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What do linguists think of the movie Arrival?
You have waited a long time, Hansolophontes, for me to answer this A2A. I did not read any spoilers. I did not read any of the other answers (which may make this look silly this late).
I finally watched Arrival last night. Very well made movie: great sense of atmosphere, and fear, and awe. I was annoyed at the plot twist: it’s annoying and cheap whenever it shows up in science fiction (it was a letdown whenever it was used in Star Trek). But given that it was going to happen, I have to say, it was handled poetically by the movie. As long as you don’t think about the plot holes (and associated plot laziness) too closely.
What did I think about it as a linguist?
- They fast-forwarded the best part, how Louise worked out the language past the first two words. They got the start of the process, but not the heart of the process. But that’s OK: not many people would have found it cinematic.
- The start of the process of working out the aliens’ language was beautifully handled.
- The whole non-linearity thing about the aliens’ language? Shoehorned in to connect to the plot twist. It wasn’t explained so as to make sense: all I could see was a circle with a bunch of words in it, I wasn’t persuaded there was anything intrinsically non-linear going on.
- Movies with any degree of complexity have an obligatory whiteboard scene. The whiteboard scene was well done: the questions Louise was raising about what basic concepts they had to establish were rattled through rather quickly, but they all made sense, and were well thought through.
- The derision of Ian wanting to talk to the aliens in maths was silly. And mercifully, the guys in Australia did not think it was silly. It’s been accepted for decades that if you want to confirm alien sentience, you use maths that does not occur in nature. (Although that means primes, not the Fibonacci sequence.)
- What sort of a linguist was she? There’s hints she’s an historical linguist (she knows some Sanskrit, and she knows both the anecdote about kangaroo = “I don’t understand”, and the fact that when someone bothered to record the language where Cook landed, it turned out not to be true). But what historical linguist has a photo of fricking Chomsky at her desk? Chomsky is a big part of the reason why historical linguists don’t get jobs.
- That was probably a freshman lecture on linguistics; the textbook she was cradling certainly looked like Linguistics 101. But what Linguistics 101 course dedicates a whole lecture to Portuguese (outside the Lusosphere)? And who the hell explains Portuguese by saying that the mediaeval Galicians thought language was art? You don’t say Onde é o banheiro? in Portuguese as an act of art.
- I’m amused that Ian brought up the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and Louise didn’t immediately start guffawing. My own opinion is that there is a little bit (a little bit) to the hypothesis. But derision of Sapir-Whorf within linguistics is universal, and in fact is something of a shibboleth: it is ideologically driven because of how linguistics currently thinks of language. It’s only non-linguists who take Sapir-Whorf seriously.
- Oh, the army guy dumping the tape recording and saying “translate this”?! Come on. Even grunts aren’t that silly…
The director has obviously talked to linguists, and has certainly read up on linguistics. The details (such as the university setting) did look to have come from someone who wasn’t that clear about how university linguistics actually works. The linguistically challenging bits were swept under the carpet. But the core scenes about establishing communication (including the whiteboard scene) were right.
OK, now to read what everybody else said…
Was Greece created by Germany?
Minority view here, and I’m astonished noone’s picked up on it.
The Modern Greek state was established in 1829; and while Greeks like to think they won the Greek state with their sword, the Greek War of Independence had pretty much been quelled by 1827. It was the Great Powers’ intervention at the Battle of Navarino that guaranteed an independent Greek state, because the Great Powers thought that would be handy. Don’t take my word for it: First Hellenic Republic – Wikipedia.
The Great Powers were Britain, France and Russia. The major political parties of independent Greece, for decades, were the British party, the French party, and the Russian party. There was no Germany, and Germany did not create independent Greece.
There was, however, Bavaria, and the Kingdom of Greece was established in 1832 under a Bavarian king, Otto of Greece. Otto brought Bavarian administrators with him, and they ran the country for the first five years of the kingdom. Per Wikipedia:
During the early years of his reign a group of Bavarian Regents ruled in his name, and made themselves very unpopular by trying to impose German ideas of rigid hierarchical government on the Greeks, while keeping most significant state offices away from them. Nevertheless, they laid the foundations of a Greek administration, army, justice system and education system. […]
The Bavarian Regents ruled until 1837, when at the insistence of Britain and France, they were recalled and Otto thereafter appointed Greek ministers, although Bavarian officials still ran most of the administration and the army. But Greece still had no legislature and no constitution. Greek discontent grew until a revolt broke out in Athens in September 1843. […] Power then passed into the hands of a group of politicians, most of whom had been commanders in the War of Independence against the Ottomans.
