Kentucky Fried Feature Chicken

Language Families: Eurasia (II)

2008-08-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

Covering the southern half of the Indian subcontinent, scattered regions of northern India and Pakistan, and part of Sri Lanka, is the Dravidian language family. The principal member is the Tamil language, while Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam are other important members. All four of these are official languages within the Republic of India, in the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala, respectively. Tamil is also official in Sri Lanka and Singapore. No relationship between the Dravidian languages and other language families have been demonstrated yet, but several theories link Dravidian to the Elamite isolate of ancient Iran, and to several other language families of Eurasia in a macrofamily (a proposed collection of already-established families) called Nostratic. Jain scriptures and some Hindu scriptures have appeared in many of the Dravidian languages, and the Tamil language has one of the oldest continuous literary traditions in Asia.
Along the edge of the Himalayan range can be found two small language isolates. One is Burushaski, spoken in the northern edge of Pakistan between the Afghan border on the west and the disputed regions of Jammu and Kashmir on the east. One theory links Burushaski to a small Siberian family called Yeniseian; others propose links to the Sino-Tibetan languages of East Asia, to the Caucasian languages, or to all of these. The other Himalayan isolate is the Kusunda language of Nepal; some linguists have proposed a relationship to the languages of New Guinea, but this has been met with skepticism. A third Indian isolate, spoken further south in Madhya Pradesh state, is Nihali (also called Kalto), which has not yet been well studied.
Moving back to Siberia, we find a series of small families which have not been conclusively linked to other Eurasian languages. One is the Yukaghir family, which, as mentioned earlier, is often linked with Uralic. The family's two members, Tundra Yukaghir and Forest Yukaghir, are spoken in far northeastern Siberia, both on the Arctic coast and inland. Another small family is Chukotko-Kamchatkan (also called Chukchi-Kamchatkan). One branch, Chukchi, is spoken in the farthest tip of Northeast Asia, across the Bering Strait from Alaska, and includes Chukchi, Koryak, and Alutor (a fourth member, Kerek, recently became extinct). The other branch, Kamchatkan, is spoken on the Kamchatka peninsula to the northeast of Japan and includes the Itelmen language (also known as Kamchadal). Some linguists have proposed a connection with the Eskimo-Aleut languages of North America, but this has yet to be demonstrated. Finally, there are two isolates spoken along the Northeast Asian Pacific coast. One is Nivkh (or Gilyak), spoken on Sakhalin island to the north of Japan, and on adjacent portions of mainland Russia. The other is Ainu, the aboriginal language of at least the northern Japanese islands before the arrival of ancestral Japanese speakers. Ainu today is confined to the northern island of Hokkaido and to parts of southern Sakhalin; historically the Ainu language and culture was suppressed by the Japanese authorities, but this policy has recently changed and now steps are being taken to protect the language.
The final language family in Siberia, Dené-Yeniseian, is remarkable for including members in both Siberia and North America, a fact which has only recently been demonstrated. The Yeniseian branch of the family is spoken in the north-central part of the Russian Federation, along the Yenisei river, and today includes only the Ket language (other members such as Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol, are now extinct). The other branch of the family, Na-Dené, is found across northwestern North America and the U.S. southwest.
South of Sakhalin and Kamchatka, and southeast of the Tungusic-speaking regions, are found two very large language groups: Korean and Japanese. The Korean language is considered an isolate (and, at more than 80 million speakers, is the most-spoken isolate in the world), as no links to other Eurasian languages have been conclusively demonstrated. However, a large minority of linguists posit a relationship between Korean and the Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages, thus including Korean in the Altaic hypothesis. Many of the same linguists, as well as others who reject Altaic, consider a relationship between Korean and Japanese likely also. Japanese was once considered and isolate as well, but is now considered to be part of a small family called Japonic; the other members of the family are a series of small language communities known as Ryukyuan that are spoken on the Ryukyu islands between Kyushu and Taiwan, including the island of Okinawa. No links between Japonic and other language families have been proven, but, as mentioned above, many linguists consider a link to Korean likely, and others include Japonic along with Korean in the Altaic hypothesis, thus giving so-called Macro-Altaic 5 primary branches (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic). The most widely-accepted link to Japonic, however, is with an extinct language once spoken in Korea and adjacent regions of China and Russia known as Goguryeo. For example, place names attributed to the Goguryeo language appear to have components related to Japanese words and morphemes. Other extinct languages of the region, known mostly from Chinese chronicles, included the Buyeo, Dongye, Okjeo, and Baekje languages; the possible relationships between these languages, and with Goguryeo, Korean, and Japonic, are still being worked out.
Japanese is the language of the Shinto religion, Japan's native spiritual system. Many important Buddhist works have also appeared in both Japanese and Korean.
