French, Flemish and English (was: cvs commit: src/sys/alpha/alpha clock.c)
gr...@freebsd.org
> At 1:30 PM +0200 2002/05/21, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
>
>> You'll be surprised at the number of foreign words in common use in
>> French. From English, there's "weekend", "stop" (in road signs),
>> "ok", and other examples I can't recall offhand; and among technical
>> terms, "CD" (in French it should have been "DC" but isn't -- with
>> "DVD" there's no problem), internet, web, login, etc. There are also
>> coinages you won't find in English, like "footing" (soccer), "fooding"
>> (roughly, the art of eating) and so on. Admittedly the French often
>> do mutilate foreign words when they import them, but that's the
>> people, not the academie.
>> I've noticed French people who can
>> pronounce "Hubbard" quite nicely when speaking English, will say
>> something like "oobaarh" when speaking French.
>
> That's because the pronunciation of the same word is different in
> the two languages.
That presupposes that pronunciation of words is a function of the
language spoken. For words which don't belong to the language, this
doesn't make any sense.
> My wife and I have kept our names, because both of us are
> professionals and we have certain affiliations and reputations that
> we've built up over the years with those names. In the US, it didn't
> matter so much whether we used her name ("Geyer") or mine, because
> most people could pronounce and spell them roughly equally well.
> Moreover, they could deal with the concept of two people being
> married and living at the same address, but not having the same last
> name.
>
> However, over here, we tend to use her name a lot more. Instead
> of saying the proper "Guy-ur", they say something more like
> "Zhie-air", but it's close enough. But the way they mangle "Knowles"
> is just unbelievable. They can't spell it, either. In addition,
> unless you want to go into a thirty minute expose as to how two
> people could be married, living together, and yet not have the same
> last name, you just don't really bother even trying to correct them
> when they call you "Monsieur Zhie-air", even though she complains
> every time that you respond positively to this usage that you are not
> her father, and therefore you do not have the right to use that name
> that way.
I find this surprising. This must be something to do with the French
Belgians. In France, women don't get the name of their husband. Yes,
they're allowed to use it, and almost invariably do, but you'll notice
the difference between "Helen Smith née Jones" and "Yvonne Belmont
épouse Dupont". My wife is French, and we got married in Germany,
where they have a book of rules. Their book of rules stated that my
wife was not allowed to take my name, and no proof we could give them
would convince them of the contrary. After something like 11 years of
marriage they finally found a solution, but by that time we were
leaving anyway.
> French-speaking people are so damn snooty sometimes.
> Occasionally you will run into one that doesn't speak English but
> will still be friendly and as helpful as possible, but if you don't
> speak French it seems that most often you will run into people who
> take a "But you must speak French in order to exist!" type attitude.
Again, this is possibly more the case in Bruxelles than in France.
The worst thing you can do is speak Flemish to them. In France, I've
frequently spoken to people in French and been answered in English.
Greg
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>
> > French-speaking people are so damn snooty sometimes.
> > Occasionally you will run into one that doesn't speak English but
> > will still be friendly and as helpful as possible, but if you don't
> > speak French it seems that most often you will run into people who
> > take a "But you must speak French in order to exist!" type attitude.
>
> Again, this is possibly more the case in Bruxelles than in France.
> The worst thing you can do is speak Flemish to them.
On the other hand, in Antwerp practically nobody speaks French. Seems
funny to me that a nation so tiny can be so sharply divided in
language...
The Belgians have at least one major improvement in the French
language to their credit: they have sensible words for numbers above
69. In France, 70 is sixty-ten (soixante-dix), 71 is sixty-eleven, 80
is four-twenties, 90 is four-twenties-ten, 99 is
four-twenties-ten-nine. Surely this situation is something the
Academie Française should have been concerned about long ago, but no
-- the French find the Belgian number system (70=septante, etc)
hilarious.
- Rahul
brad.k...@skynet.be
> That presupposes that pronunciation of words is a function of the
> language spoken. For words which don't belong to the language, this
> doesn't make any sense.
I disagree. So long as the word appears to be pronounceable in a
particular language, then I believe that most people who speak that
language will probably try to pronounce it according to the customs
of their native language. The only exception to this rule would be
if they happen to speak the language from which the word comes and
recognize it, or if they have otherwise obtained information to lead
them to believe that this particular word should be pronounced
according to "foreign" rules.
There is a Japanese word for thank you. How do you think that it
is properly spelled using what they call "romaji", and how is it
pronounced?
> I find this surprising. This must be something to do with the French
> Belgians. In France, women don't get the name of their husband. Yes,
> they're allowed to use it, and almost invariably do, but you'll notice
> the difference between "Helen Smith née Jones" and "Yvonne Belmont
> épouse Dupont". My wife is French, and we got married in Germany,
> where they have a book of rules. Their book of rules stated that my
> wife was not allowed to take my name, and no proof we could give them
> would convince them of the contrary. After something like 11 years of
> marriage they finally found a solution, but by that time we were
> leaving anyway.
We got married in the US, precisely to avoid this kind of crap.
Frankly, we have no idea what the book of rules for Belgium specifies
as to who may use what name. So far as I know, they look at us as a
married American couple, and may perhaps apply some particular view
as to how they think that Americans normally handle the name issue.
> Again, this is possibly more the case in Bruxelles than in France.
> The worst thing you can do is speak Flemish to them.
To those that speak both French and English, that is generally
true. To those that speak both French and Flemish but not English,
that is obviously false. The problem is, you don't know, a priori,
what other languages the person may speak, and you don't know if
trying either English or Flemish as the second alternative is going
to offend them.
> In France, I've
> frequently spoken to people in French and been answered in English.
