Spanish and Greek seem so similar

[Ruud Harmsen]

https://rudhar.com/fonetics/elessimi.htm

Written in Interlingua. About the very similar phonetic impression of
Spanish and Greek, and about the many phonological differences that
nevertheless exist between the languages, which can make it quite hard
for a speaker of one language to correctly pronounce the other.

With many examples, transcriptions, and links to spoken and sung sound
samples.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2023-05-18, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:

> https://rudhar.com/fonetics/elessimi.htm
>
> Written in Interlingua. About the very similar phonetic impression of
> Spanish and Greek, and about the many phonological differences that
> nevertheless exist between the languages, which can make it quite hard
> for a speaker of one language to correctly pronounce the other.

This reminds me that the characteristic lenition of voiced stops
to approximants ~ fricatives was also a feature of Proto-Germanic.
In fact, it is also reconstructed for Gothic.

Now that raises a question. Given the Visigothic Kingdom in the
Iberian Peninsula, was this lenition really an internal development
of Vulgar Latin ~ Proto-Romance... or was it influenced by Gothic?

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de

[Peter T. Daniels]

Do we know whether/that the various -goths (Visi-, Ostro-, etc.[?])
spoke languages we could identify as Gothic? If they wrote stuff
down, we'd have more than the one major text in the language.

(About 15 years ago, the Smithsonian had an exhibit and symposium
on "The Bible: The First Thousand Years," with mss. representing every
known version from the 1st millennium CE (plus some Dead Sea Scroll
fragments) -- except the Gothic codex kept in Uppsala. And we know
there are a couple of detached leaves that could have been sent, along
with a curator to lecture! -- The representative from St. Catherine's
Monastery in the Sinai turned out to be a very tall Texan, who became
a monk, with the very tall headdress, specifically so he could be a librarian
there. He spoke about his current project, which was the digitization of
Codex Sinaiticus, which over the past centuries has become a bit scattered
among libraries around Europe.)

[Ruud Harmsen]

Thu, 18 May 2023 13:04:01 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
<na...@mips.inka.de> scribeva:

Didn't it also happen in Old-French? Vulgar Latin on a Frankish or
Celtic substrate?

[Ruud Harmsen]

Thu, 18 May 2023 06:46:03 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
<gram...@verizon.net> scribeva:

>On Thursday, May 18, 2023 at 9:30:07?AM UTC-4, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
>> On 2023-05-18, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>
>> > https://rudhar.com/fonetics/elessimi.htm
>> >
>> > Written in Interlingua. About the very similar phonetic impression of
>> > Spanish and Greek, and about the many phonological differences that
>> > nevertheless exist between the languages, which can make it quite hard
>> > for a speaker of one language to correctly pronounce the other.
>> This reminds me that the characteristic lenition of voiced stops
>> to approximants ~ fricatives was also a feature of Proto-Germanic.
>> In fact, it is also reconstructed for Gothic.
>>
>> Now that raises a question. Given the Visigothic Kingdom in the
>> Iberian Peninsula, was this lenition really an internal development
>> of Vulgar Latin ~ Proto-Romance... or was it influenced by Gothic?
>
>Do we know whether/that the various -goths (Visi-, Ostro-, etc.[?])
>spoke languages we could identify as Gothic? If they wrote stuff
>down, we'd have more than the one major text in the language.

Quite a few Portuguese words are thought to have Gothic etymologies:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Portuguese_terms_derived_from_Gothic

And Spanish too:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Spanish_terms_derived_from_Gothic

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2023-05-18, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:

>>Now that raises a question. Given the Visigothic Kingdom in the
>>Iberian Peninsula, was this lenition really an internal development
>>of Vulgar Latin ~ Proto-Romance... or was it influenced by Gothic?
>
> Didn't it also happen in Old-French? Vulgar Latin on a Frankish or
> Celtic substrate?

