Basque/French Age (Split from: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages)

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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Lianne » Thu May 27, 2021 7:59 pm

rdearman wrote:
Lianne wrote:Old English and English are not the same language because they aren't mutually intelligible.

I don't have an axe to grind in this conversation. But I did want to comment on this sentence. Recently I found a guy on YouTube who speaks in Old English, and it is surprisingly intelligible. I certainly understood more of what he was saying than many of the French TV shows I've watched.

Occasionally I see snippets of Old and Middle English and find I can understand them, but not always. Certainly there is a lot of shared vocabulary. But I feel like one could intentionally choose words that are easy to understand, or words that aren't. Similarly, there are a lot of French words I could understand right away as an English speaker, but also a lot that I couldn't.

One thing that just occurred to me, regarding mutual intelligibility, is that it should be considered in both directions. While we can understand varying amounts of Old English, an Old English speaker would, I suspect, have a much harder time understanding Modern English, given the large influx of French vocabulary (unless one intentionally spoke using only Germanic words).
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby nooj » Thu May 27, 2021 8:27 pm

Lianne wrote:And humans very obviously are not lobe-finned fish. By any definition.


Of course we are.

Tetrapods evolved from a group of organisms that, if they were alive today, we would call fish. They were aquatic and had scales and fleshy fins. However, they also had lungs that they used to breathe oxygen. Between 390 and 360 million years ago, the descendents of these organisms began to live in shallower waters, and eventually moved to land. As they did, they experienced natural selection that shaped many adaptations for a terrestrial way of life. Like other terrestrial sarcopterygians, modern humans still carry the evidence of our aquatic past in the way our arms and legs attach to our bodies, as well as in the many other features that link us to our fishy origins.


Sarcopterygii = lobe finned fish.

See also this page.

The palaeontological record makes clear that the terrestrial verterbates evolved from lobe-finned fishes nearly 400 million years ago during the Devonian, and are therefore members of the Sarcopterygii. The only terrestrial vertebrates still living today are the tetrapods, which originated around 350 million years ago and are defined as that group which comprises the common ancestor of the living amphibians and amniotes plus all its descendants.


'All of its descendants' includes us.

Image

See also this page.

Fishes, as we think of them, are actually a paraphyletic or "unnatural" group. When scientists say “fishes”, they are discussing a group of organisms that includes all the descendants from a common ancestor. So, the correct grouping of fishes includes us, the tetrapods (amphibians, turtles, crocodiles, birds, squamates, mammals, and countless extinct forms).

Yes, you are a fish. Now that your view of the world has been forever altered, let us explain. In general, there are three main groups of fishes still living today; the cartilaginous fishes (e.g., sharks, rays, skates, chimeras), the ray-finned fishes (e.g., goldfish, tuna, cichlids, clownfish, and our beloved anglerfish from the logo), and the lobe-finned fishes (e.g., coelacanths, lungfishes, frogs, birds, humans). While terrestrial (or land) vertebrates such as frogs, dogs, and humans are classified as tetrapods within the lobe-finned fishes evolutionary lineage, we owe our earliest vertebrate origins to an aquatic environment. In short, just as humans are mammals, mammals are tetrapods, and tetrapods are all fishes. Welcome to the club!


Image

All of these websites are university affiliated. The first one is from Berkeley, the second is from University College London, the third is from the University of Kansas.

This is something well known among biologists. Maybe they haven't been popularising it enough for the public. Things in science tend to trickle down to the public in a slow manner. Most people know or now accept that homo sapiens are great apes, and over the last few decades more and more people have heard that birds are therapod dinosaurs. But I think cladistics and evolutionary biology is still relatively unknown among non-biologists.

I think this article called 'On Being a Fish' written by a biologist is a great read:

If you are troubled to discover that logic has made a monkey out of you, then you are likely to be scandalized by the discovery that you are a fish as well.

In the late Devonian period, members of the lobe-finned fish clade, Sarcopterygii (a clade within Osteichthyes, the bony fish) began to exploit shallow water habitat with increasing frequency. A clade of terrestrial amphibians, ancestral to the clade of all terrestrial vertebrates (Tetrapoda), resulted, ultimately giving rise to the approximately 6,000 partly terrestrial, and nearly 22,000 fully terrestrial, sarcopterygian fish species now living. Dozens of these terrestrial fish taxa have spawned partial (e.g. seals, sea turtles, penguins) or complete (e.g. whales, sea snakes, manatees) reversions to an aquatic habit, though every secondarily-aquatic tetrapod species continues to breathe air, and many continue to breed on land.

AMONG OTHER THINGS, you are a mammal. This is an assertion that no rational person is likely to dispute. Such a person might reasonably ask: “What makes people mammals?” This question would likely be answered as follows: “People have hair, make milk, have a single bone in their lower jaw, and so on.” But this answer is completely wrong. It is, in fact, the correct answer to the question, “What characteristics can be used to recognize a mammal?” The correct answer to the question above is: “People are mammals because they are descended from the most recent common ancestor of all mammals.


