Language as a Clue to Prehistory

[lpetrich]

Free Books : Download & Streaming : eBooks and Texts : Internet Archive -- search term: Shevoroshkin -- collections of work on various macro-linguistic subjects like Nostratic and Dene-Sino-Caucasian.  Vitaly Shevoroshkin came from Russia, and he brought with him his interest in such macro-linguistics. That's how I got interested in that subject.

 

[lpetrich]

Austronesian influence and Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese in: Language Dynamics and Change Volume 7 Issue 2 (2017) by Martine Robbeets

She figures in a lot of the recent work on Transeurasian languages, especially with that name of them, instead of "Macro-Altaic" or something similar.

Bringing together data from linguistics and archaeology, this paper suggests an alternative way to reconcile prehistoric Austronesian influence with Transeurasian ancestry in Japanese. It proposes that Japanese underwent Austronesian influence at a time when the so-called “Japanic” ancestor of Japanese was still spoken on the eastern coast of the Asian continent, neighbored by a sister language of proto-Austronesian, called “para-Austronesian.”

... The specific interpretation of this hypothesis proposed here is that the Transeurasian homeland correlates with the early Neolithic Xinglongwa culture (6200–3750 BC), situated in Southern Manchuria from the seventh millennium BC onwards, while the homeland of Japanic is situated on the Liaodong Peninsula between the third and second millennium BC, with its speakers adopting rice agriculture from a para-Austronesian population within the Liaodong-Shandong interaction sphere. Sagart first hypothesized that a form of pre-Austronesian was spoken on the Shandong Peninsula during that time (Sagart, 1995), and he suggested that the linguistic ancestors of the Japanese acquired rice cultivation from speakers of an eastern language within the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian macrofamily with whom they were once in contact (Sagart, 2011).

She first gets into Japanese-Transeurasian similarities.

Japanese and the other Transeurasian languages have a fair number of structural features in common, many of which are not shared with the Austronesian languages: e.g., vowel harmony, absence of initial velar nasals, absence of initial r-, preference for non-verbal strategies of verbal borrowing, mixed verbal and nominal encoding of property words, predominantly suffixing inflectional morphology, SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) sentence order, GAN (Genitive-Noun/Adjective-Noun) phrase order, extensive use of converbs, predominant use of locative existential construction to encode predicative possession, use of the ablative case form to encode predicative comparison, etc. (see Robbeets, 2017b).

The last two are constructions like "At me is a book" for "I have a book" and "Blankets from sheets are thick" for "Blankets are thicker than sheets".

A  Converb is a non-finite verb form that expresses adverbial subordination, like 'when', 'because', 'after' and 'while'.

Moreover, these languages can be shown to display a single set of regular correspondences for consonants and vowels, they have basic vocabulary and non-cultural vocabulary in common, count a large proportion of verbs among their cognates, share common verb morphology and spread their correspondences consistently over five branches (Robbeets, 2005, 2015).

She proposes (JK, Altaic) with JK: (Japonic, Korean), Altaic: ((Turkic, Mongolian), Tungusic)

Austronesian?

In contrast, the similarities shared between Japanese and the Austronesian languages, shown in Fig. 3, are of a different nature. Japanese has only few structural features in common with the Austronesian languages that are not shared by other Transeurasian languages as well (see Murayama, 1976, 1978; Kawamoto, 1985: 105–110; Robbeets, 2017b). Examples of these properties exclusively shared between Japanese and Austronesian are a small vowel inventory, open syllable (CVCV) structure, and reduplication to express plurality.

There are at least two different sets of sound correspondences between Japanese and the Austronesian languages, which has led Kawamoto (1984) to propose that Japanese was “Austronesianized” twice. Moreover, the proposed cognates consist mainly of cultural vocabulary and nouns (Kawamoto, 1984; Benedict, 1990; Sakiyama, 1996; Kumar, 2009).

This suggests at least two waves of borrowing.