Dominating most of East Asia is the Sino-Tibetan language family, whose principal member, Mandarin, is the most-spoken language in the world. Mandarin is just one of the languages that makes up the Chinese (or Sinitic) branch of the family; others include Cantonese, Wu (sometimes called Shanghainese), Hakka, Min, and Jin. The rest of the family is composed of the Tibetan and Burman branches. Tibetan includes Classical and Modern Tibetan, as well as a variety of minority languages spoken throughout western China and in adjacent areas of Pakistan, India, and Nepal. The Tibetan Dzongkha language is the official language of the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. The Burman languages include Burmese, the official language of Myanmar/Burma, as their principal member, but also include a large number of minority languages in eastern India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, southern and central China, and scattered parts of Southeast Asia. Tibetan and Burman are usually considered to form a single branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, known as Tibeto-Burman, but as the independence of the Chinese branch has recently been called into question, the internal configuration of Sino-Tibetan is subject to change.
Proposed links between Sino-Tibetan and other families include a link to the Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, Hmong-Mien, or Tai-Kadai families of Southeast Asia, or to a combination of these. Other proposed connections have been made to the Dené-Yeniseian family (in which Sino-Tibetan is considered Dené-Yeniseian's closest relative), and to Burushaski, which itself has also been linked to Dené-Yeniseian.
Chinese, in its several forms, has been an important cultural and religious language of East Asia for thousands of years. Confucian teachings were originally in Chinese, as were the Taoist scriptures. Chinese has also been an important language of Buddhism. Finally, Tibetan is the principal language of Tibetan Buddhism and of the Lamas.
Three diverse but compact language families are found in mainland Southeast Asia, apart from the Tibeto-Burman languages of Myanmar. The largest of these is a family called Austro-Asiatic, which includes Vietnamese as its principal member. Cambodian is another important member of the family. The remaining Austro-Asiatic languages are minority languages in most of Vietnam, parts of Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand, and in scattered regions of Bangladesh and eastern India. Judging by patterns of vocabulary and other historical evidence, in fact, Austro-Asiatic languages likely predate both Indo-European and Dravidian languages in the Indian subcontinent, and an Austro-Asiatic language may have been spoken by the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. Vietnamese has historically been under heavy Chinese influence, which can been seen in the large number of Chinese loanwords in its vocabulary.
The Tai-Kadai family (sometimes called Daic) is another important family of the region, its principal members being Thai and Laotian (or Lao). As with Austro-Asiatic, the remainder of the Tai-Kadai languages are spoken by minority groups in various parts of Southeast Asia, and also in southern China, where the large Zhuang minority is found. The Tai-Kadai languages show influence from Sanskrit and Pali, reflecting long periods of Hindu and Buddhist cultural influence from India. Thai and its relatives were once considered part of Sino-Tibetan, but this was later found to be incorrect.
The third family is composed completely of minority languages, and is known as Hmong-Mien (or sometimes Miao-Yao). These minority groups are found in isolated areas across southern China, as well as in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. Many Hmong people were displaced by the Vietnam war and so immigrated to the United States and other nations. The Hmong-Mien speakers likely represent the indigenous inhabitants of southern China before the expansion of Sino-Tibetan speakers into the area; one theory also proposes that the tonality of many East Asian languages originated in Hmong-Mien, as ancient Hmong-Mien speakers adopted Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic, or Tai-Kadai languages over time.
The final language family of Eurasia is also one of the largest in the world, both in terms of number of languages and in number of speakers. This is the Austronesian family, which covers a huge part of the globe, stretching from Madagascar at its western extreme to Easter Island at its eastern extreme. The Austronesian family is composed of up to ten subfamilies (linguists differ on the exact number), all but one of which are found on the island of Taiwan, where they are known as the Taiwanese Aboriginal Languages. The remaining branch of the family, known as Malayo-Polynesian, has over 1,000 members - the only other recognized language family with over 1,000 member languages is Niger-Congo in Africa. Several Malayo-Polynesian languages are large national languages, such as Malaysian, Indonesian, and Tagalog (all three of which are closely related). Other smaller national languages of the family include Malagasy in Madagascar, and Fijian, Samoan, Tongan, Tuvaluan, and Marshallese in the Pacific. Many other Malayo-Polynesian languages have regional status, such as Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, and Minangkabau in Indonesia; Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, and Waray-Waray in the Philippines; Maori in New Zealand; Hawai'ian in Hawai'i; Tahitian in French Polynesia; and many others. The majority of the Malayo-Polynesian languages are minority languages in the countries of the region, from Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Federated States of Micronesia, New Caledonia, and various remote islands in the South Pacific.
The relationships between Sino-Tibetan, Hmong-Mien, Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Austronesian remain under investigation. One proposal that has received attention is a link between Tai-Kadai and Austronesian; others instead link Austro-Asiatic with Austronesian, while some consider all three, as well as Hmong-Mien, but not Sino-Tibetan, to constitute a macrofamily. Still others place one or more of the four Southeast Asian families closer to Sino-Tibetan. For the time being, however, no solid links among any of these five East Asian families have been convincingly demonstrated.

