At the time of European invasion *cough* settlement, the guesstimate is 200. The guesstimate is based on poor data, since many were wiped out so quickly, and on Lexicostatistics — because we don’t have enough data to make a good linguistic assessment of what counts as a different language otherwise. We could of course ask […]
If you want emojis to be not just a bunch of nouns, but the basis of a full written language, with verbs and prepositions and pronouns—then you’re going to need to supplement emojis with some sort of grammatical sign system. They will end up looking a lot more like Blissymbols. Answered 2015-11-23 [Originally posted on […]
Yes and no, but in a different way from Andrew Baird’s answer. The lingua franca and administrative language was Greek. The Empire called itself Roman, but its scholars knew a lot about Ancient Greek and very little about Rome. The core of the Empire was Asia Minor, much of which was Greek-speaking until the Turkish […]
The future -b-, and for that matter the imperfect -b-, come from the Indo-European verb for “be”, bhu: The Latin Language. So amabo originally meant “I am to love”, and amabam “I was to love”. The process of words turning into grammatical affixes is called Grammaticalization. And one of the characteristics of grammaticalisation is that […]
The consequences of diglossia, which persist even if diglossia itself does not—including the trainwreck of Modern Greek phonology from all the spelling pronunciations from Ancient Greek, the lexical and morphological doublets, and the all-round linguistic insecurity. The survival of archaisms in Indo-European, including the middle voice (semantically), the vocative, and the three genders As Joachim […]
Agree with George Bekas, and one should always be wary of claims of genetic purity. But we do know anecdotally that: Its major town Gythium was a Spartan port They were very late converts to Christianity (10th century: Nikon the Metanoeite) Mani was a no-go area for certainly the Ottomans, and likely earlier invaders—so it’s […]
I don’t know the answer, but I will point out something the OP is aware of, but others may not. Like many artificial languages, Volapük underwent significant reform in 1931. I don’t know to what extent Volapük Nulik and Volapük Rigik are mutually intelligible, but if they aren’t, that’s just yet another instance of artificial […]
Artificial languages are where you’d look of course, and there are much simpler languages than Esperanto. Basic English was renowned for having a small vocab. My own favourite, with a comparably small vocab and a much tighter grammar, is Interglossa (as opposed to its revival Glosa). Natural semantic metalanguage has an extremely small number of […]
Roman alphabet digraphs were invented with the digraphs Latin used to represent Greek aspirated letters: <ch th ph>. So <ch> was available very very early on to languages using the Roman alphabet, to represent new sounds. Palatal sounds are notoriously unstable phonologically: once /k/ goes to [c] (as it did in late Latin), it can […]
The claim of Natural semantic metalanguage is that you can with around 60. It was a party trick of Australian linguistics undergrads to speak in NSM; it becomes very stilted very quickly, but in principle you can define a lot of notions with a limited vocabulary, as the asker alludes to. NSM is of course […]