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| Thread: Place Names |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · «PREV |
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markkur
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Once upon a time
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posted June 07, 2014 01:30 PM |
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JoonasTo said:
Some languages have way clearer edges between new and old though. Like English which is only 5% original vocab, 70% latin and the rest is german.
Actually it is well balanced between French, Latin and Germanic tongues. Take a peek.
origins
And a little Finnish is there too. I used to do the Sauna and sometimes the "leap in the snow" too. Or is that American propaganda?
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 01:35 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 13:36, 07 Jun 2014.
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@Joonas
Ok, so we were just using the words "old" and "new" in different ways, thanks for the clarification.
By the way, however, I wouldn't necessarily say that over time more features are lost than gained, only that the new features are typically bending rules or borrowing from other languages and therefore often conform less strongly to the language's "original" ideology (thus making it less beautiful).
I wouldn't mind continuing this discussion but I think maybe it's getting a bit too off-topic (and a bit too OSMish) to be in this thread.
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 01:38 PM |
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Edited by artu at 13:42, 07 Jun 2014.
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JoonasTo said:
Like English which is only 5% original vocab, 70% latin and the rest is german.
English comes FROM German. So, the original vocabulary is derived from German, anyway.
I think variety in vocabulary is much more important than grammatical consistency in a language, so what Nitramar mentions really doesn't bother me much, some things become harder to learn when there are too many exceptions to the rules but once you learn them, you're good to go. Less variety in vocabulary, on the other hand, is something that actually handicaps you.
Edit: I see, while I was busy uploading the graph, Markkur already linked the same thing. Well, it's better to have the actual graph than the link anyway, so I'll keep it.
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 01:53 PM |
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artu, vocabulary isn't really an issue, you can simply make new words for things that don't exist (which doesn't really change the language itself, unlike introducing new grammar). I think grammar is what makes a language, premade words are just a nice bonus.
If a language has clear semantics and rules, then you can make yourself understood by being creative and combining things without anyone complaining to you something like "that's not a word" (I'm always surprised when people say that: if everyone understood it, of course it was a valid word even if you never heard it before).
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 02:19 PM |
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Edited by artu at 14:22, 07 Jun 2014.
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Well, constantly making up words really doesn't work. It has been tried here, both in the 30's and in the 60's... Most of them don't stick or people start to use them with a different meaning.
Esperanto is a language artificially built, basically considering your criteria but we all know how that went... Yet, you are not talking about being common or practical, you are talking about beauty. The thing is, grammatical consistency doesn't necessarily make something beautiful either. There are two things that can be considered non-ideological and specifically about beauty: The musicality of a language and the richness of it.
When it comes to musicality, the consistency you speak of doesn't always result in a better way. The sound of a too consistent language can get repetitive and dull. For example, there is a grammatical rule in Turkish, that groups the vowels according to the way they sound: "a o u I" is one group "e ö ü i" is another. Yet, while Ottoman poetry which ignores that and is full of words from Persian and Arabic overwhelmingly sounds incredibly musical, a type of nationalist poetry which sticks to these phonetic borders sounds rather like drumsticks and a tin.
When it comes to richness, the foreign effects add more again. They get polished and transformed by natural selection and the ones people really find useful and beautiful are left out. (These always emerge from each other, what we find beautiful is always related to the way we think, even what kind of women are considered beautiful changes through time due to what is idealized as proper during that age. Fat means lazy today, it meant rich and royal in the old days, hence their idea of a sexy woman is not like a super model of 21th century).
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 03:20 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 15:28, 07 Jun 2014.
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artu said:
constantly making up words really doesn't work. [...] Most of them don't stick or people start to use them with a different meaning.
That wasn't my point. I meant, if a language is structured clearly and consistently enough, the made up words will be seem logical and people will understand them instantly and precisely (and using them in another meaning won't make sense). The point is, they don't need to get stuck: you don't need a huge list of existing specific words because the language allows you to use the basic words creatively (I'm talking about constructing new words out of other words, not arbitrarily making up words from scratch, of course that won't work).
Quote:
Esperanto is a language artificially built, basically considering your criteria but we all know how that went... Yet, you are not talking about being common or practical, you are talking about beauty. The thing is, grammatical consistency doesn't necessarily make something beautiful either.