 

[lpetrich]

She has this table:

	Japanese-Transeurasian	Japanese-Austronesian
Delimiting structural features	many	few
Sets of regular correspondences	I	min. 2
Common vocabulary	basic/non-cultural	cultural
Word class of cognates	mainly verbs	mainly nouns
Comparative setting	five branches	binary

As an example of what she has in mind, I'll take English. Is it a Germanic language or a Romance language? From the large amounts of Norman French vocabulary in English, one might think that it is a Romance language. But most of its more basic vocabulary and its grammar are very recognizably Germanic.

After a long discussion of early-Holocene millet agriculture in the parts of China near the Korean Peninsula, she gets into rice cultivation.

3.3. The integration of rice and millet agriculture after 3000 BC

A second major demographic pulse in Northern China is associated with the integration of rice into the millet agricultural assemblage and a subsequent population spread. The Hongshan and Houwa cultures in southern Manchuria were contemporary with the Yangshao (5000–2800 BC) and Dawenkou (4100–2600 BC) cultures of the Yellow River Basin.

Who were they?

Whereas the Yangshao culture is generally associated with the homeland of Sino-Tibetan, some scholars such as Sagart (2008, 2011: 27; Sagart et al., this issue), Blench (2008) and Van Driem (1998: 93–94) suggest that the Dawenkou culture should be linked to a para-Austronesian presence.

Indications for an Austronesian connection to the Dawenkou culture come from various kinds of evidence: the use of pottery with supporting legs, house structure, myths on the sun, burial rituals such as the use of slab tombs (Zhang, 2009), cranial measurements (Wu and Olsen, 2009), and the shared ritual of tooth ablation, notably the extraction of healthy upper lateral incisors as a puberty rite (Han and Nakahasi, 1996: 47–48; Pietrusewsky et al., 2014). Moreover, it is more likely that Austronesian agriculture spread to Taiwan from Shandong than from the Lower Yangtze River, as previously suggested by Blust (1996) and Bellwood (2005), because millets and rice arrived as an integrated assemblage in Taiwan around 3000–2400 BC, while Lower Yangtze agriculture focused exclusively on rice until 2000 BC (Weber and Fuller, 2008: 80; Stevens and Fuller, 2017). The excavation of marine shell midden sites (Yuan et al., 2002) has further revealed that the Dawenkou was a maritime-focused culture, in contrast to the Lower Yangtze culture, which lacked marine sources. The extent of the correlations between the coastal cultures of Shandong and Taiwan remains to be investigated, but it is probable that the millet-rice agricultural assemblage was transmitted around 3000 BC from Shandong to Taiwan over a maritime route. In addition, Ko et al. (2014: 430) find evidence from mitochondrial DNA that supports a separation between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan populations around 8000–6000 BC, well before Austronesian populations started to expand into Taiwan.

On the spread of rice farming,

Archaeobotanical studies such as Miyamoto (2009) and Ahn (2010) show that wet-rice cultivation came to Korea in the late second millennium BC (1300–1000 BC) via the Shandong and Liaodong Peninsulas. This marks the beginning of the Mumun culture (1300 BC–0 AD) in Korea. Rice agriculture was more popular in the central and southwestern regions of Korea than in the southeast, where dry-field crops including millet and soybean remained important.