Language Families: Eurasia (I)

2008-07-24T22:16:00.001-07:00

I'm treating Europe and Asia here as a single unit for two reasons. First, in many respects, the differences within various regions of Asia are comparable or even greater than the difference between Europe and adjacent parts of Asia, so that it seems more convenient to think of a single whole called "Eurasia" with various geographic/ecological/cultural regions such as "Europe", "The Middle East", "The Indian Subcontinent", "Southeast Asia", etc. Second, the various language families of Eurasia tend to straddle the geopolitical boundary between Europe and Asia, so it makes sense to examine all of these families together.
Starting with the Middle East, we have spillover of the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic as described in the last post. Within this region, two non-Afro-Asiatic language families are well-represented: Turkic, and Indo-European.
The Turkic languages form a group of closely-related languages stretching from Anatolia, through Central Asia, to Siberia and Northeast Asia; the most well-known and most-spoken member is Turkish, but others include Azeri, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur (the language of Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China). Minority Turkic languages are found in parts of southeastern Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Russian Federation. Past civilizations that were Turkic-speaking include the Seljuqs, Bulgars, Avars, and Pechenegs, which menaced the medieval Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire; the Tatars and Khazars, both medieval steppe cultures; and the Timurid and Mughal cultures, which ruled parts of central Asia, Iran, and India during the early modern period. The Huns, a confederation of steppe tribes that invaded the Roman Empire during the 5th century AD, were likely Turkic-speaking as well, though probably also included non-Turkic members.
The Indo-European languages are found throughout most of Europe, into the Caucasus region, and from there through Iran, Afghanistan, and into the northern half of the Indian Subcontinent. There are nine extant subfamilies of Indo-European: Indo-Iranian, which includes the Indo-Aryan languages Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Panjabi, Nepalese, Sinhalese, and others, as well as the Iranian languages Persian, Tajik, Pashto, Kurdish, Baluchi, and Ossetian; the Armenian language, which forms its own independent branch within Indo-European; the Greek language, also an independent branch which once included Ancient Greek, Macedonian, and others; the Albanian language, a third independent branch, which may have included Classical-era Balkan languages such as Illyrian, Thracian, and Dacian; the Slavic languages, found in eastern Europe and extending into large areas of northern Asia, and including Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian, among others; the Baltic languages, which today include only Latvian and Lithuanian; the Germanic languages of northern Europe, including German, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Icelandic, among others; the Italic languages, once represented by Latin and ancient neighboring languages such as Oscan and Umbrian, but today represented by the Latin-descended Romance languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan; and finally the Celtic languages, today represented by Irish and Scots Gaelic, Welsh, and the Breton language of France. Many well-known cultures of antiquity spoke Indo-European languages: the Britons, Gauls, Celtiberians, and Galatians spoke Celtic languages, while the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, and Norse spoke Germanic languages; the ancient Trojans spoke a Phrygian language, an extinct branch of Indo-European probably closest to Armenian; the language of the bronze-age Hittite civilization belonged to the most divergent branch of Indo-European, Anatolian (now extinct); while ancient West Asian cultures such as the Mitanni, the Khwarezmians, the Bactrians, the Scythians, the Alans, the Parthians, and the Medes, spoke Indo-Iranian languages. The 1st-millennium AD Tocharian culture of the Tarim basin in northwestern China was also Indo-European speaking.
Several Indo-European languages have religious importance. Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-Iranian language, is the sacred language of Hinduism and its scriptures, while the Indo-Iranian Pali language was the first (and in many communities, still principal) language of the Buddhist scriptures; likewise, Jain scriptures are found in a variety of Indo-Iranian languages, including the ancient Prakrits languages which split from Sanskrit, and the modern Panjabi language is the sacred language of Sikhism. The Zoroastrian scriptures were first set down in the Indo-Iranian language Avestan, and the majority of the Bábí and Bahá'í scriptures were revealed in the Indo-Iranian Persian language. Outside of the Indo-Iranian branch, Ancient Greek was one of the earliest liturgical languages of Christianity, soon followed by Latin; Latin still serves as the liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church, while Greek, the Slavic language known as Old Church Slavonic, and Armenian, are languages of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
Within Europe, particularly in pre-Christian times, a number of non-Indo-European languages were found. These likely included the so-called "Pelasgian" language(s) of pre-Hellenic Greece and Crete (including probably the Minoan language) though some linguists interpret the Pelasgian languages as simply non-Greek Indo-European tongues. Also present was a small language family called "Tyrsenian" or "Tyrrhenian", which may have united the Lemnian language of the Aegian, the pre-Roman Etruscan language of central Italy, and the Rhaetic language of the Alps. In Britain, the ancient Pictish language is often considered to be a non-Indo-European language that survived the initial Celtic migrations to the island, but others have interpreted Pictish as Celtic. The pre-Roman Elymian and Sicani languages of Sicily are also often considered non-Indo-European. In the Iberian peninsula, several non-Indo-European languages were spoken before the Roman conquest, including Tartessian, Iberian, and Aquitanian. Not much is known of the first two groups, but the Aquitanian language is widely considered to be the ancestor, or at least a relative of the ancestor, of the modern Basque language, the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in Europe. Basque has proven to be an enigma within the linguistic community. It has been classified as an isolate - that is, no genetic relationships with any known languages or language families have yet been demonstrated. However, hypotheses abound, with some of the most well-received ones including links to languages spoken in the Caucasus mountains, thousands of miles to the east, though this has yet to be demonstrated conclusively.
Three ancient languages spoken in the Middle East and India deserve mention here. One is the Sumerian language, the first attested language with a writing system anywhere in the world. Like Basque, Sumerian is classified as a language isolate. Many hypotheses have attempted to link Sumerian with virtually every language family in Eurasia, but none of these hypotheses has withstood careful scrutiny. Another Middle Eastern language generally classified as an isolate is the Elamite language of pre-Persian Iran; as with Sumerian, linguists have sought relatives of Elamite among various Eurasian languages, but equally without success, although a link to the Dravidian languages of southern India has gained the most attention. Finally, the language of the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization is also considered an isolate; however, as the writing system used by this culture has not been deciphered yet, no definite conclusions can be made. Several linguists have conjectured that the Indus Valley language was an early Indo-Iranian language akin to Sanskrit, or that it may represent a member of the Austro-Asiatic languages (today found mostly in Southeast Asia) but most have withheld analysis until the script can be deciphered.
In the area of the Caucasus mountains, three small language families can be found: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian, and South Caucasian (often called Kartvelian). The Northwest Caucasian family includes such languages as Circassian, Adyghe, and Abkhaz, all minority languages within the Russian Federation or Georgia; the Northeast Caucasian languages include Ingush and Chechen, which have their own autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, and many languages within the Russian republic of Dagestan, including Lak, Darga, Khinalug, the Andi languages, the Tsez langauges, and the Lezgic languages; and the South Caucasian or Kartvelian family includes, as its principal member, Georgian, the language of the Republic of Georgia, as well as several minority languages of Georgia and Turkey. Georgian also serves as the liturgical language of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Two languages of the ancient Middle East, Hurrian and Urartian, have recently been classified as older members of the Northwest Caucasian language family.
Scattered through central and northeastern Europe and into northwestern Asia can be found the Uralic languages. The principal member of the family is Hungarian, spoken in central Europe surrounded by Indo-European languages; the other two Uralic languages with national status are Finnish and Estonian, spoken to the east of the Baltic Sea. The minority Sami languages of Scandinavia, formerly known as Lappish, are also Uralic, and are usually classified in a Finnic branch along with Finnish and Estonian, and various minority languages of northwestern Russia such as Karelian, Votic, and Ingrian. Hungarian, as well as two languages of western Siberia, Khanty and Mansi, are classified together in the Ugric branch of Uralic, while the Samoyed languages of the Arctic coast of Siberia are considered the most divergent branch of Uralic. Other Uralic languages, spoken in the upper Volga river basin and the Ural mountains, include Komi, Mordvin, Udmurt, Mari, and Erzhya, which are generally classified with Finnic. A small language group called Yukaghir, spoken in a remote area of northeastern Siberia and the Arctic coast, has also been connected to Uralic by some linguists, but this has not yet been widely accepted.
Moving further across central Asia, we find the small Mongolic language family, centered on Mongolia with outliers in the Caspian Sea region and in parts of the Hindu Kush mountains. The family includes the Classical Mongolian language - that of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire - as well as Modern Mongolian, Buryat, the Kalmyk language of southwestern Russia, and the Moghol language of Afghanistan, among others.
Spreading east from Mongolia through northeastern China and into eastern and northeastern Siberia are the Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus). Historically, Manchu was the principal language of the family, being the language of the Manchurian people and of the ruling family of the Qing dynasty, China's last imperial rulers. Modern Tungusic languages are found in scattered parts of northern China and eastern regions of the Russian Federation. The family includes such languages as Evenki, Oroqen, Nanai, Udege, and Xibe. The language of China's 12th-13th century Jin Dynasty, Jurchen, was also a Tungusic language.
The language families Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic, are considered by a large number of linguistics to belong together in a family known as Altaic; evidence for this grouping includes similarities in morphology between the three language families, as well as features such as vowel harmony and lack of gender in nouns. Cognates between the three families have been proposed as well. However, many linguists have interpreted the similarities between the supposed Altaic languages as due to areal contact, rather than shared descent. As the evidence for Altaic has not been completely accepted by the linguistic community as yet, it remains, for the time being, a (plausible) hypothesis.

