By Steve Connor, Science Editor. Monday, 3 January 2011
An isolated community near the Black Sea coast in a remote part of north-eastern Turkey has been found to speak a Greek dialect that is remarkably close to the extinct language of ancient Greece.
As few as 5,000 people speak the dialect but linguists believe that it is the closest, living language to ancient Greek and could provide an unprecedented insight into the language of Socrates and Plato and how it evolved.
The community lives in a cluster of villages near the Turkish city of Trabzon in what was once the ancient region of Pontus, a Greek colony that Jason and the Argonauts are supposed to have visited on their epic journey from Thessaly (now Thessaloniki) to recover the Golden Fleece from the land of Colchis (present-day Georgia). Pontus was also supposed to be the kingdom of the mythical Amazons, a fierce tribe of women who cut off their right breasts in order to handle their bows better in battle.
Linguists found that the dialect, Romeyka, a variety of Pontic Greek, has structural similarities to ancient Greek that are not observed in other forms of the language spoken today. Romeyka’s vocabulary also has parallels with the ancient language.
Ioanna Sitaridou, a lecturer in romance philology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Romeyka preserves an impressive number of grammatical traits that add an ancient Greek flavour to the dialect’s structure, traits that have been completely lost from other modern Greek varieties.
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Tags: Ancient Greek, Geek
Posted in Dialects, Language history | No Comments »
12 July, 2010
A tiny clay fragment – dating from the 14th century B.C.E. – that was found in excavations outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls contains the oldest written document ever found in Jerusalem, say researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The find, believed to be part of a tablet from a royal archives, further testifies to the importance of Jerusalem as a major city in the Late Bronze Age, long before its conquest by King David, they say.
The clay fragment was uncovered recently during sifting of fill excavated from beneath a 10th century B.C.E. tower dating from the period of King Solomon in the Ophel area, located between the southern wall of the Old City of Jerusalem and the City of David to its south. Details of the discovery appear in the current issue of the Israel Exploration Journal.
Excavations in the Ophel have been conducted by Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Funding for the project has been provided by Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman of New York, who also have provided funds for completion of the excavations and opening of the site to the public by the Israel Antiquities Authority, in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and the Company for the Development of East Jerusalem. The sifting work was led by Dr. Gabriel Barkay and Zachi Zweig at the Emek Zurim wet-sieving facility site.
The fragment that has been found is 2×2.8 centimeters in size and one centimeter thick. Dated to the 14th century B.C.E., it appears to have been part of a tablet and contains cuneiform symbols in ancient Akkadian (the lingua franca of that era).
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Tags: Akkadian
Posted in Language history | No Comments »
By Eoin O’Carroll, CSMonitor.com / June 4, 2010
If the Scripps National Spelling Bee teaches us anything, it’s that the English language is a complete mess.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word “fish” could legitimately be spelled “ghoti,” by using the “gh” sound from “enough,” the “o” sound from “women,” and the “ti” sound from “action.”
Shaw was probably not the originator of this joke, but he was one of a long line of people who thought that the English language’s anarchic spelling, a hodgepodge of Germanic, French, Greek, and Latin, was desperately in need of reform.
To this end, he willed a portion of his estate toward the development of a new phonetic script. The result was the Shavian alphabet, whose 47 letters have a one-to-one phonetic correspondence with sounds in the English language. Like just about every other attempt to rein in English spelling, Shaw’s alphabet continues to be widely ignored to this day.
But spelling-reform advocates press on. The Associated Press reported that this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was picketed by four protesters, some dressed in bee costumes, who distributed buttons reading “Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much.”
(more…)
Tags: English
Posted in Language history, Phonetics | No Comments »
Published on May 1, 2010
There’s some new research coming out of the University of Rochester that sheds a bit of light on the origin of language in humans. What these researchers were looking into was if there’s one certain area of the brain that gives humans advanced language capabilities over other animals. To this end, they designed a great experiment (which was published in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) to determine if different brain regions were used to decipher sentences with different types of grammar.
Languages like English use word order to establish meaning. “John hugs Susan” means John is subject doing the hugging, while Susan is the one feeling the squeeze. But other languages, like say Spanish, rely on inflection-and suffixes tacked onto the ends of words-to convey subject-object relationship (while word order remains interchangeable).
Sign language, though, can do both. So the researchers put native signers inside an MRI machine and showed them video of other native signers signing 24 sentences twice. One time they would sign using the sentence with the word-order arrangement, the next time would use inflection for emphasis. What the researchers found is that there are two separate parts of the brain used to process these two types of different sentences.
A sentence that draws its meaning from word order draws on the parts of the prefrontal cortex that we use to put information into sequences, while the inflection type lights up the temporal lobe which specializes in dividing language into separate parts.
(more…)
Posted in Language and the brain, Language history | No Comments »
Высказано новое предположение, что преемниками скифов, которые долгое время считались предками осетин, могут быть восточные афганцы.
В 1950 – 60-х годах осетинский исследователь В.И.Абаев доказал преемственность между языками скифов, сармат, алан и осетин. Все эти народы считаются индоевропейскими. И доказательства связи между языком скифов и современным осетинским языком, предложенные Абаевым, опирались на лингвистические параллели. Полстолетия назад научный мир безоговорочно принял теорию, согласно которой осетины остались изолированным реликтом скифо-сарматского ираноязычного мира.
