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What caused the English Great Vowel Shift?
I’ll give a general rather than a specific answer.
The Great English Vowel Shift is a celebrated instance of a Chain shift, a sound change with impacts several sounds one after the other, as a kind of chain reaction.
It helps when discussing vowel changes (which are particularly susceptible to chain shifts) to have a Vowel diagram in your head.
There are two different possible sequences of chain shift, and each has its own likeliest motivation.
A push chain involves one vowel shifting so that it becomes ambiguous with another vowel. Because language is used for communication, and ambiguity is a horrid thing, that second vowel moves out of the way: the one vowel pushes the second vowel. But that second vowel now becomes ambiguous with a third vowel. And so on.
In this scenario, mate stops being pronounced [maːt], and starts being pronounced [mɛːt]. But that makes mate ambiguous with meat. So meat stops being pronounced as [mɛːt], and starts being pronounced as [meːt]. Only that now makes meat sound like meet. So meet stops being pronounced as [meːt], and starts being pronounced as [miːt]. Only now meet sounds just like mite. So mite is pushed over the edge, and starts being pronounced as [məit].
(Yes, Early Modern English was pronounced differently to modern English.)
This is an attractive way of understanding chain shifts. But it’s not what the evidence suggests. English, after all, has an astonishing tolerance of ambiguity.
If it didn’t, then how come meat and meet are now pronounced identically?
The second possibility sounds less plausible, but is in fact likelier.
In a pull chain, one vowel moves further away from another vowel. This makes the vowel system of the language seem somehow unnatural to learners: there’s a great big gap where that vowel used to be. So the next vowel moves up to take its place: it is pulled along by the first vowel. That in turn creates a new gap, and the next vowel along is pulled along to take the second vowel’s place.
In this scenario, mite stops being pronounced as [miːt], and starts being pronounced as [məit]. So now, you don’t have an [iː] vowel in English any more: the sequence goes [aː, ɛː, eː, əi]. To fix that gap, what used to be [eː] turns into [iː]: meet now shifts from [meːt] to [miːt]. And then meat [mɛːt] changes to [meːt], to address the absence of an [eː]. And then mate changes from [maːt] to [mɛːt], to make up for the absence of an [ɛː].
And now you’re missing an [aː] sound in English, but hey, what do you want from me. /ar/ has ended up addressing that gap, in any case.
It sounds a lot less sensible—people changing vowels not for some communicative need, but to fit some bizarre arrangement along a trapezoid that only linguists have heard of. But it does seem to fit the facts better.
For example, New Zealand English is having a merry old vowel chain shift of its own happening right now.
And where did it start? Why, with the vowel shift that is the most stereotypically associated with New Zuhluhnd Unglush. The other vowels that have shifted, you actually have to talk to Kiwis to be aware of.
And what is the vowel shuhft thet uz the most stereotuhpically essociated wuth New Zuhluhnd Unglush?
/i/ > /ɨ/.
Remember? mite stops being pronounced as [miːt], and starts being pronounced as [məit]. New Zealand English is doing the same chain shift, only with short vowels.
What can be most easily seen that change is constantly going on in a living language?
If you’re detecting change with your eyes: New vocabulary, then semantic shifts in existing words, then syntax — particularly syntax of individual words. fun became an adjective within my lifetime.
If you’re detecting change with your ears: all of the above, then maybe phonetics. But sound change is slower, socially and generationally stratified, and geographically uneven: most people don’t realise it even if they’re in the middle of it.
Pragmatics, phonology and morphology are much slower moving, though of course they change too.
What are the most fascinating things you’ve learned studying linguistics?
Me, personally?
That the same changes happen, again and again, from language to language to language. The same grammaticalisations; the same sound changes; the same semantic changes; the same syntactic changes; the same metaphors.
Which is little to do with Universal Grammar, and a lot to do with universals of cognition and articulation.
Is it possible to translate the word zori/zor/زور , that exists in Greek & Persian, with ONE English word?
From Nişanyan’s etymological dictionary of Turkish, and زور – Wiktionary , zor came into Turkish (and thence Greek) from Persian, not Arabic. And lots of languages either side of Persian and Turkish have picked it up.
A single word for all uses of ζόρι in Greek, that Dimitris Sotiropoulos lists in his answer? No, but “force” covers most of them.
From the Triantafyllidis dictionary:
Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής
- Application of relatively large amount of strength on something [force]
- Exercise of violence or pressure on someone, compulsion; typically in the expression “with the ~” (“by force”) [force]
- Of difficulties, inconvenience, which demand particularly intense effort. “The job has/needs much ~. I have great ~, I suffer much ~: I am under pressure”. [pressure, travails, difficulty]
The expression Dimitris brought up, “do you have a zori with me”, is not accounted for in that definition; the English equivalent is “do you have a problem with me? What’s your problem with me?”