Language Families: Africa

2008-07-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

To give an idea of the massive amount of linguistic diversity in the world, I thought I'd give a tour of the various language families that the world's languages can be divided into. As I mentioned in an earlier posts, linguists classify languages based on genetic relationships - language A and language B can be shown to be genetically related to each other if they share a common ancestral language C from which they both evolved.
I'll begin with Africa, the continent from which modern humans originated and spread across the globe. Through research in the 1950s and 60s, the American linguist Joseph Greenberg determined the classification of African languages that is most widely accepted in the linguistic community today. He divided the languages of mainland Africa into four distinct language families - Khoisan, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic.
The Khoisan languages are today spoken in southwestern Africa, mostly in Namibia and Botswana; a few are spoken in eastern Africa, in Tanzania. These languages are spoken by ethnic groups that used to be known as "bushmen", but are now known as the Khoikhoi and the San. The Khoisan languages are well-known for their use of click consonants, which neighboring non-Khoisan langauges like Xhosa and Zulu have borrowed. The language of the people featured in the film "The Gods Must Be Crazy" was a Khoisan language.
The Niger-Congo languages cover most of the remainder of sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal across West Africa to Kenya, all of equatorial Africa, and down to South Africa. The largest sub-branch of Niger-Congo is known as Bantu, and covers all of central and most of southern Africa. Well known Bantu languages include Kiswahili, Lingala, isiZulu, Sindebele, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda, and KiKongo. Non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages include Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, and the Mande languages, all spoken in West Africa between Senegal and Cameroon. The Niger-Congo languages are characterized by tones and by a complex system of noun classes.
The Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken in an arc through north-central Africa from Kenya in the east to Mali in the west. Major languages of this family include Kanuri and Songhay, spoken in the Niger and Mali region, the Maasai language of southern Kenya, Dinka, spoken in southern Sudan, and the Fur language of Darfur, Sudan. One ancient language that belonged to this family was Nubian, spoken in today's Sudan. The Nilo-Saharan family is generally accepted as a valid one, but some linguists propose that its subbranches should be considered separate language families in their own right.
Finally, the Afro-Asiatic language family covers all of North Africa as well as the Horn region (Ethiopia and Somalia). This family also has members in western Asia, hence its name. There are six recognized sub-families: Omotic, Cushitic, Chadic, Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic. The Omotic languages are spoken by tribal communities in southern Ethiopia, and were probably the first group to diverge from the ancestral Proto-Afro-Asiatic language. The Cushitic languages are found in Ethiopia and Somalia; Somali is the most widely-spoken and well-known member. The Chadic languages are spoken in northern Nigeria and southern Niger as well as adjacent regions; the principal member is Hausa, an important trade language of the Niger river area. The Berber languages were historically spoken throughout the Sahara and northwestern Africa before the Islamic conquest; today they can be found in scattered areas through Morocco, Algeria, Mali, and other nations. Tuaregh is perhaps the best-known member. The Egyptian branch included the ancient Egyptian language, which today survives in the form of the Coptic language of Egypt's Christian community. Finally, the Semitic branch, the largest of the family by number of speakers, is found across North Africa and into the Middle East. The most important member is Arabic, including the many vernacular varieties; Hebrew and Modern Aramaic are other modern members, as are the Amharic, Tigre, and Tigrinya languages, the principal languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. Many well-known civilizations of antiquity spoke Semitic languages, including the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians, and the Aramaeans. Three semitic languages are today important religious languages: Hebrew (Jewish scriptures), Aramaic (Jewish and Christian scriptures), and Arabic (Islamic scriptures). One of the distinguishing features of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and particularly the Semitic languages, is a template morphology, where three-consonant roots with a general meaning have patterns of vowels and affixes added to them with specific grammatical functions in order to produce the vocabulary of the language. An example from Arabic is the root K-T-B, which has the general meaning "write"; some of its derivatives include kitaab "book", kataba "to write", maktuub "written", maktabat "library", iktitaab "subscription", etc.; another root, S-L-M, includes the derivations 'aslama "to submit", islaam "submission", muslim "one who submits", and salaam "peace".
It is thought that the Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo language families are related at a more remote level, while Afro-Asiatic is thought to be more closely related to language families in Eurasia. Khoisan, however, is distinct from most other language families, and is thought to be a survival of one of the first groups of languages to split from the ancestral human language (if indeed there was a single ancestral human language).

Integration and Indigenous rights

2008-06-26T21:19:00.000-07:00

Following the so-far successful model of the European Union, a conference of national representatives was held in Brasília on May 23 (incidentally, the anniversary of the Declaration of the Báb) to officially constitute the Union of South American Nations. The Union joins together the previous trade blocs Mercosur - which consisted of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela - and the Andean Community - Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia - each of whose members were already associate members of the other bloc. Guyana and Suriname, which are the only English-speaking and Dutch-speaking countries, respectively, in the new union, are still members of CARICOM, the Caribbean Community - the degree of their participation is apparently still being worked out. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet is the president pro tempore of the Union.
I definitely welcome this latest step towards worldwide political and economic integration. As we've learned from the continuing integration of Europe under the EU, it's still possible for countries that have been enemies for decades or sometimes centuries to overcome their mutual animosity and rivaly and join together to work towards unity and progress. Other such unions have been developing in various parts of the world: the African Union, though at present not at the level of integration represented by the EU, holds promise in ending many of the regional hostilities plaguing Africa; the Arab League has served to bring together the many Arabic-speaking countries; and the Association of South-East Asian Nations has the potential to develop into a regional union in the near future. There have also been proposals for political-economic unions in the Pacific region and in North America, though the latter proposal has not been welcomed in any of the three proposed member states (Mexico, Canada, and the US).
My one concern with the formation of UNASUR (as the Union of South American Nations is abbreviated) is the extent of its commitment towards Indigenous rights. In Bolivia, where Indigenous peoples form 55% of the population, a major movement towards re-indigenization of the national culture and economy has been underway for the past two years; an associated process has also been occurring in Ecuador, where 25% are Indigenous. In Peru, which has a 45% Indigenous population, a similar shift has not yet occurred, perhaps due to the country's more conservative government. Occurring within the newly-formed UNASUR, however, it remains to be seen how these unique events will play out - whether they will receive support from the Union or whether they will be prevented from continuing. It would be a tragedy if the peaceful unification of South America's long-antagonistic countries ended up smothering the political and cultural aspirations of the continent's long-suffering Indigenous peoples.

