Linguistics

[Raw Evil]

what are your thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript?

This. :D

On a serious note, communication is an amazing thing. Coming from the perspective of a computer programmer, it is ridiculously difficult. Communication is basically the transfer of a thought from one person's mind to another's. This involves:

• Taking a completely arbitrary idea / statement / generic piece of information
• Thinking about and processing this data enough such that it becomes a series of linearly connected ideas (eg: sentence structure)
• Translating this into your spoken or written language, and sending this stream to the other party
• The other person then needs to decipher the linear structure you just presented to them, and convert it back into an interconnected web of ideas.

Getting a computer to do all this is hard work. That we humans can do it with such a minimum of effort is nothing short of astonishing.

 

[Belisarius]

RE the Voynich manuscript:
I don't think it's a modern hoax. I do think, however, that whoever wrote it had no idea that centuries later people would take it so seriously; I wouldn't be surprised if the author was--to use a favorite British slang--just "taking the piss". If not, then he probably only meant for him to understand.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

RE the Voynich manuscript:
I don't think it's a modern hoax. I do think, however, that whoever wrote it had no idea that centuries later people would take it so seriously; I wouldn't be surprised if the author was--to use a favorite British slang--just "taking the piss". If not, then he probably only meant for him to understand.

Yeah I've noticed recently scholarly types have folded their arms and proclaimed, 'It was an elaborate ancient hoax. Case closed.' While I think it's highly likely there's no real lexical content to be found in the Voynich Manuscript, I wonder why scholars are so quick to assume intentional deceit on the part of the original author. I think just as likely it could have been a work of outsider art, or a comedic parody of herbal encyclopedias from far off lands. It could also have been a voluminous example of sigil magic (personally my favorite explanation), in which case yes, as you said, it was really only meant to be be meaningful to one person.

I'm imagining armchair scholars centuries from now dissecting a document one of J.R.R. Tolkien's invented languages, with no idea that it was part of a work of fiction, and not meant to be understood by anyone.

 

[ControlDenied]

i like this subject a lot too. im studying russian currently. after that i might do a master's in linguistics or something related.

a big clue into the 'logic' of specific languages or groups of languages, is the type phonetical errors their native speakers make in other languages. for example, the way a greek would say "face" in english as opposed to a vietnamese or something. that would give a clue into how their language's logic limits them from learning the other perfectly. also study people who are perfectly multilingual - more than two languages, and all 3 or 4 perfectly equally well. see if their world is different. (obviously, to be like that you would have to know all those tongues from birth or infanthood

 

[ebola?]

Since (a potentially infinite amount of) new words are created by manipulating already-established roots, if something absolutely cannot be represented by an already-existing root, it would be very difficult to include it in the language in such a way that it obeys the grammatical rules of words formed by roots.

Interesting. I would say that English is likely less systemically elaborated in this respect, hence more lax rules for borrowing.

As such, for the most part, these words are incorporated as loan words (so an "Arabized" word "computer" is instead used). But because of their rootless nature, they are frozen and are not very flexible for grammatical manipulation.

Good eg, w/ "computer". So how common is it that a borrowed term becomes 'Arabic-ized', transmuted enough that it can accept the morphological modifications that you'd use to derive from Arabic roots?

In a way, one can say that Semitic languages (Arabic in particular) are ossified and incapable of integrating paradigm shifts. That said, I do not know what the trouble is in creating an entirely new trilateral root to express new concepts, but then again I am hardly an expert on Arabic Grammar - a subject so deep that "Grammarian" is actually still a scholarly title under which Ph.D. theses are still produced.

okay. so my question was anticipated.

Basically, one requires hardly a high-school proficiency in Classical Arabic to read a newspaper, and therefore almost all (even the educated) of Arabic speakers are only at that level at best, since the colloquial Arabic of a given area (generally mutually-unintelligible with the Classical and therefore strictly-speaking another language altogether) usually suffices for daily communication.

Yes...yet all would likely possess native-level proficiency with the language, and thus invoke what we're talking about, not necessarily with conscious awareness of the governing rules, kind of like language works everywhere.

p.s. Re: your question about "what", "how", and "that" - the answer will differ depending on whether you're looking for a prescriptive or a descriptive answer - the former the realm of grammarians, the latter of linguists.

