Language as a System
This is the assignment for Thursday, September 14.
The Language Museum is a good place to start. http://www.language-museum.com/
Examine five languages in addition to English and your own other language. What elements seem to be the same? Which ones are strikingly different. Make your reply at least two hundred words and be sure to include examples and enough information for others to find your resources.
A symbol is "an arbitrary or conventional sign" or "something that stands for or suggests something else" (Merriam–Webster).
A symbol, in its basic sense, is a conventional representation of a concept or quantity; i.e., an idea, object, concept, quality, etc. In more psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic in nature, and representations for these concepts are simply token artifacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning, or symbolism.
Spoken language, for example, consists of distinct auditory tokens for representing symbolic concepts (words), arranged in an order which further suggests their meaning.
Read the Wikipedia entry for "Symbols." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol
Bring to class an original example of a symbolic system.
posted by TRB | 5:21 AM
18 Comments:
The languages that I am choosing to examine are: English, my native tongue; Italian, my language of study at Middlebury; Latin and Ancient Greek, which I studied in high school; Arabic; Spanish; and Hindi. By looking only at the samples provided at language-museum.com and using my varying levels of knowledge of the languages, there are a lot of observations to be made. Hoping that no observation is too basic for this assignment, I would first say that all these languages have been standardized in such a way that they can be represented electronically in a uniform manner. Each passage is broken up into words, and these words are composed of letters, which appear in varying frequency in the samples. English, Latin, Spanish and Italian all use the same basic alphabet with certain differences – I see acute accent marks above some a’s, i’s and o’s in Spanish as well as grave accent marks above some a’s in Italian. Also, the letters j and y only appear in the Spanish and English samples, and k and w appear in the English one alone. Some of the letters in the Greek sample are very similar to the letters in the above four, including kappa, which resembles the English k. Like Spanish and Italian, accent marks appear over many vowels, but there are also breathing marks that appear above initial vowels or vowel combinations. In the Hindi sample, I see that there are numerals that appear exactly as they do in the English translation, but when the word “six” is used instead of the numeral 6, I cannot recognize the corresponding Hindi representation. The English translation of the Arabic sample uses the words “twelve”, “five”, “seven”, and “nine”, but I only see the use of the numeral 12 in the sample itself. The Arabic sample uses some punctuation that I recognize, specifically parentheses, periods and a dash. The Hindi sample uses the % symbol, but no other punctuation that I recognize, although I would be willing to hazard a guess that the symbol that looks like a vertical line (i.e, | ) would be a punctuation mark that signifies the end of a thought, much like a period. I look forward to seeing others’ observations on the languages that they have picked!
Kevin Tierney
I decided to look at all European languages so that I could better see the influence and diversity between them. Besides English, I examined Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, and Swedish. Italian is the closest to English. There are many cognates between the two. However, it seems that Basque has allowed in a lot of influence from its linguistic neighbors, due to words such as ‘larru-kolorea’ for color, ‘sexua’ for sex, ‘erlijioa’ for religion, and the root ‘politik’ in the uses of ‘political.’ Hungarian also shows Indo-European influence in its use of the word ‘autonóm’ in the phrase for ‘non-self-governing.’ (The Italian uses ‘autonomo.’) Hungarian shows the most similarity to Finnish, as can be expected. Some of the roots were the same, but other than that they are still quite distant from each other. All of the languages use a small word for ‘or,’ but each one is different. Italian has the closest resemblance to English with ‘o.’ For Basque ‘or’ is ‘edo;’ for Finnish it is ‘tai;’ for Hungarian it is ‘vagy,’ and for Swedish ‘or’ is ‘eller.’ And while many of these languages use symbols with the letters, such as umlauts, they signify different sounds, and the can appear on different letters. Also, concerning the spelling, some of the languages have certain letter combinations that rarely or even never appear in the others, though they have a similar alphabet. Lastly, while the Italian seemed to rely heavily upon prepositions, the others seemed to rely more upon suffixes.
I used the Language Museum in my observations.