Vida Latina

2008-04-13T22:40:00.000-07:00

Como muchos jóvenes Bahá'ís, yo hice un año de servicio. En esto, los jóvenes generalmente van al estero para vivir y servir a la comunidad Bahá'í local por un período de entre 6 meses y un año.
Cuando estaba en el proceso de decidir a cuál país iría para este período, estaba considerando varias opciones. Uno fue México, porque era un país que conocía y que había visitado tres veces ya. Otro fue El Salvador, porque cuando trabajaba en un cine en San Rafael, California, por dos años después de graduarme del colegio, había muchos empleados de origen salvadoreño, y siempre me decían de lo bello que era su país y lo hospitable que era su gente.
Sin embargo, mi focus pronto se cambió a Sudamérica, porque en ésa época ya estaba ingresando en el campo de derechos indígenas, y me atrajeron la atención los países de Perú y Bolivia, a causa de su gran proporción de gente indígena. Decidí mandar peticiones a Perú, Bolivia, y Chile en el otoño de 2005. No recibí una respuesta de Chile, y fue la AEN (Asamblea Espiritual Nacional) de Bolivia que me contactó primero. Nos pusimos de acuerdo de que iría a La Paz por un año y ayudaría en la Sede Nacional de la comunidad Bahá'í, llevando a cabo trabajos de estadística acerca de la población de los creyentes. La AEN de Perú también respondió, pero ya había aceptado la invitación a Bolivia - nonobstante, algún día me gustaría realizar servicios allí también.
Llegué a La Paz el 6 de julio de 2006, y regresé al EEUU el mismo día de 2007. Durante el año que pasó entre esas fechas, aprendí un montón de la cultura y la historia de un rincón de América Latina, y, más importante, me maduré mucho. Tuve muchas experiencias fascinantes, algunas fantásticas y algunas dolorosas, pero todas fueron oportunidades para crecer, mejorarme, y entender mejor cómo viven y sobreviven las personas en las circunstancias en las cuales se encuentran en la vida. También conocí a unas de las personas más amables y lindas que he encontrado, y, através de cooperación y a veces conflictos, llegué a un punto de entendimiento y respeto mútuos con ellos, tal que los considero como verdaderos hermanos Bahá'ís (y no-Bahá'ís, ¿futuros Bahá'ís? también).
Ya llevo 9 meses de regreso al EEUU, pero Bolivia ya me está llamando de nuevo, y las ganas de regresar están surgiendo. Pienso en ir allí durante el otoño de 2009, tal vez por 2 ó 3 meses, no sólo para econtrarme de nuevo con todos los amigos y hermanos que he dejado, sino también para llegar a conocer mejor al país, especialmente las comunidades rurales del Altiplano, y la cultura Aymara, de la cual me enamoré muy rápidamente. También voy a ir para empezar a coleccionar datos que necesitaré para mi doctorado, sobre la interacción e influencia lingüísticas entre las culturas Andinas. De todas maneras, sé que regresaré a Bolivia, porque, después de mis lindas experiencias allí, me siento que es mi segundo hogar, y que para mí, la gente allí es verdaderamente familia.

Who owns Indigenous land?

2008-04-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

One of the many, many justifications that has been used by defenders of U.S. Manifest Destiny is that, since certain Indigenous groups conquered and displaced other Indigenous groups, these groups have no legitimate claim to the land that they had taken from the previous inhabitants. In their view, somehow, this is supposed to make permissible the subsequent U.S. conquest and appropriation of Indigenous lands. "Well, the Indians were fighting and conquering each other long before the Europeans got here," the argument goes. It's often left at that, as if it were obvious that that fact justifies what the U.S. devoted a huge amount of its energy towards in the course of the 19th century.
Suppose that the Axis had defeated the Allies in World War II, including the United States. The Germans and the Japanese, triumphant, decide to deport the entire population of the United States onto reserves in the Canadian arctic or in Soviet Siberia, leaving U.S. land open for German and Japanese colonists to settle. Would the fact that wars had taken place in North America prior to World War II, including the U.S. Civil War, somehow make the Axis justified in deporting so many millions of people off their land and appropriating it for their own peoples' use? "Well, they had been fighting each other before we got here." I hope this line of reasoning sounds as ludicrous to you as it does to me. Yet apologists for Manifest Destiny continue to trot it out as if it made perfect sense; in fact, this line of reasoning has been so little challenged that Indigenous groups feel the need to downplay their own cultural differences and the various (scientifically-supported) multi-wave models of their migration into the Americas, just to deny the apologists the ammunition that these facts would bafflingly provide them.
The Hungarian people arrived in central Europe from the plains west of the Urals during the 9th century AD, displacing prior Slavic populations in the region that eventually became Hungary. Does this mean that any nation so willing and able could, with complete justification, invade Hungary, expel all the Hungarians to far-flung reserves, and chalk it up to "the Hungarians themselves took the land from its previous owners"? Ludicrous, right? So why has this ridiculous idea been accepted as a legitimate argument in the discourse on the U.S. treatment of Indigenous peoples?

The Comparative Method IV

2008-04-06T00:44:00.000-07:00

Since our whole analysis rests on regular phonological correspondences, let's take a closer look at what RPCs are and how to recognize them.
You can't find a valid RPC by only examining a handful of word sets; however, if you don't have a particular RPC to begin with, how do you look for more examples of one? The resolution of this catch-22 is a sort of bootstrapping method - at first, you do have to start with a handful of word sets; once you start recognizing likely patterns, you need to find more sets that will confirm or disconfirm the likely pattern.
In the European set we've been examining, I divided the six languages into two subgroups based on a few correspondences. The English-Dutch-German subgroup is an actual family called Germanic - it includes not just these three languages, but also Yiddish, Afrikaans, Frisian, Scots, and the Scandinavian languages Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic. The French-Italian-Spanish subgroup is also a family, one which many of you may be familiar with - the Romance languages. This group includes the three just mentioned plus Portuguese, Catalan, Provençal, Walloon, Romansh, Sardinian, Sicilian, Romanian, and many others, all of which are descendants of a language known as Vulgar Latin, which was the colloquial language of the Roman Empire, alongside the Classical Latin language used in Roman government and later in the Catholic church. These two varieties descended from an archaic Latin language that was spoken in central Italy, along with sister languages that included Faliscan, Oscan, and Umbrian. This family is called the Italic languages, and includes the Romance languages as a subfamily. Both the Germanic family and the Italic family in turn are descended from an ancient language that linguists have called Proto-Indo-European, which was spoken before 3000 BC somewhere in the region between Asia Minor and the Ural mountains (I'll talk more about this and other language families in a future post).
Anyways, was there enough data to justify me placing the six languages in our set into these two groups? So far, not really. But there were some promising RPCs that do provide a place to start. Let's look at the table again:

English	Dutch	German	French	Italian	Spanish	gloss
aɪ	ɪk	ɪç	ʒə	ˈio	jo	‘I’
mun	maːn	mɔnd	lyn	ˈluna	ˈluna	‘moon’
ˈsɪstəɹ	ˈzʏstəɾ	ˈʃvɛstəʁ	sœʁ	soˈɾɛlla	eɾˈmana	‘sister’
ˈfaɪəɹ	vyːɾ	ˈfɔʏəʁ	fø	ˈfwɔko	ˈfweɡo	‘fire’
eɪt	aχt	aχt	ɥit	ˈɔtto	ˈoʧo	‘eight’
fʊt	vut	fuːs	pje	ˈpjɛde	pje	‘foot’
dɹɪnk	ˈdɾɪnkən	ˈtʁɪnkən	bwaʁ	ˈbeɾe	beˈbeɾ	‘drink’

We see the fvf correspondence in Germanic initial consonants in two word sets, 'fire' and 'foot'. And as we saw in this table:

English	Dutch	German	French	Italian	Spanish	gloss
ˈfɑðəɹ	ˈvadəɾ	ˈfatəʁ	pɛʁ	ˈpadɾe	ˈpadɾe	‘father’
fɪʃ	vɪs	fɪʃ	pwaˈsɔ̃	ˈpeʃe	pes	‘fish’
foɹ	voːɾ	fʏʁ	puʁ	peɾ	poɾ	‘for’
fli	vlo	flo	pys	ˈpulʧe	ˈpulɡa	‘flea’

the same correspondence can be found in several more word sets, along with the equivalent ppp correspondence in Romance initial consonants for the same words. Now, how do we know that the ppp set is the one that corresponds to fvf, and not the fff set we see in the Romance words for 'fire'? We don't at first. But looking at more items, such as the ones in the second table, we will eventually find many more sets where ppp corresponds to fvf than where fff corresponds to fvf. This suggests that the fvf-fff set is not a real correspondence, but is merely a coincidence.
So assuming we've confirmed that fvf-ppp is a valid RPC set, we can begin to look for more examples. The more we find, the surer we are of the validity of the set. Here are a few for the Germanic languages:

English	Dutch	German
fi	ve	fi
fɝst	vɔɾst	fʏʁst
faʊl	ˈvoːɣəl	ˈfoːɡəl

We see the same fvf correspondence set. But this time there's a snag - the words in each set do not mean the same thing. In the first set is the English word fee, but its Dutch and German cognates, vee and Vieh, mean 'livestock, cattle'. In the second, we have English 'first', whose Dutch cognate (vorst) means 'ruler, monarch' and whose German cognate (Fürst) means 'prince'. And in the third set, we have English 'fowl' next to the Dutch and German words for 'bird', vogel and Vogel.
So, are these still cognates? Yes. Cognates are defined by their common ancestry phonologically; that is, they have evolved from their common ancestral word through a series of phonological mutations. But, human language being how it is, words also undergo semantic changes. Cognates can still be cognates even if they mean completely different things. And even so, in many cases the meanings don't have to be that different. Obviously, there's a semantic connection between 'fowl' and 'bird', the first being a specific type of the latter. Based on the fact that the Dutch and German cognates both mean 'bird' (a sort of ‘majority rules’), we can conjecture that this was the original meaning of the ancestral word, and that the English word 'fowl' at one time could refer to any type of bird. When we look at the word for 'bird' in other Germanic languages, we find the same cognate, which bolsters our conjecture that ‘bird’ was the original meaning.
Now I leave two exercises for the reader:
1 What semantic connections can you see between 'first' and 'monarch/prince'? How about between 'fee' and 'livestock/cattle'?
2 Look at the following table (the data is constructed). Are there any regular phonological correspondences that seem promising? How would you group the languages in this table based on them?

A	B	C	D	E	gloss
ˈhate	kaas	fuu	ˈkati	ˈputi	‘wind’
daˈpæɡe	niˈɾaax	ʦəˈbee 1	taˈpeke	niˈleɡa	‘mountain’
bɔˈdoja	moˈnuul	məˈnuur	moˈnula 2	moˈnaula	‘heart’
beˈzaɡa 3	piˈɾaax	fəˈɾaa	piˈɾaka 4	piˈlega	‘girl’
daˈɡoɡo	hoof 5	ʔoo	ˈhopu	taˈkuɡo	‘sea’
deˈɡeli	teˈxiil	ʦəˈɡii	teˈkili	teˈkajli 6	‘mother’

Semantic irregularities:
1 this means 'hill' in language C
2 this means 'liver' in language D
3 this means 'wife' in language A
4 this means 'sister' in language D
5 this means 'lake' in language B

The Comparative Method III

2008-04-03T17:25:00.000-07:00

So, let's say we've compared several hundred word sets and we've found a likely genetic relationship between a group of languages. This tells us that the languages in the group form a language family, sharing a common ancestor. Now we need to refine our relationships further - within the language family, which languages seem to be more closely related than others? Let's take another look at the European set from the previous post. This time, I've changed the transcription to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, a writing system employed by linguists to precisely transcribe words and speech from any human language. I've also reorganized the languages into two groups based on certain regular phonological correspondences:

English	Dutch	German	French	Italian	Spanish	gloss
aɪ	ɪk	ɪç	ʒə	ˈio	jo	‘I’
mun	maːn	mɔnd	lyn	ˈluna	ˈluna	‘moon’
ˈsɪstəɹ	ˈzʏstəɾ	ˈʃvɛstəʁ	sœʁ	soˈɾɛlla	eɾˈmana	‘sister’
ˈfaɪəɹ	vyɾ	ˈfɔʏəʁ	fø	ˈfwɔko	ˈfweɡo	‘fire’
eɪt	aχt	aχt	ɥit	ˈɔtto	ˈoʧo	‘eight’
fʊt	vut	fuːs	pje	ˈpjɛde	pje	‘foot’
dɹɪnk	ˈdɾɪnkən	ˈtʁɪnkən	bwaʁ	ˈbeɾe	beˈbeɾ	‘drink’

Let's look at initial consonants to begin with. For 'moon', the words in the English, Dutch, and German set (which I'll abbreviate to EDG) all begin with m-, while those in French, Italian, and Spanish (FIS) all begin with l-. For 'drink', the words in the EDG set all start with dr- (don't worry about the various 'r' symbols - they represent different pronunciations, but the fact that they correspond is what matters), while those in the FIS set all begin with b-.
Now look at the 'foot' set. We see the sounds f-, v-, f-, p-, p-, p- in this, which may not seem like a good set at first. However, compare it to these correspondences:

English	Dutch	German	French	Italian	Spanish	gloss
ˈfɑðəɹ	ˈvadəɾ	ˈfatəʁ	pɛʁ	ˈpadɾe	ˈpadɾe	‘father’
fɪʃ	vɪs	fɪʃ	pwaˈsɔ̃	ˈpeʃe	pes	‘fish’
foɹ	voːɾ	fʏʁ	puʁ	peɾ	poɾ	‘for’
fli	vlo	flo	pys	ˈpulʧe	ˈpulɡa	‘flea’