Descriptively, for sure. I tend to find prescriptive grammar to be short-sighted, inapplicable, and/or boring.

ebola

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

Jamshyd, your description of Arabic reminds me a lot of Chinese. Classical Chinese is dead as a spoken language, except amongst some stuffy academics. There are 14 Chinese regional languages, all derived from classical Chinese and so not far from each other, but none of them mutually intelligible. Each one has numerous, HUNDREDS, of local dialects, many of THEM mutually unintelligible. Except for Classical Chinese and Mandarin (and in some places Cantonese), Chinese languages are all oral only -- they are never written in. Writing is done in Mandarin or a simplified derivative of Classical Chinese (as in many newspapers). Can this also be said about the geography of Arabic?

I'm not sure how many distinct consonants Arabic uses, but that number to the third power would then represent the number of building blocks of meaning that Arabic could have to work with. That number to the fourth power, if each word has two units of meaning, would be the number of words expressing a distinct idea. That sounds like a lot, but really isn't necessarily, especially if the base number of consonants is low, and you consider how many new scientific and technical words there are being coined nowadays.

Chinese seems to have avoided this problem by having a large number of meaning units to choose from (in the ballpark of 10k Chinese characters in current use, with 3k of them being common). Modern Mandarin also has a pretty wide array of spoken phonemes to choose from. Therefore, like Arabic, Chinese strongly prefers calques to spoken word loans, but doesn't seem to suffer as much for it, in terms of science and technology.

 

[Jamshyd]

Bumping to avoid prune.

(And expect a reply from me soon )

 

[panic in paradise]

after reading through this thread, the thought of a couple Lithographic maps sound amazing,
especially as paintings...
;-)

linguistics have taken a place in my life, in ways taken over my thoughts of medicine, physiology and psychology -- a grand and humbling insight.
i saw JF seemed to of been touching on the dialect theory of Saharan/Basque;
does anyone have any experience or expansion (antidotal or otherwise) to share on this "subject"?

i have been naively, but seriously with nothing to lose, ;-)
interested in most likely considering Akkadian, to a degree; i only say this because i have an understanding with my confidence.


this language, Akkadian, with respects to the Bibliotheca Orientalis, to read and write with more truth or entailment, and for utter fascinations sake as to how winding and beautiful it appears the more i read - it bothers me to think that this has always been there, and i hadnt noticed, to consider to learn more earlier.
though, i am still happy to be saying this now.

bellow in an excerpt of mind twisting relevance/association for myself, being new to this - but is a Key of interest for me. timelessly interesting the thought of our existence being erased from lack of word, communication, or symbolism:

In Genesis 11:7 were are told: "Come, let us confuse their language that they may no longer understand one another's speech"

... any comments?

 

[Jamshyd]

^ Why not start now?

http://books.google.com/books?id=E4QP2wKp-NIC

This is a standard textbook for the Akkadian courses that I've seen on more than one university's reading list. I probably have an electronic copy somewhere if you find the above as interesting as you believe it to be.

And btw, could you please explain in more concrete terms? Are you saying that Akkadian is superior because it is old?

 

[panic in paradise]

Akkadian is close to superior, heh, a 'Key' of the tongue & mind.

understanding Akkadian, one has some understanding of the Sumerian language, and an understanding of other old languages; their culture in their words which came to shape our words and culture. in creative terms, it is astounding, to me, the Grammatical flow of thought, the proof of words spoken as they are, the Phonemes & standardizing(?) of Fricatives...

thank you for the link, i have been looking around, soaking it in before making any commitment. i cant think of any reason not to, and feel behind...
im not trusting my computer, so ill probably be buying the book.
t/y again though.


Edit:
alright, i read the Introductory to "The Intro. to Akkadian", and skipped around some lessons, then found it on amazon, as well as; " A Grammar of Akkadian / By John Huehnergard (Harvard Semitic Studies) " & its "Key" companion which should both come later. "The Introduction To Akkadian" Text-Book, and a soft-ware version to print out sections would probably be the best route at first.

the way "TIA" is written i can follow, visualize and absorb, until i try and start thinking and rationalizing... i havent tried memorizing anything, just feeling out my ability to comprehend, per say. so with this book and over-time with tenacity, imagining this as only a first; seems most of the language will just make sense eventually.

when i do order, im going to get a couple of poetry books shown w/o Cuniform (for now), in Akkadian with their English translations.
--------
one or two,, yeah...