Just because something does not gain popularity doesn't mean it's not beautiful. You can't seriously expect that people are going to suddenly change their language just because it's better or more beautiful: people speak a language because it's the one that other people around them speak. I don't speak Esperanto; for all I know it could be the most beautiful language in the world.
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There are two things that can be considered non-ideological and specifically about beauty: The musicality of a language and the richness of it.
Why these two things specifically? Beauty is subjective. I just happen to consider purity, functionality and ideologicality beautiful in a language. You don't, ok fine. Personally I would say that musicality is not really a defining part of a language. You can pronounce any way you want (as long as you do it consistently) without it becoming another language. The only thing, imo anyway, that defines a language is its grammar.
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When it comes to musicality, the consistency you speak of doesn't always result in a better way. The sound of a too consistent language can get repetitive and dull. For example, there is a grammatical rule in Turkish, that groups the vowels according to the way they sound: "a o u I" is one group "e ö ü i" is another. Yet, while Ottoman poetry which ignores that and is full of words from Persian and Arabic overwhelmingly sounds incredibly musical, a type of nationalist poetry which sticks to these phonetic borders sounds rather like drumsticks and a tin.
Finnish also has vowel harmony, Estonian doesn't and it sounds a bit strange to us but not any more musical. Anyway, I didn't say anything about consistency in words or sounds, only grammar, I never talked about anything but grammar.
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When it comes to richness, the foreign effects add more again. They get polished and transformed by natural selection and the ones people really find useful and beautiful are left out
If a language needs to rely on other languages in order to be rich, then I would consider it poor.
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 03:27 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 15:31, 07 Jun 2014.
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Note btw, I don't think there is, nor could be a perfet language. Even Finnish is far from perfect when compared against the ideals I have presented, but it does rank higher on those criteria than other languages I am familiar with (but I only speak four languages, so I what do I know).
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 04:06 PM |
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You kind of overatomized my context. There are many things that causes something to be defined as beautiful but I was emphasizing the purely aesthetic reasons, so
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I just happen to consider purity, functionality and ideologicality beautiful in a language.
is beside the point, and as I already explained, thinking purity and functionality are on the same side is a mistake, a language loses purity FOR THE SAKE OF functionality. It's not constructed in a lab by purists, linguists and poets but by people who are using it, overtime. So, functionality is something that evolves in languages and variation(including foreign influences) is an advantage not a disadvantage. That's why
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If a language needs to rely on other languages in order to be rich, then I would consider it poor.
is something I wouldn't agree. Functionality is determined by the efficiency of the language to specify.
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 04:29 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 16:32, 07 Jun 2014.
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artu said:
I was emphasizing the purely aesthetic reasons
I know, and I wasn't because there can't be anything aesthetic about grammar. It's kind of useless to discuss which languages sound beautiful because it's completely a matter of taste. Grammar is not.
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thinking purity and functionality are on the same side is a mistake, a language loses purity FOR THE SAKE OF functionality.
Of course. They are not on the same side but still they both contribute. Therefore, a language is beautiful if it can be extended with further functionality while suffering a minimal loss of purity. In reality that does not happen and languages get less pure (and thus less beautiful) as they age. What we talked about with JoonasTo was about languages actually losing functionality as well, which happens because functionality is sacrificed for the sake of convenience and because other languages exert influence, which has nothing really to do with improving the language, it's more like "peer pressure" because the other language is more dominant.
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 04:43 PM |
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Edited by artu at 16:45, 07 Jun 2014.
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If there can't be anything aesthetic about the grammar, why do you base your ideal of beauty on it? You reject my notions of beauty by saying what determines beauty is something else to you, and then, you say there can't be anything aesthetic about your premise, anyway??
I'd say the peer pressure is rather vocabulary based, no language's grammar will evolve to a less sophisticated state (in terms of functionality) because of some foreign influence.
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 05:17 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 17:26, 07 Jun 2014.
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artu said:
If there can't be anything aesthetic about the grammar, why do you base your ideal of beauty on it?
I guess I have either a broader perception of beauty or a narrower perception of aesthetics than you do. To me, something aesthetic is something that is pleasant to observe using our senses (so it's a subset of beauty), while beauty can also be based on ideas that are not physically observable, yet which are understandable, such as conformance to a logical pattern.
