Domino of thoughts about languages

This runner of discussion set a bit of a domino reaction in motion in my head. It is about languages. I thought this was a kind of amusing, so here you are:

Hold on for a moment.... Languages, as we know them, seem to be a produce of an endless sequence of chaotic events all the way througout the human history.

As I have been told, the language(s) that we know as English today is a relatively young language that combines three older groups of languages, the Germanic (esp. the 'Viking language' that now appears as Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, New Norwegian, the 'New' being really the old one, and Islandish) old Celtic languages (now Irish, Schottish...) and Latin languages (including the actual Latin that was brought there by Romans).

This may not be exact, but probably covers the general background. So let's not be too harsh on the young.

Maybe due to that set of origins there are plenty of synonyms or almost synonyms that are used in different contexts. Every time you think, that you have gained a good set of vocabulary in English you'll sooner or later find yourself a bit disappointed...

What is common to all those languages above (and actually to some extent the Slavic languages like Russian) is that they all contain these little words like 'from', 'to', 'at', 'on', 'of', 'by'... Those are almost completely missing from Finnish. We have other ways of expressing, what those stand for and quite a bit more. This example about the forms of the word 'dog' is actually true.

http://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/pos … -difficult

"And now the plural forms...".

This kind of practice is considered to be typical of very old languages and it is common to the Finno-Ugric or Uralic group. It is actually quite amazing, how the ancient structures of the group have survived for thousands of years between all the German, Slavic and other groups. Finno-Ugric / Uralic meaning things like Finnish, Samish (a.k.a. Lappish), Estonian, Inkerian (not sure if that is considered a language of it's own) Carelian, Hungarian etc... And what might be surprising is that the Eritrean language in Africa seems to share some of the same structures with the Uralic group. I just wonder what the connection might be?

At the moment though, there are Uralic languages, all the way from Europe to Siberia, that are practically extinct with only a handful of people talking them. Some actually are extinct. A kind of sad in a way.

Another thing, that deserves to be noted is that Finnish, like probably most other Uralic languages is gender neutral. Why would a rock or a tree have to be a he or a she? That is hard to understand, when learning pretty much anything outside the Uralic group.

A typical thing to languages is that there has always been some exchange of expressions between them. For example the Finnish word 'kuningas' has been picked from ancient German some thousands of years ago. In modern German that of course is 'König', in Swedish 'kung' and English 'king'. Sometimes that exchange can take surprising routes. Like the Finnish word 'saha' (saw, the cutting tool) that appears in the South African miners' language, Fanaglo, with only a minor difference in the pronounciation. Fanaglo is a specialiced vocabulary, that was developed for mining workers who did not have a common language otherwise. I'm not saying that Finnish would be the only possible origin of that word but it very much sounds like that. I can't imagine, how that could have happened, but if so, it must be doing of the Dutch.

If we look into the orient, at say all the 57 or so Chinese languages -- yes languages, not dialects -- they are very different in composition from the European approaches. Some time ago I took an introductory class in Mandarin Chinese. In that language every syllable is a word with a meaning of it's own. More words are constructed by combining syllables. If you'd translate just the syllables, the outcome would be entirely incomprehensible. When you get over that, Chinese is capable of expressions as complex as any other language. The spoken language is not that difficult to learn but the writing is a different story.

Maybe not so surprisingly Mandarin Chinese, being the governmental language, seems to have certain yearning for greatness built in. 'A hundred million' is expressed in one syllable 'yi'.

And about writing, for example Koreans have their own alphabet with 18 basic characters without upper and lower case but the syllable thinking is still present in the writing. You could write perfectly understandable Korean using the characters the western way, just laying them in a long row but, what they do, is to collect the letters into syllable boxes. It then looks a bit like Chinese, but it is readable with much less training. The only trouble is that, when there are six or seven letters in one syllable box, the box starts to get crowded.

There are other rather curious features in languages too. We usually think, that there are two kinds of siblings who'd be 'sister' and 'brother', but going back to the Korean, they have six kinds of siblings: A woman's big sister, a woman's big brother, a man's big sister, a man's big brother and a little sister and a little brother. I wonder what has lead to that? Large families maybe? And not to make things too simple Koreans use three different numerical systems: the Arabic (that we use), the traditional Chinese and the traditional Korean, all of those on their distinct purposes.

The only two things common to all the languages I know about (and I wouldn't bet this to be explicit) are the words for 'I' and 'you'. And that's about it. For example in Russian you can't say "I am" or "you are". They simply don't have the concept of "am" or "are" it their language. Coming to think of it, why would they? Who needs a verb -- a word of action -- for doing nothing?

Have a nice day, everybody!