...
The final spread of millets and rice into Japan is dated to the beginning of the first millennium BC, marking the beginning of the Yayoi period (1000 BC–300 AD). It is associated with an influx of farmers from the Korean Peninsula (Harunari, 1990; Nelson, 1993; Hudson, 1999; Crawford and Shen, 1998; Crawford and Lee, 2003; Harunari and Imamura, 2004; Barnes, 2015), who probably brought the Japonic language to Japan. Apart from rice, millets and various crops, Northeast Asian influences include pottery, stone and wooden agricultural tools, domesticated pigs, ditched settlements and megalith burials. It is clear that agriculture arrived in Japan as a “package” of Northeast Asian culture, even if this package had a southern, Austronesian-like touch. Wet-rice agriculture was ultimately derived from the south, and certain elements of Yayoi culture such as ritual tooth ablation (Han and Nakahasi, 1996: 58, Brace and Nagai, 1982: 405), tattooing with dragon figures to ward off monstrous fishes (Pauly, 1980: 82; Sasaki, 1991: 26–27; Solheim, 1993: 2; Bellwood, 1997: 108, 135; Oppenheimer, 1998: 77; Palmer, 2007: 51), and granaries with raised floors, curved roof-lines and gable horns (Pauly, 1980: 84; Waterson, 1997: 17; Arbi et al., 2015) indicate an Austronesian connection. As a result, the most parsimonious hypothesis, in my view, is the early, continental insertion of Austronesian elements into an essentially North East Asian cultural package, as illustrated in Fig. 5.

 

[lpetrich]

Words for subsistence activities?

As illustrated below, common words indicative of cultivation and weaving can be reconstructed back to proto-Transeurasian, while shared maritime vocabulary and rice terminology are lacking (see also Robbeets, 2017c, for the reconstruction of additional vocabulary that associates proto-Transeurasian with broad-spectrum subsistence, including consumable plants such as nuts and roots and subsistence activities such as “grinding” and “kneading,” and indirect lexical evidence for pottery production). This observation supports the identification of the Xinglongwa culture with proto-Transeurasian. By contrast, Japanese and Korean share coastal subsistence terms, but they lack common rice vocabulary, an observation which supports the association of proto-Japano-Koreanic with the Neolithic Houwa cultures on the Liaodong Peninsula. Finally, the observation that some Japanic rice terms seem to derive from Austronesian supports the addition of rice to the earlier millet agricultural assemblage under influence of the—presumably para-Austronesian—Dawenkou culture.

There are also Transeurasian words for "to twine" and "to weave". Twining is how one makes string or cord or rope. Both activities are dependent on agricultural sources of fibers.

Japanese and Korean also share some coastal-subsistence vocabulary, like for boats and fish and crabs.

Then, rice.

The Transeurasian languages lack a common rice vocabulary. In Japonic many words relating to rice agriculture can be derived language-internally. For instance, OJ momi ‘hulled rice,’ OJ ipi1 ‘steamed rice, cooked millet’ and OJ nuka ‘rice bran’ seem to be deverbal nouns, from the original verbs underlying OJ mom- ‘rub,’ MJ if- ‘to eat’ and OJ nuk- ‘remove,’ respectively (see Robbeets, 2017a).

The analysis of OJ ipi1 ‘steamed rice, cooked millet’ along these lines is given in Vovin (1998: 371–372) and Robbeets (2005: 552). Interestingly, parallel formations of ‘cooked rice’ are found in Old Chinese and Austronesian.

Then some discussion of Austronesian connections of Japanese rice-related vocabulary.

 

[lpetrich]

The Tower of Babel - Evolution of Human Language Projectl - named after that Just So Story in the Bible as to why people speak many languages - site has documents in both Russian and English
Has:

• (List Format) Articles and Books: The Tower of Babel Electronic Library
• (Table Format) Articles and Books: The Tower of Babel Electronic Library
• Databases - online interface
• Downloads - STARLING database software, databases (DOS, Windows)

 

[lpetrich]

A complication in historical-linguistics work is areal effects, This can produce a  Sprachbund of languages that share a lot of features that their ancestors did not have, notably  Balkan sprachbund and  Standard Average European

 Classifier (linguistics) is a feature of eastern Asian languages that is most likely an areal feature. WALS Online - Chapter Numeral Classifiers with WALS Online - Feature 55A: Numeral Classifiers shows their distribution, which is rather curiously patchy.

 Chinese classifier and  List of Chinese classifiers - these words emerged over the history of the Chinese language, words that were originally distinct words.

Classifier systems in many nearby languages and language groups (such as Vietnamese and the Tai languages) are very similar to the Chinese classifier system in both grammatical structure and the parameters along which some objects are grouped together. Thus, there has been some debate over which language family first developed classifiers and which ones then borrowed them—or whether classifier systems were native to all these languages and developed more through repeated language contact throughout history.

