Correction... how useful...?

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Le Baron
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Le Baron » Sat Mar 25, 2023 3:50 pm

Cainntear wrote:The classical story is most probably the wrong way round, because prior to relatively recent times, lands were named after their people, not the other way round (eg "England" is "the land of the Angles" and "Scotland" is "the land of the Scots") but historical border expansion has meant that the original "where the Franks live" meaning is well clear of the mark in a France that incorporates land where Vikings settled (Normandy), Basques lived, Celts lived etc etc etc. Some of newest countries (Germany and Italy) are named after ethnic groupings in order to justify themselves.

The names aren't always from the people adopting or naming themselves though. The origin of 'Scottish' is a name given by someone else, not Gaelic-speaking peoples to themselves because it's not Gaelic. Why was England names after 'Angles' rather than the equal currency word 'Seaxan'?Mostly because of the choices made by other writers and recorders.
This doesn't necessarily contradict your statement that places tend to be named after the people in them, but that this is sometimes not by the people themselves and also that the name of the language and the name of the people are not always the same.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Iversen » Sat Mar 25, 2023 4:15 pm

If Castile where named after its castles how did the the other names of countries then get their names? They must also have had castles.This etymology smells of folk etymology, but the one thing that might support it is that even the Arabs called the area Qashtāla (says the Spanish Wikipedia). So it must be older than 800, where it first was used in a document. And then we are almost back to the Romans..

As for the Scoti: the name was used about a tribe that sailed from Ireland to Scotland and eventually subdued and absorbed the Picti who had lived there since time immemorial. I have seen the name in the jeremiads written by saint Gildas in the aftermath after the Roman exodus from Britain, and he didn't write about a land, just about some wild men from up North.

As for the name England: maybe the reason was simply that the word 'Anglosaxons' starts with Anglo and not Saxon.... After all it is also fairly common to speak about Bosnians, but when did you last hear anybody mention the Herzegovinians?

And speaking about Brontosaurus: it's only fairly recently that it this been accepted as a valid name again - it's an old name (given by Othniel Marsh in 18799, but from 1903 the fossils were seen as belonging to the genus Apatosaurus. However in 1915 some paleontologists examined the vertebrae of some supposed brontos and decided that they were different enough from those of the Apatosauri to justify giving the Brontosaurus its own genus name back - now containing three species. So when Luke tried to find out about Brontosoaurus it probably didn't exist - at least not under that name. But the story about the extra brain in the tail is fake - it has been argued that Stegosurus and Sauropods like Camarasaurus (and Brontosurus) had a lump of nervecells in the cervical region (not tail) that easily could compete with the minimal brain in their heads - but it still didn't qualify as a brain because it didn't have the structures that define a brain
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 5:17 pm

Dragon27 wrote:
Cainntear wrote:So which seems more likely: that over a millennium ago, a country that had castles in it was found surprising enough in a time when all countries had them that it was called "Castleland"

Well, the country was at war with the Moors, so it doesn't seem so far-fetched that the (originally small) region was especially fortified. The region expanded in the process of regaining control over the peninsula and the name stuck.
The alternative explanation seems to me to require more assumptions or steps without much evidence to support them.

OK, then what about the other speakers who took on the Castlese name for their language...?

Consider that the people of Castle-unya tend to reject the similarity between their variant of the word Castlese and the other word Castlese. The way I understand it, this similarity has in the past been used to justify the Spanish line that Castlese is "just a dialect" of Castlese, and is therefore not worthy of full language status. There's been significant study into the grammar of Castilian and Catalan to show that they're both part of a broader dialect continuum, and that Catalan has features that are present further east than Castilian -- eg Catalan numbers shows a similar logic to French (eg 16) that suggests parallel evolution to Castilian, rather than an evolution from it.

The acceptance of the received wisdom etymology of "castellano" by both sides is probably why Catalans have ignored the similarity in terms and actively rejected it.

But if we look at the two languages and recognise the documented history (and linguistic evidence of parallel evolution), why couldn't they both just be named after how they started: as international commerce languages used in castles?

I mean, look at stereotypical representations of market English "You like? I give you very good price!" and it really isn't that big of a stretch to imagine a parallel universe where planes and the internet hadn't been invented, where the languages of various countries end up being called "Markit"...

Btw, when did the term "castellano" itself first appeared?

I cannot state with certainty, but I believe I read that the first written evidence of Catalan is older. I have no recollection of ever hearing a proposed etymology for the name "Catalan", and I personally believe that an etymology of "Castlese" would make perfect sense. I admit that it's a personal belief, but it was something I noticed after reading the alternative hypothesis of the etymology of castellano.

Cainntear wrote:Regardless of the specifics, I am 100% certain that the origin of Cockney H-dropping is due to French ancestry.

In the meantime, I'm going to treat this as a hypothesis (or should it be an 'ypothesis?).

OK, that was too absolute of me. To correct:
I am 100% certain that I have seen detailed evidence that the origin of Cockney H-dropping is due to French ancestry, including pictures of medieval art depicting the French-speaking mercantile settlement.
Cockney dialect is said to have originated among the working class of the East End of London and later influenced by all sorts of immigrants coming into region (including, of course, the French ones).

Googling got me the fact that Huguenot asylum seekers ended up in Spitalfields during the reformation later on, which does ring a bell with me. I don't know if I'm making this up, but I think the claim was that they ended up there because of existing French-speaking populations in neighbouring Hackney, and that this essentially provided evidence of continuing use of the French language in that area for centuries. Maybe a bit of a speculative claim, though.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 5:21 pm

Iversen wrote:And speaking about Brontosaurus: it's only fairly recently that it this been accepted as a valid name again

https://youtu.be/tClsAQzA0Ok

(sprang immediately to mind there... sorry...)
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 5:28 pm

Le Baron wrote:The names aren't always from the people adopting or naming themselves though. The origin of 'Scottish' is a name given by someone else, not Gaelic-speaking peoples to themselves because it's not Gaelic.

