Re: On Relating Languages

Hey!

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 12:34:56 -0500, Nicolas Walker
<Bitemeagain_walker@...> wrote:

>Yet more questions for the list (my third this week!), but on a different
>subject to both 'Antecedant Prepositions to Suffixes ???' and 'The Long
>Vowel Rule'. My questions today concern language families.
>
>I have three languages on the go, seperately concieved, yet structured
>(unintentionally) around similar 'design principles'. Upon realising that
>these languages were indeed related in some obscure ways, I thought
>perhaps I might be able to actually relate one to the other. I'm not big
>on 'con-worlding'(though I will conceed to have 'dabbled'), so I would
>prefer the  to be on a 'real' linguistic level. I naturally thought of
>language families.
I don't know if it helps you, but ...

New languages develop out of dialects of a common "proto" language. If the
dialect is intelligible for a speaker of the standard language, you may
speak of a new language IIRC. The Scandinavian languages are very close to
each other, though, so that e.g. the Norse can basically understand the
Swedes and the Danes. Ask others to get more information about this.
However, today's Romance languages, e.g. French, Italian, Spanish and
Portugese are all related to each other because their base is Latin. Latin
is so to speak Proto-French/Italian/Spanish/Portugese ;). Different
dialects can come to life because of exposure to other languages (e.g. at
the borders of a country) or because of "simplification" of the 'official'
language in general. Mind you that by simplifying one aspect, languages
tend to make other things more difficult. E.g. I've heard that Latin verbs
are actually easy to handle, while French verbs are just insane. But the
French nominal morphology is easier than the Latin one I think I may say.
Likewise, the way English handles nouns is very easy compared to German
with its four cases and three genders. On the other hand, in everyday
language, German tenses tend to be reduced to present and perfect (used
instead of the past tense), while English has its continuous and perfect
stuff that usually mix up German learners of English. German lacks the
continuous aspect and also does not care very much about finished or
ongoing actions anyway, for which English would use the perfect.
Pronounciation diverges because people are sometimes lazy to
pronounce "difficult" groups of sounds -- sound changes appear that
generalize the changes nearly completely regularly. But then, because words
are borrowed at different stages of the language that borrows and the one
that is borrowed from, these words do not undergo the recent major sound
change. Heck, I wish I would have read more on historical linguistics ...
Others can help you far better as for this topic!

Have a nice day,
Carsten