"When a noun is preceded by a number, a demonstrative such as this or that, or certain quantifiers such as every, a classifier must normally be inserted before the noun."

"three cats" in Chinese is 三只猫 - sān zhī māo - three (animal) cat

Very similar systems are in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Burmese, Bengali, etc.

 

[Copernicus]

A complication in historical-linguistics work is areal effects, This can produce a  Sprachbund of languages that share a lot of features that their ancestors did not have, notably  Balkan sprachbund and  Standard Average European

 Classifier (linguistics) is a feature of eastern Asian languages that is most likely an areal feature. WALS Online - Chapter Numeral Classifiers with WALS Online - Feature 55A: Numeral Classifiers shows their distribution, which is rather curiously patchy.

 Chinese classifier and  List of Chinese classifiers - these words emerged over the history of the Chinese language, words that were originally distinct words.

Classifier systems in many nearby languages and language groups (such as Vietnamese and the Tai languages) are very similar to the Chinese classifier system in both grammatical structure and the parameters along which some objects are grouped together. Thus, there has been some debate over which language family first developed classifiers and which ones then borrowed them—or whether classifier systems were native to all these languages and developed more through repeated language contact throughout history.

"When a noun is preceded by a number, a demonstrative such as this or that, or certain quantifiers such as every, a classifier must normally be inserted before the noun."

"three cats" in Chinese is 三只猫 - sān zhī māo - three (animal) cat

Very similar systems are in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Burmese, Bengali, etc.

Basically, the way to look at classifier linguistics is to consider the distinction between mass and count nouns in English. Mass nouns do not incorporate a countable unit in their semantics, so "beer" in "I would like some beer" would usually be considered a mass noun, but "beer" in "I would like a beer" would be a count noun. When you say, "I would like five glasses of beer", that is the type of structure where a classifier is used with a mass noun. Those Asian languages that have classifiers are essentially languages in which most or all nouns are mass nouns. Such languages are not exclusive to eastern Asia, but that area has a lot of languages that treat nouns as mass nouns and require a classifier in contexts where countability is important in communicating a thought.

 

[lpetrich]

I tried comparing lists of Eastern Asian classfiers, but I was not very successful.

•  List of Chinese classifiers
•  Japanese counter word
•  Korean count word
•  Vietnamese grammar - has a list of the most common ones
• Thai Classifiers - 20 Classifiers You Should Know | Thai With Grace
•  Burmese numerical classifiers

• Sheets: Ch. zhāng, Jap. mai, Kor. jang, mai (paper), Viet. tờ (paper), lá (small paper), Thai pàen, bai (paper), Burm. ywet, chat
• Long / thin objects: Ch. gēn (rigid), tiáo (flexible), Jap. hon/pon/bon, Kor. ?, Viet. cây, Thai sâyn, tâeng, Burm. chaung
• Small / round objects: Ch. méi, Jap. ko, Kor. al, Viet. quả/trái, Thai mét (?), Burm. loun

A lot of the classifier categories are rather specialized, and they don't seem to overlap very much. Seems like these classifiers were separately developed from existing words.

 

[Copernicus]

I tried comparing lists of Eastern Asian classfiers, but I was not very successful.

•  List of Chinese classifiers
•  Japanese counter word
•  Korean count word
•  Vietnamese grammar - has a list of the most common ones
• Thai Classifiers - 20 Classifiers You Should Know | Thai With Grace
•  Burmese numerical classifiers
• Sheets: Ch. zhāng, Jap. mai, Kor. jang, mai (paper), Viet. tờ (paper), lá (small paper), Thai pàen, bai (paper), Burm. ywet, chat
• Long / thin objects: Ch. gēn (rigid), tiáo (flexible), Jap. hon/pon/bon, Kor. ?, Viet. cây, Thai sâyn, tâeng, Burm. chaung
• Small / round objects: Ch. méi, Jap. ko, Kor. al, Viet. quả/trái, Thai mét (?), Burm. loun

A lot of the classifier categories are rather specialized, and they don't seem to overlap very much. Seems like these classifiers were separately developed from existing words.