I've only visited more tourist-friendly areas in France, but the
areas of France that I have been to I have encountered fewer language
problems than in some areas of Belgium (where I've been to more
off-the-beaten-track areas).
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
brad.k...@skynet.be
> On the other hand, in Antwerp practically nobody speaks French. Seems
> funny to me that a nation so tiny can be so sharply divided in
> language...
True enough.
> The Belgians have at least one major improvement in the French
> language to their credit: they have sensible words for numbers above
> 69. In France, 70 is sixty-ten (soixante-dix), 71 is sixty-eleven, 80
> is four-twenties, 90 is four-twenties-ten, 99 is
> four-twenties-ten-nine.
Whereas in Belgium, we have septante, quatre-vingts, and nonante.
They fixed seventy and ninety, but for whatever bizarre reason,
they left eighty alone.
> Surely this situation is something the
> Academie Française should have been concerned about long ago, but no
> -- the French find the Belgian number system (70=septante, etc)
> hilarious.
Any time that some French-speaking person starts ragging on the
English language, I usually just ask them what the word for "ninety"
is in French, and it helps if we had recently been talking about
differences between Belgian/Wallonian French versus French/French.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
gr...@freebsd.org
> At 8:44 AM +0200 2002/05/22, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
>
>> On the other hand, in Antwerp practically nobody speaks French. Seems
>> funny to me that a nation so tiny can be so sharply divided in
>> language...
>
> True enough.
>
>> The Belgians have at least one major improvement in the French
>> language to their credit: they have sensible words for numbers above
>> 69. In France, 70 is sixty-ten (soixante-dix), 71 is sixty-eleven, 80
>> is four-twenties, 90 is four-twenties-ten, 99 is
>> four-twenties-ten-nine.
>
> Whereas in Belgium, we have septante, quatre-vingts, and nonante.
>
> They fixed seventy and ninety, but for whatever bizarre reason,
> they left eighty alone.
Right, I remember something like that. In Switzerland they have
octante as well.
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> At 8:44 AM +0200 2002/05/22, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
>
> Whereas in Belgium, we have septante, quatre-vingts, and nonante.
>
> They fixed seventy and ninety, but for whatever bizarre reason,
> they left eighty alone.
The version I heard (from some French chap) was that the Belgians say
"huitante" and the Swiss say "octante", or perhaps the other way
around. But I bow to your knowledge :)
- Rahul
gr...@freebsd.org
> Brad Knowles said on May 22, 2002 at 09:40:20:
>> At 8:44 AM +0200 2002/05/22, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
>>
>> Whereas in Belgium, we have septante, quatre-vingts, and nonante.
>>
>> They fixed seventy and ninety, but for whatever bizarre reason,
>> they left eighty alone.
>
> The version I heard (from some French chap) was that the Belgians say
> "huitante" and the Swiss say "octante", or perhaps the other way
> around. But I bow to your knowledge :)
I heard it from a French-speaking Belgian. He was bemoaning the fact
that, though the numbers in Belgian French were better than those in
France, they still didn't go the whole way, and that only the Swiss
had got it right.
So, shall we move on to German numbers?
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
Anything interesting to say about them?
The other languages I know are boringly normal. The only interesting
aspect is the similarity of numbers, and many other words, in some
Indian languages (Sanskrit origin) and European languages.
R
brad.k...@skynet.be
>> There is a Japanese word for thank you. How do you think that
>> it is properly spelled using what they call "romaji", and how is it
>> pronounced?
>
> I don't know. But if you can't read or write, and you hear the word
> from a native speaker, how do you pronounce it?
I always thought it was "domo origato" or maybe "domo oregato".
I looked it up in a Japanes-English-Japanese dictionary last night
(for other reasons), and it turns out that the word is apparently
properly spelled "doumoarigatou".
Now, tell me how you would be inclined to pronounce this word,
and whether or not it would be the same as you would be inclined to
pronounce either of the two previous examples.
> I was referring to German interpretations of French law.
> Theoretically it could have happened to us even if we had been married
> outside Germany, though in practice we could have been a little better
> off because the Standesbeamte probably wouldn't have looked the case
> up in his Big Book.
Great. Weel, we're not likely to be living in Germany any time
soon, and although we moved to Belgium before we got married, we've
never run into the Belgian equivalent of your Standesbeamte, so
hopefully this should be a moot point for us by now.
However, I do feel your pain.
> That seems to depend on your accent. Speak Flemish to a Walloon with
> a French accent, and you could be in trouble. I've seen it happen,
> and the one doing the complaining was a policeman.
Yeah, well. Whatever other language I speak, it would be with a
"stupid American" accent, so I'm sure that I'd get it wrong no matter
what.
Which is kind of why I think I'll like learning Dutch (as opposed
to Flemish), because if I'm going to automatically "get it wrong" no
matter what, I might as well have a little bit of fun tweaking their
nose.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
brad.k...@skynet.be
> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
"Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
Fine for me, because I'm going to have to learn the language
anyway, and I am sensitive to changes like this. But when someone
tells you that they weigh forty-nine kilos and that they are
overweight, that takes a little bit of thinking to work out.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
rs...@online.fr
> At 6:30 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
> > So, shall we move on to German numbers?
>
> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
Somewhat like in older English. It just occurred to me, by the way,
that "quatre-vingts" could be translated as "fourscore" which dates to
the 13th century. Maybe there's a connection there.
> tells you that they weigh forty-nine kilos and that they are
> overweight, that takes a little bit of thinking to work out.
Depends on their height; for a woman less than 150 cm tall (quite
unusual in the Netherlands), perhaps 49 kg seems overweight.
