Kazakh 1 comment

Great free Kazakh textbook on the web

2007-10-16

I enjoyed learning what I could of Kazakh while I was in Almaty in the summer, and now in Helsinki I’ve found a Kazakh immigrant willing to do a Kazakh-English exchange. Finding a textbook was a bit difficult, as while my department has the old Indiana University manuals of Tatar, Yakut, Bashkir, and so forth, there is no Kazakh entry in the series.

I was delighted, however, to find a textbook available at no cost on the web. The Kazakh Language Course for Peace Corps Volunteers in Kazakhstan was commissioned by the U.S. government and is therefore freely downloadable. It is quite well-written, and since it has abundant exercises it certainly beats a dry old introduction like IU manuals. A pity that it is only a PDF scan of the book instead of a fully electronic version, though.

Chuvash, Hungarian, Turkic 1 comment

Hungarian-Old Chuvash contacts

2007-10-16

In the collection Chuvash Studies ed. András Róna-tas (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982) there’s a fascinating paper by Margaret Palló entitled ‘The Bulgar-Turkish Loanwords of the Hungarian Language as Sources of Chuvash Prehistory’. The earliest terminology of animal husbandry in Hungarian is of a distinctly Proto-Chuvash type, and Pallo shows why:

One group of the Old Turkish loanwords of the Hungarian language suggests that the Magyars of the Ural region had got into closer contact with a Turkish people engaged in animal husbandry, and subsequently, changed their mainly predatory way of life to the more highly developed one of livestock breeding. This is proved by the large number of names of domestic animals: Hung. bika ‘bull’ < *bïqa, ökör ‘ox’ < *ökür, tinó ‘steer’ < *tïnaɣ, ünő ‘heifer’ < *inäɣ, borjú ‘calf’ < *buraɣu, kos ‘ram’ < *qoš, ürü ‘sheep’ < *iriɣ, toklyó ‘yearling’ < *toqlïɣ, kecske ‘goat’ < *käčkä, olló ‘kid of goat’ < *oɣlaɣ, kölyök ‘whelp, young of an animal’ < *köläk. Presumably the word iker ‘twins’ also belongs to this group as it may have meant twin broods. If we consider the most prominent phonetic characteristics of these animal names — r stands for ST z, as in öküz ∼ ökör, buzaɣu ∼ borjú, ikiz ∼ iker, and l stands for the ST š, as in *köšäk ∼ kölyök — then it seems obvious that it is BT and not some other Turkish languages whence the Hungarians borrowed them. No doubt, the other animal names without the characteristic OB phonetic features were also borrowed from the same source.

Hungarian No comments yet

Hungarian regionalisms

2007-10-15

No teacher would deny that German, Italian, or French differ region by region from the standard language. Nonetheless, several prominent learning materials for speakers of English claim that Hungarian has no significant regional variation. As a beginner I believed that, but then one day when I couldn’t find a word in my dictionary, a native speaker alerted me to one of the major regionalisms in Hungarian. The writer had used ö in the word in question, but to get the standard form I had to look under e in the dictionary.

Another major regionalism is [a] for standard [ɛ] among the Székely (Szekler) Hungarians in Romania. A Transylvanian friend wrote me the following joke on the subject:

A székely városbeli vasútállomáson megszólal a hangosbeszélő:

― Figyelem, figyelem! Vonat erkezik az Á vágányra. Kérem vigyazzanak.

Vonat megjön, elmegy, ujra megszólal a hangosbeszelő:

― Mennyi halott, mennyi sebesült… pedig világosan megmondtam: Á mint Elemér!

At the train station in a Székely town the loudspeaker announces:

‘Attention, attention! A train is arriving on track A. Please be careful.’

The train comes and goes, and the loudspeaker again announces:

‘So many dead, so many injured… but I clearly said A as in Echo!’

The Department of Phonetics of the Research Institute for Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has a map of dialects where one can find the major traits of each region.

Finnish, Hungarian, Mansi, Uralic 4 comments

Hungarian and Mansi connections

2007-10-12

In the Introduction to the Study of the Finno-Ugrian Languages course that I’m sitting in on again this year, the lecturer handed out a nice concise listing of similarities between Hungarian and Mansi—and differences between these two and Finnish—that show why traditionally Hungarian is grouped closely with the Ob-Ugrian languages.

