A curious article at the Jewish Deaf Multimedia website claims that Hebrew (Ancient or Biblical Hebrew, that is, which is not the same as Modern Hebrew) has been proven to be the “original language”, that is “the first language to ever exist”. This idea goes back to the mystical Kabbala teachings explicated in The Zohar, attributed to Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, also known by the acronym Rashbi, an important legal scholar, also reputed as a worker of miracles. According to the Kabbala, Hebrew is the building blocks from which life is created and people were divinely created to be native Hebrew-speakers.

This idea has been later picked up by many authors, theologians and scientists alike. One of the latter was a seventeenth century Belgian scholar Francis Mercury van Helmont. In his book Alphabeti veri naturalis hebraici brevissima delineatio (or in other words, The Alphabet of NatureIn this book, van Helmont described “how the sounds of Hebrew were the most suited for a human speaker”. He also went on to claim that “the Hebrew alphabet was essentially a ‘pronouncation guide’ for the full range of human speech; each position that the tongue could take in the mouth to make a sound was represented by a Hebrew letter”. As a reader of this blog would know, the latter claim is simply untrue. There are plenty of speech sounds found in various human languages but not in Hebrew (Biblical or otherwise): clicks, implosives, ejectives, doubly-articulated consonants, front rounded vowels, to name just a few classes.

But it is also interesting to see how van Helmont went about proving his thesis. He instructed a deaf person on how to form the sounds encoded by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet with his tongue. From the rapid success of this experiment, just three weeks, van Helmont concluded that Hebrew was the most natural language for speaking. To me, all this experiment is proving is that Hebrew, as mentioned above, is rather poor on “exotic” sounds which may be difficult for some to pronounce. I am also curious to see how long it would have taken van Helmont to teach the same deaf person to pronounce sounds of some other language, say Zulu or Kabardian, both of which are on the richer side when it comes to consonant inventories.

All in all, however, it must be pointed out that using knowledge from articulatory phonetics may be quite useful in teaching the deaf to articulate speech sounds, which they cannot hear. Whether teaching the deaf an oral or a sign language is the more preferrable strategy is another question entirely. The readers are invited to express their thoughts on the matter.

The post Hebrew proven to be the “original language” by a deaf person? appeared first on Languages Of The World.

Kusunda is a dying isolate language. Gyani Maiya Sen, a 75-year-old woman from western Nepal, is its last known speaker. There are some 100-160 people in the Kusunda tribe, and some of them know a few words of the language, but nobody else speaks the language with any degree of fluency. Its isolate status means that Kusunda is not related to any language of the world, though there were several attempts to link the language to an established language family. B. K. Rana (2002) maintains that Kusunda is a Tibeto-Burman language as it has been traditionally classified. Others have linked it to Munda (Watters 2005); Yeniseian (Gurov 1989); Burushaski and Caucasian (Reinhard and Toba 1970; this would be a variant of Gurov’s proposal if Sino-Caucasian is accepted); the Nihali isolate in central India (Fleming 1996, Whitehouse 1997); and again with Nihali, as part of the Indo-Pacific hypothesis (Whitehouse et al. 2004). However, Kusunda does not exhibit much affinity to any languages spoken in the area.

This prompted some journalists to claim that Kusunda “looks nothing like any other language”. But is Kusunda really outside the realm of what has been so far identified as “universal grammar”? Not really. Like all other languages, it distinguishes consonants and vowels; makes use of nouns and verbs; and constructs larger lingusitic forms out of smaller ones (words out of morphemes, sentences out of words). Here are five specific ways in which Kusunda fits into the cross-linguistic typology.