~;-)

 

[purple_cloud]

Akkadian is close to superior, heh, a 'Key' of the tongue & mind.

understanding Akkadian, one has some understanding of the Sumerian language, and an understanding of other old languages; their culture in their words which came to shape our words and culture. in creative terms, it is astounding, to me, the Grammatical flow of thought, the proof of words spoken as they are, the Phonemes & standardizing(?) of Fricatives...

Before I start running my mouth about this, Semitic languages are FAR from my specialty, although I do know a little about them.

Akkadian is interesting in that it's the first attested Semitic language...historical linguists still reconstruct a Proto-Semitic using phonemes from Arabic and Hebrew as well. I totally disagree with calling it anywhere near "close to superior" however, since well, how about Proto Indo-European? If I remember correctly, it's estimated that PIE (which, clearly, is reconstructed so not really attested) was used around 3600 BC or so, and some of it's descendants, even "newer" attested languages like English and Latin, as well as many others, have held "lingua franca" positions, so that alone is not enough to make a language superior.

I don't know an awful lot about the Afro-Asiatic family, but you mention the "standardizing of fricatives" which, it seems, they just all sort of assimilated to eventually. Also, I believe it still has the velar/uvular voiceless fricative [x] in addition to , both of which exist in Modern Arabic and Hebrew as well. I think fricatives in Proto/dead languages just tend to be a good place for linguists to argue about such things...I know I have a hard time hearing smaller differences (is that alveolar? palato-alveolar? palatal?) with the sibilants compared to the obstruents, so this alone probably causes some speculation.

Oh, and you also say "the proof of words spoken as they are"...as far as I know, reconstructing stress patterns, or even figuring them out for languages that have died long ago, sometimes isn't possible. The little I know of Akkadian, no one has any clue whatsoever of the stress patterns and intonation, thus our knowledge of it's prosody is limited, if there is any at all.

So PiP, can you tell me what you mean a little more by "standardizing"? I feel like Semitic languages are Jamshyd's thing, when I'm more about Indo-European, so I hope my basic knowledge isn't stepping on any toes here.

 

[panic in paradise]

when i said "close to" i meant being a link to Early Semitic, the languages which grew from it, and the Akkadian literature.

with Fricatives, i believe that was early Semitic, as '[]'. *THeSe[] aND[][] where taken and developed in to a more widely spoken dialect; this is what i mean by "standardizing" -from what little ive learned.

"the proof of words spoken as they are" -is very important in their poetry.

i sound pretty simple here lmao!
but im loving it.
:D
even their punctuation...

trying to decide if i wanted to see how much Ancient Greek i could absorb, Akkadian seemed of more relevance to me.
some one explain this, i want to hear more also- lol.

~;-)

 

[Jamshyd]

Can this also be said about the geography of Arabic?

Better late than never

I would say yes - very much so, except the variety isn't as big as it seems with China - ie. Northern and Southern (to simplify) Syrians understand each other (and other Levantine people) just fine despite the very obvious differences, but might have a difficult time understanding Omanis, and will probably not understand Tunisians at all. But all of these can read and equally understand MSA, assuming they are literate.

I'm not sure how many distinct consonants Arabic uses, but that number to the third power would then represent the number of building blocks of meaning that Arabic could have to work with. That number to the fourth power, if each word has two units of meaning, would be the number of words expressing a distinct idea. That sounds like a lot, but really isn't necessarily, especially if the base number of consonants is low, and you consider how many new scientific and technical words there are being coined nowadays.

Chinese seems to have avoided this problem by having a large number of meaning units to choose from (in the ballpark of 10k Chinese characters in current use, with 3k of them being common). Modern Mandarin also has a pretty wide array of spoken phonemes to choose from. Therefore, like Arabic, Chinese strongly prefers calques to spoken word loans, but doesn't seem to suffer as much for it, in terms of science and technology.