If Konstantinos I of Greece had gone North to take Monastir in 1912, instead of going to Thessaloniki, would the Balkans be different?
Not a question I know much about, but let me take a stab, and see if someone more knowledgeable corrects me.
The Wikipedia article on Constantine I goes on to say:
The capture of Thessaloniki against Constantine’s whim proved a crucial achievement: the pacts of the Balkan League had provided that in the forthcoming war against the Ottoman Empire, the four Balkan allies would provisionally hold any ground they took from the Turks, without contest from the other allies. Once an armistice was declared, then facts on the ground would be the starting point of negotiations for the final drawing of the new borders in a forthcoming peace treaty. With the vital port firmly in Greek hands, all the other allies could hope for was a customs-free dock in the harbor.
In this scenario: Bulgaria takes Salonica, and Greece takes a good chunk of (FYRO) Macedonia. In real life, Bulgaria then went to war with Serbia and Greece in the Second Balkan War, dissatisfied with how much territory it had gotten, and Serbia thought that Bulgaria was reneging on the deal they had before the war on what would happen next.
Balkans after the First Balkan War. Bulgaria has gotten a lot bigger than it was later. In our scenario. Constantine I takes Monastir, and loses Salonique in the process.
Greeks having Monastir and not having Salonica spells even more trouble. I would surmise that the Second Balkan War becomes a three way war rather than a two way war. Any deal between Bulgaria and Serbia would be off. Serbia may well feel more of an imperative to protect the Southernmost Slavs, as Greece is now a lot closer to Skopje. Greece can’t be happy with Bulgarians in Salonica, especially as this likely means even more ethnic Greeks under Bulgarian control (Chalkidiki, as well as Eastern Rumelia).
In the ensuing free far all, Bulgaria is at less of a disadvantage: it may have retained Western Thrace, and it may even have ended up taking a big chunk of Vardarska Macedonia—which would end up with all of geographic Macedonia being Bulgarian.
I dunno. You tell me.
How would I go about making a Latin translator website?
Anon, I commend you on your initiative. I don’t commend you on your question topic tagging; hopefully you’ll get some responses better targeted than this now.
Learn Python.
Not because I have any love for Python. I’d be happy to chain Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum together: each other’s company would be punishment enough.
Learn Python, because Natural Language Toolkit.
Learn the Natural Language Toolkit.
Then get familiar with the techniques of Natural Language Processing. Which you can do via the Natural Language Toolkit. You’ll want to get into stemming. And lexical databases. And if you’re wanting to replicate what Google Translate does, statistical machine translation techniques.
By which time, you’ll have more targeted questions, which better informed individuals can help you out with.
How did certain words become homonyms?
Several ways. Dimitra Triantafyllidou has already answered; I’ll answer as well, a little more schematically, but it’s essentially the same answer.
- Sound mergers in the language. meet and meat used to be pronounced differently [meːt, mɛːt]; now they’re pronounced the same, [miːt].
- Sound un-mergers in the language—or at least, a spelling system out of sync with pronunciation. I read it now, I read it yesterday: same spelling, different pronunciations [ɹiːd, ɹɛd]. I’ll include here stress splits like désert (noun)/desért (verb).
- Borrowing into the language from two different origins; e.g. Dimitra’s example of tire, French and Germanic.
- Zero derivation: English can form verbs from nouns without adding any extra affixes. E.g. a book, to book.
- Semantic split (polysemy). What used to be a single word is now considered two different words, because of diverging meanings. Crane as in bird; crane as in machinery.
Could saying words one phoneme at a time have been a common practice before the invention of written language?
Neeraj Mathur is quite right: syllables, not letters. Some circumstantial evidence for this from Ancient Greek drama. When literacy was a very new thing, and the tools of grammatical analysis (such as words) were still not very popular. (https://www.quora.com/Could-sayi…):
the differentiation between utterance and word was newfangled with the Greek sophists. Aeschylus avoids Euripides’ new fangled distinction in Aristophanes’ Frogs, and sticks with the time-honoured epea, “utterances”—which could be as short as an ouch, and as long as the Iliad.
At the start of Aristophanes’ Knights, Nicias asks Demosthenes to keep repeating molōmen and auto really fast. That makes a pun: molōmen and auto “let’s go (to) it” turns into auto molōmen “let’s run away” (somewhat taboo; more taboo with the characters saying molōmen auto molōmen auto molōmen auto molōmen to the rhythm of jerking off). That displays an awareness of words being part of other words, but not of phonemes.
For “say it quickly”, Nicias says xyllabōn. In non-Attic, that’s syllabōn: “taking it together”. Something that you take together—like, say, a bunch of phonemes, or I’d say, a sound that you take together as a single quick unit—is a syllabē: a syllable.
