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

Jwf,

As usual you are making me think of things I hadn't previously considered, such as weather extremes having an impact on verbal dialogue of a culture...

So, Gnomon, what's this extinct Aquitaine language?

Made me think of langue d'oc. I find this language intriguing for two reasons:

- it has given it's name to a region of France. Are there other examples of a place being named after a language rather than the other way round? I suppose it might be quite difficult to know definitively in most cases: in this case, they conveniently tacked on the word for language so we knew which came first.

- the language itself is named after the word for "yes". Are there other examples of languages being named after one particular characteristic that they exhibit?

And, at the risk of overloading the brain cells, all that talk about Welsh made me wonder about transliterations. Why, for example, when transliterating their ideograms into latin letters have the Chinese chosen to give the letters values they don't have in (any?) other languages? So, for example, in the currently favoured transliteration, the letter 'q' is pronounced 'ch'. I understand that where the language has evolved using latin letters, we can expect different pronunciations (e.g. English vs French), but why introduce them artificially?

My head hurts now.

please pardon the misuse of "it's".

>> What about flies and mosquitos? <<

Yes those, and sand storms and locusts and typhoons, have had an influence on languages of the warmer climes. To such an extent perhaps that you might think it difficult to convince folks of my theory. Thankfully, words like mow-mow, hula, palm, maui, sunami, voodoo, banana, Tahiti, Sahara, Boa-boa, samurai and monsoon all prove that warmer weather begets softer language.

The clipt harsh consonants of northern european languages are not unique. All round the arctic circle from Russia to Siberia, and among all the various 'Eskimo' cultures, damn near every word ends in a 'K' sound. Inookshook, Inuvik, Taktiaktuk, mukluk, kayak, kodiac, Vladivastok... Where it is K-k-kold, speech is economised. Conversation is curt.

But yes, the Kalahari desert, the Iraqui oil fields and the tropical jungles often have their own causes for staying brief and tight lipped.

Any abrupt consonation in Arabic or Hebrew I would simply put down to a long history of social disorders and bad tempers. And yet, the many Arabic prayers that provide background-audio ambience to recent news reports all seem to have a drawling sing-songy quality on the order of 'moon' and 'June'.


"Just an old fashioned love song
going down in two part harmony."



~jwf~

hm... maybe you're right. Would be interesting to find out, why!

Pants. Looks out across the snow. Howls at moon:

owoooooooooooooowowowowoowowowOoooo!

Down, Rover!

~jwf~ was up to his middle in snow yesterday. Or he would have been if he had been foolhardy enough to venture out.
Please keep any reference to "pants" and "howling" to a minimum, as a mark of respect for his frontier spirit.

>> Why, for example, when transliterating their ideograms into latin letters have the Chinese chosen to give the letters values they don't have in (any?) other languages? So, for example, in the currently favoured transliteration, the letter 'q' is pronounced 'ch'. I understand that where the language has evolved using latin letters, we can expect different pronunciations (e.g. English vs French), but why introduce them artificially? <<

Yeah, wasn't there a Chinese leader call Deng Xiaoping, pronounced Dung Chowping? So why not just spell it like that?

Perhaps because the pronunciation of "ch" is so varied in European languages:

ch = tsh in English, sh in French, k in Italian, guttural sound in German.

So instead of using something ambiguous to represent the Chinese sound, they just use a letter which is totally unnecessary in the Roman alphabet, the 'q'.

Fair enough.

But "Dung" is fairly unequivocal, isn't it?

So the 'e' in 'Deng' is pronounced the same as the e in the English word 'driver', is it?

No, the pronunciation of the 'e' in 'driver' is modified by the following 'r'. This would leave us with 'Derng', which doesn't give the correct pronunciation, and is clumsy. Whenever he was mentioned on the (BBC) news, he was definitely a Dung.

well I suppose you could say it is equivalent to inventing a written language for an existing spoken language for the first time. Why should they use the same sounds as any other language?

>> ..keep any reference to "pants" .. to a minimum <<

Short pants?

Fear not, I'm just glad to have provoked any response at all from Gnomon. Some day I'll really get his Irish up.

And here's a few more northern Ks:
MurmansK, UK, MosKow, DenmarK, HelsinKi, Coquitlam, YuKon, Stockholm, Kalallit (Greenland), Rekjavik (Iceland), Ikea, Arctic...

And some more southern vowel songs:
bamboo, bayou, punjab, Venezuela, vindaloo, sahib, dunes, Hiroshima, Moors, koala, Kuala Lumpur, Saudi Arabia...

peace
~jwf~

Ukelele. Makarikari Salt Pan. tlatlatilcuahuitl.

Popocatapetl.

>> Makarikari Salt Pan <<

The 'salt pan' bit appears to be an English translation of the 'Makarihari' bit, which is probably the local tongue meaning a barren and hostile saline encrusted environment. This, as was suggested earlier, is one of those cases, like sand storms and mosquitoes, where the harshness of the place has been encased in the name.

But please note that these 'depressed badlands' are located in the otherwise balmy Botswana. Say it with me now, slowly, Bawwww-tswawwwnn-nahhhh.


~jwf~

Could Jack Naples help and if so where has he been and where is he?

at ~jwf~