I’m an American English speaker with school German and Spanish from 40 years ago and little real practice of either since. You hit it almost perfectly for me as I underlined above. Which still left me baffled as to a lot of what was said. I got that a Danish politician was hoping to work together with other parties. To what goals, when, and with what expectation of success? I have no idea.
Such fun.
Follow-on question: AIUI, in French they indicate quoted text using the double angle brackets (guillemets) with the open ends inwards towards the quoted text and the pointy ends outwards. You seem to have done the opposite. Typo or correct usage?
It does seem remarkable that the genetic source of English is so controversial despite that the transition from early Old English to late Middle English is one of the best documented of all ancient language transitions. (Or does the controversy arise because it is so well documented rather than despite it? :eek: ) Did Southern Old English shift to Northern Old English or did it borrow from it? And was Northern Old English a Norsified English or an Anglicized Norse? Opposite to Emonds-Faarlund, Thomason is adamant that all the dialects of Old and Middle English were … English. (Here is a link to Thomason and Kaufman’s book, pointing to a page in the middle of her long discussion of English.)
While Old English wasn’t mutually intelligible with Old Norse or Old Danish, they were very close in many ways, so bilingualism would have been common in the Danelaw. Is it possible that the resultant language could be best described as an hybrid or koiné? :rolleyes:
In a wonderful scholarly paper I don’t have time to look up now, John McWhorter argues (with many interesting examples) that the close-but-not-quite communications between Danish men (newly arrived in England) and their Anglo-Saxon wives led to** creolization**. That is, their kids picked up on the simplified grammar of their parents’ speech, and English itself was changed immensely. This is why English is “simpler,” grammatically, than all other Germanic languages except Afrikaans (which went through a similar process, of Dutch-speaking kids partly raised by their Black African nannies).
(“Simple” can mean different things, but here it refers to how English obviously depends more on word order, and less on verb inflections or noun case endings, than other Germanic tongues.)
I should add that the language was still much more “Anglo-Saxon” than “Danish” (in vocabulary, e.g.) – and that the “simplification” wasn’t anything special about Danish influence per se (Danish, too, had inflections and case endings), but rather was a predictable result of couples adapting to communicate.
For what it’s worth, I had a better idea about “skriver” than about “arbeit” or “Folketing” (though I’m guessing that the “folk” in “Folketing” means “people”). I don’t know more than a couple of words in German (it’s at most the third-most-learned foreign language in the US, and we Americans aren’t much for languages to begin with), but “skriver” is similar enough to “scribe” or “scrivener”.
To summarize many good posts, compared to what? I try to read books about military technical topics in a number of languages. I studied French in middle and high school eons ago but can still read it pretty easily, as long as I stay in practice, definitely also helped by large overlap in vocabulary. I’ve more or less succeeded with books in Italian just intuiting based on French and looking stuff up in the dictionary. That works better for captions or diagrams than heavy text. Likewise I’ve had some success with German and Danish books, more difficult, more looking up, but once you try for awhile you kind of get more in tune with the similar words.
Whereas, I read stuff in Korean, Japanese and Chinese too in descending order of ability, but no way would I get anywhere w/ any of those without having studied them, or more specifically studying Korean, learned 100’s of Chinese characters to understand it better (without which the large number of Sino-Korean homonyms is highly confusing, to me), then reading Japanese and Chinese based on character meaning. I don’t typically know how the characters are pronounced in the second two languages, but don’t need to (also needed to study somewhat Japanese kana and grammar but most of the meaning is in the kanji, and one needs to know modern forms of Chinese characters used in PRC which I’m still pretty weak at, traditional forms used in Korea and modern Japanese forms aren’t as different, and some Japanese stuff I read was written during WWII so uses older forms anyway).
But back to European languages, I also have some Finnish/English books (it seems common to publish there on military topics in both), and I can’t make head or tails of the Finnish text (by some theories it’s related to Korean but no evidence to a layman).
My perspective is one of reading. I have difficulty understanding some people with heavy regional English accents :), next to no ability to understand any of the languages I mentioned when spoken, except French to a limited degree and Korean to a somewhat greater degree, but still much less than what I’d like it to be.
Finnish is in the Uralic Family, related closely to Estonian, and (much more) distantly to Hungarian. One would expect there to be no cognates with Indo-European languages except those words borrowed from that language family. Korean is generally thought to be a Language Isolate.
From what I’ve read it’s more like maybe/maybe not Korean is related to Finno-Ugric languages, and another topic whether Korean is related to any other language (including Mongolian etc). But Korean is not related to Finnish in any practical way, that’s for sure. I know first hand from fair ability in Korean translating to zero ability in Finnish.