And the old-timer Aeschylus, who did not want to know about Euripides’ newfangled words, does speak of syllables, and graphemes, and NOT phonemes. Seven Against Thebes, 468:
“This one, too, shouts in syllables of written letters (grammatōn en syllabais) that even Ares could not hurl him from the battlements.”
Letters in Greek are literally “written things”: grammata. You shout in syllables. Aeschylus knows that multiple grammata correspond to a syllable. But he hasn’t quite made the leap to one gramma corresponding to one phoneme—even though that’s why distinct letters exist to begin with. Even if you interpret syllabē as “bundle”, you don’t sound letters out separately.
Similarly, Greek had a word syllabizō for pronouncing the syllables of a word one by one, used by Plutarch. The corresponding word grammatizō, used by the grammarian Herodian, doesn’t mean pronouncing the phonemes of a word one by one: grammata are “written letters”, and grammatizō means “to spell”.
Plato, it’s fair to say, uses phōnē “sound” to refer to vowel sounds as distinct from consonants. So there was the beginnings of an awareness of phonemes in Greece; after all, their alphabet was phonemic. But my hunch is still that it would be Zer-kes’ vs Zer-ges’ new cave, not Z-e-r-k-e-s, that syllabising rather than phoneme-ing was the default.
Btw, in Modern Greek, syllabising combines with phoneme-by-phoneme spelling. The informal Greek alphabet is vowels, and consonants followed by /u/. So Zu-e-ru-ku-e-su (instead of Zeta Epsilon Rho Kappa Epsilon Sigma).
Why does the French language sound so different from the other Romance or Latin languages?
These answers are kinda converging. My answer is:
- What Brian Collins said—the vowel repertoire, plus the final consonants,
- and the nasals. There are nasals elsewhere, including Vulgar Latin; but the nasals are a huge part of the French stereotype. [hɔ̃.hɔ̃.hɔ̃]
- Grudgingly, I admit that the nasals are less critical than the other two. I hate both Portuguese and French because of the nasals; but noone confuses Portuguese and French.
I was reading some Old French out loud one day two decades ago, while doing my PhD. And I turned to my bolshie (literally) fellow PhD student, and commented “hey, Old French actually sounded quite nice”.
“Yeah,” he snarled. “Before it picked up all that froggie shit.”
aka: How French got all its Froggie Shit.
What does αέναη σοφία mean in Greek?
Yes, I’m going to have fun with this.
First: HAH! You’ve outed yourself as a Modern Greek speaker, Anon OP! In ancient Greek, that would be ἀέναος σοφία. Compound adjectives used the masculine ending for the feminine; and αέναη is what you get when noone you know has been aware of Greek vowel quantity for the past two millennia.
Yes, as Dimitra Triantafyllidou and Konstantinos Konstantinides have said, the adjective means “ever-flowing”, from ἀεί “always” and νάω “to flow”: first attested in Pindar and Herodotus. Used of rivers, lakes, the river Acheron (Are there any Greek towns built along the Acheron river in Greece?); and God bless, Aristophanes had to go and invert it, and use it of bogs and shit (Frogs 146).
Looking at the metaphorical uses of the adjective listed in LSJ. They started early: you have
- glory (Simonides, Heraclitus)
- honour (Pindar)
- power (Euripides)
- tables (Pindar, as a metonymy for hospitality)
- good words (Cratinus)
So use to refer to wisdom sounds entirely plausible. And in fact the phrase ἀέναος σοφία is used by several theologians:
- Philo, On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile §151: she went to the ever-flowing wisdom of God, τὴν ἀένναον τοῦ θεοῦ σοφίαν
- Also: the Epitaph of Pectorius (“ever-flowing waters of enriching wisdom”, Ὕδασιν ἀενάοις πλουτοδότου σοφίης); Diadochus “ever-flowing and completely true wisdom”; Macarius and Anastasius of Sinai “ever-flowing spring of wisdom”; Ecumenical Council of Ephesus “the seas of the ever-flowing knowledge and wisdom of Christ”.
So many instances still make the metaphor explicit, between ever-flowing water and perpetual wisdom; but the earliest instance in Philo doesn’t, and the metaphors with other abstractions, such as glory and power, were well established already.
So. We’ve established that ἀέναος σοφία for ever-flowing wisdom is an established expression. Now to Magister Michael Masiello’s query as to whether “ever-flowing” is the right rendering of “perpetual”.
Etymology is “ever-flowing”. The association with rivers and seas and springs is explicit throughout Byzantium. That’s not unchanging eternity, that’s continually renewing perpetuity. So yes, it is perpetual and not eternal.
Ink away. Philo himself wouldn’t approve the tat (Jewish Orthodoxy is funny about body markings); but his Greek does.