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

Thanks xyroth. I was standing back from this one. I'm pretty sure we've already been through all this back at the beginning of the thread.

anhaga

You have got to be kidding, Xyroth! This was covered at the beginning of the thread? How? Like this?

'"It's an entirely hypothetical language right?"

wrong. it's the current best guess as to what the parent language looked like for that language group.'

Eh? Isn't that what I said? An entirely hypothetical language? A hypothesis is allegedly an educated guess, which I believe you might call a best guess if you were so inclined.

Or let's look at this?

'"So how do we even know the methods used to classify languages that when extrapolated backwards in time yield Proto-indo-european or something similar are even valid?"

because of the greek/hebrew/european bias. because we have writings dating back a few thousand years, and some of those writings cover the same works in different ages of the same (or similar) language(s) we can map the evolution of those languages over time.'

Greek/hebrew/european bias makes it credible? Because we have writing dating back a few thousand years? What same works in different ages? Homer's Iliad, 47 edition compared to Homer's Iliad 17th edition? Please?!!!

It seems to me the whole system is begging the question, begging very eruditely I'm sure, but begging nevertheless. And since you can't test the hypothesis, what good is it? Why does this sound like something Aristotle could have thought up?

no, not homer (although it wouldn't surprise me if that was there as well) but things considered much more important both that they be translated acurately, and they they still exist, like euclid's elements.

and we have copies of that going back to the common ancestor (although we don't have the book ordering).

other examples of books dating back to early times are the bible (in as many languages as you like) and specifically the ipuwer papyrus which tells exodus from the side of the egyptians (who I don't think are an indo-european language, but I might be wrong).

as to different versions of a book from different times being worthless, they have proved very usefull for mapping the spread and translation of the books in question.

when the same mistake crops up in different copies of the same book, you know they both have the same ancestor. by finding copies that don't have the mistake, you can reconstruct that ancestor. the same approach is used for language, and it works very well, until you start getting to the point where the split in the 2 languages predates the incorporation of the new ideas. at that point, you usually get parallel creation of the concept.

I'm sorry, Xyroth, that I'm so dense, but I'm really having a hard time getting the concept.

So like I've read that modern greeks can read ancient greek, but they don't pronounce it the same. This is deduced by some sort analysis of Byzantine accents or something that those grammarians or editors or whatever they were annotated on the documents at some point.

So in like 2500 years the language hasn't changed enough to be incomprehensible to modern speakers.

Now you contrast that with Chaucer, who most modern English speakers can't figure out unless they speak German, then again, based on analysis of the spelling, they conclude that certain words are pronounced differently but they're still recognizable, at least if you know German.

So in like 700 years the language has become mostly incomprehensible to at least the main group of speakers we presume are direct descendents of that ancestral language although a related group of speakers seems to be able to decypher it. So was Chaucer writing English or German? Or do we even know?

Now, I realize that's only two examples, but if there's that much divergence in one but not the other, how can you start to construct a rational system from these examples plus however many others, that you can use to deduce an ancestral tongue for which there is no documentation whatsoever?

And what are the changes that are supposedly documented that you conclude apply to the daughter tongues and then you work backwards to the hypothetical ancestral tongue? What are the common documents that you can observe these changes in the daughters?

The Bible?

Okay, let's consider that for a minute. Originally written in Hebrew for the most part, a dead language until the Israelis resurrected it as their national language, but otherwise changing no more than classical Latin or Greek. So how do you deduce patterns of change from something that doesn't change appreciably? And what patterns of change then do you use to extrapolate back to the hypothetical ancestral tongue and based on what?

Do you see the problems here that I'm having? Or am I just being dense about this?

"Now you contrast that with Chaucer, who most modern English speakers can't figure out unless they speak German, then again, based on
analysis of the spelling, they conclude that certain words are pronounced differently but they're still recognizable, at least if you know
German."

I can't read German. Not a word. I read Chaucer like the back of a cereal box. I read Anglo-Saxon.

French is modern Latin as it is spoken in the Roman province of Gaul. We know how to pronounce Latin. We know how to pronounce French. We can trace the change in pronunciation for a single word and deduce testable rules for changing the Latin word into the French word. We then test the rules on another Latin word. If our rules accurately predict the pronunciation of the French word that developed from the Latin word, our rule demonstrates a certain dependability. We continue to test the rule (this is the Scientific Method). If the rule keeps working, we keep using it. When it becomes really dependable, we extend it to another language, perhaps, or we try to extrapolate backwards in time to earlier languages. A large number of these sound change rules have been developed and tested with unbelievable strict rigour for two centuries in the study of the group of languages that we call Indo-European, not because of some racist bias, but because they are spoken in India and Europe. Perhaps they came to be studied so intensely because of a racist bias, but the results of the centuries of study are frighteningly accurate. Yes, proto-indo-european is a hypothetical language, but it is hypothetical in exactly the way that evolution by natural selection or relativity or quantum mechanics are hypothetical. For me, Indo-European is about as hypothetical as Germany; I've never been to Germany, but there sure is a lot of evidence out there that convinces me that something a lot like Germany exists.