We are a kind of terrestrial fish. And the same logic is used by linguists. Linguists don't say that French is Latin because it has all of the characteristics of Latin. That simply wouldn't be true. French underwent significant restructuring, lost many of the things that we understand as 'typical' of Latin at the epogee of the Roman Empire. Modern French would be unintelligble for a native Latin speaker from the Roman times and vice versa.

No, linguists say that French is Latin because it is descended from Latin. At no point has French ever stopped being Latin, just like at no point have we ever stopped being eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have the nucleus encased within a nuclear membrane). Of course, humans are modified eukaryotes with over-weening delusions of being masters of the Universe, but we're still eukaryotes and we'll never stop being eukaryotes. Let me just say that it's one of those scientific insights that brings me peace and comfort, like Carl Sagan when he says we're all made out of 'star stuff'. Well, we're distant relatives to a tree, a fungus, a bee, all of which are also modified eukaryotes that went off in their own different branch on the evolutionary tree.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 27, 2021 9:39 pm

Actual science misrepresented and misapplied (and compared) to linguistic classifications.

Don't have peace of mind.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Saim » Thu May 27, 2021 10:44 pm

Le Baron wrote:Probably. I employed it because you mentioned it in the reply. For clarity I'm referring to all languages in that region before they were displaced.


I mentioned Occitan (and Sardinian) for a very specific reason.

You claimed that French isn't Latin because it has been influenced by Frankish. I then asked if the logical conclusion is then that Occitan (a Romance language of France not influenced by Frankish) is Latin. My point is that the Frankish influence on French is entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

Le Baron wrote:Really? I think I said no-one is certain of the history and that people speaking Basque now were speaking "Basque" then, as opposed to French. It's older because French is not Latin and appeared AFTER Latin had spread into western Europe. I think I've repeated this obvious point umpteen times.


Crucially, repeating it for the umpteenth time does not make it correct.

Sure, no-one is entirely certain of the history. But there is a historical Basque linguistics literature that talks about what we do know, which you have ignored. Everyone in this thread who knows anything about Basque has disagreed with you and shown concrete examples of language change, and one user referred you to relevant literature where you can learn more. You have not addressed any of that.

Why do you consider the "Basque" spoken during the classical period to be the same language as contemporary Basque when you do not consider Classical Latin to be the same language as French, other than the fact that French and Latin get different labels? Yes, of course we use different labels for "French" and "Latin", but that in and of itself is not a measure of linguistic distance. There is no single point were French just "appeared", and certainly not "after" Latin "disappeared".

The only argument that you've presented so far is your own incredulity. I can understand that this can be intuitively difficult to understand, just as many people have trouble accepting that Hungarian and Finnish are related or that English isn't a Romance language. But it's the truth.

Lianne wrote:I personally very much disagree that Old English and Modern English are the same language. The fact that I'm totally incapable of reading Old English or understanding it spoken is enough for me to say they're different languages.

And for the same reason, I disagree that French is Latin.


Of course it's reasonable to look at the considerable distance between older forms of a language and the contemporary form and treat them as distinct languages.

The point is that there is no moment where Old English became Modern English or Latin became French, as every generation spoke the same language as their parents and their children. Note also that even though Old English still goes under the name "English", we still consider it a separate language from Modern English.

Sizen wrote:It changed drastically much like Vulgar Latin did when it came in contact with Frankish.


The vast majority of the differences (especially the structural ones) between French and Latin cannot be traced to Frankish influence.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Le Baron » Thu May 27, 2021 11:27 pm

Saim wrote:Why do you consider the "Basque" spoken during the classical period to be the same language as contemporary Basque when you do not consider Classical Latin to be the same language as French, other than the fact that French and Latin get different labels? Yes, of course we use different labels for "French" and "Latin", but that in and of itself is not a measure of linguistic distance. There is no single point were French just "appeared", and certainly not "after" Latin "disappeared".


Did I say it was 'the same'? I may have done, but I don't think I did that. I believe I suggested that the Basque 'continuum' could justly be considered the same general language (with changes, with some outside influences; like English has undergone, be my guest to twist this into something else and add another layer of unnecessary complication), but that no-one can say for sure.

The main thrust being that it was around there in what is now France BEFORE the Romans came. Unless someone is suggesting that something else called 'Basque' popped up out of nowhere a bit later as a significantly different language. Labelling French as not much more than some form of classical Latin, with just minimal input from the Franks, in order to pretend that it is essentially the same language as whatever preceded Latin and all the way back to PIE, as that character further up did, seems to me the height of nonsense. At that point we should just dissolve all development names and call everything: 'ancient utterances from wherever the first language developed'.