Indeed, hence why the average person's understanding of MSA (that is not to mention of Classical Arabic) is capped at the bare-minimum. It isn't necessary today, but in the more liberated times of Medieval Islamdom, such subtlety of meaning was developed and elaborated so as to accommodate the level of metaphysical and aesthetic discourse generated by learned people - today it is all about progress, no one has time to sit around and challenge you by repeating what you said with increasingly-delicate levels of linguistic sophistication

 

[Jamshyd]

Purple: You give me too much credit, my dear .

But to answer with what I know of Akkadian: To my very limited Knowledge, Akkadian's classification is indeed contested and interesting in that, in the course of its evolution, it seems to have started out as, then left the "Mesopotamian: other ()" grouping (e.g. Babylonian), and ended in being distinctively semitic, reflecting the period of semitic migrations into Mesopotamia. The one (outdated) source I have at hand appears to support this.

 

[panic in paradise]

heh -
ordering "Introduction to Akkadian" tonight.
plus a couple cheap little Babylonian poetry books,
with Akkadian and english translation i hopes.

... and my own copy of Ovids Metamorphoses.

anyone familiar with Saharan/Basque??
reading about this, is near too much. worth it though.

 

[purple_cloud]

... and my own copy of Ovids Metamorphoses.

I heavily support this... I Ovid quite a lot...if you're into some very explicit Latin poetry, give some Catullus a try. Depending on the translation, quite a bit can get lost, but the same goes for Ovid...reading the original Latin is much more fun (for me, anyway). I would recommend the Sisson (I think I'm spelling that right?) translation book for Catullus poetry...I think he does best at keeping the original Latin meaning through the use of English, compared to the several other translation books I've read/own.

@Jamshyd: I didn't do TOO bad with my discussion of Akkadian, did I? I don't think I give ya too much credit...you're the resident linguist of Semitic languages here

 

[panic in paradise]

^
The Art Of Love.?

thats is for maybe next go a round, i left hisMetamorphoses at the Library today.
and found a new big fat copy for under $4, four dollars,,, okay!.
lol.

"The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation (Penguin Classics) luv penguin reading them now by Andrew George"
_________________________________________
"The Babylonian version has been known for over a century, but linguists are still deciphering new fragments in Akkadian and Sumerian. Andrew George’s gripping translation brilliantly combines these into a fluent narrative and will long rank as the definitive English Gilgamesh."
-Penguin Book
this is something i can not wait to start reading; i dont want to try and hurry trough Ovid though.
cant be done.

--
im needing to get an old LapTop, so Intro. Akkadian ill read with a DL, and print out lessons, and pertinent chapters, like the cuneiform system. im thinking i might be able to do something with tracking paper to help with that, if i feel the need.

can you take a shot at Saharan/Basque p_c?!?
hahah.

 

[purple_cloud]

can you take a shot at Saharan/Basque p_c?!?
hahah.

At Saharan, definitely not...all I know is that they are part of the controversial Nilo-Saharan language family and spoken in Africa.

Basque, I know a little about...it's spoken in the France/Spain area, which is surrounded and full of Indo-European languages...but Basque is a language isolate. There is speculation that the language existed in Western Europe before Indo-European seemingly took over the area. I don't know much about the actual language itself, other than that it's ergative-absolutive (subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are both in the same case, the absolutive, with the subject in the ergative case). The only reason I even know this about it's case system/agreement is because when I took a Typology course, I struggled with trying to understand erg-abs languages, and distinctly remember it coming up as an example. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone knows too much more about Basque...it's one of those mysterious languages with a lot more speculation than actual facts about it.

 

[panic in paradise]

hehe
thanks...
mysterious indeed, and even more so the more its talked about.




harmlessly purely mind-boggling.

 

[purple_cloud]

Just for fun, an interesting website for linguistically curious minds: http://www.ethnologue.com/. Good place to get facts about languages, and it's put together by the SIL...yes, they are missionaries, but whether you agree with their cause or not, they are damn good linguists. Plus, who the hell wants to go around rewriting the bible in every language they can? Certainly not me, but it's valuable, so I'm glad someone is doing it.

Another good site is www.omniglot.com which has interesting information on writing systems...PiP, you might find that one of personal interest, actually. Just figured I'd toss these websites out there, since it's the Linguistics thread, after all