Cinese

 Il cinese è una lingua particolare, per certi versi geniale, E' costruita un po' come il lego, ha pochissimi mattoncini fondamentali, ma combinando in modo complesso questi mattoncini riesce ad avere una estrema ricchezza espressiva. Questo vale soprattutto per la lingua parlata, ma vale anche per la difficilissima scrittura, che richiede uno sforzo mnemonico molto minore di quanto potrebbe sembrare, in quanto gli ideogrammi sono costituiti da un numero relativamente limitato di caratteri base (214) che vengono combinati in base al significato e alla pronuncia arrivando a formare i circa 80.000 caratteri di un vocabolario (anche se i nativi ne usano generalmente solo dai 3.000 ai 5.000). Non è certo una lingu semplice, ma è sicuramente una lingua estremamente logica, un po' l'opposto dell'inglese che è una delle lingue meno logiche, credo, del pianeta,

Tree of Indo-European languages

 It comes to appear a paper on Science  that sheds new light on the evolution of Indo-European languages. I am pleased to see that the tree presented in the paper almost overlaps that of an old post of mine about the branching of Indo-European subfamilies, with th exception that Greek is considered basal in the tree.

Derrida

 Derrida ha sostanzialmente preso De Saussurre e gli ha tolto il significante - un po' come i neokantiani tanto criticati da Lenin hanno tolo a Kant il noumeno. Il risultato è un immenso pastrocchio in cui sguazziamo ampiamente ancora oggi.

le toerie di Derrida non sono del tutto insensate - quello che è insnesato è partire da De Saussurre-

Italiano internazionale

Tea le non molte parole italiane che sono entrate nel lessico internazionale si annoverano allegro pianissimo andante, e fascista.

Evolution of Indo European languages

It is often said that ProtoIndoEuropean was reconstructed by comparing the existing language. This is not completely true. Reconstruction of the PIE is based on the hypothesis that PIE contained all the phonemes present in the many branches of the language family (with minor variation) and that each nrabch arose by losing part of the phonemes, which is possible but ithat is difficult to distinguish from the alternative hypothesi that the original set of phonemes was reduced and that the different branches arose by consistent shift in phonemes. This is particularly important sicen the PIE was reconstructed long before the discovery of Hittite, which is quite unlike  in grammar and phonology from reconstructe PIE. If you look at a table of words in different Indo European languages you see that Hittite is consistently more similar to Sanskrit and secondarily to Greek  For instance PIE *dʰugH₂-tér Greek tʰugátēr Hittite túwatara. IThis is consistent with the grammar off Hittite, which is very similar to the more archaic forms of greek. For instance the conjucationof verb closely matches the athematic conjugation of Greek and Sanskrit, which is more archaic; reconstructe PIE grammar instead is based on the more recent thematic conjugation.

This has profounf implications, since it does not mean that PIE did not exist, but that instead of representing the protolanguage it represented an intermediate form between the oldest languages (Hreek Hittite and Sanskirt) and the more recent ones. The study of PIE leads to the conclusion that it was spoken in Ukraine, if instead Greek Sanskrit and Hyitte are the oldest languages the most probable location is somewhere near Kurdistan, where an archaic form of Indo-Arian language is spoken. One of the main arguments fro the Ukarine location is the presence of the word for horse among PIE roots, but such word is not present inHittite.

Of course it is equally possible that the XIX century ideas about PIE are true, that it arose in Ukraine, and that Hittite is somehow a branch of Indo-Arian language with a large number of loans from semitic languages of Anatolia, but I am unconvinced.

Creole, innatedness of language, complexity

In the previous post I exposed the ide of Chomsky that part of the language is inante and that the inante part is the capability to merge two units into a new one. A few linguists think that many more rules of syntax are innate, basing on the study of creoles. Creoles are languages born in colonial areas where peopel from different countries meet together. The children of these people "inventend" new languages which are a a mix of many languages and have a simplified but perfectly functional grammar. Creoles arose many times in various places where the colonizers brought workers from different colonized countries (The antilles, New Guinea etc.), and a remarkable feature of these languages is that they share essentially the sme grammar. For instance the order of words is usually subject verb object, whereas among all languages other forms (for instance subject object verb like in latin) are very common. This led a few linguists to believe thatre is a basic grammar ahrd-wirde in the brain and that the infinite variation existing among languages is a cultural developemnt.

