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Why are there ancient, long extinct scripts (e.g. cuneiform) in Unicode?
I’m going to put in a less popular answer:
Because they can.
Yes, there is research ongoing on extinct scripts, and scholars should be able to exchange texts in those scripts. The thing is, scholars usually exchange Sumerian, Old Egyptian, Mayan etc texts not in the original scripts, but in transliteration. The scholars are consulted in putting together the Unicode representations of their scripts, but they are not, from what I have seen, desperate to see them adopted because their absence was blocking them doing their work.
You can’t rule out that someone will want to use them, even if just in illustratory text, and you do occasionally see old scripts used as plaintext by scholars (Egyptian hieroglyphics more than cuneiform, cuneiform more than Mayan hieroglyphics). And Unicode is intended to be the definitive encoding of all scripts that could ever be digitised. So their presence in Unicode is legitimate; but it was never pressing even within specialised fields. That’s why they got bumped to the “Astral Plane” (the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, U+10000 to U+1FFFF.)
Who faces more difficulty, a Greek who reads the original Koine New Testament or an English speaker who reads the works of Shakespeare?
How on earth do we quantify this? Especially given (a) we read Shakespeare in modernised orthography; (b) we ignore the pronunciation differences, unless we’re tuning in to Ben Crystal for Reconstructed Shakesperian, and Randall Buth for Reconstructed Koine; (c) there is huge stylistic disparity in the New Testament: Mark is much easier to read than Paul.
- Pronunciation: Koine slightly harder: the vowels sound like a pirate in English, but we have heard pirates before in the movies. Greeks are going to be really taken aback by eta as /ɛ/ and omicron iota, upsilon as /y/; but they’re getting off easy. Those are the only real differences.
- Morphology: A lot of Koine grammar got reintroduced to modern ears via Puristic (I’m saying that deliberately: Puristic never really used pre-Koine Attic grammar). Still, that’s an alien though familiar grammar for Koine, vs only minor grammatical differences for Shakespeare.
- Syntax: Same as morphology, although Shakespeare’s syntax can at times be convoluted for modern ears. I’d call it a wash.
- Lexicon: This can be quantified, but I don’t know of any studies. Both are contaminated, because of how canonical both are in the contemporary cultures: the vocabulary of the New Testament and of Shakespeare are more familiar to modern readers than they should be, because both are taught (and because of Puristic). And you’ll need to be “edified by the margin” for both. Especially if you used an edition of Shakespeare that uses the word margent instead of margin. I’m calling it a wash, but more out of frustration than conviction.
Koine somewhat harder than Shakespeare, but I say that with little conviction. Koine maybe as easy as Chaucer. But certainly easier than Early Middle English, from what little I’ve seen of it.
What would a living natural language that couldn’t change or evolve look like?
Well, what drives language change? Whatever needs drive language change would not be met by such a language. And speakers of such a language would get very frustrated.
- They’d be bored to death with each other. A major driver is the pursuit for novel and vivid ways of expressing a concept. You would not have them. You would have heard all the ways of expressing excitement a millionfold, and nothing in language would surprise you any more.
- Their facial muscles would be twitching. A major driver is ease of enunciation; that’s how words get slurred together, syllable structures get simplified, phonemes assimilate to each other. That capability would be frozen.
- They would be constantly asking each other “huh?”. A major and contrary driver is ease of comprehension; expressions that become too indistinct, semantically or phonetically, are remodelled so that they can be understood more readily. The easy pathways for doing so would all be blocked off; any attempt to make themselves understood would be trapped in ponderous circumlocution.
- They would yell at each other a lot. Language is a major vehicle of conveying what in-group you belong to, and what out-group you don’t belong to; people unconsciously, and at times consciously, change their language to mark themselves off from others. Without that subtle vehicle, they would have to resort more often to more overt signals of their group identity. Which would probably manifest themselves more aggressively.
Expanding answer promoted by OP.
This was a good, interesting answer. Thanks.
However, there are a few things I’d like to point out/ask, if you don’t mind.