Here we see the exact same pattern across four more sets of words. This is an excellent example of a regular phonological correspondence.
Now, take a look at the words for 'fire'. We see the same f-, v-, f- correspondence in the EDG set, but we then get an f-, f-, f- correspondence in the FIS instead of the expected p-, p-, p-. What's going on here?
When we get apparently inconsistent correspondences like this, there are two likely explanations. One is that we haven't accounted for the phonological environment. The phonological environment is the combination of phonemes around the phoneme we're examining. Depending on whether neighboring phonemes are consonants or vowels (and what types of consonants and vowels), whether the phoneme is at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word, and even if it's in a stressed syllable or not, are all factors that can affect the value of the phoneme over time, and therefore affect the correspondences we're investigating.
However, this is not the case in the 'fire' set. All the phonemes in question are word-initial, and they're followed by a variety of vowels, just like the fvfppp set in the second table, so it's unlikely that a particular type of vowel is throwing off the correspondence. This brings us to the other likely explanation: there isn't meant to be a correspondence. That is, the words for 'fire' in the FIS set are not actually related to the words for 'fire' in the EDG set, despite their superficial similarity.
Words that are related to each other, such as the sets of words displaying the fvfppp correspondence, are known as cognates. Just as genetically related languages share a common ancestor, so too do 'genetically' related words share a common ancestor. When we look for regular phonological correspondences, we are looking for the existence of cognate sets between different languages. In the first table, the FIS-set words for 'moon' form a cognate set - they show regular phonological correspondences, not just in that they all begin with l-, but also that they all contain -n- after the first vowel. In other words, French lyn, Italian luna, and Spanish luna are cognates of each other. The conclusion we draw from this is that, in the language that eventually became French, Italian, and Spanish, a particular word became the three words lyn, luna, and luna over time.
Interestingly, the fvfppp correspondence set suggests that all six languages in the table are actually related, but that they fall into the above-seen EDG and FIS subfamilies. That is, while all six languages appear to share a common ancestor based on the fvfppp correspondence, English, Dutch, and German appear to share a common ancestor that is not shared with French, Italian, and Spanish, and vice versa, as evidenced by the two different word sets for 'moon' and 'drink' in each group, which show no real correspondences.
Next time, I'll explain more about how to recognize likely versus unlikely correspondences, and we'll look at some other complicating factors that need to be accounted for in a comparative study.
Bonus: Look at the word set for 'sister' in all three languages. It should be fairly clear that the Spanish word doesn't correspond well to the other five words. But what about those five? Do they correspond well to each other? Why or why not?

The Comparative Method II

2008-04-02T14:07:00.001-07:00

Let's say we have languages A, B, C, and D, and we want to know if they're genetically related. We start by taking a sample of basic vocabulary from each of them, and then compare those samples to each other. The best semantic categories from which to draw basic vocabulary includes pronouns (I, you, he, etc.), numbers (especially 1-10), human body parts (eye, head, heart, etc.), kinship terms (mother, father, etc.), natural objects and phenomena (sun, moon, water, fire, etc.), and very basic actions and states (see, know, die, etc.). Here's a small selection of possible vocabulary from languages A, B, C, and D.

A	B	C	D	English
ka	ka	ko	zimi	‘we’
nami	name	nom	soo	‘two’
paluma	paroma	polm	jai	‘eye’
litiki	redege	riik	enefo	‘mother’
kutusu	kodozo	kuts	vaha	‘water’
panu	pano	pon	haaz	‘eat’

In the comparative method, we're looking for regular phonological correspondences (which I'll abbreviate to RPCs). That is, given a set of words from each of the languages in question, we want to see if there is a regular pattern of phonemes that occurs between the items in the set. For example, look at the words for 'we' and 'water'. In all three of languages A, B, and C, these words begin with the phoneme k-. Likewise, in the words for 'eye', and 'eat', all the words in A, B, and C all begin with the phoneme p-. And in the word for 'two', we find all the words in A, B, and C beginning in n-. These are all examples of RPCs.
The phonemes don't all have to be the same to be regular. In the words for 'eye' and 'mother', language A has -l- whereas language B has -r-. Likewise, in 'we', 'two', 'eye', and 'eat, languages A and B have -a- where language C has -o-. These correspondences are just as regular as the k-, p-, and n- correspondences because they recur in multiple sets of words.
Now, what about language D? A close comparison between the different phonemes in language D's words and those of languages A, B, and C, reveals no meaningful correspondences; this suggests that D is not genetically related, or at least not closely genetically related, to languages A, B, and C, which, due to their numerous correspondences, seem to be very closely genetically related.
Now, a set of 6 words is not nearly enough to make conclusions about genetic relationships. Ideally, several hundred word sets should be selected, including not just nouns, verbs, or adjectives, but grammatical items such as plural markers on nouns, person, number, and tense markers on verbs, prepositions, different pronoun forms, etc. The more functional the items examined (those parts of the vocabulary which contribute more structure than meaning), the more solid the conclusions that can be drawn about genetic relationships.
Now, as an exercise for you the reader, here is a set of data from 5 European languages. Many of you will be familiar with at least some of these languages, but I'm going to change their spelling to make them slightly less recognizable, and also to reflect their true pronunciation a little better. Your task is to examine the word sets, look for regular phonological correspondences, and make a guess as to which languages are genetically related to which others (or which are more closely related to which, if it seems that they are all ultimately related).

A	B	C	D	E	English
ik	io	zhuh	ih	yo	‘I’
maan	luna	lyn	mont	luna	‘moon’
zyster	sorella	sur	shvester	ermana	‘sister’
vyyr	fwoko	fuh	foyer	fwego	‘fire’
akht	otto	wit	akht	ocho	‘eight’
vut	piede	pie	fus	pie	‘foot’
drinken	bere	bwar	trinken	bever	‘drink’

Bonus question: to which of the above do you think English is most closely related? What phonological correspondences can you name between English and that (or those) languages? Remember to concentrate on pronunciation, not spelling, since how a word is spelled may not reflect its pronunciation accurately.