Random note: One of the sentences in the paragraph started with ‘Ez’ in Basque and ‘Ezenfelül’ in Hungarian. Upon further research, however, I found that these did not refer to the same word. (http://szotar.sztaki.hu/english-hungarian , http://www1.euskadi.net/morris/dictionary.htm )
~Andy Gustafson
For this post I decided to look at English, Spanish – my language of study here at Middlebury, Irish-Gaelic, German, Romanian and Swedish to get a general glimpse at various parts of Europe, just like Andy. Right off the bat, I noticed that they all used the same basic alphabet, with a few unique characters interposed in each language. For example, Swedish and German placed umlauts over some of their vowels; while Spanish and Irish-Gaelic used acute accent mark and Romanian inserted the “ˆ” and “˘” over their vowels in some places. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate the names of the Romanian symbols, so if someone could please comment and enlighten me, I would be most grateful! I also noticed that all six languages were very similar when it came to the “key words” of the passages. For example, German, Swedish and English used the word “religion”, while Spanish uses the extremely similar “religion”. Also, Romanian uses the word “religie” which is also similar. Irish-Gaelic was the only word that was outstandingly different, using the word “creideamh”. However, I thought this word seemed related to the Spanish word “creer”, which means “to believe”, so a relationship could be hypothesized. Along the same vein, looking at translations for the English word “race”, German used “Rasse”, Swedish “ras”, Spanish “raza”, and Romanian “rasǎ”, which all depict a clear relationship between the languages. Irish-Gaelic was once again the “odd man out” with the word “cine” meaning “race”. Thanks and see you all tomorrow!
P.S. All of the above information was taken from The Language Museum website.
-Dan
At http://www.language-museum.com I compared samples from English, German, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, and Norwegian (Nynorsk). All of these languages are Indo-European, and are part of three separate groups: Germanic (English, German, Swedish, and Norwegian), Italic (Latin and French), and Greek (Ancient Greek). To a native English speaker German, Swedish and Norwegian look notably similar on first glance. Latin and French share some similar words, but on the whole the sentence structure is very different. Greek’s different alphabet originally sets it apart from the others, though as Kevin said many letters are recognizable.
Looking through the passages I was immediately drawn to the differing use of articles in the different languages. The two extremes of usage of articles are Latin, which uses no articles at all, and French, which uses articles even for abstract ideas (de race, de couleur, de sexe). Each of the other Germanic languages besides English in this sample use articles at the same times that English does (the political = der politischen [G] = den politiska [N]* = den politiske [S]). Ancient Greek does not have an indefinite article, but unlike the other languages they can use an article in front of a name (God = “ho theos”, or “the god”).
In addition to the frequency of articles the inflection of them changes as well. Ancient Greek is the most heavily inflected of these languages, and has nineteen different forms of the article “the”, each used based on a noun’s gender, number, and role in the sentence; English, which is not inflected, has only “the”, and the other languages (except Latin) fall in between (though with the possible exception of Norwegian much closer to English than Greek).
* While trying to research the different definite articles in Norwegian, I found that my quoting of “den politiska” to be analogous to English’s “the political” to be incorrect. Apparently the Norwegian equivalent of “the” is actually formed as a suffix on the noun itself. The “den” that I quoted above is actually part of a “double definite construction”: a separate article is only used like that when there is an adjective before the noun (the original passage is “the political … status”). http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/norwegian/grammar/nouns.html
I did not technically choose all European languages, but I did select Indo-European languages from typically European families: Afrikaans, Old Norse, Low German, and my native English to represent Germanic languages; Venetian and French to represent Italic languages; and finally Croatian as the token Slavic language. Croatian may have the same Indo-European roots as the other languages, but for all that, the text is almost completely unintelligible to someone only familiar with Germanic and Italic languages. Key words like ‘nacionalno,’ ‘rasa,’ ‘Deklaraciji,’ ‘politickog’ (please forgive the omitted special characters), and ‘suverenosti’ are recognizable as having cognates in the other languages. The presence of these cognates may stem from borrowing from other languages rather than from development from a common Indo-European root. ‘Ne,’ however, shows up as a negative in the Croatian text. Negation is a fairly basic element of communication, and similar forms appear in the English ‘no,’ the French ‘ne/pas’ and ‘non,’ the Venetian ‘non,’ the Afrikaans ‘nie,’ and the Low German ‘niet.’ I was surprised to note that in Old Norse, the negation was circumvented by some other construction, or was so buried in the text that I could not decipher it.
Venetian I found fairly readable with my knowledge of French and the Latin I had in high school. The presence of cognates is regular: ‘pare nostro,’ ‘ciei,’ ‘sanctifica,’ ‘dane,’ ‘quotidiano,’ and many others. The construction of the sentences seems a departure from what I expected; “santifica el to nome” in French would not have what appears to be an article (‘el’) and would instead mimic English construction (past passive participle + subjunctive ‘to be’).
