#language classification

[possessivesuffix]

Reading Güldemann's recent ~400-page handbook review on the classification of the languages of Africa; so far seems like fair treatment & in decent detail. Already the introduction has good underlining of basic methodological points like

where substantial shared material exists, one should default to a relationship and not propose mass loaning / creolization / "mixing" without further arguments

correspondence sets without proper reconstruction can be almost as important for tracing external relationships as fully reconstructed proto-forms

not every language has numerals and thus not every relationship involves them either

lack of proper documentation is an obstacle for proper classification

[possessivesuffix]

To add a bit more: there are reasons to think there have been at least two substrate languages that left a trace in Sami! A 2012 paper from Ante Aikio calls them "Paleo-Lakelandic", a more southern substrate that forms a common heritage in all Sami languages; versus "Paleo-Laplandic", a more northern substrate or substrate family that has left individual effects in each separate Sami language.

(For what it's worth, there might be hints of Paleo-Lakelandic or at least some language in that area being some early branch of or distantly related to Uralic — I've talked about this in a paper just this summer and a few other people have had suggestions to this effect too. It's still very scanty data though and is going to be hard to tell for sure, could be easily also e.g. old Uralic loanwords into an unrelated substrate language.)

OP's map could be likely extended also with some other languages that are not really pre-Indo-European as much as pre-Uralic, such as the "Agricultural Substrate" leaving traces in the more southwestern Uralic groups (Finnic, Mordvinic, Mari, Permic). "Europe" does include also Russia west of the Urals, contrary to what business-of-the-day cartography often may imply!

Interestingly also, the last-mentioned substrate probably was still passed thru the Corded Ware culture that once extended over the same area, which likely was some lost variety of Indo-European… something like a third branch of Balto-Slavic or a dialect intermediate to B–S and Indo-Iranian. So likely originally a "pre-Indo-European" substrate after all, even if it then comes to our attention as pre-Uralic.

Paleo-European languages

Before the Celtic and Germanic languages, before Latin and Greek, before any Indo-European languages whatsoever, Europe was populated by speakers of dozens if not hundreds of languages, most of which left little or no trace. These are called Paleo-European languages.

The only known surviving Paleo-European language is Basque, but we have ancient written inscriptions from a number of others, such as Aquitanian, Etruscan, Iberian, Minoan, and Tartessian.

Roman writing with ancient Basque names, found in Lerga, Navarre.

There are also traces of other lost Paleo-European languages in many place names and borrowings from those languages into the Indo-European languages that came later. Moreover, the Paleo-European languages influenced the grammar and pronunciation of the Indo-European languages, sometimes creating a new branch of Indo-European entirely.

When a language influences the language that replaces it like this, it is called a substrate language. It is hypothesized that the development of the Germanic languages was caused by such a substrate, which gave the Germanic languages about a quarter of their vocabulary.

More broadly, any language that was displaced or existed in Prehistoric Europe, Asia Minor, Ancient Iran, and Southern Asia before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans is called a Pre-Indo-European language. More of these are attested or recognized as substrates than for Paleo-European, but little is known about them overall.

Known Pre-Indo-European languages

Want to learn more about the history of the world’s languages? I recommend one of my favorite pop linguistics books, Empires of the word: A language history of the world:

[tiredafel]

"The borders of a country and the borders of a language are not the same." - Ö.A.

banger line from my professor during the first lecture of the comparative language analysis class, on the topic of typological classification

[gaydivorcetual]

was using voice to text for an essay and

[gottagetshiver]

Honestly u raise a good point with 40k being considered a novel in the industry. See for me i classify the lion the witch and the wardrobe as a novella- for me a novella is anything i can finish in an afternoon and a novel takes me more than one afternoon. but i forgot my reading wpm is insane

I've literally always just gone by the technical definitions of what each length is called as that's how I was taught creative writing in school, but that's so fair to have personal definitions too! I find 80-100k is more of a "default" length for me to consider something a novel since that's a much more standard industry length (at least these days for standalone novels), but as a writer I'm also gonna take my big 40k milestone of calling something novel length just for the dopamine hit LMAO

I also think I've always just called most books novels for most of my life so it's a bit of a default for me to just consider any book that's not like... a children's book series, or something similar, a novel regardless of the actual length. I devoured books when I was younger, like hundreds of thousands of words a day, so it would take something truly massive to really take me more than a day to get through lol. like whether 40 or 400k, it was gone before the sun set (or would rise lmao)

[possessivesuffix]

today in "Standard Average European is a language area that is only coincidentally made up of Indo-European languages mostly"

I understand your point but Basque being a non-IE makes it harder to learn than any other IE language

Well then, anon, good luck with easy languages like Albanian, Icelandic, Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Irish, or Nepali to name a few. I'm sure you'll be able to master them in no time since you speak another IE language.

[appreciatingtokrev]

every day i think abt this tumblr post in which a us-american was incredibly fascinated by two girls they saw who were speaking english & japanese interchangably. because, like, i speak three languages interchangably on the daily. that’s normal to me. i’m not even fluent in french (been learning it at school for 10 years now tho lmao) but there’s enough french words & phrases i use on the daily. if i can’t remember a (swiss) german word/saying/etc while talking in german i just substitude with english because most people i talk to are fluent in both anyways. i greet my little brother in french and then go on to ask if he wants to go and by ramunae with me sometime, in swiss german, in the same breath, and i answer overmorrow when he asks me when because i think it’s a funkier word than übermorn.

i think about that post every day and i genuinly wonder how someone can grow up and never learn another language. how do you live without this? without the pressure to speak at least two of your country’s four official languages? without the pressure of learning the world’s language as a second/third? without ever seeing all the beauty in knowing more than one language, and being able to understand so much more of the world?