- It seems your answer focused more on the socio-cultural aspect, especially the consequences, while I also had the language itself in mind. That is, the actual phonological and grammatical side of it.
- The various issues you mention are seemingly based on existing languages, while my question was more hypothetical (I didn’t mean an existing natural language).
- For example, you mention ease of enunciation, which means the language would not yet have arrived at the point where speakers feel they no longer need to make it easier.
- Rather than “What if a language suddenly no longer could evolve?”, my question was more about “How would a hypothetical natural language end up in such a state that all or most parts of specch and phonology had become a closed class?”.
An isolating language is going to be crying out for its function words to be reanalysed as affixes, changing it into an agglutinating language. An agglutinating language is going to be crying out for its affixes to be phonologically assimilated, resulting in a fusional language. A fusional language is going to be crying out for its inflections to become phonologically indistinct, and disambiguating function words to be added, resulting in an isolating language.
In other words, there is a cycle of language change, in this and in many other aspects of language; and so long as the forces which bring about language change exist, a language can’t hop off the cycle. The core conflict of ease of production vs ease of comprehension results in language being in an unstable equilibrium: any perturbation (and there are constant perturbations) leads to local language change. And those opposing factors are not intrinsic to any one language structure; there is no language structure that is guaranteed to be stable.
For example, you say “the language would not yet have arrived at the point where speakers feel they no longer need to make it easier.” It never will. A language which speakers feel they no longer need to make easier to pronounce is a language consisting of the single word “uhhhhhhhh”. The contradictory pressure to make the language easier to understand is going to kick in way before then.
What would it take for a language to have most of its parts of speech and phonology be a closed class? Have the language be in a world where there are no novel concepts to express. Failing that, have the language have no compounding, and no phrases consisting of multiple words and a single denotation, which could be reanalysed into a single word, and accented accordingly. It just won’t happen with language as we know it.
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What sounds in your language do foreigners find hard to pronounce?
For Modern Greek, the following sounds are cross-linguistically rare, and certainly rare among European languages:
- ɣ ~ ʝ: γάμος, γέρος
- x ~ ç: χάμω, χελιδόνι
- ɟ [the palatalised allophone of ɡ]: αγγίζω
- ð, θ: δέντρο, θάμνος
- r: ρέμα (people really don’t deal well with trills)
- Initial clusters like ks, ps, vl, vr, ðr, ðj, ɣl, ɣr: ξέρω, ψέμα, βλέπω, βρίσκω, δράμα, διάνα, γλόμπος, γράμμα
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
What is the best Greek restaurant in Melbourne?
The Press Club mentioned in other answers (which are now a few years old) is the flagship of celebrity restauranteur George Calombaris, and was at the forefront of nouveau Greek cuisine. Calombaris was into molecular gastronomy before he was into nouveau Greek, and you could tell: there was tzatziki ice cream to be had.
The Press Club was astonishing in the mid 2000s: every dish a surprise. By the time I last went there, before it closed for refurbishment (and to be shrunk to a third of its size and three times the already inflated prices), it had become a disappointment. I haven’t been to the new place (though I have been to the 2/3 of the restaurant that now serves nouveau Greek street food, trading as Gazi.)
Of the nouveau Greek places, I’d name Hellenic Republic, which Calombaris also runs. It’s not as experimental, but it’s good quality.
I have not checked out the nouveau Cretan place Elyros Restaurant yet. Got to get around to that.
The problem with old school Greek places is that the quality is very often lacking. Especially if they are meat platter joints or tavernas. Most places in Oakleigh, Melbourne’s Greektown, are not to be recommended. (Although at least at Kalimera you’ll get an actual Greek-style souvlaki, and I was impressed by the same owners’ Mykonos taverna.)
There is a hidden jewel in Oakleigh though. Literally hidden: it’s up a flight of stairs around the corner from Eaton Mall; you have to know of it to pop up there.
Mezedakia. Good Greek home cooking, utterly unreconstructed, utterly what mama used to cook, and utterly delicious. No souvlaki platters, and no tzatziki ice cream. Ask for the revani ahead of time. (What is it on Wikipedia? Oh: Basbousa.)
