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

A few years ago National Geographic reported that the origens of the Japanese language had been found with a fair degree of certainty. They went through a fairly lengthy analysis to explain how came in to being and why it appears to be an isolate. At one time there was a land bridge between the continent and Japan (don't try to pin me down on the time because I don't remember). Several waves of settlers crossed the bridge, bringing the language with them of course. Geography changed, stranding these settlers on Japan. Actually they were probably not all that stranded, even then boat building technology was probably sufficient that they could travel to the mainland fairly easily, but still, the disappearance of the land bridge did isolate them more than before.

Although they deny it vehemently, the ancestors of the Japanese were Korean. The reason the two languages bear no resemblance to one another is that the dominant entity in Korea enforced the language that they knew best of the many that were spoken in the country. When a new group overthrew the old government, they often enforced a language from a different area of Korea. The language that became Japanese was the predominant language in Korea when Japan was settled but since then changing politics has brought a different Korean dialect/language into dominance and the language that became Japanese died out (or perhaps was eradicated), except in Japan.

If you want more information on this look for the article in National Geographic I think it appeared in 1998 or 1999, but could have been earlier.

A couple of years ago (more?), Atlantic Monthly magazine published a fantastic article on linguistics - I can't find my copy anywhere, but the cover had - among other things - the picture of a mouth with a 'talk balloon' saying "Tik". The gist of the article was that Russian linguists had used the triangulation method of determining ancestral languages to reduce all known languages into eight basic families. These fanned out from the Olduvai area of Africa. (An important corollary to this is that language only rose ONCE among humans, not several times in several places.)

Triangulation is a method by which (at least) three known languages which appear related, are compared in order to derive the original common ancestor language. Best known of these is Indo-European, which is nowhere spoken nowadays but which has been hypothosized by taking its descendant languages and 'triangulating' them back to the original invoking known patterns of language shifts. For instance, when English derived from its antecedent Germanic languages 'v' usually moved to 'f', but never the reverse - that is, 'f' never became 'v' (vater to father). Each current language has these kinds of consonant and vowel shifts - another example is the Hebrew 'sh' which is usually found in Arabic as 's': shalom v. salaam (meaning 'peace' - there's a larf!) or Rosh Hashonna v. Ras as-sana meaning 'head of the year' or 'new year'. Thus to determine the original Indo-European word for 'father', one takes three descendant languages and removes the changes. Easy examples to determine the Latin form of 'father' would be to take 'pere' from French, 'padre' from Spanish and a third example from Romanian, Italian or Portuguese - knowing that in Spanish 'T' became 'd' and 'er' became 're'; and in French 'ter' dropped the 'T' altogether and reduced the word to a single syllable. Thus 'pater'. This is over-simplified, but, I hope, explains the principle.

Western linguists maintained that one could only go back so far, but their Russian counterparts then took the derived languages and triangulated THEM back to prior common ancestors. Using the hypothesis of the eight basic families, which the Russians concluded were the actual number that still had living descendants (half of which are spoken only in Africa, such as the 'click' language family), I believe it was determined that there are actually NO true isolates, but that Basque has a relation to ASIAN languages, not European ones, and that Japanese has relation to Indo-European, rather than Asian languages. The American Indian languages appear to indicate three waves of invasion or immigration: an Asian language-speaking group which cover the entire area from the Canadian-USA border to Tierra del Fuego, a Japanese - Indo-European speaking group found in much of Canada, and then another Asian wave in Alaska and northen Canada. So-called 'Isolates' were small enclaves of language completely cut off from very distant relatives and thus no one had thought to make the connection previously (e.g. Basque and Asia). Russian work which DID have a political intent was pooh-poohed by the West and largely discredited until - mirabile dictu! - the science of genetically comparing people by taking blood samples and measuring the number of differences (people evolve at a constant rate of mutation* - so you can tell how closely two groups are related by how many genetic differences there are between them). It turned out that Russian prediction of language closeness was very closely matched by the genetic 'distance' between people speaking those languages.

I regret that I cannot credit the author of this article by name because I can not find the magazine issue, but most of this info is taken from that issue of Atlantic. I will give the author's name when I can find the article. The concept of triangulation was taught me by my former co-worker Connie when we had one of many slow moments at our jobs at City Hall in San Francisco. I also do not recall the contents of any subsequent letters to the magazine on the article, and so can not say how many people disagreed with the information found there. It was by far the most interesting article that I recall reading anywhere.