Bear in mind that noun meanings are not inherently count or mass. Among languages that have a lot of count nouns, there can be lots of differences. For example, "information" seems inherently a mass noun to English speakers, but French speakers treat it as a count noun. So you will sometimes hear native French speakers using the plural "informations" when speaking in English. Languages that tend to have few or no count nouns need classifiers when they refer to the countability of things, but the classifiers themselves can also come with all sorts of other semantic baggage. So I don't think it is terribly significant that quantifying classifiers in different languages have conventionally different semantics. Languages always change over time, and they can change in arbitrary ways in speech communities that are isolated from each other.

 

[Swammerdami]

I think Copernicus' distinction between mass nouns and count nouns is a very good way to look at the issue, especially if mass noun includes nouns which are countable but the unit of counting is ambiguous. ("We'll have three beers please." Sarcastic waitress: "Three glasses or three pitchers? Three kegs?")

In Thai some words, e.g. 'finger,' are their own classifier. But you'd probably say "He show three finger," not "He show finger three finger." But the noun/classifier is sometimes repeated, e.g. for emphasis in "He kill person five person."

Many classifiers are based on shape. But 'automobile,' 'vehicle', 'spoon' and 'fork' all use the same classifier ('handled object'). I'll guess this is left over from a time when vehicles were handle-shaped, e.g. palanquin or buffalo-drawn cart.

English has one animal name that needs a classifier: you say "ten head of cattle", not "ten cattle." An English word that functions as a classifier is "train": you say "How many trains leave this railroad station every day?" not "How many railroads? (or cars?)"

Thai has a classifier /kha-buan/ meaning "train", but it's missing from Wiktionary's list of 145 Thai classifiers, perhaps because it's ONLY used with the nouns for 'rail-road' and 'parade.' I use it in the market when buying ears of corn: the little kernels of corn remind me of a parade! Another reason I use this whimsical classifier is that the correct classifier (/fak/) sounds just like an English obscenity. I can indulge in such whimsy since I am a foreigner; if I were a native they'd probably find me idiotic for hopelessly confusing a classifier.

 

[lpetrich]

In English, "railroad" refers to the tracks or the owners of the tracks, not the vehicles that travel on them.

As to vehicles being related to handles, I think that it is from how one controls them: they have handled parts for controlling them, and one uses a steering wheel as if it was a handle.

"Train" and "parade" have in common their being sequences: sequences of railcars or marchers.

 

[Swammerdami]

In English, "railroad" refers to the tracks or the owners of the tracks, not the vehicles that travel on them.

Thank you, Captain Obvious!
I wanted to segue into my intended-as-humorous anecdote about the Thai 'train' classifier /kha-buan/ and noticed that in the English "a train of railroad cars," 'train' functions as a collective noun, much like "a pride of lions." Such collective nouns are akin to classifiers.

 

[lpetrich]

Wiktionary - part of the Wikimedia family of sies: Wikimedia Foundation - "The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and our other free knowledge projects."

Wikimedia Projects – Wikimedia Foundation has

• Reference
  • Wikipedia - the well-known online encyclopedia
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• Collections
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• Guides
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• Collaboration
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Wiktionary looks comprehensive, and it also has etymologies going back to Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European, and other protolanguages. It also has word inflections, including reconstructed protolanguage inflections.

I recently got the idea of looking at words for "bridge", because of German Brücke being a cognate, but Latin pons and Slavic most not being cognates.

