Topics in language change

[Swammerdami]

Evolution in languages (rather than in the humans speaking those languages!) is an interesting topic.

To start, consider  Phonestheme

. For example, the English phonestheme "gl-" occurs in a large number of words relating to light or vision, like "glitter", "glisten", "glow", "gleam", "glare", "glint", "glimmer", "gloss" ...
[or] "sn-", related to the mouth or nose, as in "snarl", "snout", "snicker", "snack" ...
[or] "sl-", which appears in words denoting frictionless motion, like "slide", "slick", "sled" ...

Does "gl-" remind of 'light' a priori, or did a few such connections develop by chance and then drive further word development?

Here's a paper which takes an "ecological" approach to linguistic analysis. The second half of the paper has many examples of English-language phonesthemes.

 

[Politesse]

If it were a priori, wouldn't it be found in a preponderance of languages, rather than just those which happen to be related? -gl is a fairly common phoneme in Sioux, for instance, and does not have anything to do with light that I can think of. Unless you think of glimmering light when you gli over to my place and drink til you glépa it back up again!

I think it is usually safest to assume that signs are "arbitrary but conventionalized" as per linguistic doctrine, unless presented with very strong evidence to the contrary. That does not mean that within the closed-ish system of a language there might not be symbolic, pre-literal associations with certain phonemes. Indeed, you would expect them from time to time. The effect of a given language on the psyche does not have to be universal to be real, and I can easily imagine becoming conditioned to have emotional rather than strictly literal interpretations of certain kinds of sounds. Isn't this essentially what happens with language stereotypes? Unfamiliar phonetic sets can have unpredictable effects across linguistic barriers, and I would imagine different affective interpretations of shared phonemes would be a major reason for someone else's language to, for instance, "sound angry".

 

[Speakpigeon]

The examples you give for gl-, "glitter", "glisten", "glow", "gleam", "glare", "glint", "glimmer", "gloss", all originated in different languages, Germanic, Scot, Scandinavian, Old Norse, etc. Some of them are also derivations from another one in the same list.

And not one of the words in French starting with gl- connote light or vision.

And, I fail to see why there would be a connection to start with.

So, overall, it seems essentially happenstance.
EB

 

[fromderinside]

... all originated in different languages, Germanic, Scot, Scandinavian, Old Norse, etc. Some of them are also derivations from another one in the same list.

And not one of the words in French starting with gl- connote light or vision.

And, I fail to see why there would be a connection to start with.

So, overall, it seems essentially happenstance.
EB

Hmmmnnn. Even casual observation suggests you are comparing germanic with romantic and not at all by happenstance.

Still, as you say, happenstance it may be because the OP chose to list only germanic words.

 

[Speakpigeon]

... all originated in different languages, Germanic, Scot, Scandinavian, Old Norse, etc. Some of them are also derivations from another one in the same list.

And not one of the words in French starting with gl- connote light or vision.

And, I fail to see why there would be a connection to start with.

So, overall, it seems essentially happenstance.
EB

Hmmmnnn. Even casual observation suggests you are comparing germanic with romantic and not at all by happenstance.

???

Romantic? Surely not. Roman, perhaps?

And in any case, I'm lost at to the relevance of Roman languages to what I said.

Still, as you say, happenstance it may be because the OP chose to list only germanic words.

???

Sorry, not what I said or what my dictionary says.
EB

 

[Swammerdami]

OP chose to show the examples from the linked Wikipedia article. The linked pdf "Athematic Metaphors" offers a plethora of further examples and discusses much more than phonesthemia.

Examples which occurred to me before I'd heard of phonesthemes are "sm-" (related to mouth) and especially "sn-" (related to nose). The fact that "sn-" words have different etymologies supports the validity of the phenomenon! The metaphor "sn-" --> 'nose' or 'upper lip' may have developed partly by happenstance but, like weights in a neural net set initially at random, the happenstance bias gets reinforced until, when making new words, the "sn-" --> 'nose' metaphor comes into play.

For example — maybe I'm weird — when I hear "snob" (which has nothing to do with 'nose') I imagine a snob with his snooty nose held up. "Snooze" and "nap" may be synonyms, but when I hear the former I imagine the sleeper snoring!

The "sn-" --> 'nose' metaphor seems to have been present in Germanic (though not PIE) so many etymologies are inconclusive. Several "sn-"-->'nose' words (e.g. sneer, snigger) have no known etymology — the words were invented after the metaphor was already strong in English. Words like "sneeze" evolved from Old English words like "fneosan" (consideration of the /sn/</fn/ change would be a digression).

Similarly for the "sm-" --> 'mouth' metaphor, is it a coincidence that the general verb "smack" is frequently applied to the lips specifically? "Smell" has no known etymology, while "smirk" and "smile" have the same ultimate root. But during the change that separated "smirk" from "smile" the "sm-" was retained. (The "-irk" suffix might provide negative connotation as it does in quirk, shirk, irk, lurk, murky).

I realize phonesthemia is not well accepted in linguistics and, anyway, may be a minor factor in language change. But I think it is a factor and is interesting.

 

[Swammerdami]

Another topic in language change which seems interesting to me is the isolational --> agglutinative --> fusional --> isolational grammar cycle. (Link or Link, both from Dixon.)

Like the Second Law in Thermodynamics, language changes toward a more relaxed or efficient state. It is efficient to have common prefixes and suffixes, so isolational languages become agglutinative; by the time one word has two or three adfixes it's efficient to fuse them together. But fusional languages are hard to learn or adapt, so there's an incentive to fall back to simple uninflected words! Egypt's Coptic language was fusional during the Old Kingdom, went all the way around the cycle, and was fusional again during the Roman era, with details completely different from the Old Kingdom grammar!

This is of course different from thermodynamics, where entropy change is a strictly one-way street. The cycling of grammatical types is possible, I think, because the optimization lacks a simple one-dimensional objective.

 

[lpetrich]

Furthermore, many languages have features that fit more than one of these categories. The Western Romance languages' nouns are mostly isolating, while their verbs are more fusional. I say "mostly" for nouns because they still have plurals, and because those languages have lots of preposition-article combinations.

 

[Copernicus]

The historical trend in Europe has been for languages to lose distinctions in suffixes. The processes driving that change are largely phonological, although the more general process that makes language change inevitable is what has been called "imperfect learning" in infants and young children. Children restructure the language, because they lack the knowledge that mature speakers have of the discrepancy between what other speakers intend and what they actually say.