I’ve seen it as "all languages are probably related to each other, in the sense that language itself may have been invented just once (probably around where the Khoi-San ‘click’ languages are spoken today, maybe 40,000 years ago or so) –
– BUT there is NO WAY (not even via Greenberg-Ruehlen mass comparison) to say ANYTHING about which languages are more closely related to which if you go back more than about 7,000 years at the most. In other words, at about the scale of ‘Uralic’ and ‘Altaic’ as families, we’ll never know about genetic relationships AMONG them (though we might notice some evidence of borrowing)."
Again, just to be clear, I’m not saying we know what this Ur-language was, or even when it came about, or how. I believe that we start with this as an assumption… that it only makes sense that language, as we know it, came about once and then evolved into all the languages we have around us today. Partly this is because of what we know about our own evolution and how few in number we were when our species first arose.
If we could run the tape backwards, we’d see all the extant languages converge into one. If not, that would pose some very strange evolutionary questions for us.
Here’s a small NY Times graphic that mentions the “language itself probably started in the Khoi-San area.” Basically, PHONETIC diversity gets lower as you move away from there. In other words, humans would be likely to invent phonemic clicks ONCE, but once they stop serving this function, we’re not likely to invent them again!
Insofar as the OP is referring to the prosody of the Danish language (pitch, intonation, etc.), responses that concentrate on the degree of similarity of vocabulary, etc, are missing the mark.
As it happens, the pitch patterns of Danish and Swedish are quite unusual in ways that make them sound very different to English. However, it’s believable that short, isolated sentences like “du kan gå” sound very similar to their English equivalents.
But Dutch sounds (to me) very, very like English, if you tune out the words and just listen to the “music”.
I’m fluent in English and French, and years ago I spent a month cramming German before a European vacation.
After 5 days in Norway and Denmark I could get understand in vague terms what people were talking about, if not the specifics. Eg. I could figure out they had to go to the post office, but not when they were going, or why.
The few resemblances I could discern do not seem to be anything more than random chance:
18. many maneun monet
19. some jotkut jogeum
25. four neljä ne
54. fruit hedelmä yeolmae
57. root juuri ppuri
59. flower kukka kkot
60. heart sydän simjang
98. to blow puhaltaa bulda
125. to stand seistää seoda
Of these the only one I’d consider having an outside chance of being a cognate would be the words for four.
By contrast, compare these Uralic cognate sentences:
The living fish swims under water.
Hungarian: Eleven hal úszkál a víz alatt.
Finnish: Elävä kala ui veden alla.
Estonian: Elav kala ujub vee all.
Erzya: Ertsya kaloso ukshny ved’ alga.
I’m not that pessimistic. I think Greenberg and Ruhlen were onto something. I like their example of long-term word survival: Proto-Indo-European for nephew is *nepot- and modern Romanian for nephew is nepot. There are other comparable examples.
I wouldn’t consider either “unintelligible” or “partially mutually intelligible” two languages which are close enough that their speakers consider they can communicate well instantly. The speakers of Italian and Spanish who can’t communicate with someone who speaks the other language are the same ones who have problems communicating in their own language, even with their own closest relatives.
There was a Colombian TV movie called Milagro a Roma, based on a story by Gabriel García Márquez. I saw it at the Cleveland Cinematheque years ago during a South American film series, I think.
In it a Colombian guy travels to Rome and, supernatural plot aside, tries to negotiate with an Italian official by speaking Spanish while the other guy spoke Italian. The film showed them having a terrible time struggling to understand one another with just a few obviously related words. I remember thinking it isn’t supposed to be that difficult, especially in South America.
It’s in Youtube. The scene in question starts in minute 40 and it’s very much exaggerated. For example, one of the lines the Colombian doesn’t understand (excuse my transliteration) is “si giri e vaglie lá” - compare with Spanish se gire y vaya allá. Another: “de qué nazionalitá é, de dóve viene” - de qué nacionalidad es, de dónde viene. The policeman in turn takes several tries to understand reliquia - Italian, reliquia.