[proto-language]

btw if i don't meet the conditions for my preferred mphil offer it's rosemary sutcliff's fault

[cybertron-smash-or-pass]

I'm sorry, I have to say it, as a certified fan of RiD'01, RiD Scourge is not a Scourge of this same variety. He's essentially a Nemesis Prime to me in both looks and the fact that he was made from a scan of Optimus. I think he's hot, sure, but having him up against the other Scourges is just a species misidentification to me...

I mean Unicron Trilogy bulkhead was absolutely nothing like the later iterations of bulkhead and I always felt rid 01 brawn was more Ironhide than anything, but the fact remains that hasbro named him scourge and thus he remains tied to all the other scourges. Generally, if it's not a case of a character being named after another character from the same continuity in-universe (like with the case of beast era Megatron) I have to consider them in the same group. If I didn't, things could get messy with semantics and how similar in character two bots with the same name have to be before they qualify as a different species.

[cigaretteparfum]

made a new sideblog for personal textposts lol mutuals dm me if yous want to peep.

[possessivesuffix]

Areal innovations in Cushitic

A small collection of innovations across Cushitic that don't seem to establish any coarser subclassification: broad phonological changes, plus one of the more prominent grammatical divisions — loss vs. preservation of the prefix conjugation, thought to be already old Afrasian inheritance. This already suffices to distinguish every unambiguous group from each other, even though none of the features are unique to some single group! Hopefully this will illustrate the relative heterogeneity of South and especially East Cushitic.

Loss of pharyngeals and ?introduction of labialized consonants indeed continue to Ethio-Semitic, as shown. (Loss of lateral obstruents, again supposedly Afrasian inheritance, however is not quite areally shared between the two: Cushitic has mainly *ɬ > l, Ethio-Semitic *ɬ > s.) To reiterate, it would be also nice to compare further with North Omotic eventually, it already features prominently in any papers on the Ethiopian Sprachbund; but I've not seen thorough enough comparative coverage to assemble anything analogous to this.

The arrangement of the Cushitic subgroups is roughly geographic, in terms of what's adjacent to what. This ends up kind of showing also the large range of Oromo and Somali, not in a way proportional to the real geography though, e.g. HEC + Konsoid + Dullay + Arboroid are actually all cramped in an area smaller than that of just Beja or just Afar, and Agaw is really multiple language islands mainly within the range of Ethio-Semitic, instead of forming a neat cluster between Oromo and Beja. If I had put Ethio-Semitic in here geographically too, all of it would go in the same area where Agaw is now: between Beja, HEC, Oromo and SA.

Crossfading-to-white for Agaw, Konsoid, Dullay indicates that some of these languages, but not all, have *kʼ > qʼ ~ q ~ ʛ. Dashed lines mark the fairly often proposed Arboroid–Somaloid (Omo–Tana) and Konsoid–Oromo groupings and the possible inclusion of Yaaku in Arboroid.

[gaydivorcetual]

crazy that indonesian isnt even top 29 help??? its 56(?)

IKR??? esp bcs Indonesia is like the fourth modt populated country in the world ,,, like obv mandarin and english n hindi wld be above it, then spanish n arabic bcs its got so many countries, but its wildddd its so low for native speakers. Even if u include non native speakers its only 11th :0

[theperfectquestion]

The parable of the siphonophore is that, like all classifications, the organism / organ / colony terms are only useful up to a point.

'Species' is another term that generally works as a way to define 'a specific type of organism' but you don't have to go far into the weeds of taxonomy to find that it is only useful up to a point. Ecologists get good use out of 'species' because you can lobby to establish legal protections for certain types of organisms. But to an epidemiologist tracing the movement of a certain kind of bacteria through a population of humans, 'species' is simply not a useful thing to think about when genes for resistance and virulance can be horizontally transfered to any number of other bacterial species.

'Organ' is a medical term that is very useful to surgeons who need to know which set of specialized tools to use for an operation. 'Colony' is a loan word from microbiology, where it is used in the context of culturing techniques. 'Organism' is more nebulous, mainly being useful for distinguishing biology from chemistry which is, in itself, a fuzzy distinction.

So it shouldn't really upset us to discover that this lucky dip of vocabulary doesn't produce the right word to describe an animal that humans don't have a lot of cultural experience with. In a thousand years or so we will probably be able to walk thorough the fields of systems biology, microbiology and taxonomy without falling into so many rabbit holes and breaking a leg as we do so.

The reader is invited to think of other areas in which our language is inadequate, and to reflect on how this inadequacy leads to a lot of trouble when strict categories are drawn up by laws or borders. Perhaps the mesmerising, pelagic sway siphonophore can guide us towards a less injurous future.

[sillimancer]

I'm thinking about being cute and using the dewey decimal system to tag my more structured blog but I am foreseeing some problems as someone who takes a great interest in world religions

do you see the problem

[themontessoriacademyofarlington]

Early Childhood - Air, Land, Water

This student is very focused! Students place small animal figurines onto the appropriate sections of this beautiful tapestry to match the animal's habitat - air, land, or water. This hands-on activity enhances sorting and classification skills, promotes language development as children discuss their choices, fosters a deeper connection with the natural world, and encourages critical thinking and observational skills.

[mysticdragon3md3]

Fighting Game Archetypes For Dummies by GekkoSquirrel

Funny thing about being a fighting gamer back before there was easy access to a Fighting Game Community, is that I never learned all these terms.  Like, I was independently discovering strategies that I didn’t know a whole community had been sharing amongst each other and had already decided names for.  So nowadays, I keep trying to learn the FGC’s language, even though my memory is terrible. Saving videos like this for reference.