" and "The Middle East crisis is a permanent state of affairs". (It was a Portuguese guy studying at Delft, IIRC.)

[Gulliver]

It does raise the interesting issue though, of why some form of norse didn't become established in the Danelaw. Just a look at the placenames shows that settlement must have been extensive, and the Danelaw was almost half of England, not just a small enclave. There are whole areas where three out of every four villages has a name ending in -by. Norse at that time was more of a lingua franca than English, since it was used all over northern Europe and beyond, whereas English was only spoken in England and Lothian. Also England was part of the Danish kingdom for a while, and afterwards many of the powerful people in England were of norse extraction. Would English perhaps have been replaced by Norse if the Norman conquest hadn't happened. Hmm ... alternative timeline, William invades first and is defeated, only for England (or a large part of it) to then be conquered by H. Hardrada

There's practically no corpus of anything written in the Danelaw, bar, I think, a few inscriptions on sundials and the like. When Denmark became Christianised, the nearest scholars and priests were from Wessex, and evidence strongly indicates they taught Anglo-Saxon and Latin as the de facto languages of religion. The Danelaw only lasted as a legal entity for about 75 years, with obvious cultural influence afterwards and before, I think, so there was probably a lot of language mixing at the beginning and the end, anyway. There probably was some peak of Norse usage, but Danes were surrounded by Englanders speaking a fairly similar language, and writing in Old English or Latin. The Norse language left a big dent in English, but I don't think it's surprising that it didn't survive. It might have thrived, but by the time the Normans were bopping about the place, with their la-di-da pork and mutton, England was basically an Anglo-Saxon country with Celtic ancestry that had had a rocky marriage with Denmark.

Edited to add (because I didn't really make a point before): By the time the Normans arrived, the Anglo-Saxons and the Anglo-Danish were getting a comparatively well, and Harthacnut (Danish) handed over his reign to Edward the Confessor (Wessex) upon his death (or rather, released him from exile and invited him back). For much of the time Denmark ruled England as a whole, it was done remotely, with local power structures being used to a large extent, so the actual day-to-day life of most people probably didn't change a great deal. New faces on the coins, perhaps, bet when your entire life revolves around no one nicking your sheep, that probably didn't matter a whole lot.

[marconatrix]

It is odd though.
** Roman occupation of Britain, c350 yrs, Romans with more advanced culture so many Latin loans in British, fully naturalised, passed on to and now embedded in Welsh/Cornish/Breton, including many everyday words, like pysg 'fish', but not lasting shift to Latin;
** Saxon takeover, supposedly only a ruling class (really?), between c450ce and c600ce there is complete language shift over most of what is now England, hardly any British/Welsh loans in English, mostly toponyms, very few the other way at that time either, and yet the British were civilised ex-Roman, literate Christians, while the Saxons were just a tribal hord;
** Danish/Norwegian settlement, many loan words and effects on morphology, no language shift;
** Norman invasion, replaced the upper classes, marginally superior culture (??), very many loans into English now naturalised, almost no effect on morphology, no language shift despite Anglo Norman being used (with Latin) for administration and law for hundreds of years.

So how did the Saxon barbarians manage to engineer wholesale language shift whereas the 'superior' Romans and Normans never did?

[Drydic]

It is odd though.
** Roman occupation of Britain, c350 yrs, Romans with more advanced culture so many Latin loans in British, fully naturalised, passed on to and now embedded in Welsh/Cornish/Breton, including many everyday words, like pysg 'fish', but not lasting shift to Latin;
** Saxon takeover, supposedly only a ruling class (really?), between c450ce and c600ce there is complete language shift over most of what is now England, hardly any British/Welsh loans in English, mostly toponyms, very few the other way at that time either, and yet the British were civilised ex-Roman, literate Christians, while the Saxons were just a tribal hord;
** Danish/Norwegian settlement, many loan words and effects on morphology, no language shift;
** Norman invasion, replaced the upper classes, marginally superior culture (??), very many loans into English now naturalised, almost no effect on morphology, no language shift despite Anglo Norman being used (with Latin) for administration and law for hundreds of years.

So how did the Saxon barbarians manage to engineer wholesale language shift whereas the 'superior' Romans and Normans never did?

Because it wasn't just a ruling class that came over. It was dozens of entire Angle, Jutish, and Saxon tribes. And there was a considerable retreat of "civilization" on the British Isles, without Roman trade it couldn't at that time be sustained. And I wouldn't characterize Brittonic culture as literate, not in the way you're using it; they knew of writing, yes, and we have Brittonic inscriptions, yes, but there was nothing whatsoever like the sustained literary tradition that spawned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and shepherded Old/Middle English through the Norman Conquest.

(not trying to put down the Britons here, they just didn't write as much until later.)

[Gulliver]

It is odd though.
** Roman occupation of Britain, c350 yrs, Romans with more advanced culture so many Latin loans in British, fully naturalised, passed on to and now embedded in Welsh/Cornish/Breton, including many everyday words, like pysg 'fish', but not lasting shift to Latin;

"Advancement" has nothing to do with it, but that's beside the point. There was a shift to Latin, but not universally. It retreated in many areas, but there's archaeological evidence of Latin inscriptions as late as the sixth century in Cornwall and late seventh/early eighth century in Chester. Bede certainly considered Chester a Roman city, and he was born two hundred and fifty years after the Romans "left".

** Saxon takeover, supposedly only a ruling class (really?), between c450ce and c600ce there is complete language shift over most of what is now England, hardly any British/Welsh loans in English, mostly toponyms, very few the other way at that time either, and yet the British were civilised ex-Roman, literate Christians, while the Saxons were just a tribal hord;

The Saxons actually colonised by farms and towns as well as by military might. To think they just plonked a king at the top is inaccurate. They came, they saw, they founded villages.

There is a fairly robust school of thought regarding "the celtic hypothesis" that English actually has a hell of a lot of celtic influence in terms of its grammar (words not fitting sound changes, un-germanic syntax, internal possessor, periphrastic do, the Northern Subject Rule, beon and wesan etc). Tolkein was one of the earlier writers on this, in English anyway.

** Danish/Norwegian settlement, many loan words and effects on morphology, no language shift;

I think it's fairly likely that there was a shift, but it shifted back. It's likely that Anglo-Danish was Anglo-Saxon influenced, so when the territories were unified, it was less of a shift. I think both languages probably grew more similar before Anglo-Danish faded out. Sadly, unless someone digs up Colloquial Old Norse for Anglo-Saxons, we'll never really know, because there is almost no written corpus of Old Norse in Britain.

It's important to remember that "one-quarter and two-thirds of the European population (35 million people) died from the [Black Death] between 1348 and 1350". Whole villages were wiped off the map, and this changed the social landscape a lot. It has been theorised that remaining Briton villages were hit worse than others. In Britain, this appears to have led to a unification in the underclass against the gentry (who exploited the changing socio-economic climate). People began to move around more, and the prevailing common language was undoubtedly Germanic. The Black Death set in motion a lot of changes in Europe, in terms of where people were and how people behaved. Wages soared as there was a labour shortage, laws grew stricter, peasants revolted, people moved around... it's plausibly one of the factors that lead to the Reformation and the Renaissance.