Hungarian Mansi Finnish
hal xuul kala ‘fish’ *k before a back vowel
kéz kit käsi ‘hand’ *k before a front vowel
egér tänkør hiiri ‘mouse’ intervocalic *-ŋ-
harom xuurøm kolme ‘three’ *-rm- in this word.
két ∼ kettő kit ∼ kitøg kaksi ‘two’ 2 variants
alól joløl alta ‘below’ ablative ending
ház-am-ban kol-øm-t talo-ssa-ni house-1sg-inessive possessive suffix before case suffix
magyar mansyi endonyms
nyolc nyollow kahdeksan ‘eight’ same root and construction
ló luw hevonen ‘horse’ common vocabulary (around 150 total items)
nyereg nagør satula ‘saddle’
ostor osytør piiska ‘whip’

One of my favourite Uralic etyma is here: *šiŋere/*šiŋiri ‘mouse’. Here one can see the vastly different paths the word has taken in the various Uralic languages. In Finnish, initial *š- becomes /h/ and intervocalic *-ŋ- is lost. In Mansi, initial *š- merges with *s- and becomes first *θ- and ultimately /t-/, while intervocalic *-ŋ- becomes the cluster /-nk-/. Finally, in Hungarian initial *θ- (< *š-) is lost, and intervocalic *-ŋ- becomes first *-ng- and then is denazalized to intervocalic /-g-/. Cognates in other Uralic languages can be seen at a Uralic database entry.

Hungarian, Latin, Romance languages 5 comments

When Hungarian was almost Romance

2007-10-11

In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of ‘speculative linguistics’ I know. Latin was almost like a native language for the Hungarian gentry in Austro-Hungarian times, but eventually the Language Purification Movement came out on top. Makkai writes:

Yet things could have taken a different turn and Latin could only be vigorously alive; it could, in fact, have penetrated the language deeply enough to create yet another brand of Eastern Romance. Admittedly this is somewhat speculative and there were, as we now know, more forces against such pidginization and later creolization than for it, but that it could have happened diachronically can be shown from the synchronic situation in Hungarian today.

The synchronic situation to which the author refers is the speech of the oldest generation at the time of writing, which was a product of the Austro-Hungarian education regime. Makkai tape-recorded the following judgments of a Hungarian academic, aged 75, about an American colleague:

Micsoda implauzibilis szituacio! Ez a pasas nem gavaller, hanem szadista frater. Patriotismus es szolidaritas? Semper fidelis? Numquam fidelis… Nem kapiskalja, hogy aquila non captat muscas. Palam et publice impertinens, agressziv, kleptomaniakus, retorikaja extrem es abszurd. Antifeminista, antiszocialis, kriminalis tendenciai vannak. Hogy antialkoholista es antimorfinista is? Ja, noch schön… aber… imposszibilis teoriakat fabrikal, obskurus, misztikus obfuszkaciokkal alteralja a szocialis milieu-t… Intolerabilis antiracionalista, aki denigralja az universzitas-beli akademikusok konfraternitasat, amor patris-at, optimizmusat…

‘What an impossible situation! This guy/character [from French passager] is no gentleman [from Spanish caballero] but a sadistic gangster [from Latin frater ‘friar’]. (regarding) patriotism and solidarity? Always faithful? (why, he is) never faithful… He doesn’t understand [from Italian capisco] that ‘ the eagle doesn’t catch flies’ [Lat. proverb of high frequency in Hung.]. In full public view [frequent Latinism in Hung.] he is impertinent, aggressive, kleptomaniacal [from Gk. ‘to steal’], his rhetoric is extreme and absurd. He is an antifeminist, he is antisocial, and he has criminal tendencies. That he is also an antialcoholic and an antimorphinist? Well, that’s the saving grace…but… [German interjection] he fabricates impossible theories; keeps altering the social milieu [French] with obscure and mystical obfuscations… He is an intolerable antirationalist who denigrates the fraternity of university academics, their love [of their] country and their optimism’

Makkai makes the interesting point that after Latin declined in popularity, and ‘pure’ Hungarian formations became the standard, the younger generations could hardly understand classically educated old people.