R
gr...@freebsd.org
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 22, 2002 at 18:30:52:
>> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
>
> Anything interesting to say about them?
Well, they're backwards, like in Sanskrit.
> The other languages I know are boringly normal. The only
> interesting aspect is the similarity of numbers, and many other
> words, in some Indian languages (Sanskrit origin) and European
> languages.
Well, Sanskrit is uncannily close to ancient Greek and Latin that it's
just not funny, and the numbers are backwards in the same way as
German:
French English German Sanskrit
soixante-trois sixty-three drei-und-sechzig tri:sasti
(hyphens in the German to show the individual components only; as
we've already established earlier in the thread, nouns get run
together in German).
Apart from that, it's interesting to note that Sanskrit is closer to
the Swiss pronunciation of French numbers :-)
soixante sixty sechzig sasti
septante seventy siebzig saptati
octante eighty achtzig asiti
nonante ninety neunzig navati
And yes, sorry for the missing diacritical marks in Sanskrit, but I
don't have the correct character set handy.
Greg
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gr...@freebsd.org
> At 6:30 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
>
> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
So do the Germans. Dutch *is* German, remember?
> Fine for me, because I'm going to have to learn the language
> anyway, and I am sensitive to changes like this. But when someone
> tells you that they weigh forty-nine kilos and that they are
> overweight, that takes a little bit of thinking to work out.
Ah, you mean four and ninety? Yes, I'm used to that, though I still
occasionally trip over the sequence.
Greg
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gr...@freebsd.org
> Brad Knowles said on May 22, 2002 at 11:16:58:
>> At 6:30 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>
>>> So, shall we move on to German numbers?
>>
>> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
>> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
>
> Somewhat like in older English. It just occurred to me, by the way,
> that "quatre-vingts" could be translated as "fourscore" which dates to
> the 13th century. Maybe there's a connection there.
Almost certainly, I would think. It's interesting to note that it
came into English after the Norman conquest.
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> Apart from that, it's interesting to note that Sanskrit is closer to
> the Swiss pronunciation of French numbers :-)
>
> soixante sixty sechzig sasti
> septante seventy siebzig saptati
> octante eighty achtzig asiti
> nonante ninety neunzig navati
Interesting. I had a look at the latin numbers, and they're really
strikingly similar to Sanskrit, with the notable exception of "one"
("eka" in Sanskrit, which doesn't seem similar to any Western
language). Also take "twenty" -- "vimshati" in Sanskrit, very
similar to "viginti" in Latin or "vingt" in French, but quite
different from the English and German words. (In fact many other
English and German numbers -- four, five, hundred, thousand -- seem to
have very little resemblance to Latin or Greek, whereas their French
equivalents clearly come from Latin and are often similar to
Sanskrit.)
- Rahul
brad.k...@skynet.be
> Somewhat like in older English. It just occurred to me, by the way,
> that "quatre-vingts" could be translated as "fourscore" which dates to
> the 13th century. Maybe there's a connection there.
Sounds like good reasoning. Of course, we dumped things like
"four score" many years ago.
> Depends on their height; for a woman less than 150 cm tall (quite
> unusual in the Netherlands), perhaps 49 kg seems overweight.
She's not that short. And she's not 49kg.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
brad.k...@skynet.be
>> Which is kind of why I think I'll like learning Dutch (as opposed
>> to Flemish), because if I'm going to automatically "get it wrong" no
>> matter what, I might as well have a little bit of fun tweaking their
>> nose.
>
> But there's so little difference between Dutch and Flemish (apart from
> the throat disease), and the Dutch are more tolerant.
So sez you. I've been told by Flemish and Dutch speakers alike
that the languages are "very" different, and I understand that
there's probably as much or more animosity between Dutch vs. Flemish
speakers as there is between Belgian/Wallonian French vs. French
French speakers, and as there is between Flemish & Belgian/Wallonian
French speakers.
Let's not even get started on dialects. ;-)
brad.k...@skynet.be
>> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
>> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
>
> So do the Germans. Dutch *is* German, remember?
Uh, no. It's not. They may be closely related, but they are not
the same. I took German lessons while I was in third grade, from a
lady down the road who also ran a daycare center. Turns out she was
the only member of her family to survive Auschwitz, but I didn't
learn that until much later.
Before I moved to Belgium, I remembered more German from that
year than I've learned French over the past three years. And Dutch
still sounds to me like a cat hacking up a hairball. ;-)
Moreover, I have friends in the US who are fluent in German, and
they tell me they are always screwed up when they hear Dutch, because
the words are formed more like German, but the rhythm and word sounds
are much more like English -- so they feel like their brain is being
split in half.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
cj...@cornell.edu
> Interesting. I had a look at the latin numbers, and they're really
> strikingly similar to Sanskrit,
Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
Proto-Indo-European.
> with the notable exception of "one"
> ("eka" in Sanskrit, which doesn't seem similar to any Western
> language). Also take "twenty" -- "vimshati" in Sanskrit, very
> similar to "viginti" in Latin or "vingt" in French, but quite
> different from the English and German words. (In fact many other
> English and German numbers -- four, five, hundred, thousand -- seem to
> have very little resemblance to Latin or Greek, whereas their French
> equivalents clearly come from Latin and are often similar to
> Sanskrit.)
