Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 08, 2021 4:03 am

A quick note...
The smoke season is here. There is no fire near us, but the sky is an ugly color. Weirdly enough there is a pocket of clear air down here where we're breathing, but there is smoke above and smoke all around. It makes for spectacular sunsets. If the weather shifts, I'll have to hide indoors. Heck, we should all hide indoors.

I continue to wander around with my three languages. I've been getting some pretty severe interference between Old English and Norse. This just means I have some other errors to take care of. It is strange, but the Germanic languages seem less alien than Irish, even though I have a lot more background in Irish. I'm not very advanced in any of them, and it will take a while for this massive deck to have any effect on these difficult languages.

Anki is awesome. Over the days, strange shapes and sounds slowly become familiar and easy. I need to have this happen a lot to get up to speed reading native speaker materials.

I am pretty happy plugging away at this big deck for a while... I'll keep reading and fooling around with these languages while I keep doing the anki deck. We'll see if anki improves anything besides doing anki :D

Oh, I had a very close call earlier. I found a Sindarin Elvish course on Memrise, and I came very close to making an anki deck of it and adding it to my daily study. Madness...
I stopped at the last minute. I may do it tomorrow... I need to learn my runes and ogham before I start on Tolkien's language.
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

DaveAgain
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Aug 08, 2021 10:23 am

sfuqua wrote: I've been getting some pretty severe interference between Old English and Norse.
If someone just studied one of them Old English/Norse, do you think they'd be able to understand both? Are they that similar?
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Iversen
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 08, 2021 10:38 am

No. I can read Old Norse fairly confidently, but I have to struggle with Old English (especially poetry like Beowulf - the chronicles are easier). By the way, I just found an Anglosaxon reader tucked away on the backside of my bookshelves, so maybe I'll spend some time getting more familiar with that language in the near future.
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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 08, 2021 3:42 pm

Interesting, @Iversen. I wondered about that myself. I've heard people claim that the Vikings and the Anglo Saxons in the Danelaw could understand each other.

I am far from an expert on the migration period after the Romans left Britain, but I have always wondered if the Viking invasions and the formation of the Danelaw wasn't a model for what happened with the Anglo Saxons. I know that archaeologists don't find evidence of big battles between the Anglo Saxons and the Celts after the fall of Rome, and the geneticists show that the original Celtic population stayed around after the Anglo Saxons arrived to form a mixed population. Not everybody moved out of the Danelaw moved out when the Vikings moved in either. There is archaeological evidence of the battles with the Vikings; perhaps the lack of evidence of battles between Celts and Anglo Saxons simply means that we haven't found them yet. The battles weren't very big by modern standards.

I'm trying to fool around with at least one of my languages every day after anki. I shadow audio or try to read every day. I wonder if my mutterings in Anglo Saxon or Norse would even be recognized by an Anglo Saxon or Viking. Old Norse pronunciation looks closer to Old English than Icelandic looks to modern English. With Icelandic, I can be pretty sure about what my target is, but with the reconstructed Anglo Saxon or Norse pronunciation that I have been playing with, well I wonder.

I'm pretty unlikely to run into an ancient Anglo Saxon or Norse speaker, so I guess it isn't that important.
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

DaveAgain
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Aug 08, 2021 4:14 pm

sfuqua wrote:perhaps the lack of evidence of battles between Celts and Anglo Saxons simply means that we haven't found them yet.
I read one book that suggested the Celtic-British warrior caste suffered heavy losses supporting Roman forces on the continent and were replaced by Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who eventually replaced/married their Celtic employers. I think that was Ceawlin: The Man Who Created England.

Barry Cunliffe's Britain Begins is on my reading list, and should cover that period, but I've not yet read it! :-)
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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 08, 2021 5:32 pm

Academics, like other people, get attention by being shocking. I tend to think that the writings, scant though they are, from the "dark ages" period are probably true, as far as they go. There are records of Anglo Saxons being brought in as mercenaries. There are records of armies marching. There are stories of battles. Deciding that archaeology and genetics completely trump written records and long time traditions seems weird to me.

But what do I know?

Sometimes academics can get carried away by their arguments with each other. I remember the fun of being a graduate student during the early years of Krashen. A few years ago, I got savaged on this forum by someone who appeared to be a current academic or at least someone who read reddit. It was one of those stupid Internet conflicts that would have lasted about 10 seconds if we were face to face. Anyway, it was a conflict between my 40 year old linguistic training and their up to date information. It was all about the meaning of a word which had started to be used differently in linguistics. I was very annoyed, why would anybody get huffy about someone using a word in a way that recently changed its meaning? Of course people do this all the time in academic circles and elsewhere.

As I read up on current creole linguistics, I realized that my interlocutor was right as far as current usage went; I defined what our disagreement was about and backed down.

I also realized that I had been exactly the same sort of fool back when I was in graduate school. I can remember putting down a teacher who wasn't up to date with our new, improved use of the word "acquisition." I was an idiot; redefining a word doesn't really mean that one has learned anything. It is important to keep up with current usage in a technical field, and defining terms precicely is vital, but one should be nice about it.

Some of the arguments about the history of Britain in the dark ages seem pretty extreme from the outside of the field.

