Grammar Traces Language Roots

mlewan writes "Researchers use grammar to trace relations between Papuan languages. What is interesting is not that much that they use grammar features to do this, but that they seem to have given up using vocabulary as a help."

Comments

Re:Makes sense.

[Eightyford]

The vocabulary varies within the three major countries that speak it (America, England and Australia)

Eh?

Probably a mixture of both

[theolein]

I speak German, Swiss-German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, English and some Spanish and Turkish. One thing that really amazed me about Turkish is that, despite being seperated for over 1000 years, a Turk can still make himself understood throughout central asia from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The languages have changed very little from proto-Turkic. Whats more, once you learn the grammatical system on which Turkish is based, you immediatley notice the exact same or at least very similar features throughout the Ural-Altaic language group, from Finnish, Hungarian, through to Turkish and Mongolian: The way that these languages almost uniformally have no concept of grammatical gender (no word for he or she), the way that these languages universally use the concept of adding prepositions as suffixes onto the end of words instead of being seperate as is generally the case in Indo-European languages, the very large case system also added as suffixes to the ends of words, and the concept of vowel harmony, where, in the beginning of a word which has back vowel such as a,o and u, or front vowels such as ä, ü or ö, will force the rest of the word to also change their vowels to fit in with the pattern.

It is amazing that this structure of these languages has remained so solid such that Hungarian and Finnish, which have no common words, have a very similar grammatical structure after having being seperated for almost 3500 years.

This is absolutely not the case with Indo-European languages where a modern English person can usually not understand their own language from 1200 years ago, much less German or Dutch which were both very closely related to Old English at the time. Granted Old English changed very much with the viking invasions when it mixed with Old Norse and then once again when it mixed with old French after the Norman invasion, such that the structure of a modern English sentence resembles Scandinavian more than it does German, but its vocabulary resembles German/Dutch and French.

In summary, I think that language is a reflection of both society and environment. People will make up new words to fit changing circumstances, and language structure will change when different languages meet. Simply trying to match grammatical patterns will work well on some language groups such as Ural altaic, but not so well on others, such as Indo European where vocabulary patterns are better matched (try matching English's almost complete lack of grammatical cases with Czech's 7 cases). Pattern matching on languages should try to take not only historical environmental situations into account, but also language group mixing, language evolution patterns if possible, and integrate those with vocab and grammatical patterns.

For a really good question, one should ask oneself how on earth old languages evolved in the first place, since they were alomst uniformly far more complex grammatically than those we speak to day.