I think "five" and "hundred" can be explained by Grimm's Law[1] -- /p/,
/t/, /k/ in PIE usually became /f/, /th/, /h/ in Proto-Germanic, while PIE
/b/, /d/, /g/ became Germanic /p/, /t/, /k/. If anyone's curious, here
are the numbers in PIE from one to ten (from Robert Beekes' book
"Comparative Indo-European Linguistics") (and sorry about leaving off all
the accents that I can't type):
PIE Sanskrit Greek Latin Gothic
1 Hoi(H)nos ekas heis unus ains
2 duoh1 dva(u) duo duo twai
3 treies trayas treis tres threis
4 kwetuor catvaras tessares quattuor fidwor
5 penkwe panca pente quinque fimf
6 (s)ueks sas hex sex saihs
7 septm sapta hepta septem sibun
8 h3ekteh3 asta(u) okto octo ahtau
9 (h1)neun nava ennea novem niun
10 dekmt dasha deka decem taihun
20 duidkmti vimshati eikosi viginti twai tigjus
[1] Yes, the same Grimm who published all those fairy tales.
--
Cliff Crawford :: cjc26 at cornell dot edu
rs...@online.fr
>
> Well, yeah, they're related languages. :) They're both descended from
> Proto-Indo-European.
They undoubtedly have some sort of link, but is this
"proto-Indo-European" some sort of guess or reconstruction, or is
there actual evidence for it somewhere? How do people arrive at
"Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE?
Who are the people who spoke it -- the Aryans who are believed to have
originated from around the Caspian Sea? If so, how do we know
anything about their language -- is there any kind of record they left
behind at all?
Yes, I suppose I could try look up the book you cited, but I'm lazy :)
- Rahul
tlam...@mindspring.com
> There is a Japanese word for thank you. How do you think that it
> is properly spelled using what they call "romaji", and how is it
> pronounced?
"Arigato".
(Everyone knows "Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto")
The more interesting one is the formal:
"Domo arigato gozaimashita"
The interesting part is that "shita" is pronounced "shta".
Japanese is a much easier language to learn from Romaji texts if you
"happen" to have the full set of "Mangaijin" (pun on "Magazine for
foreigners"), and if you happen to know that it's SOV rather than
SVO order for most sentences.
-- Terry
re...@reedmedia.net
> I always thought it was "domo origato" or maybe "domo oregato".
> I looked it up in a Japanes-English-Japanese dictionary last night
> (for other reasons), and it turns out that the word is apparently
> properly spelled "doumoarigatou".
That is different than what I learned in my college classes (but I don't
know nihon-go very well).
If using hiragana or katakana, then it would use the characters:
do mo a ri ga to
(But I do see that some dictionaries have "dou" and "tou", but that was
different from what i was taught.)
> Now, tell me how you would be inclined to pronounce this word,
> and whether or not it would be the same as you would be inclined to
> pronounce either of the two previous examples.
If you memorize each of the characters, then it becomes easy to pronounce
(or read) the words. I used to practice
ka (kah), ki (key), ku (koo), ke (kay), ko and so on.
Also, all consonants are followed by a vowel (except "n"). This also makes
it easy for figuring out how to pronounce a word.
I see there are numerous websites about this. This site looks useful:
http://www.thejapanesepage.com/hiragana.htm
You can use it to practice hiragana.
Jeremy C. Reed
http://www.reedmedia.net/
tlam...@mindspring.com
> At 7:00 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
> >> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
> >
> > So do the Germans. Dutch *is* German, remember?
>
> Uh, no. It's not. They may be closely related, but they are not
> the same.
He's right. They are different. One is Dutch. 8-) 8-).
-- Terry
brad.k...@skynet.be
> (Everyone knows "Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto")
Indeed, but this is not the correct Romaji spelling. The correct
spelling is "doumo arigatou". Without going into some of the details
that have been explained to me in private e-mail, the pronunciation
is fairly close to "doe-moe-ahh-ree-gah-toe".
> The more interesting one is the formal:
>
> "Domo arigato gozaimashita"
According to the English-Japanese/Japanese-English dictionary at
<http://www.trussel.com/f_nih.htm>, there are a variety of choices,
the closest would appear to be:
arigatou gozaimasu
doumo arigatou
> The interesting part is that "shita" is pronounced "shta".
I don't see "gozaimashita" anywhere on this list. Indeed,
searching in the directory, I don't see "gozaimashita" anywhere.
Looking for "gozaima" in the dictionary, I only find two hits, both
for the same entry -- "gozaimasu", but with slightly different
spellings in Kana.
> Japanese is a much easier language to learn from Romaji texts if you
> "happen" to have the full set of "Mangaijin" (pun on "Magazine for
> foreigners"), and if you happen to know that it's SOV rather than
> SVO order for most sentences.
Now that would be cool to have. Where do you get these things?
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.k...@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majo...@FreeBSD.org
gr...@freebsd.org
> At 6:59 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>>> Which is kind of why I think I'll like learning Dutch (as opposed
>>> to Flemish), because if I'm going to automatically "get it wrong" no
>>> matter what, I might as well have a little bit of fun tweaking their
>>> nose.
>>
>> But there's so little difference between Dutch and Flemish (apart from
>> the throat disease), and the Dutch are more tolerant.
>
> So sez you.
And a number of Dutch and Flemish people I know.
> I've been told by Flemish and Dutch speakers alike that the
> languages are "very" different,
The differences I understand to exist are:
1. Pronunciation.
2. The notable absence of French-derived words in Flemish.
I have shown both Flemish and Dutch people texts written in one of the
languages (we still don't know which), and they couldn't tell them
apart.
> and I understand that there's probably as much or more animosity
> between Dutch vs. Flemish speakers as there is between
> Belgian/Wallonian French vs. French French speakers, and as there is
> between Flemish & Belgian/Wallonian French speakers.
No, I haven't heard that.
> Let's not even get started on dialects. ;-)
Why not? That's really what we're talking about.
Greg
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> At 7:00 PM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>>> Nah. Dutch numbers are much more fun. Where we would say
>>> "Ninety-five", they say the equivalent of "Five-and-Ninety".
