A Year In Language

A Year in Language, Day 41: Madurese

Madurese is the language spoken on Madura island, an part of Indonesian right of the coast of the much larger island of Java.

Madurese is an Austronesian language, more specifically a Western Malayo-Polynesian one, making it a relative to almost all the languages of Indonesia, a distant cousin of all the Polynesian languages and Madagscar’s Malagasy, and a very distant relation of the native languages of Taiwan (now mostly routed by Chinese).

Madurese has an unusually high consonant count by the low standards of Austronesian languages. This is largely due to a three way distinction pattern in stop consonants (voiced, voiceless, and aspirated voiceless) and a full series of retroflex consonants.

Though immediately adjacent to the Javanese speaking people of Java it is not a direct sister. It is more closely related to Balinese, spoken on an island some 300 miles to the southeast.

A Year in Language, Day 40: Kashubian

Kashubian is a Slavic language, a sister or cousin of Polish, spoken by ethnic Kashubians in Poland and parts of Germany.

Kashubian is sometimes also known as Pomeranian, though that title more accurately belongs to an ancestral language. Kashubian is also often considered to be merely a dialect of Polish. I have quoted it here before, and I will quote it again: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”. As Kashubians have had basically no mainstream representation in culture or government the status of the language is likewise ephemeral and without standardization.

Like most Slavic languages Kashubian contrasts most of its consonants between a palatalized and unpalatalized series. While both Kashubian and Polish incorporate a notable number of German loanwords, Polish borrows primarily from High German and Kashubian gets most of its loans from Low German.

A Year in Language, Day 39: Cree Cree is an Algonquian language native to parts of the United States and Canada. Within Canada it has more speakers than any other native language. Cree is sometimes considered a single language and sometimes several. The status quo amongst linguists is a healthy compromise: it is a dialect continuum. A dialect continuum, as the name implies, is when a language zone exists where every dialect group within its borders is mutually intelligible with its immediate neighbors, but not necessarily with members on the most distant edges. Cree’s continuum runs laterally, with Plains Cree forming the westmost boundary in Alberta and Montagnais in Quebec and Newfoundland forming the eastern end. Another well know dialect continuum is German. The difference in dialects in Cree, just as in German, are largely differences in phonemes, i.e. variations in pronouncing a sound /s/ or /ʃ/ (English “sh”), with the syntax staying relatively static.

Cree is a polysynthetic language, meaning that it is one an extreme end of linguistic inflection. While isolating languages like English or Mandarin barely inflect and largely rely on word order for grammar, Cree has free word order and ideas that could take whole sentences or at least very specific word choice in English can be expressed simply by conjugation. Here is an example I shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia:

kiskinohamātowikamikw

This is Plains Cree. It means “school” and is an inflection of the verb meaning “to know”. Unfortunately I do not know the exact boundaries between the parts of the word, but I do know what the parts mean. The core, as I said, is the root “know”. Added to that is a causative marker, making it something like “cause to know” or “teach”. Added to that is an applicative marker. This is.. a bit complicated, so just know that in this case it changes the meaning to be something like “teach by example”. On top of all this is a reciprocal marker. As the name implies this means the act is done together or to one another. Finally there is an ending that marks it as a place, kind of like in English how “-er” marks something as a person. So the word is, very literally, ‘a place where we teach each other by example’.

A Year in Language, Day 38: Linguistic Relativity

Though you may not be familiar with the term “linguistic relativity” or its other name, “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”, you have heard of it. It is the claim that language effects the way we perceive reality be it culturally, psychologically, or even biologically.

Let me get one thing right of the bat: for the most part this idea is just wrong. It is certain that language is a part of culture, and therefore the home to elements of culture and a reflection of those who speak it, but almost every line of the style “X people don’t have a word for Y because/which means Z” is not only wrong, but frequently racist. There is no word for frown in German. Does this mean they are a pleasant people, who just don’t get the concept? Or perhaps they are so dour all the time that frowning is considered standard and unmarked as simply background noise. Or maybe they just say “to wrinkle ones brow” instead because in the end there are many things human faces do to express displeasure and there’s no reason they should fixate on the same feature we do.

