Jak's View of Vancouver v.3

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One of my very long-term amateur interests has been the development and spread of language families. Probably because of where I come from and where I am — along with reasonably easy access to the relevant academic literature — most of my knowledge is about the Indo-European language family, and I have spent the holidays re-reading (for the third time), David Anthony’s fascinating study called The Horse, the Wheel, and Language. I learn so much each time I read this work, but the particular point that intrigues me right now is the development of personal names.

As I understand it, the first two names known in history are an Egyptian leader called Iry-Hor and a Sumerian called Kushim. Both of these lived a little before 3000BC, so about 5,000 years ago. However, these were clearly not the first names, just the earliest names that we can more or less accurately date from inscriptions and thus known to us. Obviously, we cannot ever find inscriptions from a period prior to the invention of writing (about 3500BC) but it seems equally obvious that people (some people?) had personal names well before that innovation.

I have read one theory that suggests personal names began to be used after the invention of agriculture when division of labour became more clearly defined. However, it is not difficult to imagine the value of personal names millennia earlier both in the hunter-gathering economy and as a part of everyday clan life. I doubt we can ever trace this without writing or inscriptions.

I also read that some scientists have determined that dolphins have personal names in the form of an individual “whistle” that they respond to. That led me to wonder whether any of our primate relatives call each other by individual names? Anybody know?

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The other day in my review of Riddley Walker I discussed the use the author makes of what has been called Riddleyspeak: his imagining of how southern English would sound many generations in the future. It was therefore with great pleasure that I found today an essay by Alexander Wells on a newly developing language called Berlingish or Denglish which is becoming a feature of modern culture in Berlin.

“Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German … Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier. The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German …

At the moment, German newspapers describe any kind of drama as ein Shitstorm: who knows if that is here to stay. What leads a loan word to travel? Is it the fantasy of foreign places, the thrill of the exotic? Or is it a culture’s perception of its own shortcomings? Preeminent recent anglicisms in contemporary German — words like recycelt, Streamlining, queer, Smash, Gender-Wokismus, cringe, Slay, Sneaker-Release, Content-Manager — hint at a varied and vivid set of contact points.”

Well worth reading for anyone interested in language and its development.

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For those of us with a passion for language and linguistics, the mysteries and histories of undeciphered languages always intrigue. Possibly the oldest extant script in Europe, the signs that made up the Linear A language of Crete and other parts of the Aegean three thousand five hundred years ago continue to confound scholars. Aeon has an excellent summary of the current state of Linear A studies and experiments.

A later version of the script, called Linear B, was finally deciphered by Ventris and others in 1952 as a form of archaic Greek. “We are therefore in a position to say that the Linear A to Linear B script-transmission process was prompted by the need to adapt the template script (Linear A) to a different language: Greek.” What is still missing is the identification of Linear A’s language.

“Once Linear B had been singled out as Greek, the different linguistic character of Linear A caught the eye. Linear A was unlikely to be Greek: no lexical correspondences could be securely identified between Linear A words and alphabetic Greek ones (as Ventris was able to do for Linear B), nor did Linear A show systematic patterns comparable with Kober’s triplets. From the very outset, Linear A has resisted decipherment: the Minoan language it encoded stood in stark contrast with the Mycenaean Greek language of Linear B.”

The article gives a fascinating account of the work that continues to be done on this enigmatic language. Well worth the read.

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I posted a graphic about the evolution of our western alphabet recently and received some interest, so here is some more along the same lines.

Specialists have been studying an alphabet created in 1834 in Liberia, Africa. It was devised to write down the Vai language which previously had been purely oral.

“According to Vai teacher Bai Leesor Sherman, the script was always taught informally from a literate teacher to a single apprentice student. It remains so successful that today it is even used to communicate pandemic health messages.”

The studies are looking at how the alphabet has evolved over time to see if general characteristics of alphabet evolution can be adduced.

“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs. But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers … applying computational tools for measuring visual complexity, they found that the letters really did become visually simpler with each passing year.”

Elsewhere in West Africa, illiterate inventors have reverse-engineered writing for languages spoken in Mali and Cameroon, while new writing systems are still being invented in Nigeria and Senegal.

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The always interesting Visual Capitalist has this succinct diagram of the evolution of the alphabet that most of us use today.