Of the Germanic languages, I find Afrikaans most difficult. Its cognates with English (‘ras,’ ‘kleur,’ ‘persoon,’ ‘nie-self-regerend’) made the text nearly decipherable, but does ‘geslag’ translate as sex, religion, language, or something else? Afrikaans seems least like the Old English and Chaucerian Middle English I’ve read, whereas Old Norse (which is extinct) and Low German (which is not much like the High German I learned when I was little) are easier to read than Beowulf, though that’s probably because I know the text of the Lord’s Prayer already. I enjoyed seeing how Old Norse and Low German filled in each other’s gaps or reinforced one another. For example, the straightforward ‘Fa(th)er’ in Old Norse balances the odd duck ‘Uayer’ in Plattdeutsch, and the ON ‘himnom’ and ‘haeilagt’ reflect the LG ‘hemel’ and ‘geheylicht’ beautifully.
-Jessie
I used the Language Museum primarily, and double-checked with Google on the spelling of Plattdeutsch.
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I attempted to go for an eclectic mix of languages, choosing from such Indo-European families as Germanic (English, Dutch, and Icelandic), Italic (Spanish and Caló), and Baltic (Lithuanian), as well as the Niger-Congo language of Swahili. The fact that Swahili had no cognates to the other languages than “Yohana,” the name “John,” did not surprise me, since it is of a different family. However, what did surprise me was how little Icelandic represented English and Dutch, my other Germanic languages. In addition to containing several accent marks, umlauts, and letters with which I am completely unfamiliar, the Icelandic sentence structure hardly matched the English translation’s. A possible resemblance I noted was the Germanic tendency to create long words by combining several syllables of different meaning, rather than creating phrases, like in the word “sjálfstjórnarlaust” (self-governing). The only other similarity I found between Icelandic and the other languages was “lands,” like the Dutch and English “land,” both of which mean “country.”
Within the Italic classification, I assumed I would find Caló, which is a Gitano (gypsy) language of Spain, to be almost like a dialect of Spanish. But, upon reading the passage, I found that even as a fluent speaker of Spanish, I could barely understand the text. The few borrowed words from Spanish included “y” and “de” (and, of), as well as “on,” which corresponded to the Spanish “en” (in, on, or at). Although the vocabulary of Spanish and Caló hardly matched, I did notice familiar suffixes in the Caló passage. For example, “manjirificado” contains the common Spanish suffix “-ado,” which usually signifies passive voice or the English suffix “-ated.” What struck me as more interesting was the word “acnao,” whose suffix “-ao” is also likely from Spanish. I could not verify this assumption in research, but gathered it from some time I spent in Spain. In Andalucía, the southern province of Spain and home to most of the Gitano population (and also where I spent time abroad), speakers tend to drop the “d” in the “-ado” ending, meaning that a word like “cansado” (tired) is pronounced “cansao.”
Perhaps the most striking cognates I found were within the unlikely group of Dutch, Lithuanian and Spanish. The words for “race” (Dutch “ras”, Lithuanian “rasė,” Spanish “raza), “national” (Dutch “nationale,” Lithuanian “nacionalinė,” Spanish “nacional”), “sovereignty” (Dutch “soevereiniteit,” Lithuanian “suverenitetas,” Spanish “soberanía”), “status” (Dutch “status,” Lithuanian “statusu,” Spanish “estado”), and “declaration” (Dutch “Verklaring,” Lithuanian “Deklaracijoje,” Spanish “declaración”), all demonstrated the languages’ Indo-European roots. When I considered the similar words, I noticed that each was a relatively modern word used in politics, which may have been taken from one language (like English) and modified for each respective language.
In addition to www.language-museum.com, I used the Altavista translator Babelfish for Dutch translations (babelfish.altavista.com/tr) and a Geocities site in Spanish for my background on Caló
(http://www.geocities.com/webromany/notas_gramaticales/dos_ejemplos/la_lengua_gitana_en_espana.html).
For this assignment I examined English and five other languages from the Indo-European family of languages (Spanish, French, Danish, Swedish and Slovenian). Despite stemming from common roots, the languages have evolved so much as to become almost unrecognizable as relatives. Within specific branches such as Italic or Germanic, there are considerable similarities. Between groups however, the resemblance is subtler and more difficult to identify.
