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

General discussion about learning languages
User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23122
Contact:

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

Postby rdearman » Fri May 28, 2021 11:15 am

I have split this thread off at the request of a couple of members since it seems to have diverged quite a bit from the original topic of the thread. I would also like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that while we welcome debates, we don't tolerate disrespect. We can all agree that health debate is a good thing, but if it descends into an acrimonious shouting match then nobody achieves anything.
2 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

sirgregory
Orange Belt
Posts: 171
Joined: Sat Apr 27, 2019 5:22 pm
Location: USA
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Spanish
Studies: German, French
x 615

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

Postby sirgregory » Sat May 29, 2021 4:18 am

I can't comment on the historical linguistics here but I have been following some of the genetics research. One of the interesting results about the Basques is that around 90% of Basque men are in the R1b Y-DNA haplogroup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-DNA_haplogroups_in_populations_of_Europe

This is surprising to me because R1b is the lineage that is associated with the expansion of Indo-European and I had always assumed that since Basque is non-IE that they had somehow managed to isolate themselves from that expansion. To the contrary, it seems there was near complete male replacement of that population yet the maternal language still survived. Really, the surprising thing to me isn't so much that the mother tongue prevailed in this particular case, it's that the IE "father tongues" did so well everywhere else.

Another very interesting population is the Sardinians who are said to be the modern population that's genetically the closest to the ancient Early European Farmer (EEF) samples (farmers who expanded from the Middle East into Europe during the Neolithic). Their pre-IE language presumably survived initially but it did not survive the Roman expansion.
4 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3468
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8657
Contact:

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

Postby Cainntear » Sat May 29, 2021 9:15 am

Saim wrote:
Le Baron wrote:Conversely, since the history of French is known and it has a pretty well-known point in time where that particular Latin offshoot met the Frankish influence, we know what, where, when French is. It's not Latin. It's different.


Would the logical conclusion then be that, say, Occitan, or Sardinian, or whatever, are Latin, as they were not influenced by Frankish? It seems like you're using impressionistic, ad-hoc criteria: how much foreign influence is enough to declare something a new "language"? Where is the cut off point?


Saim wrote:
Le Baron wrote:Since there's no evidence of a drastic change between older Basque and what's there now, who knows?


On what basis are you making this claim? Basque has by all accounts changed quite a lot over time.


galaxyrocker wrote:
Le Baron wrote:
They probably would understand Latin, nevertheless modern French is still not classical Latin



Then Modern Basque is not the same as the language that was spoken in Aquitania at that time. You can't say it holds for one and not the other.

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.


And Basque is not the same as what was spoken then! If you're going to say it's older because French != Latin, you can't then claim that Modern Basque == Proto-Basque! Also, there are people who will tell you that French is a dialect of Latin, and French can, in many ways, be interpreted as Modern Latin. Also, just because it was in Europe before the Indo-European languages doesn't mean it's older. All that that means is that it's been in Europe longer, which nobody is disagreeing with.

I think you're both misinterpreting the point here.

As far as I can see, LeBaron is not trying to say "Basque is older than French" or indeed that any language is older than any other, but rather to suggest that even if you do believe in the concept of older and younger languages, there's no logic that lets you declare Basque to be "younger" than French.

The simplest argument was:
Le Baron wrote:
tractor wrote:How old is Basque? How old is French? How long is a rope?

French's history has been investigated. There are 1001 books about the the history of French. Basque's origins are unknown.

The argument "French is older" from the study of the historical development of French is nonsensical because we know the Basque language existed even when it wasn't written down. (We cannot claim that Sumerian is older than the Indo-European family simply because we have documentary evidence of Sumerian's existence predating any early IE written forms.)

The argument was then extended by saying that if we are going to speculate on what happened to Basque during its years as a non-written language, then there's no strong argument that the speculation should prove the case for French as "older", which puts them at best on equal grounds.

The final extension of the argument is speculative, but fair: we know French has changed and we know why French has changed. Basque has not been subject to the same pressures (some pressures, yes, but different ones).

So as far as I can see, LeBaron's point throughout has been not "I'm objectively correct", but that "there is no objective provable truth, but even if we take up subjective arguments, there is no reasonable argument in French's favour here," and that's something I agree with wholeheartedly.

I'm firmly in the "no such thing as an older language" camp, but I'm still willing to deconstruct someone else's "my language is older" in the terms of their argument, exactly as I believe LeBaron has done here.

But I would extend the argument one step further, and point out that inflectional complexity in a language generally indicates a stable speaker population. It is generally when a significant population of non-native speakers start using a language for everyday purposes that inflections are lost: the Romans teaching Latin to the Empire; the Angles and Saxons conquering Celts and then being conquered by Normans; that sort of thing.

While it doesn't prove anything conclusively, I'd say that if I had a gun to my head and had to choose the older language, I'd say Basque, because it has a hell of a lot of grammatical affixes.
0 x

User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3505
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9384

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

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 29, 2021 11:41 am

Cainntear wrote:But I would extend the argument one step further, and point out that inflectional complexity in a language generally indicates a stable speaker population. It is generally when a significant population of non-native speakers start using a language for everyday purposes that inflections are lost: the Romans teaching Latin to the Empire; the Angles and Saxons conquering Celts and then being conquered by Normans; that sort of thing.

While it doesn't prove anything conclusively, I'd say that if I had a gun to my head and had to choose the older language, I'd say Basque, because it has a hell of a lot of grammatical affixes.


