Slashdot Mirror
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."
Use the same techniques to decipher Slashot headlines
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.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Even in England, different regions use different words and pronunciations (which could count as different words). But we all use the same grammar. It's easy to change the sounds of a sentence, but to change the structure requires hefty evolution, and hence a separation of culture.
Argh.
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.
In other news, researchers find little evidence of English language roots in Slashdot postings.
One can always, eventually, make out structure from random noise. At what point do you stop blindly searching for the sake of it?
Why is there a story about grammar on a site whose editors can't understand the difference between "its" and "it's"?
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Actually, a linguist would tell you this is just the natural way language evolves. What you call a grammatical error in the second case, a linguist would call the creation and adoption of a new word to fill an important gap in the language. Previously, there was no simple way to communicate the concept of informal or inexact quotation - in other words, when you aren't quoting a person but paraphrasing their responses or words. It is quite awkward to say "He said something along the lines of..." or "He said something like..." repeatedly, so the phrase "He was like..." developed in response to a clear need in the language, which I think in part explains its rapid adoption around the US (though still stronger in certain regions, perhaps) and its stickiness as an informal usage.
The former example, take vs. bring, is a case in which a distinction between two similar words is so obscure as to be effectively meaningless for most communications. That one may be considered "proper" by a grammarian is irrelevant to a linguist if both easily communicate the same concept to a speaker of the language. This is one way in which language regularly evolves.
I appreciate that certain usages may sound grating on the ears to somebody who had that particular point beaten into their head as a schoolchild (i.e. take vs. bring). But this is part of the continuous process of linguistic evolution, NOT some sudden degradation in American English indicative of the downfall of our society.
Traditional methods for tracking language relations are based on vocabulary. That's because every language has a rich vocabulary based on sound and meaning; and sound changes are usually widespread (that is, one sound change occurs wherever it can, changing perhaps every 'd' into an 'n'). So you can usually corrolate the basic vocabularies of two related languages rather predictably.
Grammar, on the other hand, is much smaller and more limited. It's possible for two unrelated languages to have very similar grammars, but much more difficult for them to have similar basic vocabularies. There's an Austronesian language which has a word 'dog' that means 'canine', but that's practically the only shared word between it and English. Usually you won't have more than a couple dozen shared words between unrelated languages.
Also, when two different languages interact, the result is usually grammatical simplification--even if both grammars are quite complex, you might drop a few cases and inflections. So it's extremely surprising that linguists could track language change via grammar in this case.
English has roots in ancient Saxon. Its vocabulary is largely from Latin via French. The grammar is still largely based on Saxon though. If you analyzed the vocabulary, you would conclude that English was a derivative of French. If you analyze the grammar, you conclude that it came from Saxon.
It's also interesting to look at traditional rites, which don't change as rapidly as the rest of the language. For instance, there are lots of Christmas carols which have English usage that hasn't been used in everyday speech for hundreds of years. (This also holds for musical scales.)
It has long been known that Japanese and Korean have had similarities in grammar, but both have been classified as language isolates as a result of not being able to find strong vocabulary links as nice as Indo-European languages. Some consider the two languages to be a part of the larger Altaic language group. Maybe this new method of investigation will turn up more useful results than the vocab link which is increasingly becoming a dead end.
UK: I haven't got a nose. US: I don't have a nose.
UK: Microsoft are delaying Longhorn. US: Microsoft is delaying Longhorn.
Also, grammar certainly does change quite a bit even in the course of a thousand years. E.g., "With this ring I thee wed" is a remnant of when English used Subject-Object-Verb ordering (like German) instead of Subject-Verb-Object, whereas most of the so-called "strong irregular verbs" in English can be traced back to proto Indo-European (~7000 BC). English has also lost almost all of its declinations for case, except for pronouns.
Nevertheless, this new technique does sound like a promising tool for historical linguistics.
The article reports that "the researchers made a database of 125 grammatical features in 15 Papuan languages. This included how word types, such as nouns and verbs, are ordered in a sentence, and whether nouns have a gender, as they do in languages such as German and French."
Unfortunately, these aren't reliable characteristics for determining language relatedness. For example, English and German are both undisputably West Germanic languages and are very closely related, having branched less than 2000 years ago. Nevertheless, German nouns have grammatical gender, while English nouns don't. German verbs come at the end of the clause (except in the main clause), while in English the placement of the verb is much more flexible but rarely at the end of the clause. Other examples could readily be given.