I told myself I wasn't going to get into this. I'm done now.

Excuse me, but isn't Anglo-Saxon German? As opposed to Norman-French? Which Chaucer certainly wasn't writing in?

I can't believe this.

Show me the proto-indo-european in the bubble chamber then or in the data derived from positional measurements of stars deplaced near the sun and visible during total eclipses. That should gain you the quantum mechanical or relativitistic theoretical status you're asserting.

Maybe you're on firmer ground with evolution except show me the proto-indo-european in the fossil record then.

So what is it we've got?

A hypothetical language of root words based on analysis of vowel or considental drifts or shifts or whatever in historical indo-european languages somebody wrote down. These drifts or shifts or whatever are deduced by somebody's idea of what the writing actually denoted at various times, however, since they can't actually hear the language spoken, that's hypothetical too.

And from what I hear, linguists don't necessarily agree on this stuff anyways. They're frequently disputing alternative spellings or whatever as well as the allegedly clear derivations of words from older words, which we usually call etymologies and which somebody once called faith informed by guesswork supported by coin tossing.

If it seems to work on existing documents that's okay isn't it except we'd be sort of surprised if it didn't. But when has it predicted a previously unknown document then? What "missing links" have emerged to demonstrate it's validity? What shows that the so-called laws it articulates aren't just artifacts of categorization rather than true functional processes? In the absence of actual spoken language, how would we know?

Anglo-Saxon is English. Old English. Chaucer wrote in English. Middle English.

As for missing links that have appeared since the predictions started being made I will simply suggest you look into Gothic. Not much of Gothic has survived in manuscripts but the language was pretty much reconstructed on the basis of the work I mentioned before. Then, people started turning up manuscripts that nobody had seen in centuries and, guess what, the reconstructions were accurate! Or read a history of the English Language (they always start with an overview of this stuff); I recommend Baugh and Cable's "A History of the English Language".

I don't think I've ever even met someone who's visited Germany. I don't think it's really there. The Baltic is so much bigger than everybody says!

Thanks for the missing links and references. Now we're getting somewheres right?

Now until I've had a chance to review the stuff, I not going to vex you much more on this except to note how stubbornly you cling to this Englishness, when as previously noted it's no more comprehensible than German to modern speakers excepting you of course because you evidently already knew Old English, having spoken it in your childhood no doubt. I knew you were older than me but I never dreamed you were THAT much older.

But then, I forgot that you don't admit the existence of Germany, therefore there probably can't be a German language either. So no wonder it's all got be English.

You know something? I had suspected that English were actually Germans in disguise, but it works just as well if Germans are actually English in disguise.

As for the size of the Baltic, maybe I'll yield that point. Maybe it was bigger during some extra warm interglacial period when it inundated the ancestral homeland of the indo-europeans and left no survivors, except maybe a few Goths here and there.

I'm teasing of course.

I just can't resist when it's late at night and I'm drunk and feeling happy and stupid at the same time. So I hope you'll forgive me for that and indulge my youthful indiscretions a little. And I really am grateful that you provided the sources of your very very strange ideas.

I was wondering just the other day if there were no Canadians would we have to invent them in order to explain our current situation? I decided of course that we wouldn't have to but it would be more convenient, especially for me because I definitely need the smart and patient ones like you around.

I've just been re-reading the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The bit in chapter 24 about jynnan tonnyx is relevant to the subject of this thread. Coincidences of words, upon which so much of the theorizing about ancient mother tongues (Nostratic, for example) depends, are very difficult things with which to wrestle. Now, I, as an old structural linguist, am going to have a Ouisghian Zodah.

In that case I'll join you with a gort peel. Puddumz ob!!!

but similar words, coupled with similar pottery, coupled with similar ?dances?, ?music?, ?lore? - then maybe you have something.

yes, maybe. But to go back to your DNA bit, there is no way that I know of to distinguish between borrowing and displacement without bones or books, and even with both of those the truth may be elusive, as it is in both Greece (the Dorian "invasion") and India (the Aryan "invasion").

I guess the Dorian Invasion has recently become a subject of dispute because the collapse of the so-called Mycenaean civilization was traditionally regarded as resulting from an invasion, but the archeological record apparently doesn't support that notion. What it seems to show is something more akin a slow political revolution with maybe the Dorian speakers being present all along. Then they just finally gained some political ascendency sometime after most of the palaces were abandoned.

This probably makes more sense than the more cinematic invasion theory.

