This is simply fascinating. The Ottowa Citizen reports on work by linguists which has resulted in the first evidence of a linguistic link between the Old World and New World.
The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.
The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.
…
He found that the few remaining Ket speakers in Russia and the Dene, Gwich’in and other Athapaskan speakers in North America used almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as the prow and cross-piece.
“Finally, here was the beginning of a system that struck me as beyond the realm of chance,” Vajda wrote at the time. “At that moment, I think I realized how an archeologist must feel who peers inside a freshly opened Egyptian tomb and witnesses what no one has seen for thousands of years.”
Currently, only the Eskimo-Aleut family of aboriginal languages spoken by the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia straddle the hemispheric divide between Asia and the Americas. Those connections aren’t surprising, given the relatively recent arrival of the Inuit to North America.
But linguists had never definitively linked any ancient, Old World language to those spoken by the Indian nations of North and South America. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia to the New World — across what was then a dried-up Bering Strait — at least 13,000 years ago.
French has the Académie française, Spanish has the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, but English has never had a central authority on the language. The anarchy of our English language is one of her charms, in my opinion. Although English doesn’t have any recognized central authority, we do have standards established by convention, recognized style guides, etc.
English is a mutt, so to speak. She has her origins in the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons who were later conquered by the French Normans which had a revolutionary effect on the language making English a hybrid Germanic and Romance language. Thus we plenty of synonyms and near-synonyms like kingly and royal, rise and mount, ask and question, the former being Germanic and the latter being Latinate.
English orthography, particularly our spelling, is very inconsistent. We have plenty of words with archaic spellings, such as knight, which now has a silent “k” but originally did not. However we still cling to the old spelling.
To illustrate the absurdity of English spelling, George Bernard Shaw devised an alternate spelling for the word fish spelled ghoti. That’s right, ghoti is pronounced ”fish” /ˈfɪʃ/. Take the gh from tough for the /f/ sound, the o from women for the /ɪ/ “i” sound and the ti from nation for the /ʃ/ “sh” sound and you get ghoti, “fish.” Shaw also came up with this very clever spelling for “potato” /poʊˈteɪtoʊ/, ghoughpteighbteau. Try and figure that one out. 
Perhaps the only truly successful attempt at spelling reform came about by Noah Webster who standardized the American English language. Thus we have uniquely American spellings such as color not colour or center not centre. The inconsistency is not limited to spelling, but also to grammar and sytax.
Currently there is an attempt by the Queen’s English Society to create an Academy of English modeled on the Académie Française. Gerald Warner opining at The Telegraph supports this effort.
Globalisation has meant that the predominance of English in computerised societies is making it more vulnerable to abuse than any other tongue. The advent of texting has had a disastrous effect on literacy and the mass media are complicit in bastardisation of language. Then there is the omnipresent, nightmarish gibberish of management jargon. The worst problem, however, is the collapse of literacy within our education system – the forum that should have been the sturdiest bastion of correct practice.
Instead, laissez-faire attitudes towards spelling, grammar and syntax, encouraged by trendy educationalists, have created a situation in which illiterate pupils have now been joined by a generation of largely illiterate teachers. The “inclusive” mania to embrace the lowest common denominator has left the language of Shakespeare fighting for survival. The universal misuse of apostrophes recently provoked the writing of a best-selling book; its success suggests there is still a desire among the bulk of the population to understand and employ correct usage, but abuses are proliferating.
The inarticulacy of young people’s speech is not something that will necessarily correct itself with maturity, as optimists rashly assume: where there is no understanding of the basic structures of our language, self-improvement can only be a hit-or-miss effort.
Every literate individual has his own pet aversion. I would single out, in particular, the current pandemic misuse of the subjunctive, rampant in media reports. “Gordon Brown may have won the general election if he had had more convincing policies” suggests that there remains some doubt on the subject, that it could yet transpire that Brown had won the election: “Gordon Brown might have won the general election…” is obviously the correct version, which should come automatically to any educated person.
Aggravating the current crisis is state-sponsored illiteracy, with central and local government promoting politically correct Newspeak, such as “chair” for chairman, and innumerable hideous neologisms such as “spokesperson”, which are additionally offensive in patronisingly attributing infantile insecurity to women. We live in an age of aggressive Philistinism. Modern “art” is a sick joke, imposed on the public in the absence of courageous opponents denouncing the Emperor’s new clothes; it is no coincidence that its iconic artefact was a urinal exhibited in 1917, as the old world that had produced so many glories of true art was dissolving.