I was watching a video from the Economist in which a British said that he did not like American since it is pretty basic. American is in many ways more expressive than British English (it is almost impossible to speak of philosphy in British english whereas it is not so difficult with the syntax of American englisth, which I therefore use), but it is true that it looks much simpler than British English. Linguist assume that all languages have more or less the same complexity, but many languages are simpler to master. It is largerly a matter of affinity with his own mother tongue (French is easy for an Italian but difficult for an english speaker), but it is quite obvious that some languages are "easier": Malese is quite simple to learn, and many find greek (an extremely complex language) much esasier than latin. Since creoles are among the "easieast" languages, and assuming that the gramamr of creoles is actually the basic grammar of human language, that means that easiness is not relateed to the complexity of the language, but to the distance from this basic grammar. As a matter of fact British English is an infinte series of idioms, which arose thorugh use, whereas American enlighs is probably actually more basic, as stated by the mildly racist British of the viedo.

Chomsky

The theories of Noam Chomsly are usually summarized in the following terms: the deep structure of language is fundamentally innate. The problem with this formulation, aas was pointed out by a linguist. is how much structure of the language is innate: dog certainly is not, since in closely related languages it is spelled differently, whereas the distinction bwteeen noun and verb is universal so it is a good candidate for being hard-wired. recently Chomsky clarified his ideas by saying that a mutation, maybe a punctiform mutation, which he calls "merge" allowed to merge two concepts into one. The structure of syntax which Chomsky discovered, and which are his scientific triumph, are very complex, largely unconscious, and difficult to understand, but the main idea is that language can merge units to form a new unit. This property - articulation - is unique to natural language, since it lacks for instance in the complex language of bees and even in the language of mathematics, and by the way allows the language to speak of himself (which mathematics can not). it is not unreasonable to believe that this merging propriety is genetically determined and that arose suddenly. Art arose suddenly and in very sophisticated form about 40.000 years ago, and it is usually thought to be a sign of the birth of language.

Flora, linguaggiom vegetazione

Pignatti, l'atuore della Flora d'Italia, diceva sempre che conoscere una flora equivale a conoscere una lingua. Di questa lingua le specie sono le parole e la sintassonomia è la grammatica.

Occorre riconoscere che non pochi che fanno i botanici di professione di questa lingua non conoscono né il vocabolario né la grammatica.

Gli stati fanno la lingua non la lingua gli stati

Riassumendo i miei due post precedenti, sono gli stati che fanno la lingua e non la lingua gli stati (come pensavano i romantici e in fondo anche Dante). In realtà esistono casi, anche tra i popoli cosiddetti primitivi, in cui si ha unforte senso della propria identità basata sulla lingua pur se questa lingua presenta forti variazioni dialettali: l'Ellade antica. gli Yanomami, i San del Sudafrica ecc. Ma in tutti questi casi l'unità della lingua è riconosciuta in relazione a popli adiacenti che parlano lingue completamente diverse il che generalmente avviene quando una piccola popolazione si espande su unterritorio più vasto (come accadde per esempio nell'Ellade antica). E' il caso dell'Albania, che ha da sempre una forte consapevolezza della propria identità, non tanto perché i dialetti albanesi siano poco diversi, quanto perché sono circondati da slavi e greci che parlano lingue molto differenti.

Albania, Italia, Dante, dialetti

Il livello culturale degli strati popolari in Albania è eclatantemente più elevato di quello delle masse italiane. Sicuramente tra i fattori vanno annoverate l'importanza data alla cultura del regime socialista e invece il gran disprezzo per il sapere delle classi dirigenti italiane (Zaia ha recentemente dichiarato che è scandaloso spendere milioni per i quattro sassi di Pompei), ma credo che il problema sia più linguistico che politico. Gli italiani, come gli albanesi, sono di fondo dialettofoni, in quanto i dialetti in Italia e in Albania sono estremamente diversificati e spesso poco o per niente mutualmente intelligibili. La lingua standard, creata dagli scrittori in Italia e dagli intellettuali di partito in Italia, è essenzialmente letteraria e viene appresa a scuola (o dalla televisione). però l'albanese standard deriva da un dialetto parlato (il dialetto di Argirocastro da cui veniva henver Hoxha), mentre l'italiano è una lingua creata da Dante altamente sperimentale derivata essenzialmente dal latino - un po' come se gli inglesi parlassero la lingua di Finnegan's Wake. Imparare una lingua di avanguardia creata per così dire in laboratorio è sicuramente più difficile che imparare una lingua naturale.