1. Vowel inventory. Kusunda has three vowel phonemes: /e/, /a/, and /o/. Each phoneme has two realizations (higher and lower). This vowel inventory qualifies as small. Ninety-three languages in the 564-language WALS sample have small vowel phoneme inventories (2-4 vowels, mostly 3), including Akkhaz, Malagasy, and Yupik.
2. Case alignment. Kusunda has a nominative-accusative case system, much like Latin, Russian, or even Old English. This means that in Kusunda—unlike in many neighboring languages, which are ergative-absolutive—the subjects of transitive and intransitive are marked the same way (nominative), while objects are marked differently (accusative).
3. Locative cases. In addition to nominative (for subjects), accusative (for objects), and genitive (for possessors), Kusunda has three locative cases: -lage ‘for’, -əna ‘from’, -ga, -gə ‘at, in’, as well as a commitative case (‘together with’).
4. Tense-aspect and negation affixes. Kusunda marks tense/aspect distinctions by suffixes on the verb, as do 668 languages in the 1132-language WALS sample. Options employed by other languages include tense/aspect prefixes, tense/aspect tones, mixed types, or not marking tense/aspect distinctions at all. Negation is likewise marked by an affix (more specifically, a suffix) in Kusunda. Other languages that mark negation by affixes including Nepali, Lezgian, Xhosa, Sakha (Yakut), Uzbek, and Ubykh.
5. Word order. Kusunda has the SOV order, the most commonly found order cross-linguistically: 565 languages in the 1377-language WALS sample have this order, including Basque, Japanese, Hindi, and Enets. Moreover, like most SOV languages, Kusunda has postpositions rather than prepositions: of the 408 SOV languages for which the order of adposition and noun phrase is known (see WALS page), 374 languages (92%) have postpositions.

Thus, though Kusunda may be quite different from and unrelated to its neighbors, it is hardly “unlike any other language”, as journalistic reports proclaim it to be.

The post Kusunda, a language like no other? appeared first on Languages Of The World.

Many school grammar books definite a “noun” as a category that denotes “a person, place or thing”. While many objections can be raised to such a definition, it provides a useful three-way distinction of nouns into proper names, toponyms, and common nouns. However, very often nouns migrate from one category into another. This post will consider a few examples of such conversions.

Take, for instance, the noun macintosh denoting a type of outerwear, a waterproof outer coat. This common noun goes back to 1836, when it was created out of a proper name of Charles Macintosh (1766-1843), who invented a waterproofing process. Mr. Machintosh received a patent for the “machintoshing” process on June 17, 1823.

Or consider the noun cardigan. Now denoting a type of clothing, this common noun derives from a title, Lord Cardigan. The conversion happened in 1868, according to Online Etymological Dictionary, from the title of James Thomas Brudenell (1797-1868), 7th Earl of Cardigan. He was an English general, distinguished in the Crimean War, who set the style, in one account supposedly wearing such a jacket while leading the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854.The toponym of the Crimean locale of Balaclava was also converted into a common noun denoting another type of clothing/headgear.

Other common nouns that derive from the name of the “thing’s” inventor include diesel,which was named in 1894 after Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913), the German mechanical engineer who designed this type of engine, and braille, named in 1853 after Louis Braille (1809-1852), French musician and teacher, blind from age 3, who devised it around 1830.

Sometimes proper names become common nouns not to denote things invented or popularized by a certain person, but to designate psychological or social types of people: for example, an Einstein is a very smart person and a Judas is a traitor. Other such examples include a Casanova, a Matahari, a doubting Thomas, a Romeo, and a Scrooge.

Proper names can also become toponyms: for example, Stanford (the university and the town) is named after Leland Stanford (Jr.), but the surname Stanford originally came from a toponym. Other toponyms derived from proper names include Washington and Gorky (former name of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city, named after the writer Maxim Gorky).

And as mentioned above, toponyms can be converted into common nouns: limousine, cognac, and camembert all come from French toponyms. Another interesting toponym-to-common-noun example is jeans, which comes from Genoa, the city in northern Italy. In contrast, denim comes from a French phrase that literally means ‘from Nîmes’, a town in southern France.

Such cross-category conversions between toponyms, proper names, and common nouns are found not only in English but in other languages as well. For example, in Japanese the Chinese city of Nanking is associated not only with bedbugs (Nankin-mushi) but also with peanuts (Nankin-mame), padlocks (Nankin-jo), coarse long-grain rice (Nankin-mai), hemp sacks (Nankin-bukuro) and mixed cotton-silk fabrics (Nankin-jusu), to name but a few examples. A quick look around the internet suggests that ‘Nankin’ tended to be used back in the Edo era as a prefix for various things that came from abroad, especially if they were small and exotic, or rough and cheap. Most of these items did not actually come to Japan from the city of Nanking, though some first arrived via trade with China. It just seems to have become the representative exotic foreign place where stuff came from.

[Thanks to Kären Wigen for help with the Japanese examples]

The post Person, place, thing… appeared first on Languages Of The World.