The Comparative Method I

2008-04-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

The phonological change that languages undergo over time is at present probably the best understood aspect of language change. Phonology is the component of speech that deals with the sounds utilized in a particular language and how they are combined to produce lexical items (words).
All spoken human languages have a set of speech sounds that they utilize, known as a phoneme inventory (each sound in the set is known as a phoneme). Out of the total number of sounds that humans can produce and regularly use in language production, only a subset is utilized by any particular language, though languages differ on which set of sounds they utilize. An important distinction must be made between phonetic differences and phonemic ones. A phonetic difference within a language does not contribute to differences in meaning (though it may mark differences in regional accent or dialect). For example, in English, the pronunciation of the 't' in 'top' is slightly different from the pronunciation of the 't' in 'stop'; the first 't' is pronounced with a slight puff of air (known as aspiration), while the second 't' is not. This difference is a phonetic one, since the two sounds are not identical in an absolute sense, but is not a phonemic difference, since pronouncing 'top' without the puff of air, or pronouncing 'stop' with it, will not change the fact that we're still saying the words 'top' and 'stop - that is, there'll be no confusion on the part of the listener. However, if we changed the 't' in 'top' to a 'p', it would result in saying a different word, 'pop'; the difference between 't' and 'p' in English is therefore a phonemic one, because it serves to distinguish different words from each other. We say, then, that 't' and 'p' are different phonemes in the phonemic inventory of English, while 't' with aspiration and 't' without aspiration are known as different allophones (essentially different phonetic versions) of the common phoneme 't'.
The phoneme inventory of any given language is unstable over time; some phonemes are lost, some gained, some become differentiated in different contexts. For example, Old English (the variety of English that was spoken in Britain between the 5th and 12th centuries AD) did not utilize the sound 'zh', as in the word 'seizure', in its phoneme inventory. This sound was only added later through the addition of words from Old French and through a phonological process called 'palatalization' (the process that causes 't' to be pronounced 'ch' in combinations such as 'what you'). Similarly, Old English had a phoneme 'kh' in its inventory (the sound of 'ch' German 'Bach' or Scottish 'loch'), but this phoneme was eventually lost by the Modern English period (roughly 1500 to the present), although it is maintained in the related Scots language.
So, we know that a language's phoneme inventory changes over time. But how did we figure this out? Through a process called the Comparative Method, we're able to reconstruct earlier stages of a language (most easily earlier phonological stages), even in the absence of any written records from those earlier stages. In the comparative method, we compare the vocabulary between different languages to find regular phonological correspondences between them.
The first step in this process is to figure out if a set of languages is genetically related (i.e. evolved from a common ancestral language). If we know nothing about the languages beforehand, we more or less have to start from scratch, choosing a group of languages that are in close geographical proximity, and comparing very basic vocabulary items in each of them. In part II of this post, I'll illustrate this process first with some imaginary data, then with some data from a group of European languages.

What is Historical Linguistics?

2008-03-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

More than any other subfield of linguistics, historical linguistics seems to get a lot of media coverage. You've probably at one time or another seen a newspaper article talking about how the latest linguistic research has shed new light on some ancient human migration, or on the influence that one culture has exerted over another. Because of this, historical linguistics seems to be the branch of ling that the general public is most familiar with, and (justly, in my opinion) the most fascinated by.
Broadly, historical linguistics seeks to examine two things: the history of human language, from its origins in the distant past up to today, as well as the history of particular languages and language families; and human history itself, through the evidence of past migrations and interactions that has been left in today's languages. When historical ling evidence is combined with evidence from archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics, a huge amount of information about the dim recesses of pre-history can be made available to us.
So what do historical linguists study, and what do we do with what we find? Well, we have to start with the processes that universally affect human languages over time:

Human languages are constantly changing. The mutations that gradually accumulate in human languages can be likened in certain ways to those that accumulate in the DNA of living organisms. The changes are slow and often random (though there are some general patterns), but given enough time they can completely transform the identity of a language.
Languages are constantly affecting one another. Unless a community is totally isolated from all other humans, its language is going to be affected by the languages of neighboring peoples, and will affect those languages in turn.
Languages are constantly being replaced. If a community shifts from language A to language B, until no one continues to speak language A, then language A is extinct. However, new languages are always coming into existence. If community X splits into communities Y and Z, and these two communities then become isolated from each other, then eventually language X will become language Y in community Y and language Z in community Z.

We then examine the relationships between languages, of which there are two general types:

Genetic relationship. Two or more languages are said to be genetically related if they share a common ancestral language. That is, if language X has evolved into languages Y, Z, and W, perhaps due to the original community X separating into isolated communities Y, Z, and W, then languages Y, Z, and W are said to be genetically related, since they share a common ancestor in language X (it's important to remember that once X has become Y, Z, and W in the daughter communities, X has functionally ceased to exist). Note that, though the term genetic is used, no relationship to DNA or molecular genetics is meant to be implied. A group of genetically related languages is known as a language family.
Areal relationship. Two or more languages are said to be in an areal relationship if they have affected each other in any way over time. This includes the transfer of vocabulary, grammatical structures, or sounds between any of the languages, and often implies a history of cultural, governmental, trade, or military influence among the peoples in question. The terms Sprachbund (German: "language union") and linguistic union refer to a group of areally related languages.
The two relationships are not mutually exclusive; languages that are genetically related may also be areally related, and it often happens that a language shares a genetic relationship with one set of languages and an areal relationship with a different set.

We now have the basic tools to begin analyzing the linguistic data. In the next post, I'll talk about some common features of linguistic change, and we'll take a look at some real-world examples.

Para los que hablen castellano

2008-03-27T01:23:00.000-07:00

Como mencioné abajo, hablo español/castellano, así que de vez en cuando haré posts para todos ustedes que sean de latinamérica o cuyos corazones pertenezcan allí. Tentaré de balancear el contenido de este blog entre los dos idiomas, pero ya que uso el inglés más, probablemente resultará que la mayoría del contenido estará en ese idioma.
E forze scriverò qualche post in italiano, quando il desidero mi colpa... sebbene il mio italiano già non è tan buono come era...

Preliminaries

2008-03-26T02:27:00.000-07:00

So I guess I'll start off by introducing myself, though the only people who are likely to read this blog are people I already know. My name's Aaron, I'm from San Francisco, California, and I'm currently working on my MA in linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I'm a Bahá'í by religion, and did my year of service in La Paz, Bolivia, from July 2006 to July 2007.
As far as linguistics goes, my interests are firmly in the anthropological side. I'm primarily interested in historical linguistics, especially language contact, and in endangered language revitalization, which I plan to make a career of. What I am not interested in is theory, though I have adopted the Functionalist/Cognitive approach over the Formalist/Movement-Based/Chomskyan approach. Seriously, though, I find questions of (psycholinguistic) theory generally tedious and uncompelling, especially compared to my real passion for historical reconstruction, classification, and language contact phenomena. If I could get away with it, I'd be content with merely collecting the data, leaving others to interpret how it contributes to our Theory of Language, but apparently that's unacceptable - at least for a master's student.
Anyway, I know a lot of linguists are irked by the public perception that a linguist is someone who "knows lots of languages", but I in fact pride myself on being a polyglot, since it's made so many aspects of my life (not the least of which my linguistic work) easier. I am a native speaker of English, and speak Spanish at very close to native fluency. In descending order of competence I also speak Italian, German, Arabic, Portuguese, and French. I'm currently learning Navajo, and I'm familiar with Latin, Dutch, and Aymara. I would like to learn Mandarin, Persian, and Quechua as well.
I intend for this blog to focus mostly on linguistics, but I'll have commentary on history, current events, religion, and other topics as well. I'll try to update it at least once a week, maybe twice, so check back if you're at all interested in anything I end up rambling on about. Finally, I'm also an amateur SF (speculative fiction) writer, so if you like soft science fiction, historical fiction, and alternate history fiction, I'll have some of my shorter work on here at some point too.

Chicken

2008-03-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

First post, dedicated to everyone's favorite movement-based grammar villain, Da Feature Chicken. Hop some affixes for his stamp of approval.