>>
>> So do the Germans. Dutch *is* German, remember?
>
> Uh, no. It's not. They may be closely related, but they are not
> the same. I took German lessons while I was in third grade, from a
> lady down the road who also ran a daycare center. Turns out she was
> the only member of her family to survive Auschwitz, but I didn't
> learn that until much later.
Ah, you're talking about High German, the language spoken in Germany.
That derived from (mainly) old Saxon and Barb^Hvarian, with a
significant influence of Anglo-Saxon via the English missionaries who
converted the German tribes about 1300 years ago. Dutch derives from
old Frisian, another German dialect. Like English, they're both
Western Germanic languages.
> And Dutch still sounds to me like a cat hacking up a hairball. ;-)
Indeed :-)
> Moreover, I have friends in the US who are fluent in German,
> and they tell me they are always screwed up when they hear Dutch,
> because the words are formed more like German, but the rhythm and
> word sounds are much more like English -- so they feel like their
> brain is being split in half.
Yes, Dutch sounds just plain funny if you speak English and German.
Greg
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> cj...@cornell.edu said on May 22, 2002 at 16:46:30:
> [proto-Indo-European]
>> There's no written evidence for it, as it was spoken well before the
>> invention of writing, but any claim that it never really existed would
>> have to explain where all these sound correspondences come from (and
>> no, "mere coincidence" doesn't count as an explanation :)
>
> I suppose that makes sense. There are a few "Hindu nationalists" in
> India who try to claim that Sanskrit is the mother of all languages
> and spread from India westwards, but their scholarship is in general
> quite shoddy. The fact that Sanskrit and Latin have totally different
> scripts suggests that they both originated from some earlier language
> which had either no script, or a very inadequate one...
It definitely had no script. Latin, Greek and Sanskrit also had no
script in the early days. The Greeks tried one particularly
unsuitable version early on and dropped it, then, like the Latins,
adopted the Phoenecian alphabet (as did the Hebrews). The current
Devanagari script used for Sanskrit is also at least the second
attempt, and it's much newer than the language.
>>> How do people arrive at "Hoi(H)nos" and "h3ekteh3" (how do you
>>> pronounce those "3"s?) in PIE?
>> Sorry, those are supposed to be "h"s with a subscript "3", which is kind
>> of an unusual sound pronounced something like "hw".
>
> [example of reconstruction of sounds]
It's interesting how many "h"-related sounds PIE had. I wonder if
it's indicative of the way human language has evolved over that
period.
>> (Not all of the reconstructions are this simple, of course)
>
> I'm still skeptical about how far you can really go with such
> techniques. Sounds and pronunciations change over time, and
> recordings didn't exist until a hundred years ago (in which time
> span there have already been significant changes in pronunciation),
> so extrapolating back 10,000 years seems far-fetched. Sanskrit has
> mostly been passed on by word of mouth by the priestly classes, so
> has diverged remarkably little between say the north and the south
> of India, but there are notable exceptions. The first letter in the
> word for "knowledge" is pronounced roughly "jn" or "gn" (somewhat as
> in "lasagna") in the south, but "gy" in the north (so, "jnana"
> versus "gyana"). The former is probably more accurate. The
> distinction between two different forms of "sh" -- as in "krishna"
> (more accurately, "krshna") and "sharma" -- is not altogether clear,
> and in practice most people don't make a distinction. In living
> languages such as Hindi, the divergence is much greater, as it is in
> English (even within England there is a huge regional variation in
> pronunciation, particularly of vowels).
Yes, these are normal changes, and there are similar ones in European
languages. For example, the English word "year" was spelt "gear" in
Anglo-Saxon, and at some time it was pronounced with a g.
> Given all this, and given that we can't confidently say what
> Sanskrit sounded like as recently as the Vedic period (even the
> written language then was quite different from the later "classical"
> Sanskrit of 2000 years ago), or for that matter how the Romans spoke
> Latin or the ancient Greeks spoke Greek, I don't see how sounds of a
> proto-Indo-European language (for example, the "hw" you cite above)
> can be reconstructed at all.
I'm not in a position to put the arguments, but I've read them in the
past and found them well-reasoned. The general method involves
looking at how the words evolved in different languages.
>> Well, we can tell a little about where they lived and what their culture
>> was like based on which words we can reconstruct in the protolanguage.
>> So, for example, we can reconstruct the words "sow", "plow", and "cow", so
>> we know that they knew about agriculture and raising livestock. We can't
>> reconstruct the word for "chicken", though, so that suggests that they did
>> not live any farther east than Persia. Also, we can reconstruct a word
>> for "metal", but not for "iron", so that suggests they lived sometime
>> during the Bronze Age.
Hmm, I've just read a different interpretation, which suggests that
Sanskrit "ayas", Latin "aes" and Gothic "Ais" (whence German Eisen)
might have meant iron. But that's not the point; this kind of
research is of necessity incomplete, and it needs to be refined as
time goes on.
> That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
> reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The
> words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively
> minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose
> distinction is not terribly important in practice.
Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose
is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This
suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens?
> Or, they may not have thought a separate word necessary for "iron".
> The present-day Hindi/Sanskrit word is "loha" but my Sanskrit
> dictionary suggests "loha" could mean iron, copper or gold; perhaps
> it's the generic word for "metal" you're thinking of? Iron
> certainly existed in vedic times, so the lack of a distinct word
> doesn't mean much. (There are several distinct words for gold,
> which perhaps show its importance; I'm not sure about copper.)
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about metals. My book
suggested "hatakam" for gold in Sanskrit.
rs...@online.fr
> > That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
> > reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The
> > words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively
> > minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose
> > distinction is not terribly important in practice.