There's some interesting parallels in the American southwest where we've been told the land was once inhabited by Anasazi or Hohokam or Moqui or Mimbres or whatever who mysteriously vanished.

Now what's funny about this scenario is that it was derived apparently without consulting the oral traditions or the current indigenous inhabitants. Lately, however, some archeologists have started to question the scenario and they're finding some support for their criticisms in that oral tradition or the testimony of their indigenous contempories

The O'odham for example call their ancestors, hughukum or something like that so now many scholars now think they are the remnant of that supposed people the earlier archeologists found evidence for. Likewise, the Anasazi are now often identified with the Hisatsonim or ancestors of the modern "pueblo" people.

The point is, the ancients never went away. They just moved around a bit as most people do over time. They didn't pick up everything and load it into wagons or on pack animals like some Europeans did in the past. Instead they left things laying around because they could always make more such things wherever they were going. They took with them the most valuable things which were the skills that their cultures preserved and which enabled to the people to preserve the cultures.

This is why initially at least the archeologists might have misinterpreted their finds because they misunderstood the contexts. And they probably still do that more frequently than they'd like admit.

"I guess the Dorian Invasion has recently become a subject of dispute because the collapse of the so-called Mycenaean civilization was traditionally
regarded as resulting from an invasion, but the archeological record apparently doesn't support that notion. What it seems to show is something
more akin a slow political revolution with maybe the Dorian speakers being present all along. Then they just finally gained some political ascendency
sometime after most of the palaces were abandoned."

Thank you, Analiese, for elaborating my point. What you say also applies to discussion of the Aryan Invasion.

(speaking as an erstwhile archaeologist, I don't mind admitting my mistakes.)

anhaga

That's interesting about the Aryan Invasion too. That's the one that supposedly disturbed things in the Subcontinent, correct?

I'm not really up on my Greek mythology but I seem to remember that one of the things scholars used to deduce a Dorian invasion was the legends associated with the so-called sons of Hercules, who numbered I think around 50. So it's sort of strange that people deduced an invasion from the legends of 50 men, maybe enough to man one pentecounter. Some invasion huh?

I think maybe they weren't really paying attention to the oral tradition again. All that stuff that I read seemed to suggest a very slow revolution with ups and downs just as they're asserting now.

You know something? Maybe the ancients and their descendents actually knew something about their histories after all. Unfortunately, what they knew probably didn't lend sufficient support to the Aryan theory did it?

You know, to give the archaeologists/anthropologists, etc. just a little bit of credit, a younger generation of students of Maya culture made the great breakthroughs in understanding Maya Glyphs after some of them said "hey, lets talk to the locals and learn what they have to say about it. Let's learn their language." You're right (have I said that before). I hope more people will do this kind of thing all over the place. I suspect they are.
Just another little note, Dennis Tedlock, the maker of the translation of the Popol Vuh which is really the one to read if you don't know Quiche, went up into the mountains and apprenticed with a Maya Mother-Father (shaman) for years and actually became one himself as preparation for translating the book.

I glad we agree on this one, Anhaga.

Maybe you can clear up something though. I thought the Popol Vuh was written in Spanish, being a 17th century translation made under somewhat questionable circumstances by a Spanish priest who allegedly learned Quiche from an Mayan informant and convert.

One Spanish scholar has even stated that the translation is so rife with "Christianisms" to make the entire text suspect. I wasn't aware that a text of the Quiche original actually existed or had been discovered. When did that happen?

It's always been a bilingual manuscript, Quiche facing Spanish. Some think there was a Heiroglypic original that has been lost. My impression is that the Christian interpolations are pretty much only at the beginning.

http://www.latech.edu/tech/liberal-arts/history/webre/sw440_popolvuh.htm

The Newberry Library website (which has the manuscript) has a brief description of the manuscript buried on this page: http://www.newberry.org/hse/

Okay, I was confused then.

I think the Spanish scholar was saying the Christianisms were in the Quiche which makes him think the thing was corrupted before it was translated into Spanish. The Quiche was a dictation document and that's where the thing either hangs together or it doesn't. Did the Friar's informant tell him what the thing said or what he thought the Friar wanted it to say? Or did the Friar himself alter it as he wrote it down? Something like that.

Knowing how some indians have strung anthropologists along occasionally, I wouldn't rule out it out here, especially when you consider that the Spanish had been destroying the Aztec and Mayan books as soon as they figured out what was in them.

The original document would have had to have been interpreted into Quiche probably in any case, which the Spaniard was probably transliterating on the fly and then that transliteration would need to be interpreted. Does that make sense?

The original, now lost document, if it ever existed, would have served as a template for an oral tradition that would be remembered as the interpreter "read" the original pictorial version.

I'll have to see if I can find the article again. Unfortunately, I think it was in Spanish, but we can probably deal with that somehow.