* It must be noted, that BY LAW, an exception to this mutation is found in the USA state of Kansas, where, BY LAW, no one has evolved at all, and the inhabitants thereof presumably can be found in the treetops - if trees there are, grooming each other for body lice and other interesting parasites. That evolution has bypassed Kansas is evidenced by the voting patterns therein, and was noted as early as 1939 by the makers of "Wizard of Oz" who filmed only the Kansan scenes in black and white, indicating that the ability to distinguish colors had not yet arrived in the state. Indeed, during the Cold War era, any inhabitants thereof showing signs of evolved intelligence were termed 'Red' or 'Pinko', the latter an unevolved form of the word for the color 'Pink'.

Good to know we're not in Kansas any more.

I think I need more info on that German [v] to English [f] thing. I always thought it was just an orthographic thing.

I heard that the Japanese are actually a mixture mostly of Korean, Malaysian, and the Ainu people of Japan who were the original settlers of the area. I believe I got this info from an encyclopedia. From observing a few things about the transliteration of African languages into the character set used in English, I noticed a couple of paralells between some West-African languages and Japanese. That is, in Japanese, vowels can exist independently of consonants, and all consonants (apart from N and M, which are a minor exception) must be immediately followed by a vowel, and indeed in the two phoenetic Japanese lettering systems (hiragana and katakana) they are written with one character to each consonant-vowel pair. Usually, to teach Japanese to English speaking people, they make the letters into a chart, with the vowels A I U E O across the top and the consonants that pair with them to the left side. Then, by following the chart you come to the character for the sound. In the African languages I have seen charted, there were no characters, but the sounds were arranged thus:

ka ke ki ku ko
na ne ni nu no

and so on. I think this could be nothing more a coincidence, but I thought it might be worthy of note, and that some of you might find it interesting.

No, no, it certainly isn't just an orthographic thing. I happen to be German, and their are loads of words in the Englih language that derive from German. Just look at the most basic words like: "Mutter" = mother, "Vater" = father or "Wasser" = water.
As far as I know, English resembles an early state of German. You can see that in words like "window", which translates as "Windauge" meaning wind-eye.

methos

Of course German and English are similar. They're extremely similar, because English is almost directly derived from German. If you take German, then push it toward Latin a bit, plus a bit of strong Celtic influence (If you've studied the languages, you know it's there) you get English. Dutch is also derived from German, but it's not quite as much of a jump, and has more Scandinavian than Latin influences, I think. That's a guess. But yes, English and German can be looked at as nearly identical in sentance structure, and in the tendancy to make compound words (although German does it much more often), plus the makeup of the words themselves. An English speaker would find it much easier to learn German than Latin, I'd say (once you get past all that definite article and noun declension crap...).

English inherited from the Celtic languages the lack of tendancy of verbs to conjugate, I believe. We pretty much have no conjugations of our words. Plus, as in the Celtic languages, the root of any verb is the second-person imperative form. The verb "need", for example. "Need," would be the command. I need, you need, he she it needs, we need, you need, they need. All the same, except for third person singular. I/you/hesheit/we/you/they needed. All the same. Will need, is needing... verbs just don't like to conjugate in English, and they don't in the Celtic languages. I've not seen another language with that strong of a lack of conjugation.

However, the German sentance structure - where the verbs are in relation to the nouns, and perhaps adjectives, my memory is getting foggy - is quite similar to English. Plus, most of our words are German.

I'm really tired. Much of that may have sounded as though I were babbling.

~Sirona

crap? Hey...!

No, I guess, german must be a bit hard to learn. Fortunateley it is my mother tongue, so I don't have that problem.

But I don't really think that German and English work similar in sentence structure, do they? In my experience - as a german learning English - the English sentence structure is the most difficult thing to learn about that language. Where to put which word....

Methos

I think it varies from person to person. However, I couldn't be sure about English, because I'm a native speaker, but I've found the Celtic languages a bit difficult - if you have a feel for it, though, the sentence structure can become an instinct.

~Sirona

Of course, you get a feeling for a language. At least I hope so. It seems to take a while with me and mongolian, but...

So, you do know Celtic? Cool!

methos

I don't speak any of the languages fluently. I started with Scots' Gaelic, learned a bit of that, then moved over to Irish, because my boyfriend's mother speaks it. Then I added Welsh to that, and I can say a few things. I find Welsh to be the easiest one out of any of them, mostly because it's basically a phonetic language. The Gaelics most definitely are not.

Is mongolian stemmed from proto-indo-european? Eastern languages are tough, I haven't even started with them. I'm trying to become proficient in a few western languages before I make that jump. I'm only fluent in English and Spanish, but I know bits of German, Italian, French, and Esperanto.

~Sirona

Esperanto? Cool! All i know about that one is that it exists and that it is an artificial language. But I never heard a word of it. So what it is like?