>
> Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose
> is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This
> suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens?
"Hansa" in Sanskrit/Hindi means swan, not (afaik) goose, but perhaps
close enough. (On that topic, what does "Lufthansa" mean? Given
that the emblem is a flying swan, many in India think it means "flying
swan" but I'm told there's no such word in German.)
> There seems to be quite a bit of confusion about metals. My book
> suggested "hatakam" for gold in Sanskrit.
I haven't heard that one, but you seem to be right. The most common
word is "swarna", and there is also "kanaka", etc. Similarly, there are
at least seven or eight words for "lotus." Presumably it's because
these were significant objects to them.
- Rahul
gr...@freebsd.org
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 23, 2002 at 14:45:50:
>>> That's pretty interesting, and much more believable than the
>>> reconstruction of sounds... but not *entirely* believable. The
>>> words for "chicken" or "iron" could have changed for some relatively
>>> minor reason -- compare "iron" and "steel" in English, whose
>>> distinction is not terribly important in practice.
>>
>> Indeed. I note that in some Aryan language (Hindi?), a word for goose
>> is "Hans". In Iranian, it's "Ghans", and in German it's "Gans". This
>> suggests that geese were known in PIE times, so why not chickens?
>
> "Hansa" in Sanskrit/Hindi means swan, not (afaik) goose, but perhaps
> close enough.
Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"? I have a (very good) Indian goose
recipe which has been called "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what
language that is.
> (On that topic, what does "Lufthansa" mean? Given that the emblem
> is a flying swan, many in India think it means "flying swan" but I'm
> told there's no such word in German.)
Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
To quote the OED, the Hansa (English Hanse) was "The name of a famous
political and commercial league of Germanic towns". "Luft" means
"air", so "Lufthansa" is something like "air league". I don't know
what the bird is supposed to be.
The Hanse was mainly a maritime organization, and it was spread round
the North Sea and Baltic Sea, with connections in London. Until
recently, the prevailing view was that the English word "Sterling"
referred to the "Easterlings" of the Hanse, but the OED considers this
to be incorrect. Still, it shows the importance of the Hanse that
people should have thought so.
The Hanse isn't dead; four famous towns (Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and
Rostock) still claim to be part of the Hanse, and Bremen and Hamburg
are still city-states within the German Federation.
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"?
Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
"batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
"Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
Sanskrit. My Sanskrit dictionary (V G Apte) does not say so, but a
Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary which I found online gives that
meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
chicken).
> Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
OK, what I was told (by a German) was that "Hansa" does not mean swan;
but she did not know the meaning you describe, the political and
commercial league.
- Rahul
gr...@freebsd.org
> Greg 'groggy' Lehey said on May 23, 2002 at 16:18:54:
>> Yes, I suppose so. What's "goose"?
>
> Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
> "batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
>
>> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
>> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
>
> "Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
> meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
> Sanskrit.
I'd consider it unlikely that the name of the recipe is Sanskrit. If
it's not Hindi, I'd be more likely to suspect Panjabi, Urdu or one of
the myriad other North Indian languages.
> My Sanskrit dictionary (V G Apte) does not say so, but a
> Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary which I found online gives that
> meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
> in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
> chicken).
This could have been a Moghul dish.
>> Well, of course there's a word for flying swan: fliegender Schwan.
>
> OK, what I was told (by a German) was that "Hansa" does not mean swan;
> but she did not know the meaning you describe, the political and
> commercial league.
I'm sure she did. It's a very well-known word. I suspect it's more
likely that she didn't connect it, or didn't think of telling you.
"Lufthansa" doesn't really fit into normal meanings of "Hansa".
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> > Good question. I don't know. I think the usual word in Hindi is
> > "batak" but that really means duck rather than goose.
> >
> >> I have a (very good) Indian goose recipe which has been called
> >> "Khubab Hans", though I don't know what language that is.
> >
> > "Hans" is unquestionably "swan" in primary meaning, and the only
> > meaning in Hindi as far as I know, but perhaps it means goose too in
> > Sanskrit.
>
> I'd consider it unlikely that the name of the recipe is Sanskrit. If
> it's not Hindi, I'd be more likely to suspect Panjabi, Urdu or one of
> the myriad other North Indian languages.
"Khubab" is certainly not Sanskrit and probably not Punjabi. Possibly
it's Urdu. Urdu as spoken informally in India and Pakistan is almost
identical to Hindi, but the formal language has much more Persian and
Arabic influence.
I'm told that (according to a dictionary we have back home) the Hindi
word for "goose" is "kalhans".
> > meaning. But I haven't heard of either goose or swan as a food item
> > in India (even duck is rather uncommon, the only widespread bird is
> > chicken).
>
> This could have been a Moghul dish.
In that case, it's probably of Persian/Farsi origin.
- Rahul
mr...@mrami.homeunix.org
> On Wednesday, 22 May 2002 at 9:28:38 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
> > At 11:28 AM +0930 2002/05/22, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >
> >> That presupposes that pronunciation of words is a function of the
> >> language spoken. For words which don't belong to the language, this
> >> doesn't make any sense.
> >
> > I disagree. So long as the word appears to be pronounceable in a
> > particular language, then I believe that most people who speak that
> > language will probably try to pronounce it according to the customs
> > of their native language.
>
> Assuming they recognize the word or its derivation.
If we're talking about pronouncing a written word, it goes through two
filters: 1) what rules am I going to use to translate these markings into
a set of sounds in my head (which will be determined by the individual's
knowledge of different spelling rules, knowledge of context of the word,
etc.), and 2) what rules am I going to use to translate this set of sounds
in my head into tounge/lip/throat movements (which will be filtered by the
kinds of sounds the speaker is used to making, aka accent).