The last sections of the paper are mainly in jest, example texts in the conjectured Romance language that Hungarian might have become. Nonetheless, the matter reminded me of a remark by Anthony Fox in his textbook Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method

A more radical conclusion is drawn by Trubetzkoy (1939), who suggests that, since features may be shared by unrelated languages, the idea of a language family as a group of languages derived from a single source is actually unnecessary. Terms such as ‘Indo-European’ merely cover groups of languages sharing a number of features, and as a result it is possible for a language which acquires the appropriate features to become Indo-European.

The Trubetzkoy work is ‘Gedanken ueber das Indogermanenproblem’, Acta Linguistica, 1: 81–9. I haven’t read it yet, but I would like to find it soon and see how this seventy year-old idea of languages changing families jives with contemporary notions about genetic affiliation and contact phenomena.

English & Anglo-Saxon 2 comments

Fela’s Nigerian English

2007-10-10

Over the past month or so I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti. The great Nigerian musician, human rights activist, and would-be politician was from a squarely middle-class family and lived for some time in England and the United States, so his English was generally of the standard international variety. Nonetheless, elements of Nigerian English slip through. One of the most striking innovations for me is the wide use of the verb ‘quench’, which I first heard in Fela’s song ‘Zombie’ (from his 1977 album of the same name). In comparing soldiers in the Nigerian military to undead puppets, Fela twice uses the verb in the following sense:

Tell him to go kill, tell him to go quench…

Go on, quench, with your .45s…

As speakers of American English generally use this verb only in the phrase ‘to quench one’s thirst’, this seems odd indeed. The Oxford English Dictionary gives another definition To put out, extinguish (fire, flame, or light, lit. or fig.), which is perfectly understandable though rather Victorian-sounding. There’s even the definition To destroy, kill (a person); to oppress or crush., though the examples show that in this case the verb is used in a consciously metaphorical manner.

In Nigerian English, however, the use of the word seems to have widened greatly. It can be used intransitively, e.g. ‘the stove has quenched’. It is regularly used in the context ‘to put out, extinguish’, and—to judge from Fela’s further use of it in a number of his songs—its semantic scope has widened to the point that it’s a perfectly normal word for ‘to execute’ or ‘to murder’.

I find it remarkable how in one variety of English the word has become quite marginal, while in another variety its use has expanded. Language change in action. It is a pity, though, that I’ve been unable to find academic references for Nigerian English so that I might learn other ways in which it has developed individually.

Croatian 4 comments

The innovations of Molise Croatian

2007-10-09

I’ve just finished Heine & Kuteva’s highly entertaining monograph The Changing Languages of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006), which shows how certain European languages have become remarkably alike over the last 2000 years in a series of language contacts spreading outwards from one centre or another. One of the languages that the authors frequently use as an example of contact-based grammaticalization is one I was previously unfamiliar with: Molise Croatian. The speech of the Albanian and Greek minorities in Italy is fairly well-documented, but this was the first time I had ever heard of this Croatian dialect spoken in three villages in the Molise region.

Under Italian influence Molise Croatian has grown apart from standard Croatian. The three genders of standard Croatian have been reduced to two with the loss of the neuter, although intriguingly when Italian preserves traces of the neuter, Molise Croatian does as well. Where the standard language has e.g. nožem ‘with a knife’, preserving the traditional use of the Slavonic instrumental case, Molise Croatian has merged comitative and instrumental constructions in s nožem, c.f. Italian con un coltello. Synthetic comparative constructions have been replaced with analytic constructions, as in standard Croatian lyepši ‘more beautiful’ versus Molisean Croatian veče lip, c.f. Italian’s use of più as a degree marker.

Interestingly enough, centuries of Italian influence have not sufficed to equip Molise Croatian with definite articles. The use of demonstratives to indicate definiteness is a major or minor use pattern and not fully grammaticalized. Furthermore, in spite of some hints that it won’t last, Molise Croatian nouns still have a full array of case.