Quote:
I'd say the peer pressure is rather vocabulary based, no language's grammar will evolve to a less sophisticated state (in terms of functionality) because of some foreign influence.
That is simply not true. Finnish is being influenced by grammatical constructs from indo-european languages which are causing the Finnish language to be less sophisticated. Those constructs, being very foreign to Finnish due to the huge difference between the languages, actually cause loss of precision or increase of ambiguity if they are used instead of the correct Finnish counterparts. One example of this is the you passive from English when used in favor of either the anonymous person passive or the true passive which are native to Finnish but do not exist in English. Another is decreased use e.g. of moods, cases and possesive suffixes which cause sentences to become longer since extra words are needed (thus making the language actually less convenient to speak). Word order in sentences is also becoming more limited, which causes loss of nuance. There are probably better examples too.
Things like this probably only happen in places where a foreign dominant language is very different. This is probably rare because usually neighbouring countries speak closely related languages.
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 05:37 PM |
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I think, basically, you are not talking about getting less sophisticated but more about getting distorted and hence, losing precision. But that precision is getting lost only in your idealistic level of purity. In reality, everybody still precisely knows which exception means what.
And about beauty/aesthetics, I'd say aesthetics is the more "abstract" word, so if I had to put a nuance between the two the way you did, I'd switch your definitions.
In my first objection, I already mentioned consistency not necessarily meaning beauty, but if I got you right, you find a higher level of abstract beauty in consistency itself (fitting a logical pattern). So, your only valid justification seems to be idealizing PURITY itself because it means less exceptions to the rule. But the more we go back, the simpler will the language get and more pure and basic it will be, in the end, we'll end up in some tribal language, which will consist of 600-700 words, a few grammar rules and a few tenses. That reminds me the episode of Mr. Monk, where he decides to be a painter and starts drawing straight lines, 360 degree circles, etc etc and then goes "it's perfect like this." 
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 06:19 PM |
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artu said:
I think, basically, you are not talking about getting less sophisticated but more about getting distorted and hence, losing precision. But that precision is getting lost only in your idealistic level of purity. In reality, everybody still precisely knows which exception means what.
Ok, but then what is sophistication? We could assign a number to each sentence and memorize all the numbers, "erybody still precisely knows which exception means what." Isn't that less sophisticated?
Quote:
And about beauty/aesthetics, I'd say aesthetics is the more "abstract" word, so if I had to put a nuance between the two the way you did, I'd switch your definitions.
Yeah, you migt be right about that, I just always considered aesthetics to be more strictly related to sensory observation and beauty to be more vague and less precisely defined. Anyway, since you said you focused only on the aesthetics, and did not include my views in your analysis, doesn't that imply that my views were, according to you, not based on aesthetics?
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But the more we go back, the simpler will the language get and more pure and basic it will be, in the end, we'll end up in some tribal language, which will consist of 600-700 words, a few grammar rules and a few tenses.
If such a language would actually work, then yes it would be the most beautiful thing ever .
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artu
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted June 07, 2014 06:46 PM |
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Edited by artu at 18:50, 07 Jun 2014.
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Quote:
Yeah, you migt be right about that, I just always considered aesthetics to be more strictly related to sensory observation and beauty to be more vague and less precisely defined. Anyway, since you said you focused only on the aesthetics, and did not include my views in your analysis, doesn't that imply that my views were, according to you, not based on aesthetics?
Usually, purist approaches to language derives from a nationalist ideology, but since every ideology has to produce it's own justifications, the aesthetical arguments are injected into it. Before WW2, same thing used to be done with race, and the justification involved measuring skulls, claiming anatomical perfection in facial features etc etc... but that's completely considered politically incorrect now, (it is also scientifically refuted). When it comes to language, some people, not necessarily nationalists, get convinced by the aesthetic layer of the argument because just as in your example, they assume a direct link between purity and beauty. While, if you are a nationalist, that stands out as an at least consistent position, whether it's right or wrong; without the nationalist politics, I can't see any reasonable validation for that correlation. And just like it is with race, in reality, everything is so mixed up and so hybrid in any language that has enough history and cultural interaction, trying to base things on purity practically becomes impossible anyway.
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 07, 2014 06:57 PM |
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artu, I think we got way too preoccupied with this whole purity/consistency thing. It's not like it's the only thing I appreciate in a language, just happens to be one of them. I just think that more consistency is nicer than less (if everything else is the same). Do you disagree with that?