Однако сегодня такое безоговорочное утверждение вызывает сомнение. Кандидат исторических наук Сергей Викторович Куланда из Института востоковедения РАН, сопоставив новые лингвистические данные, пришел к выводу, что вопрос о происхождении скифов и скифского языка необходимо пересмотреть.
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Tags: Scythian
Posted in Language history | No Comments »
04:44 PM CDT on Friday, April 9, 2010. By TOM MAURSTAD / Media Critic
Let’s say you have a bit of good news you want to share with someone and you’re tapping out a text (because, seriously, who does phone calls anymore?). Or perhaps you’ve just received a good-news e-mail and you want to respond with some sort of quick-and-easy affirmation.
At some distant point in our communication-technology evolution – say, a couple of years ago – you might have gone with something like “hooray!” in the first instance and a cheery “congrats!” in the second. But we’ve come a long way on our less-is-more learning curve. Today you would just issue a three-tap “yay.”
For all of its instant ubiquity in the electronic environs of texting and e-mail, “yay” is a relatively new word – a variation on the very old word “yea.” Instead of being pronounced like its one-letter-longer cousin “yeah,” it rhymes with its opposing counterpart “nay.”
Do a Google search, now the definitive tool for perusing online culture, and you’ll find it all over the place.
So why would a word that’s been around a few centuries suddenly go from “yea” to “yay”? The answer simply could be that it looks the way it sounds.
“Language is inseparable from the means by which we communicate,” says Bryan Crable, a rhetoric expert and professor of communications at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “Until recently, standardized grammar and spelling have been important to America because of its investment in printed culture.
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Posted in Language and culture, Language history | No Comments »
By David Zax * Smithsonian.com, July 19, 2009
The Indus civilization, which flourished throughout much of the third millennium B.C., was the most extensive civilization of its time. At its height, it encompassed an area of more than half a million square miles centered on what is today the India-Pakistan border. Remnants of the Indus have been found as far north as the Himalayas and as far south as Mumbai. It was the earliest known urban culture of the subcontinent and it boasted two large cities, one at Harappa and one at Mohenjo-daro. Yet despite its size and longevity, and despite nearly a century of archaeological investigations, much about the Indus remains shrouded in mystery.
What little we do know has come from archaeological digs that began in the 1920s and continue today. Over the decades, archaeologists have turned up a great many artifacts, including stamp sealings, amulets and small tablets. Many of these artifacts bear what appear to be specimens of writing—engraved figures resembling, among other things, winged horseshoes, spoked wheels, and upright fish. What exactly those symbols might mean, though, remains one of the most famous unsolved riddles in the scholarship of ancient civilizations.
There have been other tough codes to crack in history. Stumped Egyptologists caught a lucky break with the discovery of the famed Rosetta stone in 1799, which contained text in both Egyptian and Greek. The study of Mayan hieroglyphics languished until a Russian linguist named Yury Knorozov made clever use of contemporary spoken Mayan in the 1950s. But there is no Rosetta stone of the Indus, and scholars don’t know which, if any, languages may have descended from that spoken by the Indus people.
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Thursday, 9 July 2009
A legal challenge against a 270-year-old ban on the use of the Irish language in court proceedings in Northern Ireland has been dismissed in the High Court in Belfast.
An Irish language speaker, Caoimhin Mac Giolla Cathain, a member of the Shaws Road Gaeltacht in west Belfast, took the case after he was informed that his application in Irish for an occasional drinks licence could not be considered.
Court staff said the reason was that the Administration of Justice (Language) Act of 1737 stipulated that “all proceedings in courts of justice within this kingdom shall be in the English language”.
The drinks licence was sought in connection with a musical concert in the Culturlann, Falls Road, Belfast, said to be the foremost provider of Irish language events in the area and where Irish is generally spoken.
The case was heard last October when Michael Lavery, QC, argued: “Key to this case is if you are going to afford them (Irish speakers) the dignity of being Irish or going to pay lip service to it and trammel it or impede it with unnecessary restrictions.”
Yesterday Mr Justice Treacy dismissed Mr Cathain’s contention that the 1737 Act was incompatible with the European Charter for Regional and Minorities Language and secondly that the Act was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.
(more…)
Tags: Irish
Posted in Language history, Language policy | No Comments »
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, May 1, 2009
(04-30) 19:58 PDT — American scientists working with colleagues in six African nations and Europe have been boldly tracing the genetic roots of all humanity for the past 10 years, and their first results have just started coming in.
The effort – the most ambitious of its kind ever undertaken – is an attempt to learn in detail how remarkably diverse humans are; how our varied genes make some of us susceptible to deadly diseases and some immune; and just where in Africa our human ancestors first moved out of the continent more than 50,000 years ago to populate the world.
The researchers examined the genes and historical linguistics among thousands of remote African tribal peoples, carrying on a long and once-controversial study begun more than 50 years ago by Stanford geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and continuing today in partnership with Stanford mathematician Marcus Feldman.
Geneticist Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania is leading the latest project with support from African researchers in Cameroon, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria and Sudan. The first results were reported Thursday in the online journal Science Express.
Over the past decade, the researchers analyzed the genes and languages of more than 3,000 people in 121 population groups across the most isolated regions of Africa, plus 60 in Europe, and four groups of African Americans in various states across the United States. All of the participants volunteered blood samples for gene analysis, the scientists said.
(more…)
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