What are some of the must know linguistic theories for any linguistics student?
Add to Andrew Noe’s answer:
- For historical linguistics, Uniformitarianism. (Yes, I know the link describes the geological version of that hypothesis.) The notion that human language in the past worked pretty much the same way as human language works now.
- For structuralism, as an underpinning of how we do linguistics in general: the Arbitrariness of the sign: the fact that language is mostly autonomous of the things it describes.
- For syntax, if you learn nothing else, configurationality: the notion that phrase structure rules work to describe the syntax of language, that words group together to form distinct constituents. Especially fun because of the contortions syntacticians go through to account for Non-configurational languages.
- For pragmatics, Speech act theory, accounting for language not as a mere conveying of meaning, but as agents trying to get things done in the world.
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
Was there any famous Greeks called Alexander before the 1900s besides Alexander the Great?
See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Who is the most famous Greek who was named Alexander in the previous 15 centuries (one for each century)? and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer to Who is the most famous Greek who was named Alexander in the previous 15 centuries (one for each century)?
tl;dr: for Greeks who are famous to this day, you probably have to wait until the 19th century, though Alexander (Byzantine emperor) is not nothing.
Is Yiddish a Semitic or a Indo-European language?
The answer has been given by Anthony Thompson’s answer and Chrys Jordan’s answer. I’m going to spell out a bit more the general principles at work.
Fitting language history into a tree structure requires some simplifying assumptions. In particular, you have to be able to assume that a language has a single parent proto-language (otherwise it’s no longer a tree). You also have to assume a difference between the guts of the language and the minor add-ons of a language. Japanese may have borrowed the word anime from English, but that does not mean Japanese is related to English. Usually, you can differentiate borrowed words from a core vocabulary, and ignore the former when determining language relations. The “guts” of a language also includes how its grammar works.
The tree model was not unanimously accepted when proposed, and there was a rival Wave model of language change, which allows for shades of gray. There are languages which have been massively relexified (much of their core vocabulary is also borrowed), or whose grammar has been profoundly influenced by neighbouring languages in Sprachbunds. Fitting such hybrid languages to the tree model is problematic. The same goes for pidgins and creoles.
There are many languages that you would have trouble fitting to a tree model of affiliation. Yiddish is not such a language. The fact that it uses Hebrew script, is is spoken by Jews, and has a substantial layer of loans from Hebrew and Aramaic do not change the fact that its “guts” are still Germanic.
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by
, Linguistics PhD candidate at Edinburgh. Has lived in USA, Sweden, Italy, UK.
How is the Dené-Caucasian theory considered among serious linguists?
I knew linguists that had worked with long-rangers (those who propose wide-ranging linguistic affiliations); I have in fact met the late Sergei Starostin, proofread contributions by John Bengtson, and read issues of Mother Tongue (journal). I even have a quote from Mother Tongue as one of my .sigs, though not approvingly:
“Assuming, for whatever reasons, that neither scholar presented the evidence properly, then there remains a body of evidence you have not yet destroyed because it has never been presented.” — Harold Fleming
Spot the logical fallacy. The quote actually was trying to defend a link between Basque and Caucasian languages, which is part of the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis.
Dené–Caucasian languages – Wikipedia
Dené–Caucasian is a proposed broad language family that includes the Sino-Tibetan, Northeastern Caucasian, Na-Dené, Yeniseian, Vasconic (including Basque) and Burushaski language families. A connection specifically between Na-Dené and Yeniseian (Dené–Yeniseian languages hypothesis) was proposed by Edward Vajda in 2008, and has met with some acceptance.
The validity of the rest of the family, however, is controversial or viewed as doubtful by most historical linguists.
Dené–Yeniseian languages is new to me (of course, since I was reading long-range reconstructions in the 1990s), and I’ll come back to it.
The majority opinion in historical linguistics is to mistrust long-range linguistic families, because the number of correspondences those families are based on is increasingly tenuous, and the amount of noise introduced by the great chronological distance overwhelms the signal of possible links.