A common version of this idea is the “eskimo words for snow” idea. If you have somehow missed this bit of “common knowledge”, it simply states that Eskimo people, who live in the frozen parts of the northern hemisphere, have many, many words for snow, because of course they live in it. However, there are many issues here. For one there is no one Eskimo language, and even when we choose one, say Inuit Inuktitut, we know have to decide what constitutes a word, because that language is highly inflectional and thus a single root can be conjugated thousands of ways. Also consider that we English speakers have ample words of our own: snow, sleet, avalanche, drift, rime, black snow, snowstorm, etc.

There are some ways that modern research shows language may actually impact us. Speakers of tonal languages have better pitch. Speakers of languages with only geocentric coordinates (only north, south, no left or right) have better internal compasses. Both these abilities though are kind of secondary though, as they are more a result of you constantly noting speech tones or tracking North than a purely linguistic development. There have been several interesting studies of color, showing that speakers whose languages differentiate certain parts of the light spectrum will be slightly faster at identifying changes across those boundaries than those whose languages do not. If you would like an incredibly good read on this topic that gives it a very fair look, with good science, and very approachable language, I highly recommend “Through the Language Glass” by Guy Deutscher.

A Year in Language, Day 37: Māori

Māori is a Polynesian language native to New Zealand. It diverged from Tahitian in the late 13th century when the Māori people first voyaged to the island.

Māori was a common first language right up until the Second World War, when it fell rapidly in decline. Revitalization efforts began in earnest in the 80’s. Whether this is effective has yet to be seen. There is a national television channel in the language and as an official language government business can be conducted in it, and the New Zealand parliament keeps an interpreter ready.

Māori pronouns distinguish three numbers; singular, plural, and dual, for when there are exactly two people. They also distinguish between inclusive and exclusive third person pronouns. This means that in Māori there is a word for we meaning you, me, and others, and a separate word for me and others, but not you.

A Year in Language, day 36: Kabyle Kabyle is a Berber language, a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It is spoken by ethnic Berbers in northern Algeria. The Berber branch is most closely related to the Semitic branch and shares a number of features. Kabyle is generally considered to have only three vowels, /i/, /a/, and /u/. Interestingly enough almost all languages with only three vowels have these same three, which are made in maximally distant points in the mouth from one another. Most Kabyle consonants have a two way distinction, not between voiced and voiceless (though this distinction is also made), but between “plain” and “emphatic”. “Emphatic consonants are a common feature in both Berber and Semitic languages, and typically implies that the consonant is “pharyngealized” meaning they are doubly articulated with a restriction in the pharynx. Kabyle verbs undergo root mutation, i.e. change vowels or add/alter consonants in ways that are not completely predictable, to show a change of tense and use regular affixes to show agreement. A similar system likely fused the two aspects of conjugation to give rise to the Semitic system of consonant verb roots and vowel formats.

A Year in Language, Day 35: Sinhalese

Sinhalese is one of three languages with official status in Sri Lanka, along with Tamil and English. It is an Indo-Aryan language.

Like many of the languages spoken in India with a long literary history, written Sinhalese is notably different from spoken Sinhalese, representing an archaic form of the language. It is written in Sinhalese script (සිංහල අක්ෂර මාලාව), a member of the Brahmi family of scripts used throughout the subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

Sinhalese lacks the four way voicing/aspiration distinction we’ve seen in other Indo-Aryan languages, but instead has a three way distinction between voiced, voiceless, and prenasalized stops.

The 8 cases of Proto-Indo-European are preserved, as well as its gender distinction of animate vs. inanimate. Sinhalese marks definiteness (a/an vs. the) as a suffix, like in Romanian and the Scandinavian languages, but unlike those which add a suffix to show that a noun is definite (i.e. the something), it adds a suffix to show that the noun is indefinite (a something).

A Year in Language, Day 34: Proto-Germanic

Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of all Germanic languages. The exact dates of its split with Proto-Indo-European (PIE) raises some issues with the nature of language change, but it probably began developing in the 2nd-1st millennium BCE and was spoken around 500 BCE.

Proto-Germanic is not a language we have any direct evidence of. The closest is the attestation of Romans, which would have been around the time it began splintering into the various Germanic branches and some ancient loan words in Finnish and other nearby language groups.