Nazione, continuum linguistico

Coloro che hanno creato il concetto romantico di nazione (che sono essenzialmente scrittori) fondavano l'unità di popolo sull'unità di lingua. I linguisti ci dicono che non è possibile dire dove comincia una lingua e finisce un'altra, in quanto generalmente esistono i continuum linguistici, in cui due dialetti adiacenti sono mutualmente intelligibili ma non con dialetti più lontani. Per esempio tra l'Italia e il Portogallo esisteo (o meglio esisteva) un continuum linguistico per cui tra Eboli e Napoli si capiscono ma tra Eboli e Frosinone no.

Questo continuum linguistico è stato spezzato tra il XVI e il XVII secolo  in diversi stati nazionali (Portogallo, Spagna, Francia, e tardivamente Italia) che hanno una superficie approssimativamente corrispondente al territorio che può essere raggiunto rapidamente dall'esercito del re, e che poco hanno a che fare con i reali confini linguistici. Una volta creato lo stato intorno alla capitale al re al suo esercito, è stata creata la lingua nazionale o partendo da un dialetto particolare (il parigino, il fiorentino, il dialetto di Hannover), e trasformandolo in lingua standard soprattutto ad opera degli scrittori. Il caso dell'Albania è per esempio interessante, in quanto i dialetti albanesi sono mutualmente intelligibili ma con difficoltà (un po' come l'italiano e il portoghese) e la lingua standard è recentissima, creata sul modello del dialetto parlato da Hoxha. In conclusione, il processo è esattamente l'inverso di quello devisato dai romantici, dalla nazione alla lingua nazionale e non viceversa. Va detto che l'Italia fa un po' eccezione, in quanto la lingua nazionale è stata creata da Dante Petrarca e Boccaccio nel 1300 500 anni prima della creazione dello stato nazionale, e la difficoltà di apprendere questa lingua letteraria, sperimentale e latineggiante da parte di persone che di madrelingua sono dialettofone, spiega forse i gravi ritardi cutlurali del nostro paese.

Periodc tables

When I listened to this interesting video on SciSHow I thoght that it is funny that a periodic table for the consonants actually exists: it is the IPA table of phonemes

Evolution of the Indo-European languages, phentics, cladistics and the scientific method

This video about the evolution of Indo-European languages deserves to be listened. It criticizes a paper on Science, based on the method of clustering analysis, which tries to find the origin of IndoEuropean languages. Although the criticism it presents is 95% (I will come back on this later), I found it rather irritating. The reason of this irriation became clear to me at minute 45.50 where says that the research on science is close to the method of creationsim, since, instead of looking for the theory explaining the facts, it looks for the facts which support the theory. But this is not the method of creationsim, it is the hypothetica-deductive method of science. The method of creationists is "I believe in hypothesi A, let's find the facts that falsify the alternative hypothesis", and the latter is exactly the approach of the video.

Going into more detail, there are two approaches for the reconstruction of the tree of languages. The historical linguistic or traditional approaches compares in detaill single words of the languages, whereas the clustering method compares thousands of words at the same time. The two are obviously complementary, but the supporters of historical linguistics (like the authors of the video) never accepted the numerical methods. Some criticism is nonetheless founded. The two approaches exist also in taxonomy: the numerical method is called phenetic, since it looks for overall similarity, whereas the historical linguistic method is called cladistic, and in the latter method only shared similarities, not overall similarity are considered (Actually cladistic was invested in linguistic earlier than in taxonomy). At minute 24.30 the difference between the two approaches is discussed without the author being aware, obviously, of the existence of the same problems in taxonomy. In fact, if two languages (or two species) are compared on the base of overall similarity and not strictly on shared similarity, they appear more related than they are actually: the overall similarity of dolphins and fishes is large, but they are completely unrelated. Cladistic methods have never been applied in linguistics, to my knowledge, and it could be ftruiful to try.