So Germany did not create Greece; but the Kingdom of Greece was certainly initially set up by Bavarians.
How offensive is the word “cunt” in Australia?
Just to round off what others have said: yes, it is mostly a more vulgar counterpart of the Australian term bastard, and it almost always refers to men rather than women. (The reductionist misogynist use of cunt to refer to women is unknown here. I only discovered it a few years ago)
Just like bastard, if it is qualified by an adjective, it is typically informal, jocular, or dismissive, rather than outright offensive, in “lower” social contexts. (Australia does have classes, but it also has a lot of mobility between class registers: the new money millionaire can float between low and high class discourse. Old Money doesn’t, but Old Money isn’t as prominent as it used to be.)
Used on its own, though, it is still vicious. When someone called me a cunt because my dog crapped on his nature strip? He was getting ready to punch me, the roid rage rising to his head, the fists clenching; and cunt was the most hostile term he could spit out at me.
And you do have to judge your registers for appropriateness. There is a jocular, low register with ribbing and swearing and no actual harm done. But that’s not 24/7, even for the so-called lower socioeconomics.
What are the differences between standard modern Greek and the Griko dialect?
I am delighted to be A2A’d this question.
There has been long-running, nationalistically driven, and tedious argument about how old the Greek dialects spoken in Southern Italy are, with to and fro from Italian linguists and Greek linguists, and with the great Romanist Gerhard Rohlfs kinda weighing in on the Greek side.
There is a significant difference between the Griko of Calabria, and the Griko of Salento. The Griko of Calabria, which is moribund, is much more obviously archaic: it has many more fossilised bits of Ancient Greek which only make sense if it was continuously spoken in place. The Calabrian Mafia’s heartland is in Greek-speaking territory, and its name, ‘Ndrangheta, sounds like something straight out of Sparta: Andragathia, “Manly Virtue”.
Salentino Griko, on the other hand, which is much healthier, is closer to Modern Greek both grammatically and lexically. My own pet theory is that Calabrian Greek is a continuation of Magna Graecia, while Salentine Greek reflects resettlement from Greece in Byzantine times. I’m not seeing much to refute that.
As for differences: if you picture Shakespearean English spoken in a Vaudeville Italian accent, you’ll be reasonably close.
- Salentine Greek, at least, is just about mutually intelligible, though with a fair bit of difficulty.
- A lot of the difficulty will be around the massive amount of vocabulary taken from Italian (and Calabrian/Salentino dialect)
- Some of the difficulty will also be because Griko has become aligned to Italian phonotactics. No final -s anywhere. In most villages, no consonants alien to the Romance dialects: [θ, x, ɣ, ð] gone. Clusters alien to the Romance dialects gone: [ks] > [ts], for instance. Geminates all over the place (like in Cypriot, but unlike all other dialects of Modern Greek), and in fact the characteristic /ll/ > /ɖɖ/ of the Romance dialects.
- The grammar is certainly archaic: the infinitive survives to a similar extent with Mediaeval Greek, after modals (telo pai ‘I want to go’ instead of θelo na pao ‘I want that I should go’). Participles are much more used as well.
Let me try out a parallel text. The Salentine lament on migration “My Man’s Gone Away” (Andra mu pai) was a hit in Greece in the 70s—which means it was mutually intelligible enough. To try and explain what’s going on, I’ll italicise the Italian words (which in fact Italian linguists routinely do), and I’ll boldface words that Greeks won’t recognise as too archaic. I’ll then give a calque into pseudo-Modern Greek (and bracketted Italian), so you can see the differences.
Telo na mbriakeftò.. na mi’ ppensefso,
na klafso ce na jelaso telo artevrài;
ma mali rràggia evò e’ nna kantaliso,
sto fengo e’ nna fonaso: o andramu pai!
