Stream of Consciousness Linguistics Talk

The Japanese religion “Shinto” as a word comes from the chinese “shin tao” which means ” way of the gods.” I suspect the “shin” is the same “shin” as in the Japanese “Shinji” which means “belief” or “god thing” literally. This interests me because the word for a god in regards to shinto is “kami” or “okami,” which is phonetically identically to the word for “paper” and sometimes “hair,” though they use different kanji (chinese characters). K’s will sometimes be replaced by G’s, usually in the middle of a word, i.e. the Japanese word ‘tegami’ (letter) “-gami” is “kami”or 紙 which means paper. Makes sense when talking about a letter, no?

The chinese word for “apple” is pín guǒ 蘋果，the Japenese word for apple is ringo リンゴ. It is my contention that these words are cognate, the strange thing is that, while the Japanese use katakana (the japanese writing in the previous line) for foreign words, they typically do not use them for words of Chinese origin. 林檎　is another way to write “apple” in Japanese, so there is a Chinese way to write it, using completely different kanji, and it’s not the popular way to write it. Puzzling indeed.

The French word “eau” (water) is a direct evolution of the Latin “aqua”: Fact.

When doing comparative linguistics, spelling is utterly arbitrary.

The word “Sad” in other Germanic languages:

German: Traurig; Dutch: Triest; Danish: Ked af det; Norwegian: Trist; Swedish: Ledsen; Icelandic: Sorglegur. … … …

This is vexing. To start, English seems to be an odd man out here. The word “sad” is cognate with the verb “to sate” or “to satisfy,” but there is still much variation in the forms. Among the Western Germanic words, English is the only utterly dissimilar one, and without hearing the Dutch word pronounced it’s difficult for me to tell it’s relation to the German despite my educated suspicion of it’s cognateness. The Northern Germanic words are even more of a vexation. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are all but the same language, yet their words are so dissimilar. Modern Swedish and Norwegian come from Danish, and all three are descended from Old Norse, a language Icelandic is so closely related to as to be mutually intelligible.

All is not lost. There is an Icelandic-German-English connection. In my estimation (Sorglegur) is most likely cognate with the German “sorgen” (to worry) both of which are undoubtedly cognate with English “Sorry.” So that’s one mystery potentially solved. the Swedish and Danish still puzzle me. “Ked af Det” is a phrase, “det” means “it.” Hmmm… We’ll have to get back to that one. Bear in mind also that sometimes there are finer distinctions in some languages than in others. So the words I’ve posted for “sad” may be “sad” in a particular situation or another and not necessarily the same sense as in English.

For fun, here are the Romance words for “sad” (at least one iteration): triste, triste, triste, triste, trist. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. It’s quite obvious that the Dutch and Norwegian have betrayed their Germanic heritage by taking the Latin word, and probably the German too though the evolution seems to be a bit more advanced if it’s the case.

[end unsatisfied]

Dream May 11, 2009

A girl, whose identity I lost in waking, and I are walking up dark alley avenues at night toward a silhouetting light at the top . Coming upon our third or fourth cross street a creature can be seen floating down the alley toward us. As it gets closer I can see it’s pink bloated head like a large tentacled brain. The girl and I hide in the space between two houses as the creature floats by menacingly, unseeing. When our safety is assured we come out and continue walking. In a silent argument the girl makes it clear she wants to confront the beast. Suddenly, we are walking back down a different alley hunting the tentacled monstrosity. Upon its discovery I launch myself upon it and begin to pummel the mauve-ish flesh. The most curious electronic sounds become audible as my fists strike the creature. At last my foe is vanquished and there is electronic fanfare as my next opponent is announced. The camera begins to draw back slowly. The fanfare is over and a wooden shack crashes and splinters in front of me revealing a large cubical robot, my confidence falters. The camera is pulling back faster now and as I make my first strike it is clear I am looking at a cellular phone whereon a game is being played. The character fails and is brought back to the beginning of the game. Now I am in a kindergarten classroom jockeying for a seat at the communal table. The teacher is making some announcements and I awake as her voice turns toward me…

A little Historical Linguistics: Continued…

Ok, so back in September (the 7th month etymologically) I mentioned and interesting tidbit about negating things in French. (subject) ne (verb) pas.If you didn’t get it… pas comes from the root that means “foot.” In french pas means “step.” So if you have a sentence like: il ne mange pas, it doesn’t really make sense, since, literally, that sentence translates to “he doesn’t eat a step,” an emphasis on the statement. I’ll spare you the suspense (tongue firmly in cheek) and tell you that once upon a time, one would add whatever little word was appropriate for the verb like “he doesn’t drink a drop” or “he doesn’t eat a crumb,” and sooner or later emphatic statements lose their oomph (think about the word “awesome”) and now and again become grammatical words. So “pas” began being used for everything and has since become part of the proper grammar of French. Interesting little bit of info i think. Anyway, I need to get to class now, but I’ll catch you cats later. au revoir! 