Concerning the dating of the origin of languages the criticism of the video is that the dates of the tree contradict a few historical facts and that it does not consider movement of people like the latins conquering the Mediterranean. It is sensible, but useless, since the only way to estimated the origin of languages or cluster of languages for which there is no historical record is to assume constant rate of evolution. It is a pire aller, but nothing better exists.

E haplogroups of Y human chromosome, Illyrians, the early Neolithic in Europe and Albanian

I come back on the interesting topic of the relationships between Y human haplogroups and linguistic families. When I encountered the map of the distribution of the E-V68 haplogroup of Y human chromosome.

It matches strikingly the distribution of Illyrian languages. Actually, the distribution of Illyrians is not perfectly knownm but there is a peak of frequency in Albania and in Italy the highest frequencies are in Apulia, where lived the Messapi who spoke, according to the Ancient Authors, an Illyrian dialact.

The haplogroup is dated at about 10-15.000 years ago. There is a burial in Spain which is 7.000 years old where this haplogourp has been retrieved. From other sources the haplogroups is present also in Kurdistan, where, with all probability, lies the origin of agriculture, and therefore the haplogroups is related to Neolithic farmers invading Europe for the first time. If this hypothesi is true Illyrian, which is possibly an Indo-European language, should be about 7-8.000 years old, and thus may represent one of the earlies branches of the Indo-European lingustic family.

It msut be stressed that the Indoeuropean nature of Illyrian is not uncontroversial, since we have only a list of a few place and person names in Illyrian. Messapian is seemingly Indo-European, but Albanian - certainly a Indo-European language - which is spoken in more or less the same areas of the Illyrian,, has many strange feature (in particular many exclusive roots which seems to be non-Indoeuropean and a few grammatical endings of obscure origin) which could derive from Illyrian and which suggests a possible mixing of a Indoeuropean and a non-Indoeuropean language.

Semeraro, the semitic etimologies and the J haplogroup of Y human chromosome

Semeraro claimed that alla languages are derived from Akkadian, or, more precisely stated (although this precision is not present in his writing), that many words of obscure etimology in Latin and Greek derive from Akkadian. In this more limited sense the etimologies proposed by Semeraro are convincing: apeiron from eperu, mud, europa from erepu, sunset, and so on. These etimologies did not gain a general consensus; anyhow, it could gain support from the distribution of Y haplogroups, in particular from the J haplogroup, which more or less matches the semitic languages, which is present with high frequenecy in Italy and Greece, suggesting a possible semitic substratum for these languages.

Y haplogroups and language families

The genetic variability of Y chromosome in human is well known and shows striking geographical patterns. These patterns are often in very good agreement with the distribution of language families: for instance in America  two main haplogroups are present, corresponding well to the two main families, na-dene and amerindians (although it must be stressed that there is not universal consensus on this calssification); haplogroup A corrseponds closely to the distrbution of Khoisan languages and so on.

However, the situation in Europe is more confused. There is an haplotype R which matches closely the distribution of Indo-European languages (Europe and northern India), but there are many incongruencies, the Basks, for instance, who are linguistically completely isolated, are genetically very similar to the Celt speaking Irish. The main problema are with dating. The R haplogroups, for instance, is dated at about 20.000 years ago, whereas Indoeuropean languages are documented from about 5000 years ago (Hittite) and are probably not older than 6000 years BP.

English in transformation

English today is much an isolant language, like Chinese, with uninflected words that are simply justaposed to obtain meaning. But it is more and more changing, since in collioquial speech, at least of less educated peoeple, entire phrases are pronounced as an entire word. There is a possibility that this will lead to something like an agglutinating language (Turkish, Finnish).

Is the evolutionary path of languages from flexive languages (German)  to isolant to agglutinating?

