Shop 2 Khurkris

And just to confuse things, Akkadian grammer is very similar, but no 'to be' verb.
English: I am the king, Bill is King
Akk: King I, but Bill King
English: He is eating that over there
Akk: eating(he implied)that there(but all one word, about 15 letters
Aaron(Master of a Dead Toungue)

------------------
amacks@nist.gov
Don't forget to pay your taxes...they eventually become my knives:)

 
I find this interesting stuff. Some of my Nepali language teachers that were most effective were little kids -- but even they could not succeed very well. I was too old. The older we get the harder it is to master another language it seems. Little kids seem to soak it up like sponge. Why is this?

Uncle Bill
 
in re children learning language, I think we are rigged to learn languages REALLY WELL once and once only, when we are 0-3 years old... but on the other hand, I bet three years of complete immersion in Nepali would have you speaking as well as a Nepali 3 yr old, easy
smile.gif


The thing that really interests me are the 'untranslatable' words, like in German 'Gemuetlichkeit', which is sort of 'neighborly' and sort of 'hospitality', but not quite. To really get it, you have to hang out in Bavaria for a while - it's a word for an aspect of culture, and if you don't have that concept, you can't translate the word. The Germans have no idea about 'huckleberry' - it comes across as American Blueberry instead, which isn't the same thing at all.

Did anybody else catch the Scientific American TV special on PBS last night? They were showing animal intelligence tests. Really amazing stuff.

------------------
Jeff Paulsen


 
Jeff, I tend to agree about the kids. I had Chinese friends whose kids in kindergarten had to do traslating for them.

My Nepali fluency level got up to about a one year old when I was at my best.

I missed the special you mentioned but have seen other stuff that amazed me. "Dumb" animals doesn't quite do them justice, does it?

Uncle Bill
 
:
Mohd:
I have long said that All children all over the word speak the same language.
Laughter and tears are the same the world over.

My particular theory for what it's worth is that at one time all the continents were together....(I think scientest call this Pangaia(sp?)...
and that mankind was "created" there. When the continents started drifting apart the peoples gradualy changed and "forgot" thier beginnings.

Jeff:
I agree completely with you about having to have been "there" long enough to have absorbed the culture to explain the words. There are many Indin words that are that way.
"That" is probably why so many peoples have such a hard time understanding one
another.annit? LOLOL.
Just bein ornery. "ainnit,aini't,ani't,innit,ennit are all,kind of slang words that mean several things,from "doesn't it?" to
"isn't it?" and probably some I don't know about,because I am not around the people as much as I would like.
It depends on what tribe a person is as to which variant is used.

All very interesting stuff !!!

Uncle Bill:
Perhaps you had some genetic memory?
I have done several things in the past and people have asked how I knew to do that. I don't know.It just "felt/seemed" right.

------------------


>>>>---¥vsa---->®
The civilized man sleeps behind locked doors in the city while the naked savage sleeps (with a knife) in a open hut in the jungle.
 
Yvsa:
Probably a couple years ago one of the weekly newsmagazines did a Cover Story report on language. It was illustrated as a tree ( much like a family tree ) beginning with one trunk and then branching out from there. When you took modern languages/the green leaves, traced the twigs back ( old english, french, etc. ) to the branches ( french, spanish,italian and portuguese to Roman ) and then down the limbs to the trunk, including a lot of lost languages, they claimed the computers had allowed them to do linguistic archaeology ( or would that be anthropology )and trace all languages back to a single base or radix/root language. It was probably done recently enough, and was sufficiently controversial to have been published somewhere on the net, so you might try searching for it or similar studies. It is interesting if speculative.

Should have added I believe the magazine was Time, but my confidence level in my memory's reliability is about 40-45%. So try back issues of Time first, but don't be too surprised if I'm wrong.

[This message has been edited by Rusty (edited 11 August 1999).]
 

English is a Germanic language (with a lot of words & grammar forced on us by the French in the middle ages). All Germanic languages are in the Indo-European language family, along with Hindi, Farsi, and a bunch of others you wouldn't expect. 'Yoke' and 'Yoga' come from the same root word, and if you think about that you will learn something about Yoga.

Another thing about French vs German words in English: when the animal is alive, we use a German-type word for it (Cow = Kuh, Swine = Schwein) but once it is on the plate we use a French type word (Beef = Boeuf, Pork = Porc). When there were Old English (very much like German) speakers and French speakers in England a thousand years ago, who do you suppose did the farming, and who did the eating?
smile.gif


This post had nothing whatsoever to do with HI, so I should mention I got my village Sirupati today! I'll say more about that later.