When long-range reconstruction tries to use the traditional methodology that gave us Indo-European, as with Nostratic languages (trying to find commonality between Indo-European and its neighbours), the majority opinion is sometimes polite, but almost always unconvinced. Particularly when those families are instead based on eyeballing, the majority opinion simply does not want to know.
Long-range advocates defend eyeballing by the fact that Joseph Greenberg used eyeballing to work out the linguistic history of Africa. But his proposals only can get confirmed by detailed comparative work (just as the periodic table needed to wait on subatomic particles for its workings to be understood); and unsurprisingly the linguists who are sceptical about long-range comparison in general, such as Lyle Campbell, are sceptical about his work on Africa too.
When it comes to American Indian languages, we have poor historical records, and congenitally cautious historical linguists (such as Campbell) combining to refuse to reduce the number of American Indian language families below 150. Now, obviously, there weren’t 150 different waves of migration across the Bering Strait: those language families are quite likely all related. Greenberg thought they are almost all related as Amerind, again by eyeballing. But most Amerindianists don’t see enough convincing data there to call Amerind a family.
There are two indigenous language families in the Americas that Greenberg did not think could be lumped in as Amerind: Eskimo–Aleut languages, and Na-Dené languages. The best known languages of Na-Dene are Apache and Navajo; but the bulk of the Na-Dené languages are spoken in Western Canada and Alaska:
And Na-Dené may (may) reflect a distinct wave of migration into America: Settlement of the Americas – Wikipedia says “The interior route is consistent with the spread of the Na Dene language group and Subhaplogroup X2a into the Americas after the earliest paleoamerican migration.”
And if the Na-Dené are a distinct, later wave of migration, then we might (might) be able to find related languages on the other side of the Bering Strait.
The linguists behind Dené-Caucasian are Russians of the Nostratic school, not Americans of the eyeballing school. But it’s a big family: it includes North-Eastern Caucasian (of which Chechen is the language you’re likeliest to have heard of), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Burushaski (an isolate in Pakistan which lots of linguists would like to connect to something), Yeniseian (a language family in central Siberia), and, alas, Basque, which everyone wants to try to connect to something.
There’s extensive discussion of the pros and cons to Dené-Caucasian over at Wikipedia. The proposal, like Nostratic, does try to do things by the book, which is laudable. But it relies on comparing proto-languages, which are themselves reconstructions; and that is risky business, given how uncertain the reconstructions are; if you switch reconstructions (e.g. the reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan or North Caucasian), it falls apart. And given the ginormous number of consonants in Caucasian, any reconstruction of North-Eastern Caucasian is going to be fragile.
The news to me was that the more recent proposal of Dené-Yeniseian, lining Na-Dene to the Yeniseian languages in central Siberia, has not been shouted down:
It helps rhetorically that its proponent Edward Vajda has dismissed an earlier eyeballing-based proposal of Dené-Yeniseian as based on coincidence. I hate to say it, but it may also have helped that he’s American and not Russian. But a lot of Western linguists have lined up since to say that his proposal sounds plausible—a lot more than have ever said anything nice about Nostratic. (Lyle Campbell of course has continued to do his Lyle Campbell thing and be sceptical.)
And if you’re going to link Na-Dené with a group of languages the other side of the Bering Strait, Yeniseian looks somehow… safer than Yeniseian + Sino-Tibetan + Northeastern Caucasian + Burushaski + Basque.
Answered 2017-08-14 · Upvoted by
, MA in Linguistics from BYU, 8 years working in research for language pedagogy.
Do they have pazza, Πατσά, in Melbourne restaurants at 6am, the way they do in Greece?
Patsas (Tripe soup) is a Greek hangover cure specialty. It occupies the same niche in Greece that a late night kebab occupies in Britain.
Or Australia.
The answer is, not really; Stalactites would be the obvious place to do it (one of the few remnants of the original Greektown in the CBD, which is open 24/7); but I don’t see it on their menu.
One of the places in the current Greektown, Oakleigh, does offer it: Yefsi. But Yefsi closes at 10 pm.