There is what I should think a rather glaring mistake in Heinze & Kuteva’s citation of Molise Croatian material. Twice in the book the mala of the sentence jena hiža mala is glossed as ‘big’ and then the whole is translated as ‘a big house (not a small one)’. The root mal- would be understood by anyone with even limited experience with the Slavonic languages as meaning ‘small’, and either it has switched to the opposite meaning in Molise Croatian, or the translator had it wrong. Both times the sentence is cited from Walter Breu’s 1996 paper ‘Überlegungen zu einer Klassifizierung des grammatischen Wandels im Sprachkontakt (am Beispiel slavischer Kontaktfälle)’ in Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49(1). I’ll have to look for that paper and see if the error is made by Breu or by Heine and Kuteva.

Computing, Occitan No comments yet

Provençal merged into Occitan in ISO 639-3

2007-10-08

This is somewhat old news, but still interesting. The developers of the ISO 639-3 standard, a code that aims to define three-letter identifiers for all known human languages, decided in March to consider Provençal a subset of Occitan, and so now Provençal material is to be marked up with three-letter code oci for Occitan.

Finnish No comments yet

Agricola’s wacky Finnish

2007-10-07

Francis Peabody Magoun (1895–1979) stands as an oddly eclectic philologist. On one hand, he was a passionate scholar of Old English, but he was also one of the few outsiders who studied early Finnish literature. What brought Magoun to Finnish was his love for epic, for Finland produced the Kalevala. Magoun soon made his own translation of the poem into English, first published by Harvard University Press in 1963 and still widely read.

One of Magoun’s other achievements is his reader Mikael Agricola’s Gospel According to St Mark (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1967). The 16th-century clergyman Agricola was the very first man of letters in the Finnish language, and Magoun combined this portion of his gospel translation with a foreword, and outline of the language, a glossary, and an appendix for English speakers learning Finnish. The language is recognizable as Finnish, but with a peculiar orthography and much phonological exoticness. I’ll quote a random portion, Mark 7:17–19:

17. Ja coska hen canssalda welti, meni hen honesen; nin kysyit henen opetuslapsens’ henelde teste wedauxesta. 18. Ja sanoi hen heille: ’Ningö mös tökin ymmertemettömet oletta? Ettekö te wiele nyt ymmerdhä, että caiki ulcoa inhimisen siselle-meneve ei se woi hende sastutta, 19. sille ettei se mene henen sydhemens’ siselle mutta watzan, ja loonnollisesta ulosmenepi quin puhdista caiki roghat.

For the same verses in English, the King James Version has:

17. And when he was entered into the house from the people, his disciples asked him concerning the parable. 18. And he saith unto them, Are ye so without understanding also? Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man, it cannot defile him; 19. Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

I look forward to discovering more about Agricola, because much of the discussion of the history of Finnish at University of Helsinki assumes knowledge of his translation. When one of my lecturers was sketching the history of Finnish consonant gradation, an important point was that Agricola wrote dh, representing a voiced dental fricative, in places where it is no longer pronounced. In the verb ‘to understand’, for example, the strong grade of the root is ymmärt-. The negative participle in modern Finnish, as in ettekö ymmärrä ‘don’t you (pl.) understand?’, shows a weak grade where rt is weakened to rr. However, Agricola’s ettekö ymmerdhä is evidence that originally the t in the cluster was weakened to a dental fricative first and still pronounced as such in the 16th century, before being assimilated to the preceding r.

Indo-European, Latin, Romanian 5 comments

Extreme sound change

2007-10-06

I am fascinated by cases where multisyllabic words are worn down to a nub. In his textbook Historical Linguistics (London: Arnold, 1996) Larry Trask gives the following as the introduction to an exercise in Chapter 3:

This is thought to be the history of the French word cent over the last 6000 years or so: [km̥tom] > [kemtom] > [kentom] > [kentum] > [kentũ] > [kentu] > [kento] > [kʲento] > [tsento] > [tsent] > [sent] > [sen] > [sẽ] > [sɑ̃]

My favourite, however, is the modern Romanian word for ‘today’. Vulgar Latin *ecce-ista diēs had, count ‘em, six syllables. It passed into early Romanian as aceasta zi [atʃʲasta zi] and in contemporary colloquial speech it has ended up as the monosyllabic azi [azʲ].

DEX, the widely appreciated but somehow dubious Dicționar explicativ al limbii române gives an alternate origin of azi, namely Latin hac die. However, I think that it is just as likely that the word ultimately comes from *ecce-ista diēs, for its modern literary descendent, astăzi, is already almost there.