θelo na meθiso (ubriacare), na mi skeftome (pensare)
na klapso ke na ɣelaso θelo tora to vraði
me meɣali orɣi (rabbia) eɣo θe na traɣuðiso (cantare)
sto feŋɡari θe na fonakso o andras mu pai.
I want to get drunk, not to think,
to cry and laugh is what I want tonight.
I will sing with great rage
I will shout to the moon: my husband is gone!
Fsunnìsete, fsunnìsete, jinèke!
Dellàste ettù na klàfsete ma mena!
Mìnamo manechè-mma, diàike o A’ Vrizie
Ce e antròpi ste‘ mas pane ess‘ena ss’ena!
ksipnisete, ksipnisete, ɣinekes!
elate eðo na klapsete me mena!
miname monaxes mas, ðiavike o ai vritsios
ke i anθropi stekun mas pane eks ena se ena
Wake up, wake up, women!
Come here and cry with me!
We have been left alone, the feast of St Britius has passed
And our men are leaving, one by one.
E antròpi ste‘ mas pane, ste’ ttaràssune!
N’arti kalì ‘us torùme ettù s’ena chrono!
è’ tui e zoì-mma? è’ tui e zoì, Kristè-mu?
Mas pa’ ‘cì sti Germania klèonta ma pono!
i anθropi stekun mas pane, stekun tarasune
na arti kali tus θorume eðo se ena xrono.
ine tuti i zoi mas, ine tuti i zoi, xriste mu?
mas pane eki sti ɣermania kleondas me pono
Our men are leaving on us, they’re going.
If things go well, we will see them back here in a year.
Is this our life? Is this a life, Christ?
They are going over there to Germany, crying with pain.
Linguistically speaking, are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian different languages or dialects of a modern Norse language?
There’s one hiccup which I’m surprised other respondents have not brought up, Habib le toubib.
There are two standard languages of Norway, and a mess of dialects in between.
Norway used to be ruled by the Danish. The official language of Norway at the time it gained independence, Bokmål (“Book Language”), has been uncharitably described as Danish with a Norwegian accent. That was pretty much the language of Oslo. Given how bizarre Danish accents are (as others have pointed out), that makes Danish with a Norwegian accent quite different from Danish with a Danish accent.
But Norwegians resented their official language being Danish with a Norwegian accent. So Ivar Aasen, one of their language activists, went out to the fjords, recorded the West Norwegian dialects that were the furthest away from the hated Danish with a Norwegian accent of Oslo, mooshed them together, and came up with Nynorsk (“Neo-Norse”). So there are now two official languages of Norway.
Nynorsk advocates will still occasionally snarl that Bokmål is “Dano-Norwegian” (or if they’re being particularly bolshie, “Danish”; I red-lined that out of a colleague’s PhD thesis once). In practice: Bokmål has moved further away from Danish with time, and with some gentle nudging from the government. 10% or so of Norwegians claim to use Nynorsk, but in reality just speak their local West Norwegian dialect.
Are Bokmål and Danish dialects of a modern Dano-Norwegian language, then? Only if you’re being uncharitable and a Nynorsk activist. 🙂
Instead of creating Pinyin, why didn’t the CCP use IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)?
Practical Roman alphabets do need to stick as close to ASCII as possible. Particularly before computerised typography, getting hold of letters outside the Latin-1 and Latin-2 repertoire (letters and standard diacritics) was painful, and you’d avoid it if you could.
So if you had a choice between
tʰiantɕʰi pu xao
and
Tianqi bu hao
… well, really, that’s not much of a choice at all, is it. Practicality is going to overrule the universality of the IPA, by far: once everyone agrees that <q> corresponds to /tɕʰ/, there’s no reason you have to stock up on those extra odd letters again. Linguists working with Chinese can certainly remember that much.
There was fine print in the history of Pinyin, involving previous transliterations and the initial attempt at a Cyrillic based transcription; but really, this was an issue of practicality, no less than Albanian picking <x> and <xh> for /dz/ and /dʒ/.
In fact, the only practical orthography that in any way significantly depends on the IPA is the Africa Alphabet and its successor the African reference alphabet, which is used for several African languages. And that involved inventing uppercase versions of a lot of IPA letters, because the IPA had never been used in a practical as opposed to scholarly function before 1928. Hence:
Ɓ Ɖ Ɛ Ǝ Ƒ Ɣ Ŋ Ɔ Ʃ Ʋ Ʒ
So yes, there is a capital schwa and a capital esh. Who knew!
