World Enough and Time

Went to see a documentary at Alliance Française called "Les origines du langage", about how speech and language developed originally in homo sapiens. Apparently once it happened, it happened fast, because it was such an evolutionary advantage. They said the same parts of the brain which deal with gesture and patterns are the parts that deal with language.

It wasn't too difficult to understand the French, though when they first started talking bout "Les Austrolopithèques" I thought "the who?" The easiest person to understand was a linguist from the Université du Québec à Montréal, which probably means my ear is pretty much attuned to the local accent and speech patterns.

I'd like to see it again.

random, auraiaphalia and deakat came over, and we watched Stephen Fry's Planet Word, episode 2, "Identity", about how language shapes identity. Languages discussed included Irish, French, Basque, Occitan, North African French, Hebrew, Yiddish. and the various accents and dialects of England. One African language was featured; no Asian ones. I wondered what the criterion was for choice and decided it was simply Stephen Fry's whim and interests.

We noticed that when the Basque restauranteur was talking (to be translated by his daughter), he kept switching between Spanish, French, and Basque. We could identify the Basque because it was the bits we didn't understand.

Part of the show talked about linguistic genocide, a term that tends to confuse me. Cultural destruction loss is a terrible thing, yes. But things change all the time. How can languages be stopped from dying? Populations disperse, cultures change, and we are always driven by political, social and economic forces. You can't stop a language from dying. A thousand years ago no one spoke English because the language didn't exist, though many words still in use were around. In another thousands years we'll have a new set of languages. I'm sure the Etruscans wanted to keep their language and culture alive; and the Harappans; and an unknown number of languages born and lost before the dawn of history. The value of langauge is complex; ephemeral; tied to identity, but also to practical and utilitarian uses. Where does a dialect end and a language begin?

I find all these questions fascinating.

So then we talked about languages we know, and languages we want to know better, and artificial languages (like Elvish and Dothraki). random actually speaks more languages than I do, and better - though possibly his Russian and my Italian are analogues, somewhat forgotten but we think we could relearn them if necessary. We both like to dabble in languages, but he has real skill in speaking - while I dabble more like a watchmaker might poke at different kinds of clocks to see how they tick. I don't don't really have linguistic skills - just a fascination for languages.

We played the game of asking, "If you could learn one more language, what would it be?" Something that isn't Indo-European would be interesting, but what? Basque, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Finnish? Cree or Algonkian? The possibilities feel endless... but of course they aren't: limited to something like 7,000.

Oh, to have the skills and fluency of Francis Crawford.

Which I don't, and never could have, but the next best things is having friends who are willing to talk about languages with me.

maaseru now gets HBO, which means we can watch A Game of Thrones. So while she was showing me today what shows she gets, we chanced upon a fascinating behind-the-scenes feature on the Dothraki language.

They needed a language for the Dothraki to speak, so they went to the Language Creation Society and had one made to order.

I never even knew there was such a Society. I should have known; I love invented languages. So cool. All I remember of Dothraki from the books are the words Khal and Khalessi. There are samples and discussions of it online here.

And then after going so far as to invent the language, they made the poor actors and actresses actually speak the thing. I am impressed. Actors work hard for their pay. It reminds me of Klingon: a tough manly language with lots of gutterals, for a manly warrior race. Just about every translated excerpt they showed, was a threat.

I love the care and artistry they've put into the details in this show. It's following the lead of Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings and, as with Tolkien, it's paying off.

Less surprisingly, there's a forum on Dothraki on the Westeros website.

After we watched Fringe and Supernatural this evening - two shows with a fine capacity for messing with our heads - Pim was telling me about the Voynich Manuscript, which astounds me mostly because I never heard of it before. How did that one pass me by?

That got us - well, me - onto a search of invented scripts, invented languages, and fictional worlds - all subjects I love. The "see also" and the "external links" addenda to this Wiki article are fascinating. Why does this make me think of The Ninth Gate or Le Club Dumas?

It's fun to browse this list of fictional worlds, too.

In my Paratranspo ride today, there was a sticker on the dashboard of the car in a language I couldn't read. I was fascinated. All through the drive I was thinking about what it might be - for no good reason, I was running through East Asian (and South-east Asian) writing systems in my head, and it didn't look quite like any of them. It was making me think of Cambodian, though I didn't think it really was Cambodian. I was almost too shy to ask, but I told myself sternly that if I didn't ask now - as we arrived at the hospital for my physio - I'd never know and I'd always wonder. So I asked the taxi driver what it said.

He said, "'God is in charge here.'"

"That's lovely," I said spontaneously and honestly, and then wondered why I thought so, since the same sentiment from a non-immigrant would have been vaguely annoying to me. Since he didn't seem to mind the first question, I asked the second one: "What language is it?"

"Ethiopian."