At that point too the entire dispute dissolves because there is just one language.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Saim » Thu May 27, 2021 11:48 pm

Le Baron wrote:[I believe I suggested that the Basque 'continuum' could justly be considered the same general language (with changes, with some outside influences;


Let's hear it then. What changes has Basque undergone since the period something close to Classical Latin was spoken, and what principle (actually used in linguistics) have you applied to come to the conclusion that these changes are not "enough" for us to speak of a distinct language?

In fact, I'd even argue that Biscayan could reasonably be considered to be a separate language from Souletin, let alone contemporary Basque from proto-Basque.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Le Baron » Fri May 28, 2021 12:01 am

Saim wrote:
Le Baron wrote:[I believe I suggested that the Basque 'continuum' could justly be considered the same general language (with changes, with some outside influences;


Let's hear it then. What changes has Basque undergone since the period something close to Classical Latin was spoken, and what principle (actually used in linguistics) have you applied to come to the conclusion that these changes are not "enough" for us to speak of a distinct language?

In fact, I'd even argue that Biscayan could reasonably be considered to be a separate language from Souletin, let alone contemporary Basque from proto-Basque.


What do you mean 'let's hear it'? Have I not said that the history is not properly known?! And have I not said that it's a likely language continuum? I'm not the one saying it's not the same language!

I'm starting to get a low opinion of so-called 'linguists' who don't seem capable of sustaining coherence.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Saim » Fri May 28, 2021 12:40 am

Le Baron wrote: Have I not said that the history is not properly known?!


Quite a lot is actually known about the history of Basque. A couple of people (including myself) in this thread have mentioned many ways in which it's changed, as well as two authoritative authors that outline many of these changes. You have as far as I can tell not addressed any of that.

I'm not the one saying it's not the same language!


If you're saying proto-Basque is not the same language as Modern Basque then I'm not sure what you're even disputing any more. In that case you agree that we can't say that Basque is older than French.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby galaxyrocker » Fri May 28, 2021 12:48 am

Le Baron wrote:What do you mean 'let's hear it'? Have I not said that the history is not properly known?!


And have I not said, repeatedly, while giving sources (Trask's book, for the main one) that the descent from Proto-Basque (which would've been spoken during the Classical Period) is actually pretty well known? Something you've tended to ignore.

And have I not said that it's a likely language continuum? I'm not the one saying it's not the same language!


Good! Then you can agree that we can't say it's necessarily 'older' than French. Problem solved. Also, French is likely a language continuum with Latin. Doesn't mean it's 'younger' than Basque. That's all we're trying to say. Yes, you can say it's ancestor was spoken in Western Europe before Latin was. That doesn't make the ancestor language 'older', only that it was in Europe first.


If I have two people of the same age, and one lives in a town that the other moves to, that doesn't mean the first one is older than the second, only that they were in the town first. That's what's happened with languages. To date a language, apart from a few exceptional cases, is nonsensical. As we've tried to show. Same with giving firm dates for when species evolved; the biology interpretation is quite apt, even if you don't seem to think so.
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Re: French National Assembly passes bill for the protection and promotion of minority languages

Postby Sizen » Fri May 28, 2021 2:13 am

Le Baron wrote:And have I not said that it's a likely language continuum?

I think we all agree that Basque is on a continuum that extends from the past to the current day.

galaxyrocker wrote:Also, French is likely a language continuum with Latin.

It's a well established linguistic consensus that Latin and French also exist on their own shared continuum that starts with Proto-Indo-European and passes through Proto-Italic, Latin, Vulgar Latin, Old French, Middle French and extends to the current day with Modern French. Yes, French has been influenced by outside languages (as have both English and Basque), but it is still genetically (in the linguistic sense) related to all its precursors including Latin and even PIE.

This is what you seem to be claiming, Le Baron:
Le Baron wrote:[...]the Basque 'continuum' could justly be considered the same general language [...].

I think this is the crux of the discussion. What does the "same general language" mean? Basque and Proto-Basque belong to the same language family and the former is descended from the latter. If that's what you mean by "same general language", then we agree. But then the point of contention becomes whether or not this classification of "same general language" applies to French and Latin. Because if "same general language" means that the languages are from the same language family and one is descended from the other, then French and Latin are the "same general language." No linguist worth their salt will say that French is not descended from Latin. It is a Romance language and comes from Vulgar Latin, which in turn comes from Latin. I don't think that's what you mean, however, because you are aware of the literature on French and Latin. If by "same general language" you mean languages that are related to each other, one of which being the descendant of the other but having not undergone significant internal change or influence from other languages, then Basque and Proto-Basque aren't the "same general language" either as far as the evidence shows. Basque has both changed internally and been influenced by outside languages, including, most recently, French and Spanish. I assume, then, that this is not what you mean either. So what does "the same general language" mean?
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