Honey Pot and Hive

It is for naught I try to sway

the influence in my mind

to partake of this honey pot and stay

in its constant bind.

 

With this tasty treat I find

a horde of bees a’stinging,

but by the drone I am entwined,

their buzz like sirens singing.

How to Hear English as a Foreign Language, Part 2: A Few More Deductions, or: It’s Good to be a Norseman

I can’t remember if I spoke of the correlation between Old Norse sk- and English sh-, but I’m about to do it again.

Many Germanic English words (nay! perhaps one could say most?) which include sh- in their spelling correlate directly to Norse words which include sk-. As a little exercise I’m going to list a few Norwegian words, which you should have no problem understanding given the above information:

- å skinne, skip, skal, skulder, skitten, sko, skifte, skjørt, skrike

I’d bet you can figure out most of those without too much effort, but I’ll unriddle them for you.

- to shine, ship, shall, shoulder, dirty (you can make the connection), shoe, change (shift), shirt, scream (cognate with ’shriek’)

Now we’re one step closer to hearing English as a foreign language. If we do the same exercise with Norwegian and German, the similarities go even further, but that’s not the point of this entry. Incidentally, I’ve come up with another method for hearing English as a foreign language; Take out the Latin/Greek words, abhor them. You do that and start replacing them with their Germanic equivalent or “made up” Anglish words, and English sounds more Germanic, therefore more like its Northern Germanic cousins, therefore, more and more foreign.

In German, adjectives, for the most part, end in -ig. lustig (funny), heilig (holy), schmutzig (dirty), schmierig (greasy, ended up as ’smeary’ in English). You pronounce the -g in all those words. In Norwegian adjectives are spelled with the -ig but rarely is the g pronounced, making it sound closer to the English -ly ending, which is purely Germanic.

It seems I’ve made a mistake in wording. I’ve made it seem that English came from these other languages, as if English owed something to the other Germanic language, without which it would never have existed. This is not the case, I simply mean to imply that these characteristics are common throughout several Germanic languages. English is included in this language family because the people who spoke the proto-Germanic language that would become English, belonged to the same people who were speaking the languages that would become all the other Germanic languages, not because of these languages.

That being said, fill you in on a few similarities with English’s closest relative, Dutch.

Ik denk het, ik denk het niet, Natuurlijk, Prettige vakantie, dank je, hoe gaat het met je?

These are all pretty simple, if you’re having trouble: D’s will often change to Th- in English, don’t pronounce h’s, -ig is almost always the same as -ly or -y in English, J is not pronounced like in “jog” but like in “yule”, the word ‘go’ is cognate with German “geht,” as well as one of the Dutch words above, and finally “-lijk” serves the same purpose as “-ig”. Actually… one last hint: English as pronounced by the Scottish still sounds very Germanic. Naja, Ich muss jetzt gehen. Dag!

How to Hear English as a Foreign Language Part 1: Assumptions and Deductions

God dag. I’ll get to the point, straight away: I’ve endeavored (and still endeavor) to hear my native language, English, as a foreigner might hear it. I realize this is a peculiar task, but it’s difficult to comprehend what your native language sounds like to someone who doesn’t speak that language. My greatest motivation for doing this is my knowing that English is a Germanic language in the same family with, German, Dutch, Faroese (does anyone still speak that?) and the Norse languages, and it not sounding particularly Germanic to my ears. After much casual research I’ve made a considerable headway in the matter. I’ve employed several experimental methods in my efforts: 1) Learn another Germanic language. I’ve done this, I speak German with some level of proficiency and am not totally lost in matters Norse. 2) Once you’ve done this, compare their grammar and learn sound change laws of linguistics (you’ll find, I think, that Norwegian/Swedish are most similar in syntax and things like conjugation) 3) Say sentences containing only purely English words, in an English accent (or just say them if you are English) over and over again until they lose their meaning. Doing these simple (if learning a language can be called simple) things should get you close to being able to hear English as a foreign language.

I’ll make a few comparisons for you, which should be applying all three of the aforementioned methods.
I understand a little English. Do you understand English?

Those two sentences are purely English, not a Latin or Greek word in them, (I will consider some words borrowed from French to be Germanic in origin due to the fact that the Franks, the people who we’d later call the French, were a Germanic tribe AND because the Normans, those we have to thank for the introduction of Latinate French into English, were formally Vikings who conquered and settled in the north of France, Normans = Norse men) First I’ll compare them to two other Germanic language, observe the similarities in the words and in their structure.

