When they can't go a-walking people get a-talking. (Oh no! Alex is launching into a lecture about language.)
Late last night rain began to fall, a steady shower that pattered against the pavement and ivy lulling the neighborhood to sleep and driving the street animals to cover. Today I headed out in a light drizzle of rain, the air was clear of the usual traffic smell and the southern breeze was heavy with the smell of the ocean. But after my morning walk I joined the milling throngs and immediately my thoughts began to shift from weather to human interaction and language.
Apo is in formal English lessons now and was showing me his homework, practicing when to use possessive pronouns or their nominative forms. This isn't done in Turkish and seems to confuse many students. If you want to say my friend you say "doste ben" or the contracted form "dostam" incidentally this is the same as Persian:
"Duste man" is contracted to "dustam"
(This is not surprising both languages are Indo-European, not actually Semitic like Arabic or Hebrew, and despite the large amounts of borrowed vocabulary, the structure is far from Arabic. In fact I was told the higher, royal Turkish spoken around the palace resembled Persian very much and was near incomprehensible to speakers of vernacular Turkish.)
Coming back to Turkish and English, we see there are much fewer pronouns in Turkish because they make up for them with suffixes. Being told there is a difference between "I" and "me" is counter intuitive. After all, I am a single entity who who just takes a position in relation to other things, why should there be two words? Because there are in English, and we have "my" and "mine" to confuse us too. "But why?" you ask, "Why the confusion? Is their way better? Is the English speaking world at an evolutionary disadvantage?"
Of course not, our evolutionary disadvantages come from McDonalds and televisions in schools, all languages (at least all the cool ones) have ways to tell if you are doing something to something else or for it, or anything else for which you would use a preposition in English. Like Latin and Ancient Greek many have case systems as well as having the verb reflect it's subject: declension and conjugation. (Some like Sumerian have the verb reflect a whole lot more, but we're ignoring those!) As languages are used and grow and whatnot they go through phases between being complicated in grammar forms and complicated in syntax. So a language will develop a complicated grammar to explain itself, then people will begin slurring everything until it all sounds the same, (take French verbs for instance, parle and parles are pronounced the same.) later people will add new prefixes to their words and reintroduce a more noticeable grammar.
Think about Ancient Greek, you can use your words in just about any order you want as long as you have your ducks in a row as far as declining your nouns and conjugating your verbs in the right voice and person. But remember how confusing Socrates seemed to Meno? It was all the guy could do to reply "ουκ εμοιγε." Besides making philosophers drink hemlock people like Meno liked language very simple and made to fit into an order that required the least amount of thought, putting together the most immediately related words. Mountains of syntactical memorization were replaced by memorized sets of helper verbs and and prepositions, separated from their original structure to form a new one based more on word order and clauses.
Languages are doing this all the time: becoming more complicated in one way, and less in another. Some languages, like Chinese, seem to have no grammar and some languages, like English, seem to have no grammar designed to make communication easier. So where does Turkish fit in this grand scheme? Well, It's a living language meaning the rules are always changing and much that is against the rules still counts as communication. Turkish seems to be on the way out from a system that declined and conjugated everything, verbs are declined more thoroughly than English but many tenses seem to use "helper verbs" like English. Remember, despite how your head feels, learning multiple languages is fun!
Apo is in formal English lessons now and was showing me his homework, practicing when to use possessive pronouns or their nominative forms. This isn't done in Turkish and seems to confuse many students. If you want to say my friend you say "doste ben" or the contracted form "dostam" incidentally this is the same as Persian:
دوستِ من، دوستم
"Duste man" is contracted to "dustam"
(This is not surprising both languages are Indo-European, not actually Semitic like Arabic or Hebrew, and despite the large amounts of borrowed vocabulary, the structure is far from Arabic. In fact I was told the higher, royal Turkish spoken around the palace resembled Persian very much and was near incomprehensible to speakers of vernacular Turkish.)
Coming back to Turkish and English, we see there are much fewer pronouns in Turkish because they make up for them with suffixes. Being told there is a difference between "I" and "me" is counter intuitive. After all, I am a single entity who who just takes a position in relation to other things, why should there be two words? Because there are in English, and we have "my" and "mine" to confuse us too. "But why?" you ask, "Why the confusion? Is their way better? Is the English speaking world at an evolutionary disadvantage?"
Of course not, our evolutionary disadvantages come from McDonalds and televisions in schools, all languages (at least all the cool ones) have ways to tell if you are doing something to something else or for it, or anything else for which you would use a preposition in English. Like Latin and Ancient Greek many have case systems as well as having the verb reflect it's subject: declension and conjugation. (Some like Sumerian have the verb reflect a whole lot more, but we're ignoring those!) As languages are used and grow and whatnot they go through phases between being complicated in grammar forms and complicated in syntax. So a language will develop a complicated grammar to explain itself, then people will begin slurring everything until it all sounds the same, (take French verbs for instance, parle and parles are pronounced the same.) later people will add new prefixes to their words and reintroduce a more noticeable grammar.
Think about Ancient Greek, you can use your words in just about any order you want as long as you have your ducks in a row as far as declining your nouns and conjugating your verbs in the right voice and person. But remember how confusing Socrates seemed to Meno? It was all the guy could do to reply "ουκ εμοιγε." Besides making philosophers drink hemlock people like Meno liked language very simple and made to fit into an order that required the least amount of thought, putting together the most immediately related words. Mountains of syntactical memorization were replaced by memorized sets of helper verbs and and prepositions, separated from their original structure to form a new one based more on word order and clauses.
Languages are doing this all the time: becoming more complicated in one way, and less in another. Some languages, like Chinese, seem to have no grammar and some languages, like English, seem to have no grammar designed to make communication easier. So where does Turkish fit in this grand scheme? Well, It's a living language meaning the rules are always changing and much that is against the rules still counts as communication. Turkish seems to be on the way out from a system that declined and conjugated everything, verbs are declined more thoroughly than English but many tenses seem to use "helper verbs" like English. Remember, despite how your head feels, learning multiple languages is fun!
posted by Alex Gray at 10:02
1 Comments:
Old English and the Germanic and Nose languages are all Indo-European. The Indo-Europeans were the first to domesticate the horse, making their spread across Europe easy and giving them military superiority over whoever was living there at the time. As a result European languages are largely influenced by the Indo-Europeans who raped and burned their way to the top of the genetic pool. But interesting enough, the Basque language does not bear any similarity to Indo-European languages, or any languages for that matter. Up in those mountains they must have been able to avoid the Indo-European spread and preserve their language, good for them. And they are not descended from Neanderthals, that's a silly idea.
The many years have muddled vocabularies so far that cognates are few and hard to see, though most of what defines the large language groups is their structure: do they conjugate verbs or not, or have the same tenses for action in time? For instance some Native American languages do not actually separate the present and past tense, they don't exactly have the concept of "now" implicit in their language, but all Indo-European languages have concepts like past-perfect and the subjunctive. Even though most of the finer points of verb tenses have fallen out of English, we can still see a few like the phrase "If I were you..." notice we don't say "was."
P.S. I write everything in a program with spell check and then cut and paste into the window. It usually saves me headaches though sometimes I still manage to look right through the spell checker and screw things up.
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