A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of American English. According to a post on LanguageHat blog, in Baltimore attention focusing yo has evolved into a gender-neutral pronoun. A story in Baltimore Sun says:

Elaine Stotko, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins, began hearing of kids here who say “yo” to indicate another person of whatever gender, and after pursuing survey work over two years has nailed that usage down. Now she has a paper in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society.

 

Some examples: “Yo handin’ out papers.” “Yo threw a thumbtack at me.” “She ain’t really go with yo.”

 

A little further study showed her (showed yo – it can stand in for “her” and “him,” too) that this use of the word doesn’t show up in other cities; kids in Washington say “youngin’” in a general sense, but typically that’s reserved for boys.

As the comments on the LanguageHat indicate, it is indeed unclear who uses this gender-neutral version of yo and when. For example, one reader confirms:

The antecendant of ‘yo’ is more often male, but doesn’t have to be. For example, if a girl crosses over a boy in basketball, you could say, ‘yo broke his ankles’. It is obvious and unambiguous in this sentence that ‘yo’ refers to the girl, since ‘to break [someone's] ankles’ cannot be reflexive.

This use of yo may not be limited to Baltimore either, as another LanguageHat reader shared the following:

I taught 7th grade English for a year in Kansas City, KS (ending about 19 months ago) and this exact sense of “yo” was used there in exactly the way described, particularly by African-American boys. It took me ages to figure out that it replaced “he” and “she.” I don’t know that I ever heard a girl use it, and I should also note that it was almost always used in an accusatory sense – a kid would march up to my desk and point at someone in the class and yell, “Yo took my pencil!”

I would be curious to see if any LotW readers are familiar with this yo, use it themselves, or can share any more information on this.

The post “Yo” said, “yo” said… appeared first on Languages Of The World.

In the early 21st century biodiversity worldwide is sharply decreasing, with annual losses of plant and animal species estimated to be 1,000 times greater than historic rates. As the world is becoming less biologically diverse, it is also becoming less linguistically diverse. Some linguists now predict that 50-90% of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of this century. It has been noticed for some time that biological diversity and linguistic diversity tend to occur in the same places, giving rise to the notion of biocultural diversity. However, many previous studies on this topic suffered from limited spatial precision. Nor did they account convincingly for the observed correlation. A recent study by Gorenflo et al. (2012), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online, is based on greatly improved data sets, which allowed the authors to correlate the two kinds of diversity more accurately. More importantly, they also examine the issue of why linguistic and biological diversity overlap geographically.

Gorenflo and colleagues focus on so-called biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas (see map). Hotspots are defined as “regions characterized by exceptionally high occurrences of endemic species and by loss of at least 70% of natural habitat”. Totaling only about 2.3% of the earth’s land surface, the 35 hotspots contain “more than 50% of the world’s vascular plant species and at least 43% of terrestrial vertebrate species as endemics”. High biodiversity wilderness areas, also rich in endemic species, are larger regions (minimally 10,000 square kilometers, or 3,860 square miles) with relatively little human impact, “having lost 30% or less of their natural habitat”. The five high biodiversity wilderness areas cover roughly 6% of the earth’s land area and contain approximately 17% of the world’s vascular plant species and 8% of terrestrial vertebrate species. The data on the geographic distribution of languages, compiled by Global Mapping International, reveals concentrations in the forty regions of high biodiversity, with a total of 4,824 languages spoken there. Hotspots particularly notable for their high linguistic diversity include the East Melanesian Islands (#9 on map), the Guinean Forests of West Africa (#12), Indo-Burma (#15), Mesoamerica (#22), and Wallacea (#34), each with more than 250 indigenous languages. The one high biodiversity wilderness area that stands out in terms of its linguistic diversity is the New Guinea Wilderness Area (#39), with 976 languages—probably, the most linguistically diverse region in the world. However, not all areas of high biodiversity also exhibit significant linguistic diversity: the Chilean Forests (#7), Cape Floristic Region (#3), New Zealand (#26), Southwest Australia (#29), and the Succulent Karoo (#30) hotspots all contain three languages or fewer. Overall, however, nearly 70% of the world’s languages are spoken over roughly a quarter of the earth’s terrestrial surface, where only one-third of the planet’s population lives. And although considerable variability marks individual areas, “in general, regions containing high biological diversity tend to have high linguistic diversity as well”.