In this climate of anti-aestheticism it is unsurprising that even an attempt to preserve the beauty and coherence of the English language should meet with opposition by those who claim that it needs to “evolve” unimpeded. There is nothing wrong with a language evolving – English has always done so; but what is happening now is not evolution but nihilism. It must be resisted and the Queen’s English Society is to be congratulated on its initiative. All champions of literacy will wish the society success in establishing a much-needed Academy of English.
Though English has tons of etymologically Greek/Latin compounds…
ht unreasonable faith
Minnesotta Daily reports on the story of linguist d’Armond Speers who spoke to his son only in Klingon, the language of the eponymous alien race in Star Trek, for the first three years of his life. Speers wanted to learn if language acquisition would process using a constructed language in the same manner as natural language. The control was the child’s mother, who spoke to him in English. Speers said, “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it.”
As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.
Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.
“I don’t go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions, I don’t wear the fake forehead,” he said. “I’m a linguist.”
Constructed language does suffer shortcomings when it comes to language acquisition. Natural languages have the benefit of generations of use and seem far better suited for easier acquisition, but the jury is still out. It’s difficult to dismiss constructed language all together. There are plenty of stories of children acquiring Esperanto, another constructed language, and maintaining fluency into adulthood. It isn’t so much constructed versus natural language, but the content of the language. Compare studies of language acquisition across different natural languages.
It would have been interesting to see the results if Speers had continued to speak to his son in Klingon after three years.
X-Ray Analyses of Speech, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University
The classics department at Western Washington University has set up the first Census of Worldwide Latin speakers.
To all my classicist friends out there, register! Quod V minuta ad summum requiret.
Exspectatus ad primum Censum omnium hominum quavis e gente oriundorum accessisti. Census ab Universitatis studiorum Vasintoniae Occidentalis (WWU) professoribus institutus est, auspiciis Academiae Latinitati Fovendae (ALF) sodalium, duobus praesertim propositis:
* Ut homines, qui nostra aetate sermone Latino utuntur, adnumerentur;
* Quo melius Latini sermonis usus atque condiciones, quae nostra aetate sunt, intelligantur.
Huius census indiciis decursu annorum descriptis, rite ordinatis, inter se comparatis demonstrari poterit utrum sermonis usus increbrescat necne, quibus in orbis terrarum regionibus sermo Latinus maxime usurpetur, qui libri ad eius studium saepius adhibeantur et alia.
Census Latinus alternis annis ab eisdem professoribus instituetur, et indicia in eo collecta in publicum edentur. Ab illis, qui respondere velint, nihil poscetur, quod ad vitam privatam pertineat. Talia enim nullo iure in Rete Universali exhibentur.
Nexus hic…
Rhode Island is the smallest state with the biggest name, but that could be changing. The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, yeah that Rhode Island’s full name, is considering dropping the “Providence Plantations” part as proponents of the name change say it would remove images of the slave trade. Apparently this has passed the legislature and now must go before the voters for final approval.
The name derives from the merging of two colonies. The irony is that Providence Plantations is the larger mainland and Rhode Island is the island in Narragansett Bay, more commonly known as Aquidneck Island to distinguish it from the larger state.
Tradition and the uniqueness of the name among the fifty states would initially prompt me to side with opponents. Although today when we think of plantations, images of slavery come to mind, plantations don’t necessarily have slaves. However, I can’t discount folks’ legitimate objections as imagery and symbolism do matter.
Providence Plantations was founded by abolitionist Roger Williams. Williams was forced out of Massachusetts Bay Colony for his progressive ideas of abolition, religious freedom, and equality for Native Americans. Rhode Island was the first North American British colony to ban slavery in 1652. Rhode Island has a lot to be proud of and I don’t think a petty name change is necessary at all. I want the smallest state in the union to continue having the longest name.
More here…
The irony here is too much to resist. The English-only crowd tends to be uneducated xenophobic idiots who not only do not know a second language, but have bearly masterd a first language. Here is a nice piece of evidence of the latter. Our good friend Pat Buchanan (I think Pat is too brilliant to be inolved with this nonsense) hosted a conference to explore ways that right-wingers could take back control. Look at this banner at the conference. I don’t think anyone noticed.
As further proof that right-wingers have no clue, one of the brilliant ideas to come forth from this meeting of the anti-minds was to voice support for an English-only policy. Isn’t that just a brilliant idea? It’s a winning strategy all the way. Of course these dolts indulged in the bullshit you would expect of them, such as ridculing Judge Sotomayor and expressing fear that President Obama is going to force us all to speak Spanish. Spanish is a very scary language, I know. And they wonder why they are in the minority.
HT: AlterNet
For all you latinists out there, why not play Zelda II: The Adventure of Link in Latin?
This is a pretty nifty patch for a game I used to play for hours when I was a kid. Hmm… how about Metroid in Latin?