If we're talking about repeating a spoken word, it again goes through two
filters: 1) what sounds am I used to differentiating, and 2) what sounds
am I used to making. To demonstrate #1, my Dad cannot hear the difference
between Sri Lanka (pronounced 'sree') and Sri Lanka (pronounced 'shree').
He is not used to trying to tell the difference, because that is not a
minimal pair in his ideolect of American English, the only dialect he
speaks. Therefore when he says Sri Lanka, it always comes out 'shree',
which is one of the many differences from what a native would say.
Marc.
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rs...@online.fr
> If we're talking about repeating a spoken word, it again goes through two
> filters: 1) what sounds am I used to differentiating, and 2) what sounds
> am I used to making. To demonstrate #1, my Dad cannot hear the difference
> between Sri Lanka (pronounced 'sree') and Sri Lanka (pronounced 'shree').
> He is not used to trying to tell the difference, because that is not a
> minimal pair in his ideolect of American English, the only dialect he
> speaks. Therefore when he says Sri Lanka, it always comes out 'shree',
> which is one of the many differences from what a native would say.
I don't know how Sri Lankans say it, but most people in India would
say "shree". In the devanagari script (which is used for Sanskrit,
which is where the word originates) the corresponding letter is one of
the two "sh" letters to which I referred earlier (the "s" letter is
different). In the Tamil script, the same letter serves for "s",
"sh", and "ch" (though there is are special letters sometimes used for
"s" and "sh" in words imported from Sanskrit), and Tamil speakers tend
to use the three sounds interchangeably. I don't know about
Sinhalese, which uses a quite different script, though (visually, at
least) closer to Tamil than to Devanagari.
- Rahul
mr...@mrami.homeunix.org
> Marc Ramirez said on May 24, 2002 at 11:12:40:
> > If we're talking about repeating a spoken word, it again goes through two
> > filters: 1) what sounds am I used to differentiating, and 2) what sounds
> > am I used to making. To demonstrate #1, my Dad cannot hear the difference
> > between Sri Lanka (pronounced 'sree') and Sri Lanka (pronounced 'shree').
> > He is not used to trying to tell the difference, because that is not a
> > minimal pair in his ideolect of American English, the only dialect he
> > speaks. Therefore when he says Sri Lanka, it always comes out 'shree',
> > which is one of the many differences from what a native would say.
>
> I don't know how Sri Lankans say it, but most people in India would
> say "shree".
As far as I can tell (from three sources besides my head, one is at
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0846407.html), in Sinhalese, "Sri
Lanka" starts with the /sr/ in "bus route".
Marc.
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gr...@freebsd.org
My understanding was that Singhalese is an Aryan language, whereas
Tamil is Dravidian. It doesn't have to have much bearing on the
matter, but it would make it more plausible that Singhalese would
pronounce it the Aryan way.
FWIW, "Sri" in Malay is pronounced with an s, not an sh. Malay
contains a large number of words ultimately derived from Sanskrit, and
often has difficulty adapting, so "Sri" is often spelt "Seri", with an
unaccented e (schwa).
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> My understanding was that Singhalese is an Aryan language, whereas
> Tamil is Dravidian. It doesn't have to have much bearing on the
> matter, but it would make it more plausible that Singhalese would
> pronounce it the Aryan way.
It's however also quite likely that the pronunciation has
evolved/changed significantly in Sinhalese.
Many Hindi speakers today have problems saying "sh" and convert it to
"s"; they also have problems with two consonants succeeding each
other. So they not only convert English words like "school" to
"ischool", but also Sanskrit-origin Hindi words like "stree" ("woman")
to "istree" -- somewhat like Spanish speakers perhaps, except that
they will still write it "stree" and sophisticated speakers will
pronounce it that way too. Most amusingly, "station" often becomes
something like "tesan." And a name like "Krishna" becomes "Krishan",
"Kishan" or even "Kissan".
Bengali speakers on the other hand cannot say "s" but always convert
it to "sh" (and have a whole range of other peculiarities in speech).
There is a tendency in India to be contemptuous of all this and say
that the Sanskrit pronunciation is the "true" pronunciation, but I
think that's a bit elitist; in fact, after looking at European
languages, each of which thoroughly distorts Latin words in a
different way (especially French, which makes them nearly
unrecognizable sometimes), I think Indian languages have stayed
comparatively true to "pure" Sanskrit. Anyway, if the Sri Lankans
pronounce it "Sri" and not "Shri", I'm willing to accept that as the
"correct" pronunciation for their country...
- Rahul
rs...@online.fr
> > Many Hindi speakers today have problems saying "sh" and convert it
> > to "s"; they also have problems with two consonants succeeding each
> > other. So they not only convert English words like "school" to
> > "ischool", but also Sanskrit-origin Hindi words like "stree"
> > ("woman") to "istree"
>
> "isteri" (meaning "wife"). Again, the voiceless "e".
The Malay language is also called "Bahasa" I believe, and so is the
related Indonesian language. "Bhasha" means "language" in Sanskrit
and most other Indian languages. I found that a semi-Malay relative
of mine was unaware of that origin.
> > "tesan." And a name like "Krishna"
>
> Wasn't that originally Krsna, with a fluid instead of a vowel?
Yes, it should be written Krshna (the sh is one of the two Sanskrit
sh letters, the one in "Sri" being the other one). The Sanskrit "s"
is the letter in "stree" for "woman". But in English it's usually
spelt "Krishna", perhaps for easy pronunciation.