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artu
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posted June 07, 2014 07:11 PM |
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Partly, I think there are situations it results in harmony and situations it results in monotony. In most cases, purists try to extract something from the language, whether it is etymologically foreign words or new templates in grammar. And again, in most cases that results in loss of nuance, not the other way around.
Of course, I think the transaction between languages and the transformation which is caused by it, should have a rather slow pace. A very sudden invasion of too many foreign elements may result in a less harmonious language, just like a city, taking in too many immigrants at once, may start to lose it's cultural identity and the unique beauty that comes with it, (plus it can face infrastructural problems).
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markkur
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Once upon a time
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posted June 08, 2014 03:27 PM |
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I think the single most damaging aspect about our languages is "the need for speed" of the modern world. Well, that and trying to be "cool."
Here in America and I assume many other places, folks don't want to spend time with anything, especially something not-cool, like using proper anything.
I think original Anglo-Saxon (the old Germanic)was an awesome language when it came to "description." That's why I was attracted to the place-name list I put together. Unfortunately it does not sound as pretty as it "means." i.e. "Joy + Strings" could mean Harp. There are many examples of two word combinations that were used to name something, not only place-names.
My attraction and I think JRRT's was all about this descriptive aspect of the way the early Anglo-Saxon was constructed and what it could bring to the art of descriptive-writing.
But today most everything is done behind a fast-food-mentality and few would favor making "anything" take-more-time.
"Good day Lord Rich-vocabulary how are you on this fine day?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you on this fine day?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you today?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you?"
...x-amount of years pass
"What's up?"
...x-amount of years pass
"Sup?"
____________
"Do your own research"
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artu
Promising
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My BS sensor is tingling again
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posted June 08, 2014 03:49 PM |
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Edited by artu at 16:03, 08 Jun 2014.
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Well, while the written language gets more and more descriptive by time (both in literature and in academy), I think it's universal that everyday chat is always based on practicality, vey similar to what's up and sup we have a very short ne haber which now evolved into one word: naber, which is the equivalent of what's up. Don't get confused by the formality of the old centuries though, in their everyday routine, they werent so formal either. But the gap between formal and informal was bigger, as well as the social distinctions between the educated and the uneducated. Think of the acting of the 1920's, 1930's which seems so overtheatrical to us now, compare them with modern methods focusing on appearing natural. Something similar, a change of etiquette, also applied to language, when you read two letters from a 19th century writer, one written to a friend, the second to a state official, there is an enormous difference between the styles of the two letters. Today, there is still a difference but the gap has narrowed down. Acting casual is considered less of a taboo now. That being said, when I hear my grandmothers manners while she's talking on the phone, the intonation, the phrases, the precise, perfect emphasize on the necessary words etc etc, I sometimes feel exactly like you.
Edit: Damn, I forgot that you are nearly as old as my granny, for a second there, Markkur
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Nitramar
Adventuring Hero
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posted June 08, 2014 07:46 PM |
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Edited by Nitramar at 20:10, 08 Jun 2014.
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markkur said:
But today most everything is done behind a fast-food-mentality and few would favor making "anything" take-more-time.
"Good day Lord Rich-vocabulary how are you on this fine day?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you on this fine day?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you today?"
...x-amount of years pass
"How are you?"
...x-amount of years pass
"What's up?"
...x-amount of years pass
"Sup?"
Well, at least it's more efficient. Unlike some trends in Finnish where for example:
"Päässemme juhliinne."
becomes
"Me päästään luultavasti teidän juhliin".
Both sentences mean "We can probably make it to your party". The first one is formal Finnish, second one spoken "street Finnsih". The much speedier version is discarded in favor of a more indo-european way of saying the same thing, even though the first version is almost twice as fast (6 syllables vs. 11).
EDIT: However there are some cases where Finnish could (and does) also benefit from taking some inlfuence, for example when dealing with long numbers:
23 541 = kaksikymmentäkolmetuhattaviisisataaneljäkymmentäyksi
in 23 541 = kahdessakymmenessäkolmessatuhannessaviidessäsadassaneljässäkymmenessäyhdessä.
Basically you have to add "in" to every digit of the number. Of course, nobody really wants to say it that way.
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