Right! He certainly looked more Ethiopian than Cambodian, being black and bearded. (How stupid am I?) Afterwards, I wondered if he were Christian, Muslim or Jewish. At first I guessed Christian, but on reflection, perhaps the lack of indicators (like a cross) might mean Muslim - and would a note like that in a Christian's car not be more likely to say Jesus was in charge? Or am I overthinking it?

And of course there are many Ethiopian languages, and different scripts, though I'm assuming it was Amharic, for lack of other indications. It looked like this or this.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the Cambodian (Khmer) script, and it looks like this. Okay, not the same, but looking at them side by side, I see why I was confusing them.

Not so stupid, after all.

A few days ago I was talking about languages here and now found an article in The Economist about that very subject: whether some languages are more difficult than others to learn, and, if so, which ones. And the general question of comparing them. Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language. This goes a little beyond the Mario Pei sorts of things I read in my student days. Good quotes from it:

• "spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled."
  
• "German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why 'a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has'. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)"
  
• "Mandarin, the biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what sounds just like 'ma' in English has four distinct sounds, and meanings.... Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones' pronunciation through a series of complex rules.
  
• "!Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."
  
• "Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions."
  
• "To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them."
  
• "Take 'we'. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, 'we' has two forms: “me and you” and 'me and someone else (but not you)'. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just 'we', Kwaio has 'we two', 'we few' and 'we many'. [Presumably each taking a different verb in each conjugation?] Each of these has two forms, one inclusive ('we including you') and one exclusive."
  
• [In] Berik, a language of New Guinea.... Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means '[he] drinks in the evening'. Where verbs take objects, an ending will tell their size: kitobana means 'gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.'

Then the article talks about the Universalists like Chosmky, who belive with Noam Chomsky, that there are basic patterns for all languages because of the way the mind works, and those who belive like Benjamin Lee Whorf, who believe that language conditions the way we see the world. I am a confirmed Chomskyite, though I hope no one tries to make me prove it. And I'd rather not even try to master a language that will put a lump on my larynx.

The article concludes that the most difficult language in the world is Tuyuca, and I'm not going to try to describe it, because even just reading about it has made my head spin. It sounds impossible, but I suppose, if you learn to speak it as an infant, it's a breeze.

Maybe.

From Livejournal's Writer's Block:Which language(s) do you currently speak? If you could learn only one other language, what would you choose, and why?

I speak, read and write English. Canadian English.

I used to be able to speak, read and write Canadian French, though with a vocabulary that was never quite as large as your average Francophone. This includes having read volumes of Old French and Anglo-Norman. And studying French Literature as an undergraduate, and spending a couple of months studying Acadian language and literature in Nova Scotia. (I adored reading Antonine Maillet!)

I was (and always am) better at understanding than speaking any language.

I also studied Italian, reading, speaking and writing it well enough to pass exams, and using it well enough to get on in Italy without much difficulty. I haven't practised it in years, and so lost my fluency. Ditto Latin, though I never did master verbal Latin and would dearly like to. I sometimes recite poetry to myself in these languages just to retain some of it.

I studied German, and have forgotten most of it. Ditto Welsh and Arabic. Really, I just took the introductory levels, not enough to hold much of a conversation... fascinating but difficult. I never could make all the right sounds in Arabic. Heck, I don't even pronounce things well in English.

As for Esperanto... I need more practice, but it's my favourite. I studied most of these as a teen, when I had more time to do it. It was something I shared with my father, who was likewise fascinated by languages, but didn't use them verbally. He encouaged me to be ambitious in picking up languages as much as possible. I once found him reading an Agatha Christie novel in Turkish. "I didn't know you knew Turkish," I said.

"I don't know it very well," he said sheepishly.

He taught me a little (very little) Sanskrit, which was fascinating, but all those declensions terrified me.

As for the why, well, I love languages, and poking at how they work. I love seeing the history of languages, seeing how one language morphs into another, how they effect each other and part ways. I love the compare and contrast of disparate and similar languages, and the psychology by which we use them. I love the legends and myths of history, and idioms, and speculation, and the way language works with odd mechanisms. I wish I had twenty lifetimes to study a thousand languages, because I'm really not doing so well in this one.

I don't know if I want to learn to speak them, but I'd like to learn more about Basque, Finnish, Maltese, Assyrian, Ancient Egyptian and Breton.

I find myself curious now about Chinese and Japanese, but I'd really, really like to learn Occitan. And Anglo-Saxon. And Greek, both classical and modern. And...

Really, I want to learn them all.

I am such a language Geek. This really excites me.

Mind you, I haven't finished reading Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis yet. Not by a long shot. But it's great fun. And I'm umpteen times more of a Tolkien fan.

And I have Lord of the Rings in Esperanto, which is superb.

An interesting item about memory and language.

I suppose it would be the same in languages other than English?