I can see someone who’s as nervous as that guy would be having problems understanding about anything, but it’s not due to the languages themselves.
In the original Danish/Swedish version of The Bridge, there was at least one scene where the Danish detective was in a meeting with Swedish colleagues. I couldn’t tell whether he was speaking Danish, or trying to speak Swedish but with a Danish accent, but they squeezed out the maximum in comic effect from the Swedes’ polite but somewhat exasperated attempts to understand him.
On the other hand, the fact of the bridge and the relative ease of access between at least Copenhagen and southern Sweden must create some sort of common understanding or “creolisation” (cf. the intermingling between the southern Netherlands, eastern Belgium and the Rhineland, between Cologne, Liege, Aachen and Maastricht).
Thanks for the link! I’ve been reading that book (it’s a 181-page pdf) and find it very interesting and convincing. I think even someone interested in history but not linguistics might enjoy the first chapter or two.
I won’t try to summarize the book’s many involved arguments, but the timing is one key. The switch from Old English to Norse Middle English occurred after the Norman conquest, and resulted from the de facto alliance of English and Danish/Norse against their Norman overlords. (Given the conventional view, the timing and nature of Middle English’s “borrowings” from Norse don’t make sense.)
Grazie for the link and the analysis and confirming that I wasn’t deluded.
ortografia italiana:
Si giri e vada là. (Turn around and go there)
Di che nazionalità è? Da dove viene? (What nationality are you? Where are you from?)
Italian has 2 distinct words da ‘from’ and di ‘of’ where Spanish & French have only de.
Milagro en Roma. En, not a. Just when I thought I’d mastered Romance prepositions… More recently I’ve seen the lovely Spanish movie Habitación en Roma set in the same city and ought to have remembered. Je suis allée au Canada. J’ai voyagé en France à Paris.
How do they get around the huge influence French had on Middle English? Might their argument be turned around to say that English is a Romance Language?
That French influence is just ordinary borrowing is not controversial. The French influence on English, BTW, came after the Norman nobility had switched to English — the upper classes then used French as a 2nd language for prestige.
That scene was an exception. Throughout the series, the conceit was that Danish characters and Swedish characters understood each other perfectly while each speaking in their own languages. That one scene you refer to in the first episode, where Martin speaks very rapidly in Danish to the Swedish police before noticing their looks of blank incomprehension and slowing down, is played for comic effect.
There are also scenes of Swedes and Danes communicating by each speaking their own languages in The Killing and in Wallander, and a similar scene with an unfortunate Norwegian in S1 of The Killing.
It goes back further than that - Skåne was part of Denmark until 300 years ago, and the local dialect is close to Danish.
Yes, to be clear to the casual readers, most sentences are not this closely related among the Ugrian (which includes Hungarian) and the Finnic (which includes Finnish and Estonian) lanugages. From what I remember, the words for “blood” and “pocket” (although that lines up with the word for “bag” in Hungarian) and “ice” and a few dozen other words have cognates across these languages, but, for the most part, the actual vocabulary is quite divergent. That said, I understand your point that there are some clear vocabulary similarities retained across these languages, whereas evidence for it in Korean is difficult to find, if there are any at all.
Finnish and Hungarian wouldn’t be quite so divergent if they’d not imported tons of loanwords from North Germanic in the case of Finnish, German and Slavic for Hungarian. Among the native Uralic words the level of cognates is clearly higher; just look at the Swadesh lists.
Out of curiosity, where do the basic words for, let’s say, numbers come from? Hungarian and Finnish seem quite divergent. I could see cognates maybe in the word for “two” and “four” (and zero, which seems to be some variant of “null” I assume via Latin in both. Or basic colors. I can’t see any similarities in those, either, and they don’t seem to be influenced by Germanic or Slavic languages in either language (except for “orange” which seems to have IE roots to my eyes). Living in Hungary, there were certainly some Slavic cognates here and there, as well as some Germanic ones, but they were pretty few and far between, in my experience.