Calling all language lovers!

[Gauchita]

I'll shamelessly plug a friend's blog here because it's great!

If you're interested in language, etymology, linguistics, etc, head this way.

She's an etymology addict (and doesn't mind me saying so ) and is teaching the rest of us a lot, so thank you Alex

alexpolistigers.wordpress.com/

Lahana = cabbage?

Yes, lahana dolmasi and lahana sarmasi are popular in Turkey, too. Lahana sounds like it could be Turkish or Arabic.

Then again, Turks were nomadic tribes until the last 1,000 years or so (Have you seen Mongol? Brilliant film about Ghenghis Khan's early life) so I'd be inclined to beliee that names of vegetables came from other languages.

... as opposed to words about war and meat, naturally

For example, pastirma (pastrami) was the salted meat Turks cured & kept under their saddles so it was "pressed", back in Central Asia. The word comes from:

Bas = Press, put down on
Basinç = Pressure
Bastir = Press hard on
Bastirmak = To press hard
Bastirma = Something that's been pressed hard on (I'm not translating this well

Re consonants - Syllables in Turkish don't have two consonants in a row, like:

Bu-gün e-vi-mi-ze bir ya-ban-ci gel-di ve bi-ze ye-mek yap-ma-yi ög-ret-ti. Bu ne-den-le se-nin-le bu-lus-a-ca-gi-miz ye-re gec gel-dim.

Coupled with vowel harmony, I suspect it sounds like speaking in tongues to foreign ears.

Neither does Japanese (syllables are CV). Hence arigato from Portuguese obligado and kirimete from English Christmas.

I believe there are other similarities as well: All vowels are pure (no diphthongs etc), sentence structure is SOV, etc

Is arigato from the Portuguese? That's very interesting.

Yep.

Before trading with Portugal (which eventually happened A LOT) Japanese didn't have a single word for "thank you". Much of Japanese is very formal and would always previously have expressed that thought more fluently, like "I'm deeply obliged for your kindness" or something. But the Portuguese traders came over and a kind of pidgin arose between them, leaving arigato as a legacy.

I find Japanese absolutely fascinating - actually there are several Far East languages that are similarly formal, with up to seven (IIRC) levels of morphological formality depending on your social level and that of the person you're talking to. Compare with English "you" and even Fr/Ger/Sp tu-vous/du-Sie/vos-usted and we suddenly don't seem that class obsessed in Europe at all!

Now I'm going to mess with your brain eeeeeeever so slightly.

Lots of children go through a phase of not being able to combine consonants either. Did yours do this? You might not have noticed except in particular words. Certainly they might have inserted or inverted some sounds. I'm stuck for an example off the top of my head but "nucular" is an example of someone struggling to combine -cl- in the middle of a word.

One theory is that there are only very few language settings in the human brain, and the baby learns which switches to switch on while it's practising. So for example verb-object or object-verb (I play tennis v I tennis play) is one switch, combine consonants or not is another, require subject or not is another, and so on. Some things you wouldn't think were the same all go together as if all on one switch. And in the meantime the baby might have some of his switches set wrong so he comes out with peculiar ways of saying things that he hasn't heard from anyone.

At least in the case of Turkish, it is not an inability to pronounce consonant groups, but just the fact that Turkish words just don't have them because of agglutination and vowel harmony in particular. Turks are quite capable of saying words like "extra" (with /kst/ consonant group in the middle).

I'm not an expert in English language but my feeling is that trouble with a word like "nuclear" is the diphthong rather than the not-so-difficult /kl/ sound and that a dim president made it acceptable to pronounce it "nucular".

"One theory is that there are only very few language settings in the human brain, and the baby learns which switches to switch on while it's practising"

I doubt it. I started learning English at the age of 12 and as you can see, my brain has managed to cope with its fundamentally different grammar and sentence structure. My DC speak three languages (English, French, Turkish) and their brains seem to have managed switching on these conflicting switches, if they exist.

I could mess with your mind, though by telling you about the book I'm reading at the moment, which talks about language as the software that programs the standard brain (hardware) that everyone is born with. Hacking into the brain with the basic programming language (Sumerian), then a verbal virus spreads through the population like wildfire and so Tower of Babel story happens - languages diverge. Fascinating story

That's for native language learning though, not second languages.

Have I misunderstood what you said? "Switching on/off" sounded permanent. So if my mother tongue switched on the SOV sentence structure, would you have expected me to be so fluent in the two SVO languages I have subsequently learned?

No, sorry. My oversimplified explanation.

They do set their switches per language. So a child growing up bilingual compartmentalises the two separately, and sets the switches accordingly.

When we learn a "second language" (in Linguistics terms, this is something one learns after puberty starts, roughly speaking) no matter how immersively we do so we don't have access to that deep instinctive understanding feel for that language. We learn it more formally, even if we never have a formal lesson - as a conscious skill.