Yep, Mongolian is really, really difficult to learn. It just works totally different from any European language I know. Mongolian belongs to the family of the Altaic languages which consists mostly of the mongoloian languages.

What is proto-indo-european?

Methos

Mother is common to all of the Indo-European language groups. Even in Sanskrit where it's Mather.

Indo-European is the huge language group that includes almost every single Western language that's not an isolate. It spawned Latin, Celtic, German, Sanskrit, and quite a few others, I believe, which each spawned their own languages.

Altaic, eh? I need to do some more research on language grouping. I find linguistic typography one of the coolest things in the whole world. Sentance structure has never been a problem for me, really. I mean, most of the Latin languages are the same, so learning Spanish gave me the others. German sentance structure confuses me a little, because I haven't looked into it as much. It's the whole compound word thing that makes me wonder about it. But it doesn't seem too difficult. I haven't actually started making many German sentances, but I can understand a few. Oh, I can say "Ich spiele klavier" and "Ich bin lernen deutsch", but nothing beyond that, really. I'm afraid to touch on definite articles, in fact. They scare me.

In the Celtic languages, the sentance structure's a little confusing because all their prepositions are insane. They don't have a verb for "to have" in the Gaelics, so you use a preposition that sort of conjugates (I don't know the word for the way a preposition changes) based on the object of the preposition. You would say "at me."
Ta/ an doras agam = Is the door at-me = The door is mine.
Ta/ doras agam = Is a door at-me = I have a door.
Sentance structure never really snagged me much in any language, but I gain a feel for that very easily.

~Sirona

Well, when I started learning English, sentence structure wasn't a problem. I think... It was a few years ago, so I don't remember that much... Oh, but the first word I've ever written in English was "pencil". In the moment I wrote it down, I thought, you have to remember that this was your first word - and I did!

In Mongolian there is no word for to have either. You either say "I am with something" or "Me (in dative) is something". Oh, and the real word order would be: "I something-with am" But, you know, in Mongolian verbs aren't conjugated... It really is totally different from German or English.

Definite articles, huh? Well, I can imagine they must be scary. Fortunately, German is my native language.

Methos

Do the verbs alter with tense, if they're not conjugated? The conjugation in English is relatively limited, I've found. A regular verb only has three or four basic variations. Jump, for example. You have jump, jumps, jumping and jumped. Of course, the different tenses are indicated by the necessary pronoun, and the context. After knowing Spanish, it was hard for me to adjust to using subject pronouns.

~Sirona

Yep, the verbs in Mongolian altre with tense. And there are many, many tenses. I can tell you... Then there are infixes which mean that two persons doing something against eachother or with eachother or...

The Mongolian language uses nearly no adverbs, so what we tell with adverbs the mongolians do with suffixes on/ at (?) their verbs...

The Mongolian verbs really make up for the fact that they don't conjugate, I can tell you!

methos

Ouch. I think I'm most definitely avoiding Eastern languages for awhile. Too unfamiliar.

Anyone know a good way to get started with Welsh?

~Rona

Unfortunately, I don't know a single thing about Welsh.

But you shouldn't avoid all Eastern languages just because Mongolian happens to be really mean. Like I said, Mongolian is not connected to Chinese at all for example. And I heard, that the Chinese grammar isn't that heard. You just have to manage remembering all those words and pronouncing them right so that you're not laughed at...

Methos

Well, I'm avoiding them for now. I think, once I get a good hold on French, Welsh, German, and Gaelic, *then* I can worry about Japanese and Korean and Mongolian and Chinese...

Is written Mongolian phonetic? What sorts of characters does it use? Gaelic and French aren't, but Welsh and German are, which makes them much easier to study. Plus, they use the same characters (for the most part) that English does. (German has umlauts and those nifty ß things... Gaelic adds dots over some of the letters in the proper way of writing it, but the accepted way is to add an h after the letters instead, Welsh has letters with circumflexes, and God knows French has some insane accents...)

~Sirona

Mongolian uses the cyrillic alphabet. They choose to do so in the 1930'ies when they finally noticed that their old language - the mongolian script - wasn't working anymore. You see, that script writes the words in forms used in the 12th century.
While the cyrillic alphabet enables you to write Mongolian like you pronounce it, you have actually to learn how to write a word in the old script. For example: The word "aaw" means "father" in Mongolian. In the old script you have to write "abu"...
That's interesting to study the language of the 12th century, but it's very impracticle for everyday use... Although at the moment the Mongolians think about using the old script again. Probably because they don't want to use the cyrillic one anymore after getting rid of the socialism and all...

Methos