Several theories have been proposed to account for this strong correlation between biological and linguistic diversity. Some scholars view a direct link between the two kinds of diversity whereby plentiful, diverse ecological resources enable greater linguistic diversity either by engendering more competition and adaptation to more complex environments (Pagel & Mace), or by reducing the likelihood of having to communicate and share resources with other groups in times of need (Oviedo et al.; Sutherland; Nettle). Another theory proposes that “certain cultural systems and practices, represented by speakers of particular indigenous and non-migrant languages, tend to be compatible with high biodiversity”. While it is true that certain cultural systems may support higher biodiversity, it is not clear why they should be embraced by speakers of varied languages rather than by a single linguistic group.

The three theories outlined above fail to take into account the three “T”s that have been identified as instrumental in creating linguistic diversity: time, terrain, and tribalism. Areas that have had human habitation for a long time without experiencing major episodes of migration or conquest that resulted in linguistic replacement, such as West Africa, the Caucasus, and Papua New Guinea, tend to have a high degree of linguistic diversity. Areas of rugged, mountainous topography, such as Nepal and once again the Caucasus, also tend to be very linguistically diverse. Other topographic features that pose barriers to social interaction and therefore favor linguistic diversity are islands, rugged coastline, swampland, and tropical forests. Finally, tribal societies support the existence of many minor languages, while a large national state typically correlates with a smaller number of dialects/languages. Of these factors, only that of terrain can be said to affect biodiversity, at least directly.

Specific regional examples underscore the idea that biological and linguistic diversity do not arise for the same reasons. For example, Madagascar has extremely high biodiversity, but hosts a small number of languages (the Ethnologue lists 17 languages for Madagascar, all of which are closely related). The island’s high level of biodiversity is due to its “geographic separation millions of years ago that allowed the evolution of unique species”, whereas its relatively low linguistic diversity is because human colonization from a single region (Borneo) less than 2,000 years ago provided little opportunity for linguistic diversification.

Similarly, a closer look at regional variation within New Guinea (further illustrated in a series of Ethnologue maps) reveals that

“the isolated and rugged highlands feature high biological diversity, but less linguistic diversity than the northeastern coast of that large island. Topographic barriers to biological dispersion help account for the former; comparatively lower incidence of malaria in the interior allowed the emergence of large polities and the diffusion of associated language groups that did not occur on the more linguistically diverse northeastern coast, where topography is less rugged but the incidence of malaria higher”.

Thus, it appears that the search for explanation of correlating biological and linguistic diversity must focus not on factors that increase diversity, but on those that decrease it. To put it differently, the real question to be answered is not why areas of high biodiversity also tend to be linguistically diverse, but why is it that certain areas are low in both biological and linguistic diversity. For example, Nettle and Romaine have proposed that the European biological expansion of people, crops, diseases, and languages served to reduce both kinds of diversity in many localities. Since this expansion concentrated mostly in temperate areas that are roughly similar to the European homeland, its impact in the tropics has been much less pronounced, resulting in high levels of both biological and linguistic diversity. As Gorenflo and colleagues conclude:

“Although different processes may have given rise to the diversification of languages, cultures, and species in different areas, similar forces currently appear to be driving biological extinctions and cultural/linguistic homogenization.”

 

[This article was originally posted on GeoCurrents.info]

________________________

Sources:

Gorenflo, L.J.; Suzanne Romaine, Russell A. Mittermeier, and Kristen Walker-Painemilla (2012) “Co-occurrence of linguistic and biological diversity in biodiversity hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas”. PNAS online.

Nettle, D. (1999) Linguistic Diversity (Oxford University Press, New York).

Nettle, D. and S. Romaine (2000) Vanishing Voices (Oxford University Press, New York).

Oviedo G., Maffi L., and Larsen P.B. (2000) Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of the World and Ecoregion Conservation: An Integrated Approach to Conserving the World’s Biological and Cultural Diversity (World Wildlife Foundation International and Terralingua, Gland, Switzerland).

Pagel M. and R. Mace (2004) The cultural wealth of nations. Nature 428: 275–278.

Sutherland, W.J. (2003) Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species. Nature 423: 276–279.

The post Linguistic and Biological Diversity Overlap—But Why? appeared first on Languages Of The World.