Across all six languages that I examined, several words are strikingly similar and suggest a closer relationship than the other words in the passage. These are easy to spot and instantly recognizable as cognates to English. The lack of derivation suggests a more recent borrowing from the Italic root rather than a long-standing preservation from an ancient PIE root.
English- political social race
Spanish- política social raza
French- politique sociale race
Danish- politisk social race
Swedish- politisk socialt ras
Slovenian- politično socialno raso
Any similarities between the languages seem to be at the level of vocabulary, specifically words used to describe topics of public importance. Other similar elements are at the level of basic components. Each language has its own recognizable rules such as adding -no to a noun in Slovenian to make it an adjective, or requiring the adjective to follow the noun in Spanish and French. There are no arbitrary elements, only logical and regulated patterns.
Other similarities appear between Slovenian, Danish and Swedish which do not occur in German, French and Spanish. While the first three languages relate to one set of roots, the second three clearly relate to another set.
English- color or
Spanish- color o
French- couleur ou
Danish- farve eller
Swedish- hudfärg eller
Slovenian- barvo ali
These examples indicate that a cognate might appear in only a few branches of a language family or across an entire family.
Elements of language that are strikingly different tend to be those which are hardest to identify as cognates – verbs and smaller connecting words. These words are less likely to be borrowed as they are so fundamental to the composition of a language. Of course, the most obvious difference is the variation of vocabulary and the complete lack of relation between words like the Slovenian “okoliščino” and the French “situation.”
Source - http://www.thelanguage-museum.com
In addition to my native language, English, and the acquired language with which I am most familiar, French, I decided to examine Welsh, Gaelic, and Basque. On a very basic level all of the five languages are written in the same alphabet. A lot of the words in the three languages which I was able to translate using the translation of the entire text were adjectives, and so, many of my observation resolves around that particular part of speech. “Political” is a word that is easily recognizable in all five languages. In French it is “politique”, in gaelic it is “pholiticeach”, in welsh “boliticaidd”, and in Basque it is “politikako”. I found this to be interesting, as so many of the other words are extremely different, and at first glance bear no relation to one another. I found that in the cases where I could distinguish both the noun and adjective in sentences, it seemed that while English sentence structure normally places the noun after the adjective, in French and Welsh the noun appeared before the adjejctive.
Furthermore, I found that all five languages often endings to indicate that a word is an adjective. Like in English there not all adjectives used the specific endings, however there were a significant number. In English, adjectives often end in “al” or “ic”, such as in normal, political, numeric, systematic and pathetic. In French, similar endings are used: “al(e)” and “ique”, such as in normale, pathetique and systematique. In Welsh I found that many words that to my best knowledge are adjectives end in “iol” or “all”, similar to the French and English “al”. These words include “gyfrithiol”(jurisdictional) and “chydwladol” (international), and “arrall” (other). In Gaelic, I found “ial” and “each”, both phonetically similar to the English endings. Examples include “politeach”, “neo-elemeileach” (non-self-governed), and “uachdoranail” (jurisdictional). In Basque, the English “ic” ending was seen as either “ik” or “ako”. Examples include “autonomarik”, “nola-helako” and “politikako”.
After looking at the Language Museum website, I chose to examine Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Latin in addition to English. What first caught my attention was the number of English cognates present in the Spanish, Italian, French and Latin translations. The similarities between the romance languages are striking. The same words appear as cognates in each of those languages: race, color, sex, origin, national, religion, and opinion to name some. Latin also contains cognates although it seems like it uses them to a lesser extent, and German appears to only have a few: Religion, nationaler, and internationalen.
The visual aspect of each language’s paragraph also caught my attention. The German version contains many more words with capitalized letters; such words which do not require capitalization in other languages stand out more to those who are illiterate in German due to the visual unfamiliarity. The use of accent marks also works to distinguish the languages; Spanish, Italian and French all contain accented words while English and Latin do not.
At least in Spanish, Italian and French, the sentence structure appears to have a similar layout. Similar to English, these languages’ sentences start with the subject, are followed by a verb and end with nouns which are preceded by adjectives. This seems to suggest that these languages are likely to have shared similar origins, and the fact that these countries all exist in the same geographic location helps strengthen such a hypothesis. Not knowing any Latin or German, I had a harder time deciphering those versions’ structures as there were fewer cognates present to help discriminate the varying particles of speech.