English bridge < Middle English brigge < Old English brycg
Cognate with Dutch brug and German Brücke, and descended from reconstructed Proto-Germanic *brugjôn and Proto-Indo-European *bhrew- / *bherw- “wooden flooring, decking, bridge”

Latin pôns, pont- "bridge" is obviously not cognate, and the Romance languages all have descendants of it: Italian ponte, Spanish puente, Portuguese ponte, French pont, etc. Romanian punte is a small bridge, and the laguage's more general word is pod, a borrowing from Slavic. They are all descended from the accusative or direct-object form pontem, something typical of Romance nouns descended from Latin ones that ended in -s.

That one is descended from PIE *pent- "path" with such descendants as English "to find" and Proto-Slavic *poti "way, path" with descendants pot / put / ... A derivative word is putnik "traveler" a derivative of that is sputnik "fellow traveler, satellite of celestial body".

The Slavic languages have most / mostu / mist, descended from Proto-Slavic *mostu. Likely from PIE *masd-to-s “aggregate of timbers/boards” and related to *mazdos "pole, mast" with descendants like English "mast"

Scottish Gaelic drochaid and Irish drochead are descend from Old Irish drochet, a compound meaning "wheel path".

The Modern Greek word for bridge is gefira, from Classical Greek gephura, with dialect variants bephura, dephura, diphoura. Its origin is unknown, but its suffix -ura suggests that it's from some pre-Hellenic language.

Armenian kamurj may have the same origin.

There's also a Sanskrit word for bridge, setu.

Though all the earlier dialects had words for bridge, most of them are unrelated, meaning that PIE had no clearly-reconstructible word for bridge.

-

I looked in other language families, and I found that the Finnish word silta was borrowed from a Baltic Indo-European language like Lithuanian, with tiltas. For Semitic, we have Arabic jisr, Aramaic gishra, Hebrew gesher, and Akkadian gishru. In Arabic, g > j often happened.

Proto-Turkic had *köpürüg, with descendants like Turkish köprü, and it was likely borrowed into Mongolian, which has güür.

I couldn't find much else that indicates much prehistory. Seems like making enough bridges to have a word for them is something that is not far before having written language.

 

[Copernicus]

One thing to keep in mind about historical reconstruction is that we can only posit cognate sets--sets of words that we think might descend from the same protoword. Unfortunately, anything can mess up that assumption, most especially the possibility of regional  Sprachbund or a borrowing from a related language. One principle established from the 19th century has been that "sound change is regular". That is, the pronunciation of words does not usually change arbitrarily. Pronunciation changes across the entire vocabulary all at once. So valid cognate sets will obey the established rules of regular sound change--consonant and vowel shifts, for example. Hence, it isn't reasonable to speculate that similar words in related languages really belong to a given cognate set. They need to also involve regularities that apply to the pronunciations of a large number of words in cognate sets. The process of reconstructing a historical protolanguage is tedious and requires serious scholarship. Although it is fun to speculate about word origins, we need to validate it by linking the speculation to sound correspondence patterns at the very least.

 

[Bomb#20]

I recently got the idea of looking at words for "bridge", because of German Brücke being a cognate, but Latin pons and Slavic most not being cognates.

English bridge < Middle English brigge < Old English brycg
Cognate with Dutch brug and German Brücke, and descended from reconstructed Proto-Germanic *brugjôn and Proto-Indo-European *bhrew- / *bherw- “wooden flooring, decking, bridge”

Based on my completely unscientific anecdotal exhaustive survey, the most commonly appearing phrase in the Icelandic language is...

... "One lane bridge".

 

[Swammerdami]

Examples of sound changes and semantic shifts

Here's an example of four different English words, all meaning 'leader of a group' and cognates of each other: all derive ultimately from the exact same PIE root (*kaput) but with four different initial consonant sounds: head, captain, chief, chef. The four different initial sounds (H, K, CH, SH) are all due to regular sound changes but these words, despite having almost the same meanings, followed different trajectories. captain, chief, chef were all borrowings Latin->French->English but the ordering between sound change and borrowing matters. In addition to the change in initial consonant, a P>F transition has occurred in two of the words and those words have lost their third consonant (that's common: consider English 'captain' > 'cap' [slang]). Head lost the middle consonant from Old English 'heafod.'