There is one, and only one, method for determining relatedness between languages which is generally accepted by specialists in the field: namely, by identifying a core of lexical and morphological items which show systematic correspondences in their sounds between languages (e.g. English father, fish, Latin pater, piscis), and which can't reasonably be attributed to borrowing or to chance.
Of course it would be nice if we could show relatedness between languages which branched further back than 10,000 years or so. Because of the way in which languages change, it's very unlikely that we'll ever be able to do so, at least if we are observing accepted standards of scientific rigor. Approaches roughly similar to the one described here have been attempted repeatedly in recent years, and have been repeatedly answered in the literature. You don't earn brownie points for sexing up an unreliable methodology by involving computers.
IAAPHCL (I am a professor of historical and comparative linguistics).
When I travelled to Jakarta (capital of Indonesia) the first time, I found out that that noone really speaks Indonesian there. The whole beautiful language does not exist, because everyone speaks slang there and this is difficult. Indonesian is only being written and not talked.
Two years later I got to know my current girl-friend. She is from same island as Jakarta (Java). She speaks Javanese and I realized that all my efforts to learn Indonesian have been waste of time. The vocabulary is completely different (remember what I said before about the vocabulary being the only thing you really have to learn). The easy kind of grammar is the only thing both these languages have in common.
The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.
The Slashdot Limerick
"Technically, 'he ain't got it' is just as wrong as 'he doesn't has it', considering that 'ain't' means 'am not'. The only difference between your examples is that one error (he ain't) is widely accepted in every-day speech and one (doesn't has) isn't."
How about something like: "Aren't I supposed to go to school?"
This is perfectly standard English, though "aren't" is a contraction of "are not". So, the sentence, when changed into a statement rather than a question, says: "I are not supposed to go to school".
Strange, at first glance. However, contractions don't have to do precisely what one might say they're supposed to do. The evolution of language need not be absolutely precise.
Still, language does precisely what it's supposed to do--convey meaning. So, meaning is use, and language evolves, regardless of how prescriptivists would have it.
That Nature article is badly misleading in claiming that traditional historical linguistic methods are based on vocabulary and that it is an innovation to use grammar. It is true that amateurs' ideas about linguistic relationship are based almost entirely on vocabulary, but that isn't true of what professional historical linguists do.
To begin with, there are two different problems to be addressed. The first is, given a bunch of languages, are they related at all, where by "related", we mean "descended from a common ancestor". The second problem is, given that a bunch of languages are related, HOW are they related, that is, what is the family tree, in what order did they separate?
To determine whether languages are related, we look at "similarities". I put this in scare quotes because the relevant sorts of "similarities" are more accurately described as congruences, that is, systematic relationships between languages that may not necessarily be "similar" in the usual sense. For example, English and Armenian are distantly related members of the Indo-European language family. Proto-Indo-European *dw appears in English as /t/, as in "two", while in Armenian it appears as /erk/
as in /erku/ "two". Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk is a regular sound change in that it happens in all of the attested cases in which that sequence of sounds is found. It is almost certainly the result of a series of less peculiar changes of which the intermediate stages happen not to be attested. The point is that this kind of systematic relationship is evidence of historical relationship between languages but is not a similarity in the usual sense.
Given some similarities or congruences between languages, the first question that arises is whether they might be due to chance. It is easy to find examples. For example, the Korean word for "language" is /mal/, as is the Icelandic word. There is no other reason to think that Korean and Icelandic are related, so this is written off as a coincidence. Amateurs tend not to realize how high the probability is of chance resemblences - there is a large crank literature in which people list words that they consider similar in sound and meaning in two languages and offer this as evidence of relationship.
One reason that historical linguists look for regular sound changes like Proto-Indo-European *dw -> Armenian erk, or less exotic, Proto-Indo-European *p -> English f (e.g. English "father", Latin "pater", Sanskrit "pitar") is that regular sound changes, which are reflected in regular sound correspondences among the daughter languages, greatly reduce the number of degrees of freedom and therefore provide evidence that the similarities observed are not merely coincidences.
A first point, then, is that even to the extent that historical linguists rely on vocabulary for establishing relationships, what they rely on are the regular sound correspondances, not raw similarities in words.
