A Year in Language, day 16: Dutch

Dutch is a West Germanic language, the same branch as English and German. It is primarily spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium, and is colloquially considered to be both a geographic and linguistic halfway point between English and German. It is mutually intelligible with the Afrikaans language of South Africa but not with Pennsylvania Dutch which is actually a descendant of German.

Dutch is the direct descendant of the Frankish language. Franks you may remember as the ethnic group to which Charlemagne belonged and the namesake of the modern day country of France.

Like English, Dutch is a more isolating language having lost much of the inflection still found in German, though it does retain grammatical gender. Unlike the gender found in German, which has a classic three way distinction; feminine, masculine, and neuter, Dutch has only two; common, and neuter.

A Year in Language, Day 15: AAVE (African American Vernacular English)

AAVE, also known as Black English, Blaccent, or, with some controversy, Ebonics, is a leaf of the American English twig of the Ingvaeonic stem of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

AAVE was first formally studied in the late 60’s and 70’s to prove a rather strange point: that AAVE was a language. I would love to be able to talk about how people ~used~ to think about the speech of black Americans, but the frank truth is people still very much maintain the idea that black speech is “ungrammatical”, “slang” and a result of poor education. What linguists demonstratively proved, what frankly any decent human being already knew, was that AAVE is a true language with consistent grammatical rules.

There are many theories about AAVE being influenced by the West African languages of slaves or a child of the creole languages of the southeast and Caribbean. However this is likely untrue, or at most a minimal influence. AAVE is most similar to archaic forms of Southern English and is probably a sister dialect. The two share many phonological features, like “monopthongal ai” (pronouncing “nice white rice” like “nahs waht rahs”) and also unique lexical entries like “fixing to” also spelled “finna” meaning “going to, about to”.

What little forms of conjugation persist in English, like the third person -s (ex. I run, he runs) are dropped in AAVE. It also exhibits zero-copula, where the copula i.e. word that equates two things (ex. the word “are” in “dogs are great”) can be dropped, hence white English “who is that?” vs. AAVE “who that?”. Hebrew is also a zero-copula language. AAVE has a pretty robust system of verb tense and aspect, consider “he workin”, “he been workin” “he be workin” “he done work” “he do work” “he done been workin” are all distinct placements of one mans action of working in time, and that these are consistent and identifiable verbal constructions.

A Year in Languages, Day 14: Amharic

Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia. It is a member of the Semitic language family, the same family as Arabic and Hebrew.

Like all Semitic languages Amharic morphology (word structure) is based on what are called “triliteral roots”. These roots are normally three, though sometimes two or four, consonants that prescribe the meaning of the word. These consonants are then nestled into vowels and affixes to give more specific grammatical function. So “ktb” is the root for “write”, “katab” is “he writes” and “kitub” is “it is written” and so on.

A Year in Language, Day 13: Mongolian

Mongolian is the national language of Mongolia and the largest member of the Mongolic language family, itself unrelated to any other language family.

In phonetics the “l” sound is called a “lateral approximant”. Approximant refers to the manner of articulation aka. the way the airflow is instructed to make noise. Approximant shave very little obstruction and are the closest to vowels of any consonants. Lateral refers to place of articulation aka. The position of your tongue, lips, throat, etc in making the sound. Lateral sounds cause the airflow to split and flow to the left and right of the tongue instead of over the top. I’ll give you a moment to make a few “l” sounds and feel this for yourself. Mongolian does not have an “l” sound like English, instead it has a much rarer lateral consonant; a lateral fricative. Where approximates barely obstruct air, fricatives force the air to undergo a lot of friction. “S”, “v” and “th” are examples of English fricatives. So to make this Mongolian sound, put your tongue in the same position as you would an “l” and try to go “zzzz” without moving your tongue. Are you making a particularly wet hissing noise that sounds vaguely like an “l” when you add a vowel after it? Good job! You’re nailing it.

Mongolian is written with both the Cyrillic alphabet (the one used by Russia and many other Slavic nations) and Mongolian Script: ᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴ. Mongolian script is more typically written from top to bottom (Tumblr seems to only let me write left to right). This script is descended from the writing system native to the Turkic Uighur people of Central Asia, and like all languages of that descent are unique in that they are written top to bottom in columns going left to right (right to left is more common, as seen in Chinese and Japanese).

A Day in Languages, Day 12: Basque

Basque, known to itself as Euskara, is a language isolate, like day 1’s Sumerian, with no known relatives. It predates the arrival of the Indo-European languages and is spoken in Basque Country, a small territory that straddles the border between Spain and France.

Basque is known for its complex verbs and frequent use of auxiliary, or helper verbs. These helper verbs, normally found at the end of a sentence, carry only a little semantic (meaning related) weight, but basically contain all of the verbs grammatical functions. It’s effectively a word on the end that specifies the subject, object, indirect object (yes, Basque verbs agree with all three), and verb tense.