I am currently studying Japanese, and because it differs greatly from these European languages, I thought it would also be interesting to comment on it briefly. The obvious major distinction is that it has a completely different writing system. Another difference occurs in the sentence structure; verbs come at the end of the sentence. However, there are also some similarities. Cognates seem to be a common theme among the formerly mentioned languages and Japanese too borrows words from other languages. It is interesting to wonder how on different continents languages formed in such completely different manners.
*http://www.language-museum.com/
I decided to start looking at 5 languages through the lens of the word for "I". I made a friend this summer who spoke Mixe (a native language from Oaxaca, Mexico), and found the sound of their word for "I" to be very interesting. It sounds like "oots" or "euts". This varies remarkably from English, in which the word "I" does not end in a consonant. In French the word for I is "je", which is very open sounding (it seems more so than "I" which could almost end in a "y"). In Russian, the word is "ya". In Spanish, "yo", in Chinese, "wo" (but not rhyming with "yo," perhaps more like "wa" or "wu").
It seems to me that the endings of the word in English, Chinese, and Spanish are similar because they all end in vowels and at the same time have a more closed sound (feeling vaguely like you're swallowing) than "I" in Russian and French. "Je" and "ya" sound more open and apart from the self. Mixe sounds completely different, ending in two consonants and overall having a much faster and pointed delivery. I wonder if the open/closed sound is influenced by how that culture perceives the self, or if the use of the word affects their interpretation of the self. At the same time, the word in the context of the entire language may have less of a marked effect--because the entire language somewhat mirrors that sound (for instance what I heard of Mixe has many words with harsh though not unattractive consonants: "oots mhaktpé" is what "my name is" sounded like) and the speakers are used to expressing the world within those general parameters of sound.
Tessa...I wasn't at the last class, but am visiting the class tomorrow (-:
In addition to English and Chinese (my native language), I chose French, Japanese, which I have some knowledge of, Korean because I wrongly assumed it would be linguistically similar to Chinese, Malay, because I used to live in Singapore, and Tibetan, which belongs to the same language family as Chinese (Sino-Tibetan).
For English and Chinese are already very different languages, I was only able to observe one similarity that all seven languages share. All seven languages start the passage with the English equivalent of “everyone”, indicating that despite the difference in V-O order (Japanese has an O-V structure), they all place the subject at the beginning of a sentence.
English, French and Malay have a recognizably similar set of alphabets, with minor differences such as the accents in French. However, the distributions of sounds differ greatly. Whereas English and French vowels occur with similar frequency, the passage in Malay contained a splurge of “a”s. Compound vowels such as the English “ir” (birth) and the French “oi” (soit) are practically non-existent in the Malay passage, except for one occurrence of “ua” in “dibuat”.
Korean and Tibetan are presumably both constructed with alphabets as there are a limited number of shapes that appear repeatedly in the passage. What differs Korean from the other alphabet-based languages is that in Korean alphabets are arranged two-dimensionally (as opposed to linearly) to form a self-contained character/word, like having the word “CAT” spelt with the T below CA. While Chinese is composed of characters, Japanese contains a mélange of characters and alphabets.
These observable constructional differences can also be used to explain why the five languages other than Japanese and Chinese show spacing in the passages. Adding alphabets to a word may create gibberish but adding characters to characters is exactly how Chinese and Japanese form meaningful sentences. Although I am not sure why Korean, whose basic unit could be arguably a character (formed with alphabet), still requires spacing.
Another minor difference would be the recognition of plural for nouns. English and French obviously address plural (“rights” and “droits”), and after scrutinizing the passage in Malay for a few minutes, I deduced the repetition of a word, linked by hyphen (“hak-hak”), would indicate the plural. While the other four languages do not distinguish “right” from “rights”.
From the language museum website, I decided to compare Korean, Japanese, Chinese, three Asian languages as one group since none of the three uses the Roman alphabet writing system. Korean is my native language while Japanese and Chinese are the languages I am currently studying. And as a second group, I decided to compare Italian, French, Spanish and English, the Indo-European languages.
The Korean language is made up from the Korean alphabet, Hangul. Before the invention of Hangul, written Korean was derived from Chinese characters. Similarly, the Japanese language also has its unique set of alphabets. However, Japanese is different from Korean in that it has two sets of alphabets, the hiragana and katakana, and also adopts the Chinese writing system, kanji. Although most words are pronounced differently from what they actually sound like in Chinese, the meaning tends to be similar. For Chinese, however, each character has its unique syllable and hence, are thousands of characters which combine to create the Chinese writing system.
