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

yeah, my little weakness
sorry, but it will happen again, I'm afraid, just can't remember the correct spellings with double r, d, etc.
( Canicula, you've heard this before...)

The benefits of back reading!

'plethora'

Is it 'there is a plethora of..' or 'there are a plethora of..'?

The former sounds better to my ear, but I wonder!

No, it's not plural. It's Greek not Latin.

Originally (Oxford English Dictionary) a pathology term for a morbid condition involving a swelling containing an accumulation of blood or other bodily fluid.
Plethory was the word used initially for what we now expect of plethora - a great colletion of whatever.

>.. there does seem to be a blurring and shortening that happens in some words.. <<


Yes. That is where I was heading. First by making everyone conscious of our tendency to insert vowels between pairs of consonants. Like 'Puh-leaze', 'aberupt', 'disteract', etc. I'm sure you're all thinking about them now and maybe willing to agree that this is really happening.

Anyway, my point was going to be that you are now seeing the thin edge of a much larger wedge, the tendency to expand vowel sounds and reduce or eliminate consonants altogether.

The old northern european languages came from tribal dialects that survived the Ice Ages. They are full of cold, harsh, high-impact consonants that can be spit out explosively with a minimum of vowel openness. This is an effect of a cold harsh climate and is common to English, German and the Scandanavian tongues.

Modern English is a mish-mash and a survivor of several hard and brutal, primitive dialects that have since been marinated in a stew of open vowel wallowing brought from the warmer climes of the Mediterranean where building a cloud of frozen breath over your face is not a serious social concern when speaking.

You may have noticed that most of the polynesian and many ancient oriental languages seem to be a singsong of vowel sounds with few consonant interuptions. With but a few dramatic consonant stops they are a melody of ahs, ees, and oos.

I believe that English is heading the same way. As the language gets older (and the climate gets warmer) we are wearing off the sharp corners and pointy bits of 'K', 'P', 'T', 'G', 'B', etc...

There used to be only 5 vowels. A, e, i, o & u.
Then somebody noticed that Y was a 'sometimes' vowel.
And then 'W' and 'H' started softening up so much they could be more melody than percussion, more legato than staccato.

It is interesting to note (and only for reasons of linguistic discovery) that in America, Afro-Americans have developed some dialects of English that preview a vowel-intensive and consonant-purged form of English. The consonant 'G' is totally omitted from words like 'going' for example; so that "I am going" is said as "Imo" in a sentence like "Imo torsh de naybhood."

You can also see that the 'ch' in torch is softened to a 'SH' and 'neighbourhood' is reduced to 'naybhood' or sometimes even 'hood'.
Because rhythm is important to a melodious vowel language the 'nay' sound is required in this example to allow the whole sentence to scan: "Imo TORshda NAYbhood."

Sci-Fi programs like 'Firefly' and 'BladeRunner' have suggested that some sort of Chinese will be mixed into future-English. More likely the writers were aware at some level that English is becoming 'like Chinese' (or any other ancient warmer climate language), a rapid-fire series of intoned and maleable vowels, sparesly punctuated by a minimum of consonant stops.

I case my rest.
peace
jwf

Oi!
Shift that case off my keyboard!

"And then 'W' and 'H' started softening up so much they could be more melody than percussion, more legato than staccato. "

Just a moment.
It is sometimes claimed that Welsh is one of the oldest surviving languages (challenged by the Basque EUSKARA). It has existed in a pretty miserable climate (with people to match ) but has "W" as a vowel.

jwf, what a wonderful theory! Not much basis in fact, though. The vowel-oriented languages and the consonant-oriented languages seem to be evenly spread around the world. Arabic and other Semitic languages are very consonant-centred - Egyptians I have spoken to can't even agree on what the vowel sound in their name for Egypt is : Masr, Misr or Mesr. They all agree on the consonants, though. The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, all of them consonants.

The languages of the Kalahari include the "click consonant", the "tongue smack consonant" and the "lip pop" consonant. And all of these from a hot country.