As discussed in an earlier post, modern technology can be called upon to help save a dying language. Another example of this is a language called Arapesh, marked as #140 on the Ethnologue map of languages along the northern New Guinea coast. According to the Ethnologue, in 2003 some 4,340 people spoke Arapesh, out of almost 9,000 ethnic Arapesh. But the number of Arapesh speakers is constantly shrinking. Today, middle-aged and younger adults no longer speak the language, and children have almost no knowledge of their ancestral tongue.

Luckily, Lise Dobrin, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Virginia, conducted fieldwork in the village of Wautogik on the northern coast in 1998-99 and was able to record villagers telling stories, talking about how they did things in everyday life, such as gardening, and describing events like First Communion. At the time, the technology at her disposal was limited to a portable analog stereo cassette recorder and lavalier microphones. But in subsequent years, Prof. Dobrin compiled her recordings into a digital archive. When a group of urban Arapesh who use Facebook stumbled upon the Arapesh archive, they reached out to Dobrin asking for her help in preserving the language. In March 2012 Prof. Dobrin brought together a dozen people to discuss the best ways to make Arapesh, and possibly other endangered languages, available online to the tech-savvy generation and to connect far-flung villagers to one another. The conference was joined by Emmanuel Narokobi, an Arapesh man, who participated from Papua New Guinea via Skype. Professor Dobrin is working now with Mr. Narokobi and other urban Arapesh to determine what information would be most useful to them.

Papua New Guinea is slightly larger than California, but it is one of the most culturally diverse countries on Earth, as it is home to more than 900 languages, none of which traditionally was written down. Since the 16th century, several European nations have occupied parts of the New Guinea island; the eastern half gained independence from Australia in 1975. As in other developing countries, younger Arapesh have moved to cities for education and work, sending money home to the rest of the family. Today, many Arapesh villagers — those who still live in native villages and those who moved to cities — use Tok Pisin, Papua New Guinea’s lingua franca,  as their medium of communication in daily life. Tok Pisin comes from the English “talk pidgin“, from the term for a system of communication developed between people with different languages. English is taught in PNG schools.

The post Modern Technology Helps Save Dying Languages appeared first on Languages Of The World.

A “Language Nest” program has recently opened at the local kindergarten in the village of Potapovo, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. The goal of the program is to maintain—and to some extent revive—the Forest Enets language, one of the many endangered native Siberian languages. The program works by complete linguistic and cultural immersion of 3-to-6-year-olds whose parents do not speak the indigenous language and therefore cannot pass it to their children. The first “Language Nest” program was originally designed to save the Maori language in New Zealand. Similar programs are now used for Cree and other Native American languages. As this methodology is already being used successfully in Saami regions of Finland, the former president of Finland Tarja Kaarina Halonen proposed to apply the same methodology to rescuing Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic languages in Russia. “Language Nest” programs for Karelian, Veps, and Komi languages are now in operation in Petrozavodsk and Syktyvkar, in northwestern Russia.

The Enets language, of which Forest and Tundra varieties exist, is now in critical condition: very few ethnic Enets still speak the language. In the village of Potapovo, where most Enets live, there are 320 residents, of which only 68 are ethnic Enets. But no more than 15 speak the indigenous language. Only the older speakers in their 60s and 70s use the language in everyday life. Most Enets that do speak the language are self-employed in reindeer herding and fishing, so few of them get to use the language in work-related situations. The rest work in Russian-dominated environments, though a few women work at the local kindergarten. It is up to these ladies to run the “Language Nest” program. They have collected various teaching materials. Stylized ethnic costumes and toys have been made for the children and texts in the Enets language have been recorded. Folklore and ethnic games also constitute a large component of the program. The parents have been extremely supportive of the program. They actively participate in cultural events, teach the children about Enets traditions and customs. Even non-Enets parents now want their children to learn the Enets language.

While such “Language Nest” programs have been quite successful with the Saami language in Finland, it remains to be seen how much can be achieved for the Enets language because there are far fewer speakers of Enets than of Saami. Assimilation pressures in Siberia remain very strong. But even though the children enrolled in the program will not become native speakers of the Enets language, there is hope that their children might.

The post “Language Nest” Program to Nurture the Enets Language appeared first on Languages Of The World.