One of the most unique features of the language is that it is Ergative-Absolutive. To properly explain what this means I’m going to need to introduce some other linguistic terminology, so I’ll hope you’ll bear with me a moment and I would honestly appreciate feedback as to how manageable this explanation is. Here we go:

In Linguistics “transitivity” refers to how many nouns a verb requires. Normally the answer is either one, in which case the verb is labelled “intransitive”, or two, in which case the verb is labelled “transitive”. So a transitive verb in English is “I ate chicken”; the verb “to eat” requires there be a subject, someone doing the eating, and an object, something being eaten. Clever readers may be able to think of exceptions, and I assure you this is accounted for but for the sake of brevity I’m leaving this bare bones, and yes, this IS bare bones. An intransitive verb would be “I slept”. While you can slap any number of adverbial phrases onto that “in a bed, at night, with my paramour, etc.” the only thing truly requires is the subject, and it can’t take a direct object like “eat” can.

At this point I’m going to ask you to take a step back, forget what you think you may know about basic grammar, and look at language as though you were an alien. You can see that the words classified as verbs sometimes demand one or two other words classified as nouns to complete their function. You can also see that when there are multiple noun-words that some linguistic element must be used to distinguish their exact relation to the verb. You may be inclined to think then that no such distinguishing element is required for intransitive verbs as they have only one required noun-verb. However, if we want language as a whole to be as efficient as possible we can actually save mental space by marking the intransitive noun-word like one of the two intransitive ones. In doing so it means all verb required nouns are marked in a two way system (as subjects or objects) instead of a three way systems (intransitive subject, transitive subjects, and objects). So the choice now is… which one of the two intransitive noun-words do we mark the intransitive noun-word like?

Most languages mark intransitive subjects and transitive subjects the same and leave transitive objects as the odd man out. This system is called Nominative-Accusative, named after the cases used for those words in languages that have cases. But some language mark the subject of an intransitive verb like they would the object of the transitive one! And when they do so they are called Ergative-Absolutive, and for the same reason (ergative is the case for transitive subjects and intransitive objects, absolutive is for transative subjects).

A Year in Language, Day 11: Hawaiian

Hawaiian is a member of the Polynesian language family, which includes just about all the native tongues spoken across the various Pacific Islands. Polynesian itself is a branch of the larger Austronesian family which also includes the languages of the Indonesian archipelago, the Philippines, and, interestingly enough, Madagascar.

The name of the language comes of course from the largest island of the Hawaiian islands, which itself is named after the cross-Polynesian mythical mainland from which their ancestors first voyaged from.

Like most Polynesian languages Hawaiian has an impressively small inventory of sounds. Depending on the count it has about 6 vowels (not uncommon) and only 8 consonants (very small!). This small inventory also lacks one of the most universal sounds found in languages across the world: t. Where in other related languages we would find a t sound they have fused to k sounds in Hawaiian, so “Taboo” (forbidden) becomes “Kapu” Not only this but the phonotactics, i.e. rules regarding syllable structure, are also very limiting; the most complex syllable that can exist is CV, which means one consonant followed by one vowel. Lets see this in action with a famous English loanword in the language.

A Year in Languages, Day 10: Elvish (Quenya)

Quenya is a constructed language or “conlang” invented by author and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien. Conlanging as an art form has been documented as far back as the European Middle Ages, and likely goes back much further. Quenya is the oldest of Tolkien’s conlangs, the mythology of middle earth and the books he wrote in that setting all developed to contextualize and enrich his languages. He had been working on Quenya for 40 years by the time it was published.

Tolkien was as interested in constructing rules of language change as he was in creating the languages themselves. Quenya existed to Tolkien not as a static invention but as a true living language, with older forms and descendant forms, generations of loanwords and derivations. Tolkien was so skilled at crafting his conlangs in line with the patterns by which natural languages develop that crafty fans have been able to posit theoretical reconstructions of ancestral languages to Quenya and fill in gaps, areas of the language Tolkien never revealed in publication, by comparison to his other languages.

A Year in Languages, Day 9: Turkish

Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic language family, most other members of which are spoken in Central Asia. Most students of linguistics will be familiar with example sentence in this language as it is a prime example of agglutinative grammar and vowel harmony.

Those who have been keeping up may recall that I referred to Chinese and English as isolating languages. This was a reference to the amount of complexity exists in those languages word structures, specifically how many affixes and root changes they undergo. Isolating languages have low complexity, synthetic or polysynthetic languages have high complexity. If we imagine a line going from isolating to polysynthetic as a kind of x axis, agglutinative is a pile of the y axis. Agglutinative as a description does not tell us about the number of affixes words take, but how information is packaged in them. In an agglutinative language every affix encodes just one piece of grammatical information. So unlike Latin, which is a fusion all language, where a single suffix can tell you the gender, case, and plurality of a noun, in Turkish that would entail three separate suffices. Turkish piles on these suffixes (agglutinates them, if you will) pretty aggressively and is known for long words.

A Year in Language, Day 8: Czech.

Pronounced like the English word “check”, Czech is a Slavic language, the family that encompasses most of Eastern Europe, and is generally considered to be mutually intelligible with Slovak. Mutually intelligible means that speakers of either language can understand each other. If this causes you to wonder how they can be considered different languages while being so similar I would direct you to a famous quote on the matter by Max Weinberg, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”

Czech allows “l” and “r” to function as the nucleus of a syllable. Normally syllables are based on vowels, but English too can use a few more vocalic consonants, for example in the last syllable of the word “little”. While the environments such syllables can exist in are relatively limited in English, Czech is more liberal, and this is apparent in the nations best known tongue twister (which I was once taught by a Czech patron when I worked at Amy’s Ice Creams): “strč prst skrz krk”