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Speak Up

We're heading into winter for sure now, but never mind, a hearty good morning to one and all in any event! Today I've got a collection of facts about languages.

Moving on

I've spent a lot of time lately discussing modern linguistics and some of the things it is teaching us, much of the material drawn from several books I've read recently. Today I draw on a book that has been a trendy best-seller and a Pulitizer Prize winner for non-fiction. I've known about it quite a few years and have often had it recommended to me. So finally I got around to it and, frankly, was massively underwhelmed. What's all the fuss about? It is worth reading, but it is also vastly over-hyped and not nearly the amazing piece of research or thought some claim it is. In fact, it's a repetitive and at heart lazy effort. But who am I to knock Jared Diamond and his Guns, Germs and Steel off their mighty pedestals just because what's presented as new and somehow revolutionary is neither, even if it is well researched?

Various facts

More interesting than Diamond's thesis are a lot of the facts he draws upon to make his points. And some of those directly involve language. The isolated tidbit, for example, that the Japanese language has special forms of the pronoun 'you' reserved for use only in addressing the emperor.

Now that's status!

Inherent clues

Our languages in the world have many inherent clues as to their origins, which is one way scholars can work their way back to try to reconstruct what they call 'protolanguages.' Those are the ancient, now lost, languages that gave rise to our modern languages. Nearly 2,000 words of our ancestral Indo-European language family's protolanguage have been reconstructed by comparing vocabularies of words in our descendant languages. That includes most of the languages from Ireland to India, including Irish, English, Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, and Greek. Diamond cites the word 'sheep' which is 'avis' in Lithuanian, 'avis' in Sanskrit, 'ovis' in Latin, 'oveja' in Spanish, 'ovtsa' in Russian, 'owis' in Greek and 'oi' in Irish. In the ancestral protolanguage, experts deduce (from various factors about how languages differ, how they spread and how known sound shifts occurred) that the original was 'owis.'

And yes, I omitted English. Our word 'sheep' itself is from a different root and source, but the original protolanguage word does survive in English, as 'ewe,' our term for a female sheep.

That proto-Indo-European language, by the way, would have been spoken about 6,000 years ago. Other words they have worked back include: goat, horse, wheel, brother and eye.

Other clues

Now this may seem obvious, and it is if you think about it, but it constitutes another example of how useful language can be to researchers. There is no proto-Indo-European word for 'gun,' nor are the words for gun in other Indo-European languages anything like the English word. The reason is simple: speakers of these languages had to invent their own word for the weapon since the people who created the ancestral language lived several thousand years before guns were invented. That very fact, however, can allow researchers who sometimes must work with very little or no archeological evidence, to trace mass movements of people between regions or even continents. It can also help illuminate which cultures were interacting with each other. Interacting cultures will borrow each other's words or adapt them to their use. And those words will survive down through the years of history demonstrating a virtually certain link or interaction that otherwise could only be speculated about. It's clever detective work.

China

China is a bit of an oddity in that unlike most other large nations or regions, it's not a linguistic melting pot and it doesn't support many minority languages. The U.S., thanks to immigration, legal and illegal, has many Spanish speakers, it still has French speakers and creole, and it still has many Aboriginal languages. Europe has about 40 languages, some strikingly different despite common roots (English and Russian, for example). But China is the world's most populous nation covering a vast territory yet has only one writing system (Europe has dozens of modified alphabets) and for the vast majority only one language, Mandarin. There are about 300 million speakers of seven other languages, but all seven are as closely related to Mandarin as Spanish is to Italian.

My point isn't to get into the whys, but to satisfy curiosity, the reason appears to lie in the fact China, politically and geographically, was a unified state for a very long time, well into ancient times whereas other nations and regions have not been.

The last word

Here is humourist Dave Berry:

"Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages."

* Lex Talk! is researched and written by Times & Transcript editorial page editor Norbert Cunningham. It appears in this space every Monday.