No, it's an exonym, but there's a lot of people who absorb exonyms -- eg the many people in the world called "funny foreign types"... eg (arguably!) Welsh people and Walloons.

Consider also the Farsi is so-called because while Persians could pronounce a word-initial P, their neighbours kept mispronouncing it as F. To a certain extent, endonyms are of minimal use because they might be misunderstood when speaking to foreigners, and who actually needs a word other than "us" to talk within the group?
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Mar 25, 2023 6:33 pm

Cainntear wrote:OK, then what about the other speakers who took on the Castlese name for their language...?
...
The acceptance of the received wisdom etymology of "castellano" by both sides is probably why Catalans have ignored the similarity in terms and actively rejected it.

The word "catalan", as far as I know, doesn't have an accepted etymology (just a bunch of competing ones). That it looks somewhat similar to "castellano" could just be a historical coincidence. If it isn't, then it could just be a separate development of the same word in a different (Romance) language variety. Although I don't have the required linguistic competence to check if it's compatible with the known history of phonetical evolution of the corresponding languages.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby luke » Sat Mar 25, 2023 6:52 pm

Iversen wrote:And speaking about Brontosaurus: it's only fairly recently that it this been accepted as a valid name again.... So when Luke tried to find out about Brontosoaurus it probably didn't exist - at least not under that name. But the story about the extra brain in the tail is fake - it has been argued that Stegosurus and Sauropods like Camarasaurus (and Brontosurus) had a lump of nervecells in the The Double Dinosaur Brain Myth region (not tail) that easily could compete with the minimal brain in their heads - but it still didn't qualify as a brain because it didn't have the structures that define a brain
So interesting that a magazine and institution as highly regarded as the Smithsonian would still be entertaining my childhood studies.

And you're right about the Brontosaurus too, of course. I remember that name from The Flintstones:
Back when I was a kid, we called it a Brachiosaurus. Later, similar terrible lizards appeared on the scene with new names, Pluto lost its planetary status, and science began to appear to be a humanistic endeavor.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Iversen » Sat Mar 25, 2023 7:05 pm

Brachiosaurus is (or rather was) another critter with a more flat snout. Dino from the Flintstones is more Brontosaurus-like, and Diplodocus had a long head. Actually I have also been through a few changes in good old scientific truths in my time. I recently made my second collection of vertebrate species names, and I was quite shocked to see all the changes that the learned ones had made to the system since I made my first collection in the 60s.

By the way, I thought that it would be easy to find out what the different parts of the Iberian Peninsula were called in Roman times, but instead I found a list with placenames back then and now - not what I was looking for, but nevertheless quite interesting. Many of the names have actually survived in some form. I did however also find a list over pre-Roman tribes,and it seems that Ptolemy mentioned some Castellani - but they lived at the bottom of the eastern Pyrenees, and that's now part of Catalunya.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Mar 25, 2023 7:15 pm

Dragon27 wrote:The word "catalan", as far as I know, doesn't have an accepted etymology (just a bunch of competing ones).

Yes, and the accepted etymology of "castellano" is a folk etymology which I don't see as much more credible than a creation myth.

That it looks somewhat similar to "castellano" could just be a historical coincidence.

It could be, but then that seems as unlikely as any claim that Gàidhlig and Gaeilge are historical coincidence. The existence of a shared root is taken as a given, but in the case of Scottish Gaelic vs Irish, there's a shared literary tradition which has been used to claim ScG as a recent corruption of the Irish mother tongue (led by Irish academia which has historically been dominant) but which has more recently been challenged by the observation that "Middle Irish" is essentially a misnomer, as most extant texts are from Scotland and display clear evidence of grammatical differences that are found to this day between the two, which is used as evidence of a much earlier development of vernacular differences and the claim that the common written form was essentially a "high dialect" used for literature and not evidence of a shared spoken form.

If it isn't, then it could just be a separate development of the same word in a different (Romance) language variety.

The proposal that "castillano" means "castlese" was not (IIRC) presented with Catalan as supporting evidence, but the same logic that made Vulgar Latin into the language of trade in castles in central Iberia applies to eastern Iberia.
Although I don't have the required linguistic competence to check if it's compatible with the known history of phonetical evolution of the corresponding languages.

S is retained before P and pronounced (eg esperar) but retention before T is more iffy -- aquest has a mute S, but castell has a pronounced one (see also the town of castelló -- big castle -- in Valencia, which also has a pronounced /s/ phoneme).

My working hypothesis is that everybody basically forgot that the language name was "Castlese" which led castellanos to decide it referred to Castilla and catalans to assert that there was no common root because it couldn't refer to Castilla. To me, the "Castlese" theory just seems the most likely.
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Re: Correction... how useful...?

Postby luke » Sat Mar 25, 2023 7:16 pm

Iversen wrote:Brachiosaurus is (or rather was) another critter with a more flat snout. Dino from the Flintstones is more Brontosaurus-like, and Diplodocus had a long head. Actually I have also been through a few changes in good old scientific truths in my time. I recently made my second collection of vertebrate species names, and I was quite shocked to see all the changes that the learned ones had made to the system since I made my first collection in the 60s.
Yes, this old man sees what that young child did not.
Brachiosaurus
Image
Brontosaurus
Image
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