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had to go back bc i could not believe my ears or eyes..... i love when I find gems like this 😭😭
wiktionary says vercajk (colloquial for tools) was borrowed from German Werkzeug, but the pronunciation is much closer to the pronunciation in my North Bavarian dialect, which is Werkzeich
another beloved example is Czech ksicht (colloquial for face), which is borrowed from Bavarian Gsicht (of identical pronunciation)
A new study shows that genetic evidence of historical contact between populations reveals consistent patterns of language change.
Interesting, but I don’t think it will come as a surprise to linguists—or pretty much anyone, really—that when people come into contact they tend to exchange aspects of their respective languages.
French speakers need to chill out about how English speakers use French loanwords lmao. Like yes, I will use “vis a vis” to mean “regarding/concerning” because it’s a legitimate use of the phrase in English and that’s how semantic change works, babbbyyyyyy!
If the French don’t like it, they shouldn’t have done the Norman invasion 🤷🏼♀️
In a future where people will meet other forms of life, how will that impact language? Because the words we use to describe people (human, person, individual) basically mean "conscious creature I can understand"
Even in some of pieces of media where there are conscious beings other than people, like aliens or talking animals for example, the characters might refer to them as people, unintentionally, just because in actualily people are the only beings we can meaningfully talk to
I could imagine some words taking on additional meaning - maybe human would solely mean homo sapiens, while person would become a word for any conscious being, but I am very interested to hear your perspective as someone who knows a lot about linguistics
Sorry if the message isn't too understandable, English isn't my first language
It'll change language in the same way it's changed every time new cultures encounter one another. This has happened countless times throughout the centuries. And, yes, words change meanings, new words are borrowed, new expression are calqued, etc. It will be the new, but the process itself will be quite old. It won't radically change our understanding of language nor how language works.
Crossposting from Twxttxr: some interesting news about ongoing research by colleagues, from a workshop "Diversification of Uralic" just this Thursday and Friday
Do the Permic languages have loanwords from Old Norse? e.g. ONo. ár ~ Komi & Udmurt ar 'year'. This would've been sensible during the brief time when Norsemen originally from Sweden were in charge of trade along the Volga and settling in inner Russia, forming the Rus' (later Slavicized, but as we know from Byzantine sources they remained Norse for centuries) — and also the Norwegians too were known to conduct exploration + trade along the Barents Sea at the time, our oldest written reports of "Bjarmia" come from them after all.
Do the Finnic languages have loanwords already from Pre-Proto-Germanic into Pre-Proto-Finnic? My first reply would've been "yes surely", this has been discussed for half a century and there's dozens of etymologies out by now. Turns out though that there's still a lot of room for skepticism if we try to assemble a big picture. Most of these could be (and have been proposed by other analyses) to be proper Germanic after all, or from some non-Germanic kind of Indo-European, or even incorrect. There is unambiguous evidence I think at least of loans lacking *ā > *ō, but that's already though to be one of the latest common Germanic innovations, perhaps barely post-PG. [Follow-up question: do we even know where Pre-Proto-Germanic was spoken? might not have been anywhere convenient for contacts with Pre-Proto-Finnic.] — A few similar problems also in the less discussed supposed layer of Proto-Balto-Slavic or pre-BSl. loans, but by areal considerations it seems obvious to me there must've been Uralic/IE contact somewhere in the Russian forest belt for ages already, even if it might not have left enough evidence to clearly distinguish from things like pre-Indo-Iranian loans.
Do the Samic languages have loanwords that are not from any historically attested branch of Scandinavian, but some sort of a lost variety entirely? This could be an explanation for an unexpected sound correspondence *j → *ć in many loans; it might also explain some loans that look surprizingly archaic, e.g. lacking any reflection of Siever's Law. One example showing both is indeed *Tāńćə 'Norse', from some sort of a *Danji- variant of Proto-Germanic *Daniz.
Several new hypotheses on the history of of sibilants in Ugric, adding to the growing tally of evidence that traditionally reconstructed *s > *θ and *ś > *s "in Proto-Ugric" are actually later developments. A paper supposed to be coming out soon!
No linguistic evidence so far, but a 1670 travelogue by de La Martinière appears to still report seemingly pre-Uralic populations along the Barents Sea coast — and even on Novaya Zemlya, traditionally thought to have been uninhabited (as reported by other early modern explorers) before some Tundra Nenets briefly settled there in mid 19th century. Apparently there's been no real archeological investigation, but also at least two stone labyrinths are known as signs that humans still must've at least visited there sometime in the past. [By current knowledge, labyrinths from Sweden and Finland have mostly been built in late medieval and early modern times though, so they don't suggest especial antiquity either. Could the ones on NZ in fact have been left behind by some of these historical Northwest European expeditions?]
Various discussion also on the development of Samoyedic. Nothing particularly all-new (maybe on Nganasan, more on that in a PhD thesis to appear later this year though), but a few main results include 1. clear recognition that there is no "North Samoyedic" group (as has been suspected for several years now), 2. confirmation that there is regardless a narrower Nenets–Enets group, and 3. some development of a model where all three of Nenets, Enets and Nganasan may have moved to the tundra zone independently from further down south (as is certainly the case for Northern Selkup, the most recent northern expansion of Samoyedic speakers).
Edward Vajda lecture on how Ket language structure was gradually affected by the unrelated neighboring languages. Title: “Areal features in Yeniseian grammaticalization”, a talk given for the symposium Areal patterns of grammaticalization and cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization scenarios. Mainz, March 12-14, 2015 Recorded by Matthew Anderson, University Communications, Western Washington University.
Lingthusiasm Episode 28: How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a long time, especially in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers, so it’s a really interesting place to learn more about why and how languages influence each other.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Hannah Gibson, a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, about her work on how word order differences between Rangi and Swahili, both Bantu languages, are related to the different languages that they’ve been in contact with. They also get enthusiastic about Bantu languages in general and especially how the famous Bantu noun class system works. (Swahili, for example, has 16 different noun classes. including humans, natural things that aren’t human, abstract nouns, places, and words that begin with ki-.)
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
This month’s bonus episode was about naming people, a topic which has been on Lauren’s mind a lot recently! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to this and over 20 previous bonus episodes.
Here are the links related in this episode:
Hannah Gibson, University of Essex website
Hannah on Twitter
Blog post by Hannah on the research process and finding the construction she was working on in another language, Simbiti
Research talk by Hannah with more details about her research on language contact in the Rift Valley (youtube)
Paper by Hannah on word order change in Rangi
Rangi (Wikipedia)
Grammatical gender (Wikipedia)
Lauren's football fan analogy of linguistics (Superlinguo)
Bantu languages (Wikipedia)
Great Rift Valley (Wikipedia)
Languages of Tanzania (Wikipedia)
Language contact (Wikipedia)
Word order (Wikipedia)
Auxiliary verbs (Wikipedia)
Noun class (Wikipedia)
SOAS, University of London
University of Dar es salaam: Department of Swahili Language and Linguistics and Department Of Foreign Languages And Linguistics
Zanzibar University
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Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Though the Basque and Armenian languages share no superficial resemblances, they do share a baffling litany of words and grammatical element