The defining feature of the Germanic languages is a sound shift known as Grimm’s law, named for Jacob Grimm who formalized it, the same Jacob Grimm who compiled fairy tales with his brother. Here’s the simplified version of it: in PIE there was a three way distinction in stop consonants. There were voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/), voiced stop (/b/, /d/, /g/), and aspirated voiced stops (/bʰ/, /dʰ/, /gʰ/). Grimms law shifts all of these in turn; first the voiceless stops become fricatives instead (/p/ > /f/, /t/ > /θ/, /g/ > /x/ [note: /θ/ is like English “th” and /x/ is like German “ch”]). The voiced stops then are pulled by this vaccum and become voiceless themselves, and the aspirate voiced ones tumble after becoming voiced, losing the aspiration. Compare, for example, Latin “ped” to English “foot” or “dent” to “tooth”

Proto-Germanic did not undergo umlaut, another unique feature common in Germanic languages that causes front vowels to round, and is generally responsible for the large vowel inventories of those languages (compare English’s 15 or so vowels to Spanish’s 6). It also had nasal vowels, largely absent from modern Germanic languages.

A Year in Language, Day 33: Pali

Pali is the religious language of Theravada Buddhism spoken in India around the 5th to 1st centuries BCE.

Some consider Pali to be a descendant of Sanskrit, the holy language of Hinduism, but it is probably actually a sister language. Like Sanskrit Pali has the three classical genders (male, female, neuter) and 8 cases. Students of Classical Latin will be familiar with 7 of these cases, with the Instrumental case, used for objects used as tools or means, being the 8th.

In a pattern people who have read my last two entries for Indo-Aryan languages Pali has a four way distinction in its stop consonants; voiced vs voiceless and aspirated vs unaspirated.

A Year in Language, Day 32: Concept: Affixes

Affixes are morphemes, aka. the basic building blocks of words, that cannot form a full word on their own and must therefore affix themselves to another morpheme.

Most of you are likely familiar with prefixes, which affix to the start of a word, and suffixes, which affix to the end. However there are two other kinds of commonly accepted affixes: infixes and circumfixes.

Infixes go, as the name implies, in the middle of a word. We actually have infixes in English: curse words. Think of phrases like “abso-fuckin-lutely” or “ri-goddamn-diculous”. Incidentally these are not random insertions; the infix must always go before the primarily stressed syllable (you can’t say “absolut-fuckin-ly” or “ridic-goddamn-ulous”). A clever reader may note that this is rather contrary to the definition I gave at the start: curse words can stand on their own. The honest truth is the strict definition of affix is more complex than I thought would be wise to start off with, so I went with a general approximation. Forgive me.

Circumfixes go around words. Malay is well know for this, though anyone who has taken German has technically encountered one: any German past tense that starts “ge-” and ends in “-t” (or a similar ending) has been circumfixed. It should be noted that this is not the same as having both a prefix and a suffux. The English word “unusable” has two affixes, three morphemes total “un-”, “use” and “-able”. You can remove the “un-” and still have a word. Interestingly enough you can’t remove just the “-able”. Why? You’ll have to wait for my post on inflection and derivation. C:

A Year in Language, Day 31: Nauruan.

Nauruan is the official language of the Micronesian nation of Nauru. It is spoken by around 6,000 people.

Nauruan is generally considered to be in the Micronesian branch of the Oceanic languages, itself a limb of the Austronesian language family. It is however an outlier of this group, placed alone on a branch apart from the other Micronesian languages like Gilbertese/Kiribati and Marshallese.

Nauruan Bilabial consonants, /b/, /p/, and /m/ all have contrasting palatalized and velarized forms. This means that in addition to their primary place of articulation (bilabial, with both lips) their is also a secondary motion of the tongue either against the hard palate (palatalization) or the soft palate (velarization). Palatalization normally makes sounds appear to be followed by a “y” sound (/j/ in IPA). Most American would recognize this from Russian words like “nyet”, meaning no, which features a palatized /n/. Most Americans probably aren’t as familiar with the effects of velarization, which are generally more subtle. If you’re curious, simply you tube it for examples. Incidentally, Irish Gaelic makes this same contrast.