OTOH while technically linguistically speaking Korean isn’t at all related to Chinese, 60+% of Korean vocabulary consists of so called Sino-Korean words, and that only counts words where the underlying Chinese characters’ standard pronunciation in modern Korean exactly corresponds to the modern pronunciation of the word. Many other Korean words were originally derived from Chinese but the pronunciation of the word in modern Korean has drifted away from the pronunciation in modern Korean of the Chinese characters from which the word is derived (‘kimchi’, the word for the quintessentially Korean food, is an example). And Japanese borrows a lot of words from Chinese though not to the same degree as Korean, and in fact a lot of ‘Sino Korean’ words were coined by the Japanese, some of which were also picked up in Chinese. Also Japanese grammar, though possibly just by coincidence, is similar to Korean grammar. So practically speaking Korean, Chinese and Japanese are fairly closely related in terms of learning one if you know the other, though not in terms of linguistic trees (except maybe or maybe not Korean and Japanese). Whereas it’s academic whether or not Finnish and Korean are distantly related or not.
You’d have to ask a proper linguist to be sure, but from what Wikipedia says, the idea that Korean is related to Finnish has pretty much been discredited. It was basically an attempt to merge into a single family the Uralic languages (of which Finnish is one) and the Altaic languages (of which Korean may or may not be one.)
The phrasing in the Wiki article is somewhat misleading. What is rejected is “the hypothesis that Uralic and Altaic are related* more closely to one another than to any other family*.” (Let’s ignore Korean.) The article does not dismiss the possibility that Uralic and Altaic are part of a macro-family which contains one or more other families.
Finnish is an interesting one to me on this subject. I speak a smattering of Hungarian (not terribly well) but spent five years surrounded by it. Whenever I hear Finnish, it sounds like Hungarian to me with almost no recognizable vocabulary. They are related, but the relationship is more in the underlying grammar than vocab. But the rhythm, sound, and cadence of the language is also similar. Really disconcerting to me. The effect to me is a little bit like that fake English song by that Italian singer. (I’m on the phone in a hurry, so can’t link.)
Emphasis added. I don’t know the consensus date, but those two languages split a very long time ago. Thousands of years, IIRC. One would expect the cognates to be not so easily recognizable after that long a time. So, I’m not so sure you can dismiss similarities in vocabulary just by a layman’s perusal of the languages. Rather, I’d look for what linguists see and how they draw comparisons to the vocabulary. It could be that Finnish, being so close for so long to Indo-European languages, has absorbed many I-E words, masking the earlier Uralic vocabulary. I’ll wait for one of our resident linguists to weigh in.
Just to be clear (and some linguist can correct me if I’m wrong), the general thought is that all language are related to each other. That is, there were not separate “inventions” of language during our evolution. But our ability to find and prove a relation between languages drops to near zero as we go back in time to 5 - 10K years ago. Perhaps some tools will be developed in the future to push that date back further, but that’s about where we are now (If we consider what is consensus among linguists. Greenberg’s mass comparison technique which breaks that time barrier constructing sweeping, continent wide language superfamilies is not the consensus view.) So, it’s not that we think, for example, that Korean has a history all to itself, going back to the very beginning of language. It’s just that we don’t have the tools to rigorously prove which languages it merges with as we go backwards in time.
Likewise ok, but first maybe we come from a little different worldview, of the importance in general of ‘consensus’ about stuff people are highly unlikely to ever prove, and of limited practical relevance* whether they do. AFAIK and your albeit interesting missive doesn’t seem to directly contradict it, there are varying opinions how Korean might be related to other modern languages, technically linguistically. Likewise I did not misunderstand ‘language isolate’ to mean a language descended from a separate invention of language to all others, but rather one with no demonstrable relation to other languages, but again ‘demonstrable’ in this context is fuzzy, I believe.
Anyway back to practicality I can quickly demonstrate to you that it’s of no specific use in learning Finnish to know Korean, but of plenty of use in learning Japanese or Chinese to know Korean. But I am now sorry I threw out the aside of Finnish v Korean. :smack:
*note this is not a shot at ‘scientific consensus’ about climate, where it certainly practically matters so there’s more of an imperative to settle on a most likely to be true explanation and prediction.
By the way, I thought that this idea of a proto-human language was still considered controversial. Maybe we can also page Johanna into this thread to add to the resident linguists (or folks quite studied in linguistics; I’m not sure she’s formally a linguist, but if she’s not, she should be. )
That’s for sure. Even if it hadn’t been the case that nearly everyone spoke perfectly fluent English, I think it would have been one of the easier countries to visit and not be a native speaker.
As it stands, it’s maybe only a half-step removed from the UK, in terms of easy European travel countries.