How did the pre-Persian Semitic peoples of the Levant, Assyrian and Babylonian call the Greeks?
As OP clearly knows (by his “pre-Persian” restriction), the main Semitic name for Greeks, Yunan, derives from Persian contact with Ionian Greeks.
We know that the Hittites used the term Achiyawa to refer to what we reasonably guess were the Achaeans; that’s contact dating from Mycenaean times.
From Greek Contact with the Levant and Mesopotamia in the first half of the first millennium BC: a view from the East by Amelie Kuhrt, University College London – Academia.edu, it looks like Assyrians in the 7th century BC were already referring to Ionians. (See also Ionians.) I’d be surprised if the Babylonians knew the Greeks at all before then.
The really interesting question is what did the Phoenecians call the Greeks, before the Ionians settled Asia Minor. I’m not finding it online, and you know, there may well not have been an established term. If the Phoenecians had one, I’d have thought it’d have shown up in Wikipedia.
Do letters exist?
Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics.
Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have a psychological, measurable reality.
Letters (Graphemes) are a means of capturing phonemes in writing. They’re some arbitrariness to them, but they definitely have referents with psychological reality. So they are signs, and they have as much existence as any sign in the world—that is, as much existence as numbers or words do.
How did the verb esse end up suffixed to the back of the perfect stem in the latin’s perfect conjugations?
Vote #1 Christopher Kowalewski: That’s the working through of internal reconstruction that you only see the results of in the textbooks.
Now, Chad Turner suggests I’d know the answer. God, *I* don’t know the answer. But Sihler does: New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Or at least, Sihler knows as much of the answer as there is to be known.
§531. Other tense and mood stems of the Latin perfect system are all based upon a combination of the Latin perfect stem, whichever that happens to be, with an element *-is-, of wholly obscure origin but most commonly imagined to be related somehow to the s-aorist. […]
1. Pluperfect Indicative. Functionally the past of the perfect, in effect, like New English had gone. Latin -eram, -erās, -erat from *-is- together with *-ā-, the optative formation which functions as an anterior tense marker in -bā- and erā- ‘was’. (The vowel of -er- is of course ambiguous per se, but its historical value can be surmised from the pluperfect in *-issē-, 4, below.) […]
3. Perfect Subjunctive. […] So *-is-ī- plus endings, whence by regular sound laws –erim, -erīs, -erit, -erīmus.
4. Pluperfect Subjunctive. Descriptively, the stem in *-is- with an additional element *-sē- of profoundly obscure origin; so *-is-sē-, whence -issem, -issēs, -isset.—The same *-sē- is found in the imperfect subjunctive.
So, to unpack this. If we look at the pluperfect ama-v-eram ‘I had loved’, the pluperfect person inflection (-m) comes from the same place as the person inflection of eram ‘I was’. And the vowel -ā- in -eram comes from the same place as the -ā- of eram. But the -er- in the suffix is not the same stem as the er- in eram. It is a development of proto-Latin *-isām.
And how do we know that the “wholly obscure” *-is- infix is not the same as the stem of esse? Because the -i- still shows up, e.g. in the pluperfect subjunctive. But also because a verb doesn’t get just plunked at the end of a finite verb, †amavi eram. If you have a compound verb in Latin, you expect the auxiliary to be combined with a non-finite verb, like amare habeo > French aimerai.
Add that the perfect –v– is specific to Latin (it’s absent from Sabine: Sihler §528), so it can’t be that old in the language: certainly not old enough that an †amavXXXXX eram could have been lost in the depths of time.
What were the musical notes’ names in Ancient Greece?
The notes of the Ancient Greek musical system were organised into tetrachords, groups of four notes. Two tetrachords made an octave.
The central octave went:
{Hypate, Parhypate, Lichanos, Mese}, {Paramese, Trite, Paranete, Nete}
It gets rather more complicated than that; the paramese, for example, is an interstitial note, and the tetrachords keep going above and below the central octave. See Musical system of ancient Greece – Wikipedia