Thank you all for keeping up with these for a whole month! When I started doing these I thought it would be mostly for my benefit, I didn’t really expect people to be interested. Y'all have proved me wrong in spectacular fashion, and it gives me energy to keep it up! Here’s to another month in language!

A Year in Language, Day 30: Yoruba

Yoruba is a language spoken by 30 million people primarily in West Africa. It is in the Niger-Congo language family, the same family the Bantu languages though Yoruba is not of that branch.

Yoruba is a religious language for many Afro-American religions, primarily Caribbean Santeria and Brazilian Candomble.

Yoruba is a pluricentric language. This means that unlike Japanese or Romanian, which have only a single formal form, Yoruba has multiple formal dialects. Other well known pluricentric languages are Arabic, Spanish, and English.

Yoruba, like English and Chinese, is an isolating language with SVO (subject - verb - object) word order. It is also tonal, making use of three tones. An interesting phonetic feature of the language is the presence of labio-velar stops. This sound is like an English /k/ and /p/ pronounced at the same time.

A Year in Language, Day 29: Hittite

Hittite is an ancient Indo-European language spoken in Anatolia (modern day Turkey) between the 16th and 13th centuries BCE. Though the language was preserved on cuneiform tablets it was not deciphered until the early 20th century.

The decipherment of Hittite came with the discovery of tablets written in the Hittite language but using the already deciphered Akkadian style of cuneiform, thus allowing linguists to piece the language together from a phonological standpoint. However, while we could now make accurate guesses at what the language sounded like, the grammar and meaning remained elusive; consider if someone taught you the sounds made by the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, but nothing of the Hebrew language. The linguist Bedřich Hrozný made a breakthrough when considering the following sentence:

“NINDA” is in all caps because it does not represent the actual Hittite word. Instead the cuneiform symbol used was an ideogram i.e. a pictographic image known to represent bread, the word for which is “ninda” in Sumerian. Bedřich noticed two things. First the word following “ninda”, “ezzatteni” looks similar to German “essen”, meaning “to eat”, and also to its Latin equivalent “edo”. Eating and bread are common couples. Secondly he noticed “watar” which, well, sounds like water. He guessed correctly that the sentence would translate to something like “eat bread and drink water”. Noticing these roots was impressive as it meant Hittite, unlike most of the languages spoken around it, was Indo-European.

The decipherment of Hittite was also an important moment for reconstructive linguistics i.e. the science of reconstructing unattested languages. Using a tool called the comparative method linguists can reconstruct more ancient unattested languages by comparing the existing daughter languages. The issues with these reconstructions though is that they are inherently impossible to truly verify; one must simply trust modern linguistic theory, which, I should mention, is in a state of constant flux. Ill try to keep the explanation digestible. Before Hittite was rediscovered Linguists had posited a certain sound that existed in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to explain certain features of its descendants. The only issue was this sound had fused with other sounds very early in the language families history, so the only evidence of it where echoes of echoes. The comparative method said it must exist, but the historical record said it did not. Then comes Hittite. Hittite belongs to a branch of Indo-European that split off much earlier than most other branches. As such, it preserves features that were lost in other branches. Amongst these where sounds that could have only emerged from these theoretical PIE sounds. Thus Hittite proved the legitimacy of the comparative method.

A Year in Language, Day 28: Mozarabic

Mozarabic is not, as the name might imply, any kind of Arabic or any Semitic or Afro-Asiatic language. It is, in fact, a medieval variety of Spanish.

The word Mozarabic is derived from Arabic “مُسْتَعْرِب‎, mustarib” which means something like “one who has adopted Arabic culture”. It refers to the Hispanic Christians who lived under Moorish rule in Southern Spain, most specifically those living in the region now know as Andalusia, then Al-Andalus.

Mozarabics did not call themselves or the language by that name. As far as they were concerned they were still speaking Latin, though they often wrote it with Arabic or even Hebrew script. It lacked many of the sound changes typical of other Iberian dialects at the time, including Castilian which is what most of us know as Spanish, meaning that at least in some ways it was more like the Latin of the Roman Empire.