For instance, looking at the word “religion” in the three languages:
Korean-종교 (pronounced jonggyou)
Japanese-宗敎 (pronounced shuukyou)
Chinese-宗敎 (pronounced zōngjiào)
We can see that the words are exactly the same for Japanese and Chinese, while there are notable commonalities between the pronunciations between the three languages.
From the four Indo-European languages, I was easily able to spot similarities between certain words which seemed to share common roots such as:
Italian- Dichiarazione
Spanish- Declaracion
French- Declaration
English- Declaration
It seemed to me that the words which seemed to be recognizable cognates to English were those which were important nouns, implying that the four languages probably were derived from similar origins.
An additional finding to this assignment was that Korean and Japanese shares almost identical grammar structures. The verb is mostly placed at the end of the sentence in both languages.
However, it was also very interesting to realize that Chinese and English had a rather similar grammar structure in that the pronoun can be directly followed by a verb. Could it have been by pure coincidence that two languages spoken and written in entirely different continents shares similar grammar structures?
-JeeYeon
--
http://www.language-museum.com/
In addition to English and Chinese (my native language), I chose French, Japanese, Korean and Malay which I have some knowledge of, and Tibetan, which belongs to the same language family as Chinese (Sino-Tibetan).
For English and Chinese are already very different languages, I was only able to observe one similarity that all seven languages share. All seven languages start the passage with the English equivalent of “everyone”, indicating that despite the difference in V-O order (Japanese has an O-V structure), they all place the subject at the beginning of a sentence.
English, French and Malay have a recognizably similar set of alphabets, with minor differences such as the accents in French. However, the distributions of sounds differ greatly. Whereas English and French vowels occur with similar frequency, the passage in Malay contained a splurge of “a”s. Compound vowels such as the English “ir” (birth) and the French “oi” (soit) are practically non-existent in the Malay passage, except for one occurrence of “ua” in “dibuat”.
Korean and Tibetan are presumably both constructed with alphabets as there are a limited number of shapes that appear repeatedly in the passage. What differs Korean from the other alphabet-based languages is that in Korean alphabets are arranged two-dimensionally (as opposed to linearly) to form a self-contained character/word, like having the word “CAT” spelt with the T below CA. While Chinese is composed of characters, Japanese contains a mélange of characters and alphabets.
These observable constructional differences can also be used to explain why the five languages other than Japanese and Chinese show spacing in the passages. Adding alphabets to a word may create gibberish but adding characters to characters is exactly how Chinese and Japanese form meaningful sentences. Although I am not sure why Korean, whose basic unit could be arguably a character (formed with alphabet), still requires spacing.
Another minor difference would be the recognition of plural for nouns. English and French obviously address plural (“rights” and “droits”), and after scrutinizing the passage in Malay for a few minutes, I deduced the repetition of a word, linked by hyphen (“hak-hak”), would indicate the plural. While the other four languages do not distinguish “right” from “rights”.
Here I’m trying to sort out some of my thoughts examining English, the language I’ve been using everyday for the past year, French, the one I’m taking at Middlebury, Chinese, my native tongue, Spanish and Japanese. To me, all these languages start from small radicals or letters and then people make choices to put certain parts together to create words or characters. This creating process reminds of jigsaw puzzles. I found two great differences. Firstly, except for Chinese all the other four languages have some kind of “alphabet” (Japanese is special since it uses both Kanji(characters) and Katakana but at least Katakana is comparable to an alphabet). Secondly, English, French and Japanese all conjugate verbs according different tenses but Chinese doesn’t have a well-structured conjugation system. Apparently each letter in the alphabet doesn’t mean anything itself until people put it in a specific spot in a crowd of letters. However, a Chinese ideogram does carry some meanings itself even though you may not be able to pronounce it. My feeling is that having an alphabet means this language (at least in written) is phonetic. For example, suppose we all know the alphabet for French, when we see a word instantly we can get the pronunciation close without even knowing what it means. On the other hand, in Chinese the phonetic system is independent from the written script. The pronunciation is detached from how the character looks which could make the written language more concise and precise. Japanese actually proves this point. Technically in Japanese anything can be written simply by Katakana which will result in great confusion. Many characters or words can share the same pronunciation while one character or word rarely have more than 3 different ways to pronounce. So we see in the website Japanese is a mixture of Katakana and characters. That might explain why English, French and Spanish have such vast vocabulary and essays written in these languages are usually longer than those in Chinese. Just think in this way, to make words out of 26 letters is a Math problem and it’s linear. But to play with thousands of radicals in a plane, it’s in a different scale. The alphabet inevitably limits the possibility of variation. That might be a hint why conjugation exists in those phonetic languages. We use languages to express and record our life experiences and thoughts. So it makes sense that most ancient languages are very pictorial. The observations of nature originate and stimulate the evolution of languages. Most ancient pictorial languages died out since they are by nature difficult to be wildly-used by the mass. I haven’t figured out why Chinese still exists…
(Here are just some of my random thoughts and definitely lack of proof. I’m eager throw these out and share with you because I share the passion of languages with all of you and please come talk to me if you have any thoughts on what I said.:-)
The languages that I decided to compare are Korean, English, Burmese, Russian, Chinese, French, and Zulu. Korean is my native language and I am learning Chinese in Middlebury. I learned to speak Burmese, Russian, and French at some points of my life. With the exception of Zulu, I have some knowledge about the languages presented above.