Oh yes. Or a Frankish superstrate, rather. The Langues d'oïl are
the most divergent of the Italo-Western Romance languages and they
just happen to coincide with the area of pronounced Frankish
settlement.

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2023-05-18, Peter T. Daniels <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:

>> Now that raises a question. Given the Visigothic Kingdom in the
>> Iberian Peninsula, was this lenition really an internal development
>> of Vulgar Latin ~ Proto-Romance... or was it influenced by Gothic?
>
> Do we know whether/that the various -goths (Visi-, Ostro-, etc.[?])
> spoke languages we could identify as Gothic?

I think that's the general assumption based on ancient historians
identifying them as Goths. Also, when the Goths moved into Iberia
in the fifth century, this would have been only a few centuries
after the breakup of Proto-Germanic.

As Ruud mentioned, various lexical items in Iberian Romance are
etymologized as Gothic, but that propably works from the assumption
that the Germanic language that left a lasting impression in the
area would in fact have been Gothic.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Gothic is sufficiently different from regular Germanic that it shouldn't be
too hard to tell. I assume, the same way 19th-century philologists could tell
which parts of the (Ethiopic) Book of Enoch had been translated from
Hebrew and which from (very similar) Aramaic. And then when sizable
chunks turned up in the Dead Sea Scrolls, none of the "guesses" were wrong.
(Far from the whole immense book is attested in the DSS, though.)

[Ruud Harmsen]

Thu, 18 May 2023 18:01:43 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
<na...@mips.inka.de> scribeva:

All your France are belong to us. Dutch is New Nether Frankish.

[DKleinecke]

It seemed to me that the Gothic of the Bible was more archaic than the dates
justified so I speculated that Wulfila didn't translate into the Gothic of his own
day but rather used the oldest dialect he could find. Presumably the Gothic of
the religious rites that were being performed in his day. So the usual dates for
Gothic quotations are probably a couple of centuries too late.

King James' men did that they translated into what they imagined the English
of two centuries earlier had sounded like.

PS: OT: I think Wulfila was an Audean Bishop - not an Arian one. The two sects
appear to have merged before they surrendered to Rome.

[Dingbat]

Dutch is Ingvaeonic whereas Frankish (Old Franconian) was West
Germanic. What I read distinguished Ingvaeonic (aka North Sea
Germanic), West Germanic and Low Germanic as different
branches of Germanic. A peculiarity of Saxon is that it's the name
of two languages, one Ingvaeonic and one Low Germanic.

What I don't understand is why the Low Germanic language Low
Saxon is called so. It should be called high Saxon and the
Ingvaeonic language called Saxon should be called low Saxon,
being spoken on the coast at a lower elevation.

[Ruud Harmsen]

Thu, 18 May 2023 16:51:39 -0700 (PDT): Dingbat
<ranjit_...@yahoo.com> scribeva:

>On Friday, May 19, 2023 at 1:55:55?AM UTC+5:30, Ruud Harmsen wrote:
>> Thu, 18 May 2023 18:01:43 -0000 (UTC): Christian Weisgerber
>> <na...@mips.inka.de> scribeva:
>> >On 2023-05-18, Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>>Now that raises a question. Given the Visigothic Kingdom in the
>> >>>Iberian Peninsula, was this lenition really an internal development
>> >>>of Vulgar Latin ~ Proto-Romance... or was it influenced by Gothic?
>> >>
>> >> Didn't it also happen in Old-French? Vulgar Latin on a Frankish or
>> >> Celtic substrate?
>> >
>> >Oh yes. Or a Frankish superstrate, rather. The Langues d'oïl are
>> >the most divergent of the Italo-Western Romance languages and they
>> >just happen to coincide with the area of pronounced Frankish
>> >settlement.
>> All your France are belong to us. Dutch is New Nether Frankish.
>> --
>
>Dutch is Ingvaeonic whereas Frankish (Old Franconian) was West
> Germanic. What I read distinguished Ingvaeonic (aka North Sea
> Germanic), West Germanic and Low Germanic as different
> branches of Germanic. A peculiarity of Saxon is that it's the name
> of two languages, one Ingvaeonic and one Low Germanic.
>
>What I don't understand is why the Low Germanic language Low
> Saxon is called so.