------------------
Jeff Paulsen


 
Jeff, that did it! You are now the official HI resident linguistics expert. You join good company in our bevy of residents.

Uncle Bill
 
Uncle Bill,

Well, no, actually. The difference from the Tower of Babel story is approximately equivalent to the difference of evolution from the Biblical creation story, though at this point, the evidence for common linguistic descent is a lot weaker than the evidence for common biological descent.

Basically, the idea is that human languages diverged from a single common ancestor language at the same time that the human population dispersed from a homogeneous population in Africa around 50,000-? years ago and that you can trace a good deal of that divergence even using the (now sparse) data in the resulting modern languages. The position is controversial (especially the part about being able to use modern language data to reconstruct a linguistic family tree), but it isn't crazy.

It would be crazy for me to go into a major explanation of (my take on) the evidence and conclusions that can/should be drawn from it, but a pretty good presentation -- not too technical, IMHO
smile.gif
-- by one of its principal exponents can be found in The Origins of Language by Merrit Ruhlen. Wiley, 1994. ISBN: 0471159638. I got mine from Powell's Books in Portland, OR http://www.powells.com . I just checked and they don't seem to have any used copies in stock, so you might have to pay full price there right now, but you can always keep checking.
smile.gif
Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471159638 also has it at $14.36 (+s&h)

It's pretty fun reading, but, then, I often read this sort of thing as bedtime reading. YMMV.
smile.gif



------------------
Paul Neubauer
prn@bsu.edu



[This message has been edited by prn (edited 12 August 1999).]
 
:
I would never have thought that there may have been an argument for the possibility of a root language.
It sure wouldn't do me any good to try and read something like that at bedtime. I have enough trouble getting through the educational section (the funnies.
smile.gif
) of a morning.Who knows,perhaps the old Cherokee legend that we came from the Pleiades might be true.The Lakota also have thier stories of the star people as do some of the other tribes.If I remember right the Hopi have one of the largest group of stories about thee kinds of things.

------------------


>>>>---¥vsa---->®
The civilized man sleeps behind locked doors in the city while the naked savage sleeps (with a knife) in a open hut in the jungle.
 
Wheeew! Thank you for taking me off the hook on that one. I've got one bookcase overstuffed with just religion and theology stuff, with more in boxes. My wife retiring as of the end of August means that she'll be bringing home the other two bookcases I got her. Maybe that'll give me room to unpack the rest. Know I have at least 350+ books to go there, maybe over 400. Enough to teach me not to get into an argument in this area, for sure.
 
This really is getting interesting!

Paul, help me out. It seems I recall reading somewhere in the Good Book about people trying to build a tower or something so they could just walk up to heaven and God looked on this action unkindly and split a common language into a multitude of different tongues. I thought this was the tower of Babel and that's why nonsense talk was sometimes referred to as babel. I am old and my memory is not so good anymore, like Rusty. And I am too lazy to search the Bible to see if I can find what I'm trying to speak of here. So, scholars help me out.

Uncle Bill

 
Genesis 11:1-9: "And the whole earth was of one language and one speech.... Therefore is the name of it called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth"
O.E.D.: Hebrew babel, Babylon, associated in Genesis with the idea of confusion, but not referable to any known Semitic root...Assyrian bab-ilu, Gate of God, the Assyrian rendering of the Accadian Ca-dimira.
If necessary to keep this on topic, I'll try to find Jesus' injunction to his disciples that two swords were sufficient for their uses.
 
Try Genesis chapter 11, v 1-9.

If you accept a couple of definitions:
1) that a myth is as close as we can get to describing the really real, and
2) the little girl's explanation of a myth: "it's a story that's true on the inside".
Then "on the inside", the story of the Tower of Babel seems to me to meet the 3 criteria of truth per Wm. James, i.e.; congruity, usefulness, and luminosity. The message tells us about what and who we are.

Could we move on to the subject of Occam's Razor now?


[This message has been edited by Rusty (edited 12 August 1999).]
 
"True on the inside"
smile.gif
-- I like that one!

It does mean that we need to be very careful about making sure we know what's on the inside and what's just on the surface. Hmmm, sounds like Cliff's knife tests.
smile.gif
Destructive testing of myths -- good idea! Look carefully at everything!


------------------
Paul Neubauer
prn@bsu.edu

 
Occam's Razor :

William of Occam (1284-1347) was an English philosopher and theologian. His work on knowledge, logic and scientific inquiry played a major role in the transition from medieval to modern thought.
He based scientific knowledge on experience and self-evident truths, and on logical propositions resulting from those two sources. In his writings, Occam stressed the Aristotelian principle that entities
must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. This principle became known as Occam's Razor, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms. In science, the simplest theory that fits the
facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top