The most obvious feature shared by all the languages that I have chosen is that they are written left to right. Also, with the exception of Chinese, the others are all phonetic languages. English, Russian, French, and Zulu are written in Latin alphabets. Since Zulu existed as an oral language, Latin alphabet was adopted to express the sound of the language. Almost all the letters from English and French are identical with the exceptions of accent marks that are not present in English such as ç, â, and é. Unlike English and French that have 26 letters, there are 33 in Russian. Nonetheless being an Indo-European language, there are many letters that look and sound the same.
Chinese, Korean, and Burmese have their own characters that are significantly different from one another. All these languages are original and used specifically in their nations. Until Korean alphabet was invented in the 1400s, Chinese characters were used in written form in Korea. ‘Intelligent’ in Chinese is 聪明 (pronounced chong-ming), while in Korean is 총명 (pronounced chong-myung). As seen in this example, these two languages look very different, but the influence from Chinese is seen in Korean language. This similarity is not seen in Burmese, mainly due to strong influence from Hindi instead of Chinese.
In terms of grammar, it was interesting to see that the constituent word order for English, French, Zulu, Russian, and Chinese is Subject Verb Object. On the other hand, for Korean and Burmese, the word order is Subject Object Verb. English and French grammars are almost identical; although there are some differences, the general grammar pattern is very much similar in Russian as well. Grammar patterns of Chinese, Korean and Burmese are strikingly different from one another. When glancing over these three languages, there seems to be absolutely no relations between them. However, considering they are from different language families, such difference is not so surprising.
I would also like to note that Chinese and Burmese are tonal languages and Zulu has clicking sounds. Furthermore, English and French have articles that do not exist in other languages.
* When writing this response, I referred to the language museum website and some articles from wikipedia.
The languages that I decided to compare are Korean, English, Burmese, Russian, Chinese, French, and Zulu. Korean is my native language and I am learning Chinese in Middlebury. I learned to speak Burmese, Russian, and French at some points of my life. With the exception of Zulu, I have some knowledge about the languages presented above.
The most obvious feature shared by all the languages that I have chosen is that they are written left to right. Also, with the exception of Chinese, the others are all phonetic languages. English, Russian, French, and Zulu are written in Latin alphabets. Since Zulu existed as an oral language, Latin alphabet was adopted to express the sound of the language. Almost all the letters from English and French are identical with the exceptions of accent marks that are not present in English such as ç, â, and é. Unlike English and French that have 26 letters, there are 33 in Russian. Nonetheless being an Indo-European language, there are many letters that look and sound the same.
Chinese, Korean, and Burmese have their own characters that are significantly different from one another. All these languages are original and used specifically in their nations. Until Korean alphabet was invented in the 1400s, Chinese characters were used in written form in Korea. ‘Intelligent’ in Chinese is 聪明 (pronounced chong-ming), while in Korean is 총명 (pronounced chong-myung). As seen in this example, these two languages look very different, but the influence from Chinese is seen in Korean language. This similarity is not seen in Burmese, mainly due to strong influence from Hindi instead of Chinese.