I understand a little English. Do you understand English? — English

Jeg forstår litt engelsk. Forstår du engelsk? — Norwegian/Swedish

Ich verstehe ein bißchen englisch. Verstehst du englisch? — German

Now if you hear them spoken, and understand that no matter what they sounds like, every word in all three of those sentences is cognate with each other, it’s quite obvious. Understand – verstehen – forstår all come from the same Proto-Germanic verb. To make it a little easier here are the phonetic pronunciations for the last two; verstehen = fer shtay en; forstår = for shtor, the R’s being slightly like a Spanish R. Norwegian becomes even closer to us when we hear that jeg is pronounced like English I except with a “ya-” in front of it (it should be noted that modern English descends from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, which had a strong Old Norse influence do to the vikings and other Norsemen who settled there).

Next you’ll observe the word order of the second sentence, the inquiry. Modern English has all but discontinued use of the inverted word order for questions, we use the auxiliary verb “to do” as a question word and find the inversion to be archaic and quaint. However; in days gone by, this was the only way to do it. So one normally would say “Understand you English?” keeping that in mind, English begins to look a lot more Germanic already.

Now for some linguistic notes I’ve taken.

Modern English takes it’s grammatical cues from Old Norse, more so than from a more southern Germanic trend. For example: Norwegian/Swedish doesn’t conjugate its verbs, English has many verbs that are not conjugated, but many more that simply add an “-s” for the “you, he/she/it” forms of them. This is likely due to language change patterns where the ends of words begin to be lost as people start relying more on context. Er du amerikansk? is Are you American? in Norwegian (er is pronounced virtually identically to are), and jeg er amerikansk is I am American.

To digress slightly; bare bra, takk is like just fine, thanks in Norwegian. Bra is the “fine/well/good” word there. Unless you’ve lived very uncomfortably under a large stone for your entire life you’ve heard the phrase “Erin go brea”… it is my contention that the bra is cognate with brea. Erin go brea is translated as something like “Ireland is beautiful”, I know, I know, Irish is a language of Celtic origin, but Ireland was ruled by the Vikings for a pretty significant amount of time, certainly long enough for some words to go awandering. To take something that means “good” or “fine” and use it to mean “beautiful” is not a far stretch… this may already be proven to be cognate but I’m coming up with this stuff on my own.

テッコンキンクリト

この映画はすごいだよ！

皆はこの映画を見るべきである。

少し日本語が話せます。

おやすみなさい！　ありがとうございました！

“A Little Historical Linguistics” or “I Wish I Had a Camera”

Looking out my window there’s a sunrise that would like fantastic on film (read: digital flash media). There’s a great tree and the sky. The sky orange and pink and right on the border where the edge of the tree meets the sky, the sun. El sol es muy brillante. El sol, die Sonne, le soleil, il sole, たいよ.

I’ve learned something interesting. Dr. John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute informed me (by way of recorded lecture) that verb conjugations in various languages started out as different words tacked on to the end of the original verb. Example: The Italian word for “I will love” is amerò. Now we should all know the Latin root word amere means “love.” That “am-” is everywhere in words meaning and related to love. the future form of “love” is amere habeo in Latin. Now over a couple hundred years the Italians (and the other derivations of Latin around Europe) would say “amere habeo” and they’d slur it, and say it faster and eventually, due to the principle of least effort, the habeo becomes -o. So we have amerò. Pretty interesting, I thought. I must endeavor to learn more about this.

He also told me of an interesting little French factoid. How do we negate something in French? One must say, “(subject) ne (verb) pas.” Think about this one. Pas come from the same root as pedal, pediatrics, pedestrian, and centipede. Then think about this sentence, il ne marche pas. Marche is related to English March (as in what an army or a marching band does, not the month). I’ll leave you to ponder that one a bit then I’ll be back to explain it more in depth.

So I’m off to have some coffee and study. I’ll write again soon. Adieu.

Sie werden diese warscheinlich nicht Verstehen

Veil ich schreibe es auf deutsch. Ich muss einer Antwort schreiben, über die Thema e-mail. Ich hab’ ja keine idee was ich schreiben soll’! Es ist so eine Zwangslage! Ich hab’ drei Versuchen und ich muss Sie zusammen fassen. Aber ich weiss nicht wie mann das machen sollen. Und mein deutsch ist auch etwas nachlässig. Ach! Gott im Himmel. Was soll ich jetzt tun? Ich wünsch dass ich etwas Wein hat!

Naja, ich muss jetzt wieder versuchen. tschüß.

A Sort of Palaeography: Part 1

Lo! How things digress! I was set upon a simple task and it has since developed into a massive undertaking, branches of questions propagating in every direction. It has come to it that I must start from the beginning and answer every question that comes along, with only reasonable digression from the root.