Some words, like fashion fads, appear in the language and disappear without a trace soon thereafter. Other words (and morphemes) are much more conservative. In this brief post, I will cite just two examples of highly conservative lexical elements, those that are preserved across huge distances.

The first example comes from the Turkic family, which stretches from the Balkans to northeastern Siberia (see map below). Despite the expanse covered by Turkic languages, contact with other languages, and contact among various languages within the family, some lexical elements are highly conservative. Among them is the plural morpheme, the suffix /-LAr/. In most Turkic languages it exhibits vowel harmony and in some languages also consonant assimilation. For example, in Turkish the plural suffix is subject to vowel harmony: for example, ağaçlar ‘trees’ but evler ‘houses’. In Sakha (more commonly known as Yakut) the plural suffix is subject not only to vowel harmony but also to consonant assimilation: depending on the preceding consonants and vowels it may surface as -lar, -ler, -lör, -lor, -tar, -ter, -tör, -tor), -dar, -der, -dör, -dor, -nar, -ner, -nör, or -nor. Some of these forms (in Cyrillic, commonly used for Sakha) are illustrated in the population chart above. Curiously, in Sakha the plural is used only when referring to a number of things collectively, not when specifying an amount. The one Turkic language without vowel harmony is Uzbek: here the plural suffix always surfaces as -lar.

Another example of a highly conservative lexical element, preserved over huge distances, comes from Austronesian languages (see map below). The word for ‘five’ is pretty much the same across the Austronesian family, which stretches from Madagascar to the far corners of the Polynesian triangle. In Malagasy, the Austronesian language spoken on Madagascar, ‘five’ is dimy. Nima is the form found in Tongan. Several other Austronesian languages, including Thao (on Taiwan), Rapanui (on Easter Island), Maori (in New Zealand), and Rarotongan (on Cook Islands) have rima for ‘five’. But the even more commonly found form is lima, which is attested in Samoan (in Samoa), Tuvaluan (on Tuvalu), Hawaiian (in Hawaii), Fijian and Rotuman (both on Fiji), Cebuano and Tagalog (both in the Philippines) and Malay (in Malaysia).

The post On conservativity appeared first on Languages Of The World.

The topic of differences between British and American English has already come up several times in this blog. These differences concern pronunciation (“tomejdo”-”tomahto”), word choice (truck vs. lorry), and even grammar (is the definite article needed in in the hospital?). Another case in point is the use of intensifying adverbs, such as pretty, rather, and quite.

Take, for example, pretty. If you hear someone say pretty sure, pretty good, pretty cool, or pretty darn close, they are most likely to be an American, or at least under the influence of American English. Another intensifying Americanism is mighty, which Brits do not use as an intensifier except when they’re trying to sound American. In fact, corpus data reveals many instances of mighty fine in British English, but they are nearly all examples of Brits’ poking fun at Americans. On the other hand, a Brit is more likely to use rather as in rather odd, rather strange, or rather silly. To an American ear, rather in front of an adjective sounds a bit formal and a bit British.

Other adverbs of this type may be used with a different meaning by British and American speakers. For example, “Thanks a bunch” is often used sincerely in American English, but ironically in British English. Another intensifying adverb that Americans and Brits do not quite agree is quite. The usage note in the Macmillan Dictionary puts it this way:

In British English quite usually means “fairly”:  The film was quite enjoyable, although some of the acting was weak. When American speakers say quite, they usually mean “very”: We’ve examined the figures quite thoroughly. Speakers of British English sometimes use quite to mean “very,” but only before words with an extreme meaning: The whole experience was quite amazing.

Still, Oh, quite! is often used by Americans in a light-hearted way poking fun of the Brits.

The post “Oh, rather!” appeared first on Languages Of The World.

A couple of days ago, I attended a very interesting talk by Sebouh Aslanian on New Julfa Armenians and their trade networks, stretching from Amsterdam to Manila in the Philippines. New Julfa is an Armenian settlement in Isfahan, Iran, located along the south bank of the Zayandeh River. Its historical roots go back to the city of Julfa (also known as Jugha or Djugha) in Nakhichevan (present-day Azerbaijan). In 1606 Shah Abbas I, an influential shah from the Safavid dynasty moved some 150,000 Armenians from Julfa to Isfahan, founding the New Julfa community. This move was due to forced resettlement by Abbas I himself (though some Iranian accounts disagree). What the various scholars do agree on is that New Julfa Armenians were adventurous traders in silk. They established trusted relationships with members of their own community who have spread over the silk trade roots. These trade neworks are discussed in more detail in a GeoCurrents‘ post by Martin W. Lewis.