For the vast majority of people, there's only one "first language".

Language divergence is FASCINATING. It seems to prove that all the possible structures of natural human language already exist in the infant brain - but because the child only learns from what it hears, it applies the wrong rules.

For example, English is fairly strictly SVO with occasional V2 anomalies; German is more strictly V2. That means that English sentence structure almost always has a subject, then a verb, then any objects (Yesterday Gary gave the ball to Steve) whereas German puts the verb second (Yesterday gave Gary the ball to Steve).

A lot of the time you can't tell the difference (Gary gave the ball to Steve = Gary gave the ball to Steve) so a child hearing such a sentence can't tell whether to set SVO or V2. If the language is actually SVO but children decide to set V2, then within a generation the language is V2.

A frivolous example:

A thousand years ago we said "Me like cakes" - our case marking and V2 structure meant that it was obvious that pears are doing the pleasing and I am benefiting therefrom. But as we lost verb morphology and mislabelled the structure as SVO, we "corrected" me to I, and ended up with "I like cakes". Unlike comparable examples in other European languages our verb "like" is sort of inside out.

Crikey I'm rusty. These examples are dredged from some very cobwebby parts of my brain.

I found like hard to crack when learning Spanish...had to remember it as cakes please me to be able conjugate correctly.

Horry - I read your posts several times and honestly don't know what you were saying. So now I'm going to bed

... but before I go:

I'm not sure about the hypothesis that second language cannot attain the instinctive fluency of the mother tongue. From personal experience, I would say that it is entirely possible to speak a second language (learned after puberty) as well as your mother tongue.

There is a very little empirical proof that a second language is not learned in the same way as a first - stroke or head injury sufferers who lose their mother tongue but retain second languages.

Although functionally a highly skilled person could attain a high degree of fluency in a second language, linguists still distinguish between "fluent" and "native".

I'm knackered too so who knows what garbage I'm spouting

Good night!

Wow, fascinating posts, ladies!

Horry, I had no idea about the PT/Japanese thing; you'd think the PT teachers would mention that!

Alex, Slovenian might have been trumped by Turkish then? Ha!

Very glad to hear we've delved into bilingualism and multilingualism. I need to go to bed but I need advice re this and DD. I'll come back tomorrow.

Cote, good idea to ask MNHQ to move this thread so we don't lose it. I'll email them now.

Gauchita not at all, I am quite tempted to learn both Turkish and Slovenian! And a bit of Spanish too, why not! It would be fun!

I really don't agree with the theory on "language switches". I have learnt a number of different foreign languages, with varying grammatical structures. I started learning Greek, a language in which I am entirely fluent, when I was already an adult. I have never found the different structures and grammar to be a stumbling block.

Horry you've confused me a little bit, but I think you are trying to say that the language can easily evolve into another type?

I read an article about that re English question construction. Currently we are supposed to invert the auxiliary verb with the subject (You like fish > Do you like fish?). The article suggested that in the nost so distant future it will become standard to just say "You like fish?" with a questioning tone.

Cote that explains where the Greek word "pastourmas" comes from then! (personally I can't stand the stuff! I much prefer things like dolmas!)

Re "lachano/ lahana" I have found a Homeric reference to the word, so it seems to be from ancient Greek.

This means that lahana sarmasi is actually an interesting mix of Turkish and Greek. I like finding things like this - a good example is "butcher's shop". In standard Greek this is "kreopoleio". But in this area, Greek speakers say "hasapiko", putting a Greek ending onto the Turkish word.

Or another of my favourites is "glentao" in Greek, meaning "celebrate" - this is a great example, because -ao is a standard Greek verb conjugation, not the one usually used for foreign words, and yet it is tacked onto the Turkish "glent" (I am not sure precisely how the word is in Turkish, but I am sure Cote can enlighten us!)

Yes, languages can evolve into other types - each generation is fractionally, incrementally different from the last. Usually it's social changes that splits one from another (eg the differences between Danish and Swedish are largely political) such as a group emigrating and not keeping in contact with the original community. Australian Finnish is different from Finnish Finnish; American English is different from English English, because they evolved separately.

How else would languages develop except incrementally and generationally...?

What an interesting thread! We're going to move it to Language now so it doesn't get lost.

""hasapiko", putting a Greek ending onto the Turkish word. "

Almost Butcher = Kasap.

""glentao" in Greek, meaning "celebrate" - this is a great example, because -ao is a standard Greek verb conjugation, not the one usually used for foreign words, and yet it is tacked onto the Turkish "glent" "

"Glent" isn't and can't be Turkish, since words in Turkish can't start with two consonants, as I mentioned below. I can't imagine what this word can be. "Celebration" in Turkish would be kutlama, tören, or maybe merasim (clearly of Arabic origin - no vowel harmony), depending on the context.

the differences between Danish and Swedish are largely political Can you explain this, sounds fascinating?