Cladistics

Cladistic is a method for reconstructiong philgenetic trees, in particular in animals and plants. It is based to the principle that only shared innovation that are not present in other groups are informative. For instance, fins are present in fishes, ichtyosaurs, seals and dolphins, and are therefore not iformative. Mammal glands, instead, occur only in mammals, and therefore are a good character (synapomorphy) to demostrate descent from a common ancestor. Early systematics was based on overall similarity, i.e both on innovations and ancestral characters, whereas modern taxonomy is based exclusively on innovations (apomorphies). The ideas of cladistic are credited to Hans Hennig in the '50s, but only in the '80s gained wide acceptance. And yet, exactly the same ideas are a century older in linguistic, and are known under the name of Leskien principle, that states that only positive innovations are usueful for philogenetic reconstruction of language relationshis. The reason why systematics lagged so behind lingusitcs, lies in the fact that evolutionary idea were commonplace in linguistics since its foundation n the XIXth cenutyr, whereas taxonomy remained more or less the same of its beginnings in the XVIII century even after the discovery of natural selection, and only very late evolutionistic ideas influenced effectively taconomy,

Etruscan numerals

The first ten Etruscan numerals are the following

thu                            śa

zal                             senph

ci                               cezp

huth                          nurph

mach                         sar

An asimmetry is evident. Whereas the first five numbers have clearly no correspondant in indo-european languages, the last five are more familiar (sar for instance is similar to desa in sanscrit), and are probably loans. It seems, in other words, that the system of Etruscan had base five, and that only later it added the numbers from 6 to 10 with loans from the surrounding countries. This is confirmed by the fact that Latin numbers are obviously with base five: six is written VI (five and one), seven VII (five and two), etc. and Latin numbers are certainly of Etruscan origin.

A base five system can seem primitive, but it allows to count easily up to 25 on your fingers: it is enough to count the ones on one hand and the fives on the other. This is not possible with the decimal system, where you have to stop at 10 or to resort to an abacus or some other device. This mathematical ingenuity is consistent with the extraordinary engineering works of the Etruscans – many of the older realizations in Rome are in fact Etruscan, for instance the cloaca maxima.

Etruscan

Etruscan is either cosnidered a language isolate, together with two closely related languages (Rhaetic and Lemnian) or loosely related to Anatolian Indoeuropean languages such as Hittite. The relationships with Indoeuropean languages are many: numerals such as semph (seven) and numph (nine), words such as lautun (people = populus, Leute, liudi), and in particular many morphological items such as the genitive in –s, the locative in –thi. Nonetheless, they are outbumberd by strong discordances: for instance the words mach (five) and clan (son). In phylogeny, an animal that shares characteristics of different groups is typical of transitional types. For instance, Hippopothamus is very different from Cetaceans, even fossil Cetaceans, and yet has been shown that Artiodactyls, to whom Hippopotamus belongs and Cetaceans are in fact two grades of the same order Cetarctiodactylans, and Hippopothamus is exactly the “missing link” between the two (the morphology is of cow, but it lives in water).

In my opinion – and this is nothing new, it is for instance more or less the same opinion of Francisco Vilar in his “the Inodeuropeans and the origin fo Europe” – Indo-European is a fairly recent  and rather homogeneous branch in a larger family that comprises Anatolian languages and a number of preindoeuropean languages, among which possibly the Tartessian, the Pelasgian, possibly the language of hydronims of Northern Europe studied by Krahe, and appunto the Etruscan. These branches were diverging, with different morphologies and lexicon, and yet had a common origin in the so called Nostratic. Possibly also Anatolian languages such as Hittite and Luwian , that diverge in so many grammatical and lexical ways from the reconstructed Protoindoeuropean, represent one separete branch of this original radiation. The situation, in other words, is analogue to Semitic languages, one of the traditional linguistic families, that has been shown to belong to a larger Afro-Asiatic familiy that comprises also Berber, Somali etc. The hypothesis of an agricultural and matriarchal pre Indoeuropean Europe worshipping a Great Mother – as suggested by Marija Gimbutas - that was replaced by steppe people speaking Indoeuropean languages would be thus the history of the replacement of older and newer branches in the same large linguistic family.

Basque, that has often been related to the languages of Old Europe (pelasgian, etruscan, etc.), seems instead completely isolated – it is in any way unrelated to Etruscan.