Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 March 26

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March 26

Intelligibility

Which languages have changed the least in history; i.e., modern-day speakers would be able to understand speakers from the furthest back? 72.128.95.0 (talk) 02:37, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't exactly know the answer to your question, but I believe that Icelandic has changed relatively little over hundreds of years. 86.160.211.9 (talk) 03:04, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

The same example occurred to me. It might be an impossible question to answer definitively though, as we can only look at written language, and pronunciation may have changed over time. I'd suspect that a situation like Iceland might be most likely to preserve linguistic intelligibility well though, compared to other situations. A combination of relative geographic isolation, and a sufficiently-large population to filter out the random 'drift' you'd get in a smaller group might well help for a start - and then there is the long-standing tradition of Icelandic Sagas, which may also encourage linguistic continuity. This is guesswork though - I don't know whether linguists can come up with more concrete evidence. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:13, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

86.160.211.9 -- The written Icelandic language has changed relatively little, but the spoken pronunciation of the language has changed quite strongly in a number of respects since the time the sagas were written... AnonMoos (talk) 05:10, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

If you google "most conservative language" you will find a number of discussions linguist list, straight dope, etc., and Icelandic gets mentioned often, as does Lithuanian. Within the family of German dialects it is said that Highest Alemannic German is the most conservative, and, in fact, I experienced this when first reading medieval German texts at school as a teenager; they always reminded me of Walliser German which I had been familiar with since childhood. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:20, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

One should not forget "dead" languages. Most of them disappear without a trace like a flock of squaking dodos, but there are exceptions like Classical Latin. I have no idea if Cicero and Joe Ratzinger could waffle away in the Vatican without the odd confusion, but by definition a dead language is not changing a great deal. It is, of course, a moot point if Latin is (or has ever been) "really" dead. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 21:43, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

That's right. It's still used far too widely - if selectively - to be properly considered dead. Is there a universally accepted definition of "living language", "dead language", "moribund language" etc? If not, this would be as bad a gap as the lack of definition of planet until a couple of years ago. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 21:56, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Would that make Pluto a dead planet ? How appropriate, for both Pluto (god) and Charon (mythology). StuRat (talk) 22:23, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

The usual criterion for language death is the dying out of a community of native speakers. By that criterion, I think Latin counts as dead. (A moribund language is one with an aging community of native speakers but one that is no longer being acquired by children.) I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few oddball parents here and there who speak Latin to their children at home, but there is no community of native Latin speakers. Marco polo (talk) 00:23, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

There are consistently several thousand people who claim that their native language is Sanskrit in censuses of India, but Latin and Sanskrit have not really been evolving with the centuries in the same way that truly living languages do -- Cicero and Panini are still considered arbiters of correctness -- so it wouldn't necessarily be a fair comparison for the purposes of the original question. AnonMoos (talk) 01:08, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Although Biblical Hebrew has many differences from Modern Hebrew, Israelis can easily understand the latter after 2,500 years. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:51, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Modern Hebrew has not evolved for 2500 it was created for less than 150 years ago based on biblical Hebrew, which sort of makes the high intelligibility understandable.·Maunus·ƛ· 02:03, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, Hebrew was used without interruption for all of those years, albeit not as anoyone's only language, as the article you cite makes clear. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 02:55, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

It was read, not spoken. Just like latin it was a dead language that retained liturgical functions. Dead languages don't change unless they are revived which was what happened in the late 19th century. Hebrew has been changing sine then only.·Maunus·ƛ· 02:58, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I see your point, but Hebrew did change between ancient and modern times -- see Medieval Hebrew. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 14:30, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Medieval Hebrew is special in the same way as Medieval Latin is, but that still isn't "normal" language evolution. If, as many now believe, Mishnaic Hebrew was a spoken language that naturally evolved from Biblical Hebrew, then we may get a glimpse of how Modern Hebrew differs from what it would have been if it had never become extinct, in that it has actually moved back towards Biblical Hebrew in a few respects. Some of these features are /m/ instead of Mishnaic /n/ in grammatical endings, use of the imperfect as a future rather than as a subjunctive mood, use of the present active participle for the present only but not for the future, mostly final instead of mostly penultimate stress.(here is a description of Mishnaic Hebrew). --91.148.159.4 (talk) 15:21, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

