h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There has been a great deal of argument here as to certain points:
one: is japanese an Isolate?
two: the influences that have been exercised on English, and the relations amongst germanic languages.
three: Whether or not there ARE isolates
In addition there have been a few misconceptions which I hope to clear up. I hope that I don't sound too full of myself here, but I actually am a linguist and I study these areas professionally, so I assure you I only sound huffy because it's something that I actually know about. I hope that the following will clear up some of the arguments, and misconceptions regarding these points.

One: Is Japanese an isolate.
There are many ideas around regarding how Japanese may be related to other languages, but at this point there has been no definitive proof for any such claims. Yes, there are some remarkable similarites between Japanese and Korean, but this can be attributed to universal linguistic tendencies coupled with cross contamination (and some of these similarities can even be attributed to coincidence.) The problem with claiming that these languages are related is that in order to make such a claim, one must show the existence of cognates (words that exist in one language that can be shown to be derived from the same root word as a word in another language.) Japanese and Korean appear to have no such relation. Even English and Hindi (which may have split apart as much as 5,000 years ago) have thousands of demonstratable cognates. Why then, with the remarkable similarities between the languages (Japanese and Korean) Why are there no demonstratable cognates? The answer is that they are probably not related, or are related very distantly at best. But the truth is that whether or not they are related is unlikely, but unknown. For now the general linguistic community considers Japanese an isolate.

Two: What are the influences of English? What are the relations within the Germanic language family.
I don't know why there have been so many comments in this forum on the Indo-European family, since the original post was on Japanese, but here's the deal:

The earliest language that we can reconstruct in this family is a language that we call Proto-Indo European. From this language came Indo-European. Indo-European gave birth to Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Illyrian, Tracian, Anatolian, and Tocharian. Of these you guys seem to be most focused on Germanic and Italic, so we'll limit ourselves to those.

Germanic was the original language that gave birth to English and German (as well as a dozen other languages.) English DID NOT COME FROM GERMAN. It came from West Germanic, which is considered a different language, but which also gave birth to German.

Italic is the language that eventually gave birth to the Romance languages (Latin,) Latin then gave birth to Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Rumanian, Sicilian, as well as others.

Very little influence over english came from Celtic sources (though there was definitely some influence) The majority of the changes that English has undergone came from two things: The occupation of England by France lead to our borrowing massive amounts of Lexicon, and morphological processes (the processes for building a word from another word, or a root word.) The other main reason for the change of English was natural linguistic evolution. The kind of thing that changes "No" into "Nah." German underwent a similar evolutionary process in a different direction, which is why the language is so different now. This is also the reason why French is considerd by some to be easier to learn (for English speakers) then German is. (Actually the Easiest language for English speakers to learn is probably Frisian, which is English's closest relative.)

Three: Are there actually Isolates?

The answer to this is unknown. It may be that all languages originated from a single language a couple of million years ago. It may be that language actually emerged a number of different times. What we refer to as Isolates today are not necessarily actually unrelated. (This point is unknown.) But we cannot show any relation between them and any other known language. In all likelyhood there IS a language out there (or once was) which could be shown to be related to Japanese. But it is either unknown, not studied thoroughly enough, or extinct. So, to this day Japanese IS considered an Isolate.

A few clarifications:

There seems to be a misconception with some of you that language follows a certain population. This CAN be true, but is not always. For instance the asian population of the orient speaks a number of unrelated languages. When the slaves came to america, they spoke dozens of different languages, and within a couple of generations were speaking the standard English of the time as a first language. Hindi (the largest language of India) originated with Sanskrit, a language probably spoken by the Aryan race. Language moves and evolves separate from the people who speak it. It has its own rules regarding how it spreads, and how it changes. People do not have to be genetically related for their languages to be genetically related, and vice versa. This is an important concept, because the people of Japan obviously didn't originate from nowhere, and in fact they probably ARE related genetically to the Koreans, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest this, but this DOES NOT mean that their languages are related.

All languages are phonetic. There may be a difference in their writing system, but their is no relation between the writing system of a people, and the actual language used. There are three basic kinds of writing systems: Ideographic- Like early hieroglyphs, or the Chinese alphabet, in which a single symbol represents a single word. Syllabic writing systems- like Japanese Hiragana, in which a single symbol represents a single syllable. and Alphabetic Writing systems, in which a single symbol represents a single Phoneme (a unit of linguistic sound.)

Anyway, that seems to be all the points that I've noticed here.

Well then 191482, I see we have another linguist in our midst. Excellent, someone to argue with! Nicely, of course. H2G2 isn't about point-scoring (well, theoretically) but about informing people. In which case, I won't take issue with any of what you've written above. Actually, it's mostly uncontroversial.

I've only managed to cobble together half an entry so far, on Spanish pronunciation. When I get some more time, I'll do more - perhaps we can collaborate on these?

Meanwhile, you should do something about the decoration here. It's looking a bit, well, sparse.

All the best
Jack Naples

Surely unless a particular language has been spoken specifically by only one TOTALLY insular group ( for example in Papua, or deep in the Amazon jungle)that has never had any contact with outsiders, there must be some kind of link to other languages? After all a language doesn't appear overnight. I find if difficult to believe a country like Japan would have had no contact at all to anyone speaking another language. The sheer size of Japan, even with it's legendary insularity, surely must result in some common ground? Ah, what the hell do I know, I should keep quiet when i'm drunk. Too Late!

What kind of Spanish, Jack?

I am interested in this project, because I spent a year in Madrid and speak Castellano with a Madrid accent (awful though it is. I lived in Champagne and picked up the accent there, too, which is not a good thing, but dropped it again later and went back more to the Parisian accent I had picked up earlier)

Anyway, I would like to teach my son the rudiments of Spanish as he is going to spend next year in Peru, and I would be particularly interested to know what to watch out for in regard to pronunciation. Vocabulary I will not touch. He'll have to pick that up for himself. Somehow I have a few Mexican usages at the back of my mind (from Speedy Gonzales?) but that seems to be far too large a field.

Can you post the A number of your entry?

Can I just throw in a red herring with the Dravidian languages here? Aren't they also "linguistic isolates" (great term, sounds so much like the kid at school that nobody wanted to play with!)? Incidentally, the Dravidian languages are those found in the southern parts of India and in Sri Lanka (including Tamil, Kanada, Telegu, Malayalam, etc. etc.). Oh and what about the Aboriginal languages of Australia -- aren't they isolates too?

minimeas