Let me begin by informing you of the nature of my task. It seems very simple at first glance; I must write an explanatory synthesis on the origins of the letter Æ (æsc in Old English, it means “an ash tree” and is pronounced like the /a/ in “ash”). One might think this would be a fairly straight forward explanation, describing its lineage down through to the Latin ligature “æ,” which was its first usage that I’ve so far found. Looks can be deceiving.

In order to find a full history of the letter “ash” one must break it into its parts, “A” and “E.” This is where things begin to get slightly confusing. The history of “A” up to its usage in Latin is thus: A long, long time ago, sometime around the fourth millennium BCE, the people who would eventually become the Semites started speaking what linguists refer to as Proto-Semitic. They did not have writing like we do today, it was logographic much like ancient Egyptian with their hieroglyphs. They drew little pictures to represent sounds. It so happened that the little picture for the sound /a/ (most likely pronounced like /a/ in “father”) was an ox’ head, horns sticking out from the sides.Over some time the Proto-Semitic language broke up into several different languages that now take up a fifth of the Afro-Asiatic language tree. Included in these languages is the our next victim. Phoenician. Now, the Phoenicians got around. You wouldn’t expect it but these guys got all over Europe and all the way up to the south of Britain. The name “Spain” actually comes from “I-Shaphan”, meaning “Land of Hyraxes”. The Romans later mispronounced it as Hispania. Anyway, the Phoenician letter “aleph” (that’s still the name of the /a/ letter in Hebrew and similarly “Alif” in Arabic two Semitic languages) derives from that ox’ head and became what is almost recognizable to us today as an “A” that’s laying on its side.

Now we’ve got the Phoenicians going around with their “aleph,” and the Greeks come along and they mingle. Around 750 BCE the Greeks land on Italy and start living large in the south. They found cities like Naples (that’s “neo-polis” to you!) They’ve already encountered the Phoenicians and got a fairly large portion of their alphabet (think about that word, alpha->beta) for their own. They’ve wrested away “aleph” and metathesized it into “alpha.” Now it’s completely recognizable, it’s an “A.”

Here’s where the fun part starts. Estruscans. The Etruscans came along about a century and a half before the greeks, but they don’t enter our game until now. In the Etruscan orientalizing period (between 700-600BCE) they pick up “alpha” from the greek and call it their own. Now we’ve a pre-Roman italic society using this letter, among others that you would see as somewhat familiar. And so the Romans start to build their little town and the Etruscans move on in and say, “Hey! We’re going to interbreed and rule you for a while, oh right! Here’s a letter or fifteen.” And thus the Etruscan period begins in Rome and “A” is passed on again.

But wait!

Around this time those crazy Germanic tribes start to get restless and start moving about. Not to mention the Celts, but they’re a story for another day. So somehow in this period (or perhaps a little before?) the Germanii have a lunch date with the Etruscans and they are gifted with a chunk of alphabet as well. We won’t see that again until about the second century BCE, way up north. Pushing on!

So the Estruscan period ends in Rome around 510 BCE. The Romans drive the Etruscans out but keep their alphabet, their numerical system, and various other parts of their culture that they fancied. We should all be at least a little familiar with what happens next. Rome has some growing pains but eventually solidifies and proceeds to take over the known world. As fascinated as I am with the Romans, I realize they’ve been talked about almost ad nauseum (pun intended), so I won’t bore you with minutia (another pun intended). All that’s important is that in about 55BCE Gaius Julius Cæser makes his way up to Britain, and he’s brought his army with him. It’s at this time we see the Romanization of what will become England, and, you guessed it, the Latin alphabet comes with it.

As a side note I should bring us back to those Germanic tribes. The Germanii as a Roman would have called them. They took that Etruscan alphabet and ran up north. The thing is it’s really cold up north. So they’ve got this alphabet, but it doesn’t change much due to bad growing conditions. So around 200BCE we start to see writing on stones and things that looks strangely Etruscan to be quite honest. It’s called Futhark (after the first six letters in the alphabet), or you might know them as Runes. The inhabitants of England at this time would’ve known the runes, but they weren’t used to write with on a regular basis. Only for ceremonial purposes and the like. I imagine there must have been an Old Englishman or two that looked at the Latin alphabet and scratched their heads at its vague familiarity.

There begins the story of English, so I’m going to leave it at that for tonight. The story of “E” is not terribly far removed from this story right here. Just change the ox’ head to the figure of a man praising or calling and follow the pattern. Then all you must do is tie the “A” and the “E” together during the growing pains period of Roman history and you’ve got your ligature. Gifted to us by the Romans. And eventually, sadly, forsaken by the English.

Hopefully this has been at least mildly entertaining. I’ll see you next time. Goodnight.