These words have all changed their original PIE meaning, which was 'top part of an animal's body.' Just as many sound changes are one-way streets (K can mutate to CH but seldom vice versa), so this semantic shift is one-way. To fill the gap when a word shifts from 'top of animal' to 'leader', a word for 'jug or bowl' may come to mean 'top of animal' by shape analogy (German Kopf or English 'jughead'!) The French word tête has undergone both these transitions: 'cup' [Latin testa] > 'top of animal' > 'leader.'

 

[lpetrich]

PIE *kaput, kapwet- > Proto-Germanic *haubudan > Old English heafod > Middle English hed > Modern English head
PIE *kaput > Latin caput, capit-
Latin caput > Late Latin capitâneus > Old French capitaine > Middle English capitain > English captain
Latin caput > Late Latin capus > Old French chief > Middle English chef > English chief
Old French chief > Middle French chief > French chef > English chef

English also has "capital" and "cattle" and "chattel" from Latin capitâlis and some Old French words derived from it.

Italian capo "leader" and Spanish cabeza "head" also have this origin, though the Spanish one is from interpreting the plural of caput - capita - as a singular noun.

---

Latin testa "earthenware pot" gives rise to Italian testa and French tête

That may be from PIE *ters- "dry" like Latin terra "land" and English "thirst".

Looking at Celtic, Welsh pen and Gaelic ceann are derived from Proto-Celtic *kwennom - a word of obscure origin

The words in Slavic languages, like Russian golova and Serbo-Croatian glava, are from Proto-Slavic *golva, in turn from PIE *gelH- listed in Wiktionary as "naked" and "head".

Appendix I - Indo-European Roots - couldn't find it there.

 

[Copernicus]

Examples of sound changes and semantic shifts

Here's an example of four different English words, all meaning 'leader of a group' and cognates of each other: all derive ultimately from the exact same PIE root (*kaput) but with four different initial consonant sounds: head, captain, chief, chef. The four different initial sounds (H, K, CH, SH) are all due to regular sound changes but these words, despite having almost the same meanings, followed different trajectories. captain, chief, chef were all borrowings Latin->French->English but the ordering between sound change and borrowing matters. In addition to the change in initial consonant, a P>F transition has occurred in two of the words and those words have lost their third consonant (that's common: consider English 'captain' > 'cap' [slang]). Head lost the middle consonant from Old English 'heafod.'

Unidirectional changes of this sort are called "implicational universals", because they tend to hold across all human languages, although one does find occasional counterexamples. The point is that linguists discovered these types of universals in the first half of the 20th century, thanks to the famous Prague School linguist, Roman Jakobson. He published Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze from Sweden in 1941, which was the seminal work on these universals. (It was later published for the first time in English in 1968 as Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, although the translator mistranslated "implicational universals" as "universal rules of solidarity". Big goof.) Jakobson was in Sweden, because he had to be evacuated as Hitler's troops marched into Prague. The Soviet Union wanted him to come back to his native Russia, but Jakobson feared Stalin as much as Hitler. (I actually met a Russian who claimed to have spent the night with Jakobson in a Prague hotel trying to convince him to return to Russia, and he claimed Jakobson would have agreed but for the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. Jakobson's famous colleague, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, was later interrogated by the Nazis and died as a result.)

The point is that implicational universals of the sort Swammerdami mentioned had all kinds of implications for linguistics, because Jakobson pointed out that the sounds on the lefthand side of his universals tend to be the first sounds produced by infants during language acquisition. And that the sounds on the righthand side usually tend to be produced afterwards. He also pointed out that people suffering from motor aphasia (loss of pronunciation) tend to lose the last sounds acquired during acquisition first. So, if k>ch, then it will be common for toddlers to mispronounce it as "keese", but someone who suffers aphasia might also mispronounce the word in the same way. That's because the palatal "ch" sound tends to be mastered later than "k".