Andalusian Spanish is one of the primary sources of the introduction of the language to South America. As such many South American varieties of the languages have features, both phonologic (sound related) and lexical (vocabulary), that ultimately descend from Mozarabic influence.

A Year in Language, Day 27: Concepts: Phonetic Alphabets

Today I’m introducing a new addition to my language days. Once a week instead of a language I’m going to talk over some linguistic topic of interest. Why? Well as I’ve been plotting out my Languages on a calendar I realize that while the world has no shortage of languages to record, I have a limit of languages I can talk about with any degree of effectiveness. So I’ve decided to cut myself a break in a way that will reinforce knowledge of the languages I discuss. I hope y'all enjoy.

An inherent issue in discussing the languages of the world is that one must do it in one of those languages, and thus be subject to the limitations of that language. How then to talk about and describe sounds that may not exist in certain languages, or be understood differently in different languages? The answer is a phonetic alphabet, a script that is internationally constant and able to transcribe any sound.

The most popular phonetic script in use today is the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA. This is what you’ll see in Wikipedia articles. Another one still in wide use is the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or APA, which while less common is a bit easier to type, for example the English sound typically written “ch” is /t͡ʃ/ in IPA and /č/ in APA. If you are wondering about the slash marks, they are the standard brackets for phonological transcription. Angle brackets are then used to represent that the letters are as they appear in the native languages orthography (I’ve been using quotation marks because they are easier to type and I didn’t want to confuse anyone).

The way letters are ordered and named in a phonetic alphabet is by descriptive features. The primary features I have discussed before; the place of articulation (where in the mouth the sound is made) and the manner of articulation (how the windstream is being obstructed). A third prominent feature is voicing, I.e. whether or not your vocal chords vibrate. Common places of articulation are Bilabial (m, f, b), Alveolar (t, s, r), and Velar (k, ng). Common manners of articulation are Stops/Plosives (p, d, g), Fricatives (v, z), Nasals (m, n, ng), and Approximants (w, y, l).

A Year in Language, Day 26: Hindi

Hindi is the lingua franca of Northern India. It is an Indo-Aryan language and mutually intelligible with Urdu. When spoken of together (Hindi, Urdu, and other related dialects) the language is called Hindustani. Hindi distinguishes itself primarily by using more words of Sanskrit origin than Urdu, and is written in Devanagari script instead of Arabic.

Hindi is a SOV language, meaning its basic word order is Subject - Object - Verb. It uses postpositions instead of prepositions, meaning they come after the word instead of before it.

Like Sindhi, Hindi has a four way distinction amongst it’s stop consonants; they can all be voiced or voiceless and aspirated or unaspirated. Hindi contains a sound that linguists call a “labial approximant”, written /ʋ/ in the international phonetic alphabet. To English ears this sounds kind of like a “v” and a “w”, and as such you’ll often see Hindi words written in English vary in their preference, and those familiar with Indian accents may notice this as well.

The language is written using Devanagari, which is an abugida, meaning that the glyphs representing consonants modify their form to tell you what vowel follows, making every written letter an entire syllable. Devanagari is the widest used of the Brahmic family of writing systems which are used throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

A Year in Language, Day 25: Pitjantjatjara

Pitjantjatjara, pronounced “pitch - ant - cha - char - uh”, or, to use an actual phonetic transcription, /pɪtʃəntʃəˈtʃɑːrə/, is a language of the Western Desert or Wati branch of the Pama-Nyungan language family that dominates Australia.

The word “pitjantjatjara” means “having pitjantja” noting the word used by this group for “to go”. This distinguishes them from the Yakunytjatjara people who speak a mutually intelligible language but use a different word for “to go”.

Uluru, formerly known to the western world by its colonial name “Ayer’s Rock”, gets its name from the Pitjantjatjara to whom it is sacred. The Pitjantjatjara, along with their close linguistic relatives collectively known as Anangu, have been relatively successful in gaining rights to their sacred lands and more, and the languages are currently still healthy i.e. not dying out.

Like many aboriginal languages Pitjantjatara has retroflex consonants and no fricatives. It is a split-ergativity language, meaning it inflects nominative-accusative in some grammatical context and argative-absolutive in others.