---------------------

I'd dispute the fact that Welsh is the oldest language in the world. Welsh has changed enormously over the years, so it is not really the same language as it was. You might as well say that Italian is the oldest, since the Romans were speaking a form of it in 500 BC. Or that English is, because the original Angles and Saxons spoke a version of it at about the same time in Northern Germany. Claims that Euskara (Basque) is the oldest are crazy, because Euskara was only first written down in the 17th or 18th Century, so there is no evidence whatsoever as to how old it is.

Hebrew has no vowels either. It - and also Arabic - are like Pitman's shorthand in theory.

I loved the theory though, too.

And I would stick my neck out and maintain that this elongation and dipthongation of vowels is more an Americanism (geographical) than Britishism. Only slightly, but nonetheless.

Got me theories muddled up. I wanted to say that I liked ~jwf~'s hypothesis that warm weather allows you to keep your mouth open longer.

What about flies and mosquitos?

Flies and mosquitoes keep their mouths open longer, too.

Gnomon,

"Claims that Euskara (Basque) is the oldest are crazy, because Euskara was only first written down in the 17th or 18th Century, so there is no evidence whatsoever as to how old it is."

Oh, I say!
That's a sort of "When did you stop beating your wife?" thing.
Are you selling the idea that it was an Esperanto type revelation?
If you find a language that has no apparent ancestors, should you not consider the possibility that *that* language is as old as the ancestors of other languages.

"Hebrew has no vowels either. "

Hmmm, the precursor of txtspk?
*goes off to scour bible for references to mobile phones*


p.s. I take it the plethora thing should be 'is' then?

Plaguesville, I don't understand your objection. Either the Basque people speak the same language as their ancestors did 2000 years ago, in which case the language is 2000 years old, or they don't because the language has changed over the intervening years, in which case the language may be only a few hundred years old. We have no way of knowing, because the original language from which present-day Basque descended was never written down.

Yep, that's it.

You had dismissed, as "crazy", the claim of oldest.
Either the language was created at the time of the earliest writing, or it existed before. Unless the first text is "a verb is a doing word" then it is the latter.
I gather that there is no evidence of an antecedent so it has a good claim. One that is unlikely to be substantiated, but a claim, nonetheless.

Lurking, backreading, gazing in awe...

skeeters as vowel stretching factor! Oh boy.

Plaguesville, every one of us is speaking a language which is a direct descendant of the original language which people spoke when they left Africa. So we're all speaking the oldest language in that sense.

Basque's claim to be the oldest language is that it has remained unchanged for longer than any other. This is something that we can't comment on, since there is absolutely no evidence.

*completely out of my depth but having a go anyway*

I thought that the research of languages which were not written down was based on similarities and commonalities and that one of the reasons for those languages being thought to be so old is that they have within them constructs or portions nowadays which are recognised as having come from, or developed along with those identified in other older languages.

Does that make sense? Probably not. So, for example, if the Basque for 'dog' is wibble and we know that indo-european for 'dog' is wybblie then that would show a strong case for basque being directly related to the indo-european *and* having not diverted much from it.

Or possibly i am getting this completely wrong and making it up as I go along. Appologies if I am

Hmmmm

So this hammer is the one used by Noah to make the Ark. It has had fifty new heads and thirty-three new handles since then, but Noah used it.

I really don't know whose side to be on when discussing this sort of thing.

Your own?

You're right, Ictoan, in general. But since Euskara/Basque has nothing in common with any other language under the sun, other than the extinct Aquitaine language, we can't begin to compare it. Carrying on your example, if the Indo European for dog is wybblie, then the Euskara is poaxtl. It doesn't really tell us very much.

I think the argument for Basque being the oldest is as follows. Basque is descended from the language that was spoken in Europe before the Celts arrived (presumably). That was about 3000 years ago. Since that language has no other descendants, it is by convention called Basque as well. Since Basque was spoken 3000 years ago, the present language is 3000 years old. Spot the flaw? By the same reasoning, I'm a fish.