There was also Medieval Latin, but it reflected vernacular influences more than the results of any natural-language-like process of change, and at the end of the Medieval period, people went right back to Cicero as the arbiter of correctness. Similarly, the core of modern Israeli Hebrew is basically mostly taken directly from Biblical Hebrew of the B.C. period, with some omissions of semi-esoteric grammar and/or features that would not be distinguished in a modern Sephardi type pronunciation (such as wayyomer type verb forms, and the distinction between the ha- definite article prefix and the hă- interrogative, etc.), and with some few features taken from Mishnaic/Rabbinic Hebrew of the early A.D. period (such as always prefixing infinitives with ל, interpreting אםרתי amarti / אני אוםר ani omer / אוםר omar as a simple past / present / future verb tense distinction, etc.). Rather little of modern Israeli Hebrew comes from post-Mishnaic medieval Hebrew, as far as I'm aware, except a few scattered vocabulary items... AnonMoos (talk) 15:23, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Just an addition: the "shel" possessives are also an important Mishnaic-like feature of Modern Hebrew.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 19:45, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I now realize that nobody has mentioned Persian and Arabic. The so-called "New Persian" stage of the history of the Persian language has been going on for more than a thousand years, and the language hasn't changed too much, so educated speakers are, I believe, still able to sort-of read texts from the beginning of the period. The present-day Modern Standard Arabic is basically the same as the Arabic of the Quran (7th century) with a few modifications (even fewer, I think, than the differences between Biblical and Modern Hebrew). Of course, the actual spoken Arabic dialects have changed a lot more during that time, but it's remarkable that MSA is able to function as an official and literary language at all. All in all, these are examples of astonishing linguistic conservatism.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 22:37, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Sounds

Hey, me again. I've noticed that the vast majority of sounds, consonant or vowel, are produced by blowing air out. Are any produced by inhaling in? Thanks. 72.128.95.0 (talk) 20:24, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I think most are neutral, and don't require you to be breath in or out to make them (unlike whistling). StuRat (talk) 20:37, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I am confused by this comment. Do you mean that most consonants and vowels do not require the passage of air (as whistling does), or that whistling requires breathing out? Because neither of those appear to be true. Voiced consonants and I think all vowels require air flow, and I can whistle breathing in as easily as breathing out. 86.164.69.241 (talk) 15:59, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Really ? I can't whistle while breathing in. (I can make some sort of noise, but it's not what I would call "whistling", it sounds more like "slurping".) StuRat (talk) 22:41, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes. I started doing it when I was about 12, when I was experimenting (and failing) with circular breathing, and after a few years I could do it as easily both ways, although the ranges are slightly different (it's easier to control into the high notes breathing in). It means I can whistle nearly non-stop until my lips hurt ;) It really does make sense, since there is nothing in the mechanics of whistling that requires air to flow in one specific direction. 86.164.69.241 (talk) 17:51, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

All pulmonic egressive sounds (e.g. all the sounds in English, and pretty much any sound you've come in contact [exceptions are clicks, implosives, and a few others]) require you to expel air from your lungs. You know how when you blow up a balloon and then let it go and all the air comes out? You didn't apply force to the balloon, yet it deflated. The same thing happens with your lungs for speech: the differences in pressure dispense a flow of air to the oropharyngeal tract without much action from the diaphragm. Perhaps whistling requires a faster flow of air, and requires more involvement from the diaphragm, which may be why StuRat perceives whistling as requiring more exhaling compared to speech.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 22:31, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Airstream mechanism and Ingressive speech are relevant articles. Pallida  Mors 20:44, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

You will find Airstream mechanism#Pulmonic initiation particularly interesting. Note that there are sounds created by sucking air into the oral cavity that do not require any lung activity; these sounds are called implosives and clicks. They occur in a variety of languages, though if you look at the sound inventories of all the world's languages, they're very uncommon. Now, sounds that involve inhalation, i.e. an ingressive mechanism driven by the lungs, aren't attested as a systematic speech sound (phoneme) in any of the world's natural languages that we know about (and it's very doubtful there would be one). The WP article I referenced points to Damin, but this is not a natural language. It also mentions that an "ingressive voiceless nasal with delayed aspiration" exists in !Xoo, but I don't know if this is a pulmonic ingressive mechanism (all clicks involve a velaric ingressive mechanism). There are also interjections in languages that are pulmonic ingressive, but we wouldn't say that these languages contain ingressive phonemes since they're extremely limited (compare the [χ] sound in the English word Ugh!). There are many pulmonic-ingressive interjection examples in the article Ingressive sound which should probably be merged with Ingressive speech.--el Aprel (^facta-_facienda) 04:43, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Ingressive "yes" ("ja") is sometimes used in Norwegian, when said as a separate sentence (ie an affirmative answer) Jørgen (talk) 18:33, 28 March 2011 (UTC)