Now, there are reasons why the implicational rules proposed by Jakobson work, but that's for people interested in the branch of linguistics known as phonology. The relevance of these universals here is that languages undergoing changes of pronunciation produce these universal patterns in daughter languages. So, if you propose cognate sets across a suspected family of related languages and discover patterns of sound correspondence, then you prove that the languages are related. But how do you know what the original sound was in the protolanguage? It is unlikely to be just any sound. If you have a knowledge of common unidirectional sound changes, you can infer the original sound by tracing back to it via implicational rules.

These words have all changed their original PIE meaning, which was 'top part of an animal's body.' Just as many sound changes are one-way streets (K can mutate to CH but seldom vice versa), so this semantic shift is one-way. To fill the gap when a word shifts from 'top of animal' to 'leader', a word for 'jug or bowl' may come to mean 'top of animal' by shape analogy (German Kopf or English 'jughead'!) The French word tête has undergone both these transitions: 'cup' [Latin testa] > 'top of animal' > 'leader.'

I haven't seen much literature on the subject of semantic implicational universals, and the reason for the phonological universals can be linked to the physical difficulties inherent in the articulation of sounds. So I would be much more skeptical that one can establish implicational universals for semantic shifts quite as convincingly as Jakobson did for sound shifts.

 

[lpetrich]

In what order does a child learn phonemes? - Quora has one answer, with a detailed chart.
noting
When are Speech Sounds Developed? | Mommy Speech Therapy
noting
sound_development_chart - sound_development_chart.pdf

Which age learned: (initial), (medial), (finall) positions

• p 232, b 222, m 222, f 334, v 665
• t 333, d 243, n 223, th dh 777, s sh 555, z 755, ch j 555
• k 333, g 333, ng _35
• l 555, r 665
• (initial only) y 5, w 3, kw 4, bl 5, br dr fl fr gl gr kl gr pl 6, sl sp sw 7

dh = voiced th
The r is the English r, not the French r or the trilled r (very common). English also doesn't have "kh" (velar fricative, an almost-k h-like sound), another common sound.

Anything on vowels?

 

[Copernicus]

In what order does a child learn phonemes? - Quora has one answer, with a detailed chart.
noting
When are Speech Sounds Developed? | Mommy Speech Therapy
noting
sound_development_chart - sound_development_chart.pdf

Which age learned: (initial), (medial), (finall) positions

• p 232, b 222, m 222, f 334, v 665
• t 333, d 243, n 223, th dh 777, s sh 555, z 755, ch j 555
• k 333, g 333, ng _35
• l 555, r 665
• (initial only) y 5, w 3, kw 4, bl 5, br dr fl fr gl gr kl gr pl 6, sl sp sw 7

dh = voiced th
The r is the English r, not the French r or the trilled r (very common). English also doesn't have "kh" (velar fricative, an almost-k h-like sound), another common sound.

Anything on vowels?

A more accurate way to look at these studies is to take them as claims about speech production. The two sides of language are perception and production, but the two sides are much further apart in child language learners than adult speakers. So researchers look at the sounds that come out of the mouths of babes, but they don't really have an easy way of knowing what the children are hearing or trying to say. There is considerable evidence that young learners try to pronounce pretty much the full set of adult phonemes, but that their articulation is impeded by the need to "tune" their muscular coordination to produce the adult repertoire. Most studies of language, however, are focused on cataloging sounds that can be detected in speech, not in the mind. This is particularly true of studies by language pathologists, whose job it is to get speakers to produce normal speech.

Added to this problem is the theoretical question of what a phoneme is. Since about the 1930s, the concept was defined as a type of perceived sound contrast. However, since the time that the word "phoneme" was coined (about 1887 in Kazan University by Baudouin de Courtenay) until the 1930s, it was mostly defined as sounds that speakers were trying to produce in speech (aka the "psychological phoneme"). So Baudouin allowed for the fact that the phonetic output could quite different from the phonemic input to articulation. He also noticed that there was a huge discrepancy in the speech of children and a lesser (but still significant) discrepancy in adults.