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The origin of languages is a key part of how we became the species that we are today. And knowledge of the history of each language group allows us to track the migration patterns of humans millenia ago.

I have written before about ur-symbols, the origins of Indo-European, and other linguistic ideas. Now, we have exciting new research on the origin and dispersal of TransEurasian languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish.

“This language family’s beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across north-eastern Asia over thousands of years, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago … The findings illustrate how humankind’s embrace of agriculture after the ice age powered the dispersal of some of the world’s major language families. Millet was an important early crop as hunter-gatherers transitioned to an agricultural lifestyle.”

The always useful Visual Capitalist supplies this interesting map of certain words we use every day and how they followed the trade routes:

Most people are aware of a phonetic alphabet (A = Alpha, B = Bravo, C= Charlie, etc) that is used to spell out words and to avoid confusion.

In 1934, the Nazis altered the German version because, they said, the original was too Jewish. They changed S = Samuel to S = Seigfried, for example, D = David to D = Dora, and Z = Zacharias to Z = Zeppelin, amongst other changes. That version, the Nazi version, has been used more or less intact for the last 86 years. Many people in Germany today have no knowledge of the Nazi background to this symbolism.

But no longer. Germany will now revert to the pre-Nazi version, at least until a new version is approved next year.

“Michael Blume, the ombudsman for antisemitism in the state of Baden-Württemberg … has been leading a quiet campaign to get rid of the Nazi version of the system. The fact it had stayed in place for so long, he said, was proof in itself of a “deep-seated antisemitic and racist mindset” in Germany. “Just in that one name change, Nathan to Nordpol, which we still use today, you can see how deeply into our language and our thinking this Nazi idea has seeped, with no one really questioning it,” he told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. In the Nazi’s pseudoscientific ideology, the north pole was seen as the original home of the Aryans.”

“Clemens Schwender, a professor of media who has studied decades of spelling tables that were typically listed in telephone books from 1881 onwards, told Die Welt that the fact that people still habitually used words such as Siegfried “shows that the 12 years of the Nazi era, which they had intended to be 1,000, still have their impact … even secretaries who are supposed to have learned S is for Samuel hardly ever use it,” he said.”

I am looking to find the ultimate origin of the English word SKULK which, in the southern England that I grew up in, means to hang around, in a semi-concealed fashion, for some underhanded purpose.  “That burglar is skulking around the neighbourhood.”

In all the etymological dictionaries that I have examined, the word origin is given as Scandinavian from the 12th or 13th century.  For example: Danish “skulke“, Swedish “skolka“, and Icelandic “skolla.”  Those derivations are from Walter Skeat’s Dictionary, and similar derivations can be found at various online dictionaries such here, here, and here.  Normally that would be that; all the sources agree.

However, I have also been read 1985 PhD dissertation on the settlement of 6th and 7th century northern Italy by the Langobards who came from Pannonia which is roughly Croatia, and northern parts of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzeogivana.  In a discussion of military organization, the author mentions: “the sculca, denoting a spying or reconnaissance group or look-out … it was of Germanic origin which passed into Byzantine usage.”

Sculca as spies or look outs and skulking seem awfully close in both meaning and sound.  Could the Scandinavians have picked up the earlier word via the Germanic tribes between Lombardy and the Baltic?  Or perhaps both words derive from a proto-Germanic or even PIE original. Is there any debate on this anywhere?

One of my enduring interests is the history of language in general, the historical and genetic links between each language in a language family (Indo-European, for example, or Niger-Congo), and between each of the families into which we have divided the earth’s 7,000+ spoken and written forms of communication.

Languages, like all living forms, evolve and change. We know that each language and each language family had earlier forms, known as proto-languages; and there has been speculation that all languages are ultimately derived from some original or ur-language.  I haven’t accepted that thesis for quite some time, preferring instead to believe that language — being so vital to the complex world that the fast-rising homo genus was creating — evolved multiple times in multiple locations.

That being said, and while understanding that language and writing are not the same thing, Canadian paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has presented evidence that the same symbols of human communication might well be global at a period many thousands of years before the Sumerians “invented” writing.

In fact, she suggests that this system is “a carryover from modern humans’ migration into Europe from Africa” tens of thousands of years ago. ‘This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new invention,’ she writes.”

Like much cutting edge science, this analysis remains to be proven or otherwise. In the meanwhile, it allows for fascinating speculation.