Language desk
< October 30	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	November 1 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 31[edit]

Scandinavian language ID[edit]

Hi,

Could someone check whether I've identified the following languages correctly?

I have as Danish:

Synnöve Solbakken (by Bjørnson); Et Besög (Brandes); En Hanske (Bjørnson);

also all the titles of plays by Ibsen (e.g., Fru Inger til Östraat, Gildet paa Solhaug, Kjærlighedens Komedie, Fruen fra Havet).

And as Swedish:

Henrik Ibsen, ett Skaldeporträtt (by Vasenius).

I gather especially with Ibsen, the difference between Norwegian and Danish was fluid at the time, but I need to decide how to mark the languages for some CSS.

Thanks, Henry ^Flower 14:56, 31 October 2017 (UTC);[reply]

No expert here, but I thought the ö doesn’t appear in Danish (I thought it’s always ø). And also, I thought Danish just has pa with an o on top of the a (or maybe paa is just the old way of spelling it). Loraof (talk) 22:07, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Å#Origin mentions that å had only been added to the Danish alphabet in 1948; before then, paa was the standard spelling. --194.213.3.4 (talk) 14:42, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Henry Flower, Swedish uses ä and ö, Danish and Norwegian use æ and ø. But I'm pretty sure that "-øg" ending (even though written "-ög") is distinctively Danish, where both Swedish and Norwegian would have -ök/-øk. So that title, at least ("Et Besög") appears to be Danish in a non-standard orthography. --ColinFine (talk) 01:03, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks both. The titles were taken from an oldish book in English, so I think the use of ö rather than ø can be put down to ö being rather more familiar, and probably also availability of type. Henry ^Flower 08:07, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

From Ø#Language usage: "Under German influence, the letter ö appeared in older texts (particularly those using Fraktur) and was preferred for use on maps (e.g., for Helsingör or Læsö) until 1957." --194.213.3.4 (talk) 12:26, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

a sound change of palatal > velar?[edit]

Where is change like this attested. Specifically refering to a change from an actual palatal plosive like c, to a velar. I've heard this is next to impossible, and so far the only place I've found a change like this is in one of the Mienic languages. Proto-Hmong-Mien N-ɟuə changed to Dzaomin ku54. Idielive (talk) 19:07, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps early Arabic [ɟ] to modern Egyptian Arabic dialect [ɡ] (Modern Standard Arabic often [dʒ], many other dialects [ʒ]). However, early Arabic [ɟ] comes from proto-Semitic [ɡ], so one could set up scenarios to avoid a direct [ɟ] to [ɡ] change... The letter of the Arabic alphabet involved is ج -- AnonMoos (talk) 22:04, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Some reconstructions of PIE have palatalized, plain, and labialized velars, (k^y, k, k^w) with the palatalized velars falling in with the plain velars in the Centum languages, and becoming sibilants in the Satem languages. μηδείς (talk) 02:10, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See specifically, @Idielive: Proto-Indo-European_phonology#Dorsals. μηδείς (talk) 04:39, 5 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

How can a non-native parent make a dead or constructed language the native language of his child?[edit]

I know some people speak Latin and Esperanto as a native language, which means that there must be an ancestor who whimsically taught the language. But how can that be? What if the parent sucks at pronouncing accurately and this mispronunciation carries over to the child in the form of a strange accent? Is the child nevertheless a native speaker of Latin, Esperanto, or Cornish? 140.254.70.33 (talk) 22:48, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You can't, unless the wider community speaks it, as with Modern Hebrew which was revived by an entire highly-motivated nation. This man tried to teach his son Klingon but after the child found his peers only spoke English he stopped responding to his father in Klingon and would only speak English. μηδείς (talk) 23:01, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

140.254.70.33 -- If Esperanto is the only language that a child's mother and father have in common, then it's quite natural that the child will have Esperanto as one of his/her languages (though not the only one). However, such "native" Esperanto speakers are said to make certain changes in the Esperanto that they speak (not exactly the same as the official codified standard).

I'm actually more suspicious of the thousands of people who consistently claim Sanskrit as their first language in Indian censuses (14,135 in the 2001 Census of India, according to our article)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:40, 31 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The article says Hebrew

continued to be used as a liturgical and literary language.

That is rather misleading. The more educated and religious Jews have always spoken Hebrew in their day - to - day life. 80.5.88.70 (talk) 09:09, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