Has to do with certain sound shifts in High German, that didn't happen
in Low German, Low Saxonian and Dutch.

>It should be called high Saxon and the
> Ingvaeonic language called Saxon should be called low Saxon,
> being spoken on the coast at a lower elevation.

It is all very complicated, and not quite settled. See Wikipedia.

[Ruud Harmsen]

Fri, 19 May 2023 06:35:59 +0200: Ruud Harmsen <r...@rudhar.com>
scribeva:

>Thu, 18 May 2023 16:51:39 -0700 (PDT): Dingbat
><ranjit_...@yahoo.com> scribeva:

>>Dutch is Ingvaeonic whereas Frankish (Old Franconian) was West
>> Germanic.

Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germanic_languages Dutch is
called Istvaeonic, not Ingvaeonic.

Some dialects of it, like Zeeuws and West-Flemish (not mutually
intelligeable with Dutch, or hardly so) are considered Ingvaeonic. So
are dialects in the east and north-east (Veluws, Achterhoeks, Twents,
Drents, Gronings) which are sometimes seen as dialects of Dutch, but
also (and better, I think) as dialects of a seperate language Low
Saxon, which also has lots of dialects in northern Germany (including
Bremen, Hamburg, and formerly also Danzig, Königsberg). This used to
be an international trade language, a lingua franca, in the Hansa
period.

>> What I read distinguished Ingvaeonic (aka North Sea
>> Germanic), West Germanic and Low Germanic as different
>> branches of Germanic. A peculiarity of Saxon is that it's the name
>> of two languages, one Ingvaeonic and one Low Germanic.
>>
>>What I don't understand is why the Low Germanic language Low
>> Saxon is called so.
>
>Has to do with certain sound shifts in High German, that didn't happen
>in Low German, Low Saxonian and Dutch.
>
>>It should be called high Saxon and the
>> Ingvaeonic language called Saxon should be called low Saxon,
>> being spoken on the coast at a lower elevation.
>
>It is all very complicated, and not quite settled. See Wikipedia.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Actually they mostly copied Coverdale from the mid 16th century who did a
lot of copying from Wyclif of the 13th.

[Christian Weisgerber]

On 2023-05-18, Dingbat <ranjit_...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dutch is Ingvaeonic whereas Frankish (Old Franconian) was West
> Germanic.

That doesn't make sense because Ingvaeonic is a subset of West

Germanic.

> What I read distinguished Ingvaeonic (aka North Sea
> Germanic), West Germanic and Low Germanic as different
> branches of Germanic.

You'll have to explain your terminology, because it looks hopelessly
confused.

Germanic is generally accepted as consisting of three branches:
* North Germanic
* West Germanic
* East Germanic

Some proposals split West Germanic further into
* Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic)
* Istvaeonic (Weser-Rhine Germanic)
* Irminonic (Elbe Germanic)

However, it's questionable that the latter three refer to genealogical
groupings.

[Arnaud Fournet]

You insane demented Dutch !!

[Arnaud Fournet]

No, pronounced Frankish settlement led to a separate Normand-Artesian (NW) isogloss, typically words like capelle instead of chapelle.
The Langues d'oïl as a whole do not have a pronounced Frankish settlement.

[Ruud Harmsen]

Fri, 19 May 2023 22:37:27 -0700 (PDT): Arnaud Fournet
<fournet...@wanadoo.fr> scribeva:

I was just joking.

[Peter T. Daniels]

So, uncharacteristically, was AF.

[Ruud Harmsen]

Sat, 20 May 2023 07:31:37 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
<gram...@verizon.net> scribeva:

I doubt it. But anything is possible.