In terms of grammar, it was interesting to see that the constituent word order for English, French, Zulu, Russian, and Chinese is Subject Verb Object. On the other hand, for Korean and Burmese, the word order is Subject Object Verb. English and French grammars are almost identical; although there are some differences, the general grammar pattern is very much similar in Russian as well. Grammar patterns of Chinese, Korean and Burmese are strikingly different from one another. When glancing over these three languages, there seems to be absolutely no relations between them. However, considering they are from different language families, such difference is not so surprising.
I would also like to note that Chinese and Burmese are tonal languages and Zulu has clicking sounds. Furthermore, English and French have articles that do not exist in other languages.
* When writing this response, I referred to the language museum website and some articles from wikipedia.
This is sorta long, and I apologize...
I chose Kabyle, Gujarati, Burmese, Tagalog, Turkish, and English because I know people that speak these languages, and they are not generally considered widely-spoken (relative to languages like Chinese and Spanish, with English the exception.) Of my five chosen languages, none are primarily found in North America, South America, or Europe. Kabyle is found primarily in Algeria, Africa and is an Afro-Asiatic, Berber language. Gujarati is an Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan language. Gujarati is spoken primarily in a small part of India, but several African countries also use the language. Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman, Lolo-Burmese language. It is found Myanmar (Burma). Tagalog is a much more specifically categorized language. It is considered an Austronesian, Central Philippine language. Tagalog is spoken in the Philippines. Turkish is an Altaic, Turkish language. (Rosetta Project) I consider that Turkish, spoken primarily in Turkey, is a Eurasian language. Turkish is spoken widely in other Eurasian countries, but not as widely in European countries. (Ethnologue) English is described as an Indo-European, Germanic, West, English language. (Rosetta Project)
Without prior knowledge of these families and their relations to one another, I would be tempted to say that there should be a relation based on their geographic location or historical interactions. Kabyle should look different from all of them, but bear a small similarity to Turkish, due to historical interactions. Gujarati and Burmese may have some relations, but shouldn’t be very similar to the other languages, based on their geographic properties. It is possible that Tagalog would have some noticeable English influence, but I think that its isolation is enough to keep it different from these five other languages. Turkish and English have not seen much contact with these other languages to really have been influenced by them. Turkish also would be less likely to be influenced by Kabyle than Kabyle would by Turkish due to the colonization of Algeria and not of Turkey.
Further examination from Wikipedia helps reveal the Turkish situation. “Turkish is written using the Turkish alphabet, a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as an important step in the cultural reforms of the period, replacing the Ottoman Turkish alphabet previously in use.” It is apparent that there is currently a link between Turkish and English, the basis of the Latin alphabet. Wikipedia goes on to say that most foreign vocabulary was borrowed from Arabic and Persian as Islam was adopted and the Ottoman Empire flourished.
The story of Tagalog has a similar plot. Tagalog had an original script that was later abandoned for the Latin alphabet during the time when the Spanish colonized the islands. Like Turkey now, there is a heavy interaction between English now; however, these new developments do not show where the languages are rooted. (Wikipedia)
The Burmese language has its own script as well, and again, there were recent efforts to standardize the language by Anglophones. (Wikipedia) Numbers are barely recognizable as well. They seem to have their own characters for numbers. Gujarati also follows this same pattern, with different numerals than the traditional Arabic ones. On the other hand, the Kabyle language does use a Latin alphabet and recognizes Arabic numerals.
Due to my lack of mastery in these languages, I would say that the most similar in vocabulary would probably be Kabyle and Turkish, due to their overlapping history in Algeria. Grammar, on the other hand, I really don’t know. Grammar is very hard to compare. Burmese and Gujarati are similar in that they use scripts and not alphabets. Both are also Sanskrit derivations. (Wikipedia) Tagalog probably most resembles English, and this is mostly because of their recent interactions. (Wikipedia) The differences are obvious, as none of them have truly the same script. Kabyle and Turkish use unique accents, Tagalog uses sounds like “ng” that are not represented in most Latin languages. English doesn’t use any accents, and does not have a Sanskrit-derived script. After taking a look at the two scripts you can see the most obvious difference in Gujarati and Burmese. Overall these languages are much more different than similar. An easy example is the amount of vowels. Kabyle has three, Burmese has eight, Tagalog has five, Turkish has eight, English has five, and Gujarati appears to have twelve (there are also vowel diacretics.) (Wikipedia, Omniglot) These kinds of differences in addition to the writing systems show a vast difference in the languages, but this doesn’t mean they are completely unrelated.
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