^{[citation needed]} on that, IP user. It's my understanding that few or no Jewish communities in Europe did so. --ColinFine (talk) 09:46, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Two references here and here for the extinction of Hebrew as a language of everyday speech for about one and a half thousand years, and both from scholars anxious to emphasize its survival as a written and ritual language. --Antiquary (talk) 10:56, 1 November 2017 (UTC) And added those references to Hebrew language, the article the IP was quoting from. Chalk up one more WP improvement coming from the Ref Desk. --Antiquary (talk) 11:28, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Jessie Little Doe Baird has raised her daughter, Mae Alice Baird, speaking Wampanoag, a language that had been extinct for 150 years. I think Mae Alice was born in 2004. There is a wealth of written documents in the Wampanoag language, including two Bibles, but of course no voice recordings. It would be interesting to hear what it sounds like. —Stephen (talk) 09:28, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The thing about all of these examples is that they are not a speech community. These groups, like the Wampanoag noted above and the Klingon example noted by Medeis, all consist of extremely small groups of people, at most 3-4, who teach a language as the first language, to their child. That's not a speech community. That's one weird parent being goofy and teaching their child a language no one else uses. Until people converse at the corner shop, and chat up random strangers, and order a beer at the pub in that language, it isn't a living language. A speech community uses a language as part of their everyday business, not as a weird hobby they inflict on their infant children. No matter how many isolated examples of people learning or teaching Klingon or Esperanto or Wampanoag we get, until we find some village or neighborhood or somewhere like that where old biddies play games of mahjong while chatting over tea in that language, or whatever, it isn't a living language. That's why reconstructing a "dead language" is almost impossible. You end up with at best a zombie language. It happens occasionally but it is very rare, and requires the concerted effort of thousands of people over many generations, not just one isolated family. --Jayron 32 11:06, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pages 11 - 13 of the second reference say different (I can't access the relevant page of the first reference on google). I'll firm up this reply with references when I get the opportunity. 80.5.88.70 (talk) 11:57, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No it doesn't. I just read it. It talks about Hebrew, and no where does it say "Hebrew was revived by one guy in Paris teaching it to his infant son". Revival of the Hebrew language was accomplished by the deliberate, concerted effort of many thousands of people over decades and decades. Or, like exactly what I said. --Jayron 32 14:17, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The OP seems to be making an assumption that you could not call it a native language if the child has learnt it with a different accent or pronunciation. However, the accent does not make the language: English is English as long as you are more or less using the right words and grammar (otherwise it becomes a pidgin) - if not, no American can ever claim to be a native English speaker. I recall many years ago my Latin teacher telling us about a conference he attended for Latin teachers from across Europe: they all spoke Latin, but with such diverse national accents that they usually couldn't understand each other. Wymspen (talk) 14:50, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also, the problem is more subtle than that: What we do in language classification is attempt to place people who exist on a continuum into categories which are necessarily quantized. That is, languages do not fit into nice exclusive boxes where they can be easily classified. Americans speak American English and the British speak British English. But are those different dialects or are those different languages. It gets messy in the categorization, because there are dialect continuums between languages, its the EXACT SAME problem as the species problem. Just as we cannot easily define a group of biological organisms as a "species" in a reliable way, we cannot define a particular collection of speaking methods a "language" in a reliable way. In the species problem, this is typified by the "mutual viable mating" issue: We define two organisms as the same species as long as they can mate and produce viable offspring who themselves can mate, and carry on. However, we get issues like organism A can mate with organism B and organism B can mate with organism C, but organism A cannot mate with organism C. So, how do you classify that? Language has the SAME problem. If Jim and Mike speak mutually intelligible tongues, we say they speak the same language. But what if Jim and Mike can speak fine together and Mike and Tom can speak fine together, but Jim and Tom have no idea what the other says? How do we classify their languages? Are they all speaking the same language? Are they different? Are we stuck with classifying 7 billion idiolects? What about people who speak in multiple registers? Is code switching between different mutually intelligible dialects the same as speaking two languages? Its just not useful to overextend the use of categorizations to be bold, black lines over which nothing crosses. The boundaries between the classifications are very fuzzy, and its in the fuzzy boundaries that all the interesting stuff happens. Putting stuff in boxes is only useful to expanding our understanding if we run into places where the boxes break down... --Jayron 32 15:39, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Remember that children are entirely capable of inventing a fully-fledged language: Nicaraguan Sign Language has been well documented, and the experiment could be repeated in many poor countries with a little cash and time and political will. (BTW is there a deaf-inclusive term for "speech community"?) Carbon Caryatid (talk) 18:12, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It should be noted that at first Nicaraguan Sign Language was on the level of a pidgin, which is not a full-fledged language in the normal sense, but a limited and uninflected form of language that allows bear-bones communication. Only when newly introduced young children learned this pidgin as their first language, thus becoming a creole-level language, was it as complex as a "full-fledged" language. Our article on NSL addresses this without much detail. I thought Oliver Sacks had went into it, but can't find relevant material on the web. I will have to see if I can find the original source I read on the matter. μηδείς (talk) 01:18, 2 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm well aware that the first children were limited in their linguistic (and therefore, in some cases, their cognitive) development, and that it took the younger newer pupils to nurture the pidgin into a creole. It appears that Sacks published Seeing Voices just before the studies of NSL were made public. it would indeed be fascinating to read his thoughts on the case. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 19:55, 2 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't accusing you of ignorance, but think the nuance is important for the readers. I suspect the source I was grasping for may be Merlin Donald, rather than Oliver Sacks, who actually aludes to Donald as one of the best new author's he's read in one of his books. Unfortunately, I have sold or given away most of my Sacks books since I can get them so easily from the university library. I'll look through the Merlin Donald, whom I recommend unreservedly. μηδείς (talk) 01:45, 4 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, but these articles are wrong.

Three generations have received a systematic education in Hebrew, and Hebrew as a living, spoken language is known by almost everyone. Even heated debates with the teacher are conducted in pure Hebrew.

- page 479

Many family records, such as the family tree or scroll of origin (megilat yuhasin), were also kept in Hebrew, and many families prided themselves on their fluency. Indeed, some families told a special genre of stories describing their loyalty to the Hebrew language - stories so cherished that they became featured highlights of the family history, told and retold down through the generations. The Coutsai family in Eishyshok, for example, who were descendants of the thirteenth-century tosafist Rabbi Shimshon, the Noble of Coucy, took as much pride in their family's historical commitment to the Hebrew language in its purest, most elegant form (the Sephardic) as they did in their illustrious ancestry.

- page 513

Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was A World: A 900-year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, New York 1999, ISBN 0-316-23252-1. 80.5.88.70 (talk) 21:42, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not convinced that that extract says that they "[spoke] Hebrew in their day - to - day life", IP user. It might mean that, but I think it is also consistent with a practice of using Hebrew for scholarly and ritual purposes but not in everyday life. --ColinFine (talk) 17:56, 3 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an article that cites Merlin Donald's works, and the MIT dissertation by Senghas that addresses the rise of NSL to a creole after one generation. μηδείς (talk) 04:33, 5 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]