That's actually a great point. I wish I'd thought of it. Well played.
0 x

galaxyrocker
Brown Belt
Posts: 1119
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:44 am
Languages: English (N), Irish (Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge B2), French, dabbling elsewhere sometimes
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=757
x 3327

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

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat May 29, 2021 12:41 pm

Cainntear wrote:As far as I can see, LeBaron is not trying to say "Basque is older than French" or indeed that any language is older than any other, but rather to suggest that even if you do believe in the concept of older and younger languages, there's no logic that lets you declare Basque to be "younger" than French.


But that's exactly what they were trying to say if you go back and look at the original thread. Nooj said here to ignore the part about Basque being older than French, to which Le Baron replied:

Isn't it? Wasn't Basque was in the area well before French (and any romance language)? Basque's origins are unknown, whereas French's are.


That's what sparked the whole discussion, was their first bit there, which seems to imply Basque is older than French.

Le Baron also has such quotes as this in the thread I linked above, which spun off this discussion:

French as it is, is a combination of the residue of Latin conquest plus the influx of the Franks at a later date. So it is that "French" as a language didn't exist at all until that happened, no matter what antecedent input it has received because they were not French, they were something else.. Which makes it a good deal younger than Basque.


They're *exactly* claiming that Basque is younger, and it seems their argument relies solely on the fact that we 'know' the history of French, ignoring any and all work done by historical linguists on Basque. Nobody here is arguing French is older, from what I've witnessed being a part of the discussion. We're arguing that you can't say one language is older, which you admit you agree with.
3 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23122
Contact:

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

Postby rdearman » Sat May 29, 2021 1:05 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:We're arguing that you can't say one language is older, which you admit you agree with.

Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?

You have an interesting POV, but I don't agree with it.
2 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3505
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9384

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

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 29, 2021 1:14 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:They're *exactly* claiming that Basque is younger...


So I'm first of all saying it's not younger, but then actually arguing that it is by saying French is so recent as to have had its origins mapped whereas Basque hasn't?

Okay.
0 x

galaxyrocker
Brown Belt
Posts: 1119
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:44 am
Languages: English (N), Irish (Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge B2), French, dabbling elsewhere sometimes
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=757
x 3327

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

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat May 29, 2021 1:20 pm

Le Baron wrote:So I'm first of all saying it's not younger, but then actually arguing that it is by saying French is so recent as to have had its origins mapped whereas Basque hasn't?




That doesn't make it younger. All that makes it is attested. There's a huge difference between recency and actually being written down. And, I would argue we don't know French's origins anymore than we know Basque's because eventually French goes back past Latin and we don't exactly know where Latin came from, though lots of historical linguistic work has been done on that. Though, of course, lots has been done on Basque too, which you conveniently have ignored for this entire conversation.

Attestation != age (if it did, Basque would be younger since we have evidence for French before we have evidence for Basque). Also, you've repeatedly seemed to assume that the ancestor language of Basque was close enough to Modern Basque to be counted as the same, but you refuse to give Latin/French the same benefit of the doubt. If you claim French isn't a form of Latin, you must also claim that modern Basque isn't a form of Proto-Basque (roughly contemporaneous with Latin from what I recall). Just because we don't have an attested record of the changes doesn't mean they didn't occur and we can automatically group the two languages together, especially when you refuse to do that for French/Latin simply because they're more widely attested.

rdearman wrote:
galaxyrocker wrote:We're arguing that you can't say one language is older, which you admit you agree with.

Really, so all of these languages are the same age?

Arabic, Kʼicheʼ Maya, Esperanto, Toki Pona, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, English, Sumerian, Archaic Chinese, Hittite, Afrikaans, Lingala, Klingon?

You have an interesting POV, but I don't agree with it.


No, I'm absolutely not saying all of those specific ones are the same age. In fact, there's more than one conlang in that mix, which is one of the exceptions we've repeatedly made in this thread. As for the others, yes. Sure, you can go by date of first attestation (at which point Basque is younger than French!), but that makes no sense as some form of the language, an ancestral form, was spoken before. The better answer is that we cannot know the age of languages, and it's a meaningless discussion to even try to compare two languages.
4 x

User avatar
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3505
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
x 9384

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

Postby Le Baron » Sat May 29, 2021 1:28 pm

Interesting. Maybe we should just be calling Afrikaans 'Dutch' then, and remove the name Afrikaans. Just like people keep saying French is really just Latin.

When I posed that question above I was inquiring about the suggestion that I'd said one thing, then apparently argued the opposite.

The point, utterly missed, misrepresented and twisted out of recognition in relation to this thread though, is that Basque was most likely (was and is imo) present in France before Latin and its offshoot as French (or that special French actually known as 'Latin' if one must) and so its suppression along with other minority languages is rather nasty.

Frankly the long and tortuous history of Latin's origins is really quite irrelevant in relation to this specific question.
0 x

Dragon27
Blue Belt
Posts: 616
Joined: Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:40 am
Languages: Russian (N)
English - best foreign language
Polish, Spanish - passive advanced
Tatar, German, French, Greek - studying
x 1375

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

Postby Dragon27 » Sat May 29, 2021 1:55 pm

Le Baron wrote:The point, utterly missed, misrepresented and twisted out of recognition in relation to this thread though, is that Basque was most likely (was and is imo) present in France before Latin and its offshoot as French (or that special French actually known as 'Latin' if one must) and so its suppression along with other minority languages is rather nasty.

And I'll just repeat my correction: the ancestor of Basque (Aquitanian language) was present there before the arrival and development of French.
And, of course, none of it means that any language (be it Basque, Occitan, French, or any other) is allowed to be suppressed.
5 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: tastyonions and 2 guests