But New Julfa Armenians are interesting not only from the point of view of their trade networks, but for their dialect too. As is typical for many emigre communities, New Julfa Armenians preserved some features of the ancestral tongue better than other dialects remaining in the homeland. One aspect of the New Julfa Armenian that is of interest to linguists is that it allows us to examine the issue of aspiration in fricatives.

Aspiration refers to a short (about 25 milliseconds) delay in the spread of the vocal cords after a voiceless stop is released. For example, consider the articulation of the word pot in English. The first segment [p] is voiceless, so the vocal cords are spread to let the air pass through the glottis unimpeded. As for the oral tract, the lips are first closed and then released. The second segment, the vowel, is voiced so the vocal cords are brought close together to create vibration. In the oral cavity, the vowel is articulated as low, back, unrounded, and lax. Aspiration results from the non-alignment of the laryngeal (vocal cords) and oral (mouth) articulations: when the mouth is already pronouncing the vowel, the vocal cords remain for a brief moment in the voiceless/spread position.

In English aspiration is non-phonemic, as its appearance is predictable from context. Specifically, voiceless stops are aspirated in stressed syllable-initial position, for example in tack and attack, but not in stack. But the same is not true in several other languages, where aspiration serves the distinctive function (that is, it can distinguish one word from another). For example, in Thai ta: (without aspiration) means ‘eye’ and tha: (with aspiration) means ‘landing place’. Similarly, in Hindi kal (without aspiration) means ‘era’ and khal (with aspiration) means ‘skin’. Armenian too uses aspiration distinctively: kap (without aspiration) means ‘bond’ and kaph (with aspiration) means ‘club’; mut (without aspiration) means ‘entrance’ and muth (with aspiration) means ‘darkness’; and tak (without aspiration) means ‘under’ and takh (with aspiration) means ‘hot’.

Phonetically speaking, aspiration most typically applies to stops (though some languages, such as Burmese, have aspirated fricatives too). But what about the mental representation of fricatives? Are they grouped into the same natural class with aspirated or unaspirated stops? The New Julfa Armenian dialect sheds some light on this issue. As discussed in a paper by Bert Vaux “The Laryngeal Specifications of Fricatives”, New Julfa Armenian has a four-way (2×2) contrast in its inventory of stops: voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated, voiceless unaspirated, and voiceless aspirated. Fricatives, on the other hand, only come in voiced and voiceless varieties, and never carry phonetic aspiration. But a certain assimilation phenomenon reveals that voiced and voiceless fricatives are categorized differently in this dialect: voiced fricatives pattern with unaspirated stops and voiceless fricatives with aspirated stops.

The assimilation in question is a morphophonological rule operating on the future morpheme, the prefix k-. This prefix assimilates in voicing and aspiration to the following consonant; the basic form k- is retailed if it attaches to a stem that starts with a vowel. The prefix remains k- if it attaches to a stem that starts with an unaspirated voiceless consonant, such as the stem tam ‘go’ (an epenthetic schwa is inserted between the prefix and the stem to allow for syllabification, but this insertion must apply after the assimilation rule; we don’t need to concern ourselves with this detail though). When the future tense prefix is attached to a stem that starts with a voiced unaspirated consonant, e.g. lam ‘cry’, it is voiced, turning into a g-. When the prefix is attached to a stem that begins with an aspirated voiceless stop such as thorniem ‘allow’, the resulting form of the prefix is kh-, and when it attaches to a stem beginning with an aspirated voiced stop such as ghom ‘come’, the resulting form of the prefix is gh-. What happens when the future tense prefix attaches to a stem that starts with a fricative, such as savoriem ‘grow accustomed to’ or zram ‘bray’? In the latter case, the prefix becomes g-, that is it assimilates in voicing but there is no aspiration added. But in the case of stems starting with a voiceless fricative, like savoriem ‘grow accustomed to’, the resulting form of the prefix is kh-, meaning that voiceless fricatives are mentally treated not only as voiceless but as aspirated as well. The image below summarizes these data from Vaux’s paper.

The post Aspiration in New Julfa Armenian appeared first on Languages Of The World.