> Hmm. There are other issues apart from pronunciation. I believe the
> grammar has diverged considerably both in India and in Europe
> (interestingly giving rise to excessive use of the present participle
> both in English and in Hindi IIRC).
True, I don't know much about Sanskrit grammar but it seems totally
different from any modern language. There aren't separate words for
prepositions, declensions, etc, they're all modified forms of the
noun. Also, as in German, compound words are formed from simple
words, and indeed an entire line is frequently written as a single
word. It seemed initially strange to me that in French there is no
distinction between "I go" and "I am going" -- both are "je vais"
but now that I think of it, the same is true of Sanskrit.
> language spoken in Tamil Nadu. In particular, it retains more Aryan
> words, whereas in Tamil Nadu they try to replace them with
> Tamil-derived words. It rather reminds me of the difference between
> Flemish and Dutch :-)
Hm, I've heard that Sri Lankan Tamil is much "purer" than the Tamil
Nadu version because it has *less* Sanskrit influence... There is
indeed a movement to get rid of the non-Dravidian words in Tamil, but
I don't know to what extent it has been successful, and certainly I
don't think it looks like a worthwhile exercise.
The other thing about Tamil in Tamil Nadu is that the written
language, or the formal spoken language, is *very* different from the
informal spoken language; I'm reasonably comfortable in the informal
version but can barely understand the formal version, having always
lived in non-Tamil-speaking regions. I'm told that the divergence
between the two forms is not so sharp in Sri Lanka, and indeed I have
some trouble understanding Sri Lankan Tamils.
rs...@online.fr
> > > "tesan." And a name like "Krishna"
> >
> > Wasn't that originally Krsna, with a fluid instead of a vowel?
>
> Yes, it should be written Krshna (the sh is one of the two Sanskrit
> sh letters,
And now that you mention it, "Sanskrit" too is really "Sanskrta" with
no vowel after the "r", and a short "a" after the "t".
And while we're on that subject :) the "l" in "Tamil" is not an "l",
but a sound which doesn't have an exact equivalent in other languages
(except Malayalam). It's something between an "l", an unrolled "r"
and a "y" -- perhaps something like the Japanese "l/r" sound. It's
sometimes transliterated "zh" in English but that's even more unlike
the true sound than "l".
gr...@freebsd.org
> Rahul Siddharthan said on May 25, 2002 at 06:52:36:
>>>> "tesan." And a name like "Krishna"
>>>
>>> Wasn't that originally Krsna, with a fluid instead of a vowel?
>>
>> Yes, it should be written Krshna (the sh is one of the two Sanskrit
>> sh letters,
>
> And now that you mention it, "Sanskrit" too is really "Sanskrta" with
> no vowel after the "r", and a short "a" after the "t".
Yes, I knew that :-)
> And while we're on that subject :) the "l" in "Tamil" is not an "l",
> but a sound which doesn't have an exact equivalent in other
> languages (except Malayalam). It's something between an "l", an
> unrolled "r" and a "y" -- perhaps something like the Japanese "l/r"
> sound. It's sometimes transliterated "zh" in English but that's
> even more unlike the true sound than "l".
But I didn't know that. Considering the amount of contact I've had
with Tamil people (I used to speak English with a Tamil accent), that
surprises me. I wonder if that's one of the differences between India
and Malaysia.
Greg
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rs...@online.fr
> This is just a matter of orthography. The German word
> "Elektronenaufenthaltswahrscheinlichkeit" could be translated into
> English as "Electron Location Probability". That's three words in
> English and only one in German, but in reality it wouldn't make any
> difference to the German pronunciation if it were written "Elektronen
> Aufenthalts Wahrscheinlichkeit",
It makes a difference in Sanskrit if the first word ends with a vowel
(most nouns end with a short a) and the second word begins with a
vowel; there are rules for how to combine the vowels. (There
are such rules for consonants too, but I think those are usually
straightforward.)
eg, "katha" + "upanishad" = "kathopanishad", etc.
I believe in some cases it can also lead to actual ambiguities about
where to split the compound sentence: the same sentence can be
interpreted in two contradictory ways. But I'm not enough of a
scholar to supply an example.
> > The other thing about Tamil in Tamil Nadu is that the written
> > language, or the formal spoken language, is *very* different from
> > the informal spoken language; I'm reasonably comfortable in the
> > informal version but can barely understand the formal version,
> > having always lived in non-Tamil-speaking regions.
>
> Hmm. You sound like Kumar. What's your native language?
Tamil. It's what we spoke at home but I never learned it formally.
My "best language" is English, which is, for better or worse, not an
uncommon situation in urban India.
- Rahul
rs...@online.fr
>
> > And while we're on that subject :) the "l" in "Tamil" is not an "l",
> > but a sound which doesn't have an exact equivalent in other
> > languages (except Malayalam). It's something between an "l", an
> > unrolled "r" and a "y" -- perhaps something like the Japanese "l/r"
> > sound. It's sometimes transliterated "zh" in English but that's
> > even more unlike the true sound than "l".
>
> But I didn't know that. Considering the amount of contact I've had
> with Tamil people (I used to speak English with a Tamil accent), that
> surprises me. I wonder if that's one of the differences between India
> and Malaysia.
Interesting. It is a very common letter in Tamil, looks something
like this:
_
| / \
| | |
L__|_/
__/
different from the "l" letter (actually, the two "l" letters, one "l"
as in "tall" with the tongue nearer the teeth, and one "l" as in
"gold" with the tongue deeper inside the mouth).
Lots of words use it, eg fruit (palam/pazham), way (vazhi), etc.
However, people from Karnataka (local language Kannada), when speaking
Tamil, often substitute "l" for this sound. Perhaps that's what
happened in Malaysia.
- Rahul