More academic arguments should be held in pubs and not in writing.
Last edited by sfuqua on Sun Aug 08, 2021 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sun Aug 08, 2021 5:45 pm

Um. You have way more experience with German than Irish. Your native language is a Germanic language. It makes a huge difference.

(Yes, English is a weird Germanic/Romance hybrid, but you still get a massive discount on Germanic languages.)
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sfuqua
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 08, 2021 6:06 pm

About Irish... It has always seemed strange. I assume that I will eventually get familiar with it. I find it strange that Icelandic and Old English seem familiar, even with all of their complex case marking and the like.
Samoan and Tagalog are both non Indo European languages, but they both didn't seem as strange to me as Irish. Perhaps I felt that way because those were languages that I learned in country, with pretty massive immersion going on.

I need to read up more on philology. I loved historical linguistics when I was in graduate school, and then let the interest drop.
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荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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Iversen
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 08, 2021 8:05 pm

I have read a fair amount of texts from the Anglosaxon period, and it is clear that there were lots of battles - but on the other hand it is also clear that the bulk of the British population wasn't replaced. If anything, the average Modern Brit is more related to the Spanish population than to the Germanic tribes on the continent (including the vikings), and even less to the Normans who arrived in 1066.

The monk Gildas (around 500 to around 570) describes the Brits from the period after the exit of the Roman armies around the year 400 as a a bunch of pathetic wussies who couldn't even defend themselves against the fierce Scots and Picts. So once the Romain sent an army to ward off the invaders, but the second time the Brits pleaded for help the Romans sent a message back that the Brits had to defend themselves, period. So for a time a culture with an elite speaking some kind of Vulgar Latin coexisted with a population that probably still spoke Celtic - but we can't even be sure of the balance. It is very likely that individual Germanic warriors and traders settled in Britain during this period, but even in the absence of piles of bones I don't see any reason to doubt the detailed accounts of Gildas and the venerable Bede about a real invasion in the mid 5.century, stating that the naive king Vortigern invited an army of fierce warriors from Angeln, Saxony and Jutland to help him in a minor fight with a neighbour, 'forgot' to pay them and thereby caused the Saxon invasion that effectively ended the Celtic-Roman period. Gildas doesn't mention king Arthur by name, but there are credible suggestions that "Arthur" just is a nickname meaning "bear". We can safely reject all the Medieval rubbish that was added to the tale by people like Geoffroy of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes, but somebody must have stopped the tsunami from reaching Wales - and the nickname of that person is more likely to have been "Arthur" than "Donald Duck".

So what about archeology? Well, there aren't many bone fields from this period, but I once saw in a documentary a claim that the whole subdivision of fields in England was drastically changed at the onset of the Anglosaxon period, and if that can be substantiated it is a clear indication that something in the power structures had changed - to boot something that can be documented through archeology if true. And the Sutton Hoo burial and other remains also show that new rulers had taken over who didn't owe anything to the preceding mixed Roman-Celtic culture. As for the language, it has been claimed that Frisian is the nearest relative to Old English. Well maybe, but I have searched in vain for solid evidence in the form of 'sound laws' that this is the case - I have mostly found wobbly arguments based on isolated words and grammatical details.

Wikipedia mentions that "palatalisation of velar consonants also [is] found in Old English" - with something like "tzirke" in Old Frisian (which by the way is a reconstructed language - only convincingly attested from around 1300), resembling "ċiriċe [ˈtʃiritʃe]" in Anglosaxon, but different from the unpalatalised "kirika" of Old Saxon and Old the-precursor-of-Dutch. OK, more of that, but when I look at Anglosaxon it is as close to Old Saxon as to the much later text samples in Frisian. So I think that the Anglosaxon language started out as a mixture of the preexisting Germanic speech variants from before the Hengest-and-Horsa invasion and the languages spoken by the invaders. And the palatizations could have developed separately, maybe not even at the same time. After all the palatization wawe has hit Swedish, but not Danish or Norwegian, and the Frisians can't be blamed for that.

And then the vikings came several centuries later. They managed to influence even the grammatical core of Anglosaxon so there must have been a lot of reciprocal relations, but as I wrote above, I still struggle with Anglosaxon, while Old Norse thanks to my studies of Icelandic has become reasonably easy to understand - but ONLY in the edited versions, which differ a lot from the original texts. One attestation of the close relationships is that the poem "Beowulf" almost certainly tells (in poetical form) about events in Denmark, but told in Anglosaxon and not Old Norse. And I have a quibble to vent here: those who write about Anglosaxon often forget to mention that this language during its whole known history (from 700 and up) was split into a number of dialects, and it must have evolved during the approximately 600 years where it was the common language of the ruling class in England - and presumably with time also the general population.

Sorry for writing such long rants in Sfuqua's log, but it seems we share an interest in the relationships between the old Germanic languages.

PS: I also think that Irish is a strange language - stranger than for instance Indonesian, which isn't even Indoeuropean.
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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sun Aug 08, 2021 10:43 pm

I think the non-Germanic, non-Romance indo-european languages that use the Latin script exist in an uncanny valley for native English speakers. They seem weirder to us because they are somewhat similar to what we know, but aren’t. Irish feels “weirder” to me than Chinese.
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