Now, given that we have reason to believe that there are similarities between two languages that are unlikely to be due to chance, we still have to determine their origin.One possibility is that they are due to common descent,in which case we have evidence of a genetic relationship. The alternative is that the similarities are due to diffusion. Diffusion can consist of outright borrowing, e.g. English acquiring karate from Japanese, or it can be less direct, e.g. Amharic and Tigrinya shifting away from the old Semitic verb-initial word order to verb-final word order under the influence of the neighboring languages in Ethiopia and Eriterea. The problem is, how can we tell whether a given similarity is due to genetic relationship or to diffusion?
The answer is, sometimes we can, but often it is hard, maybe even impossible. If you have multiple sets of regular sound correspondances, at most one of them can be genetic. The others must reflect borrowing. If the vocabulary that show
You missed the point. It's not a mistake, it has a common usage of the word in a grammatically distinct role in colloquial American English. It may be a particularly grating one, but a linguist would say it is no more or less "right" or "wrong" than any other linguistic development.
The American Heritage dictionary lists it as an informal usage at this point and explains the subtleties of its meaning in this form in an explanatory note. See dictionary.com's entry for more.
Remember that English is just a fallen/corrupted/dirtied mix of German dialects with a healthy mix of Romance (Latin-derived) influence. There's nothing so pristine about it to begin with.
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.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
The English grammatical structure was primarily taken from early Germanic languages (probably from early Scandinavian), whereas our core vocabulary is mainly derived from Latin (a good deal of it comes via French, thanks to the Normans). Although English has become quite a bit removed from its Germanic origins, our grammatical structure still greatly resembles German in many aspects.
The core vocabulary, which is inseparable from the grammar, is clearly predominantly Germanic. There is no grammar left without to, of, a, the, and, or, etc. Core religious vocabulary like god and hell is also Germanic, just like the days of the week, the numbers, basic agricultural and hunting vocabulary etc. Just nouns and verbs are to a large extent derived from Latin, and remarkably it is the only Germanic language, as far as I know, that uses non-Germanic words and concepts for core legal vocabulary (law, violation, guilt, responsibility, liability, act, court, etc.).
German changed a lot over a long period during the High German consonant shift (look at the map) originating from northern Italy in the early Dark Ages. That is why nowadays you find so-called High German dialects, closely related to standard German, in the south, and Low German, which is more distant to standard German and closer to Dutch, and English, in the north. Morpholinguistic distances between (remnants of) dialects of villages from Austria to England are a lot less than the difference between standard German and English would suggest. English also changed a lot through Romance influence, but in another period and in a completely different way. English became much simpler: a kind of pidgin Germanic for French conquerors.
In my opinion, the Germanic core of English only appears to be more related to the Scandinavian languages, or minority languages in the Netherlands and Belgium like Frysian and coastal Flemish/Zeeuws, because these changed less than standard German or - to a lesser extent - standard Dutch. One of the problems facing Dutch linguists for instance is that old Dutch is completely indistinguishable from Old Kentish on the opposite shore of the North Sea, making it impossible to attribute sources. British historians unfortunately read too much into these modern similarities, and pretend that Angel, Dane and Saxon tribes tribes more or less jumped to England from southern Scandinavia.
A sideline: History makes a lot more sense if you note that people in northwestern France around Calais (where the Channel is at its narrowest) still spoke a - Germanic - dialect of coastal Flemish in the 19th century, and that the language border between Germanic and Romance languages hardly moved for two millenia. The burden of proof is on those that claim that whole nations moved and invaded areas not even adjacent to the area they were born in. There is little hard evidence for mass migrations before the modern colonial ones. The 'genetic evidence' for Germanic invasion based on the close relatedness of English and Frysians in the Netherlands overlooks the possibility that a 'Germanic' population already lived in England in Ceasar's time and gradually expanded over the centuries, even though there is as much Roman and Celtic lore about the 'Belgian' (Fir Bolg etc.) migration into Britain as there is for a Saxon invasion.
Steven Pinker presents a bunch of examples of sentences like this that follow strict grammatical rules but don't make sense in English in his book The Language Instinct, and relates it to the difficulty of dealing with ambiguous parsings of English sentences in computer language programs. A fascinating book, even if you don't agree with all of it.
Actually, 'aren't' in this context could easily be a contraction of 'am not' -> amnt -> ant -> a:nt (like 'aunt') which is homophonous with 'aren't' in non-rhotic dialects and was then borrowed based on its orthography by rhotic dialects like American English. American English used to borrow a lot of changes from American English. (See also 'can't' which has a similar pronounciation.)
Look out!