Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

news.yale.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#61

Post by wl »

rubberpoliceman wrote: post #43
wl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or learn Hittite. It's got the oldest corpus in the Indo-European language family. You've got your standard assortment of Indo-European cases. Grammatical gender is animate/inanimate and the animate gender has yet to split into masculine and feminine. The script is tons of fun, especially if you write it with a stylus on clay. And as a bonus, you get to learn a smattering of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary.

Animate gender didn’t split into masculine and feminine — inanimate collective plural was repurposed as feminine.

That "repurposing" is more morphology than grammar. You also frequently find in Indo-European languages multiple cases having overlapping morphology, but that doesn't necessarily change the cases themselves. My point, in any case, is that Hittite has the older animate/inanimate genders from Proto-Indo-European (only attested in the Anatolian languages!) whereas Sanskrit has the later masculine/feminine/neuter genders.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#62

Post by whythismatters »

schoen wrote: post #60
whythismatters wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The ş is like sh, š is regular s That's not correct, in transcriptions of Akkadian š is pronounced sh (Heb. shin), ṣ (not ş) is pronounced ts (Heb. tsade), and there's also s, pronounced as regular s.

Is it possible that the Hebrew consonants' pronunciations don't align fully with their cognate consonants' pronunciations in Akkadian? This is certainly true among other Semitic languages, that there are drifts over time in the values of consonants.

Valid point, while cognatic kinship can be clearly established through afro-asiatic linguistics, that doesn't say anything about actual pronunciation. My comment wasn't meant as an absolute statement, but merely reflects the scientific consensus on the matter, i.e. how an assyriologist would read those characters in a transliterated text out loud. With cuneiform languages we're talking millennia, so of course there has been considerable variety (space) and change (time) in pronunciation, some of it reflected in writing, cf. Assyrian vs Babylonian dialects. I could imagine that ṣ pronounced as "ts" may have been inferred/validated for specific timeframes through variant "spelling", or maybe indirectly via e.g. Hittite or Old Persian, but that's just a wild guess.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#63

Post by schoen »

whythismatters wrote: post #62
schoen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that the Hebrew consonants' pronunciations don't align fully with their cognate consonants' pronunciations in Akkadian? This is certainly true among other Semitic languages, that there are drifts over time in the values of consonants.

Valid point, while cognatic kinship can be clearly established through afro-asiatic linguistics, that doesn't say anything about actual pronunciation. My comment wasn't meant as an absolute statement, but merely reflects the scientific consensus on the matter, i.e. how an assyriologist would read those characters in a transliterated text out loud. With cuneiform languages we're talking millennia, so of course there h…

Thanks for the explanation! Yeah, I guess it's a similar or at least analogous situation for Proto-Indo-European, where there might be conventional ways to pronounce reconstructed forms, and some evidence about what is more and less likely, but people don't really know. There are even some reconstructed consonants where they actively have no definite consensus at all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#Pronunciation

I guess it's quite an imperfect analogy, because we have Akkadian writing (by people who actually spoke the language) and we have no equivalent at all for PIE.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#64

Post by thegrim33 »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #13

The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

A thought experiment I sometimes think about is if it'd ever be possible for the world to somehow, in some way, agree that every country would switch over to the same constructed language over the course of generation or two. A modern conlang without all the idiosyncrasies, irregular verbs, exceptions to rules, etc. that's endemic in current organic languages. Of course, how long a language like that could stay relatively clean is an open question.

It's interesting to think about the next generation being taught both their home language and the new language, they're the intermediate generation that can bridge the two worlds, and the generation after that being only taught the new language, and how that process might work.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#65

Post by mdp2021 »

ben_w wrote: post #38
mdp2021 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That still does not make Sanskrit an ancestor language of English You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention. > though both English and Sanskrit do share a common ancestry several thousand years ago And those roots can be found and recognized in the subsequent languages, and there lies the value.

> You are taking 'ancestor' in a strict technical sense, which was clearly not my intention. Blutly, this was not obvious, and what you suggested would have been equally true if you'd said: Learn Lithuanian. You were writing in a descendant language just now. If you learnt the roots, you would understand the descendants better. Because Lithuanian has about as much in common with PIE as Sanskrit does.

Does Lithuanian have a comparable corpus of important literature? Is Lithuanian equally giving when reconstructing the networks of meaning? Is it comparably enlightening in the suggestion of the original common language?

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#66

Post by mdp2021 »

schoen wrote: post #58
mdp2021 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad :) It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

It is basically confusing an uncle with a grandfather, or an aunt with a grandmother. These languages are indeed relatives, literally part of the same family, but we usually distinguish whether they are lineal ancestors or not. If you said "Julia is your grandmother" when Julia was actually the person's aunt, that person might get very confused about your claim! People's aunts do often have a cultural effect on them,…

No, the succession (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, post-Latin) was given mainly in terms of the apogee - one peak follows the other in time. When I wrote «Sanskrit entered into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English» I described the phenomenon, not the fact.

The literal matter (of direct inheritance) was meaningless to me in the composition, because the whole point was not and is not "what took from what": the whole point is the contribution that those languages give in the understanding of the current languages they informed.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#67

Post by mdp2021 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #42
mdp2021 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bad :) It's just that I cannot allocate the safest amount of effort in composing. I thought it was clear enough.

Except the rest of your arguments fall apart if your point is just "Sanskrit and English shared a common ancestor thousands of years ago and English (and some actual ancestor languages to English) pulled in some Sanskrit loan words". As other commenters mentioned, lots of languages (and languages with long and robust literary traditions) fit this bill, so from an English speaker's perspective there is nothing special…

The perspective in your post is rationalistic and not empiricist. There was no theorematic argument intending to prove the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on historical notions: it was a witnessing of the importance of Sanskrit (and Greek, and Latin) for the understanding of English based on experience.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#68

Post by aboardRat4 »

patcon wrote: post #22
aboardRat4 wrote: post #13

The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

Isn't that a collapse in cognitive diversity? Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently? Different languages afford different ways of thinking and speaking? Just talk to a translator in works of literature or poetry. Some languages are more verb-y or noun-y, and so are more about getting between things than being something. Or have more or less ambiguity due to…

>Not to be "gotcha", but out of true curiosity: may I ask if you speak multiple languages fluently?

yeah, I speak 4 languages fluently, and can get through more with a dictionary

>Imho monoculture is toward death, not toward something golden

Same language does not mean same culture. Singapore and USA both speak English, yet the cultures are different.

The same culture can be represented in different languages, as translators prove by their existence.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#69

Post by aboardRat4 »

layer8 wrote: post #48
aboardRat4 wrote: post #13

The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

Knowing multiple languages, in particular less related or unrelated ones, is mentally enriching. If you only know a single language, you don’t know what you are missing in terms of diversity of thought and expression. Languages aren’t fungible. Translation is lossy, often considerably so.

>Knowing multiple languages, in particular less related or unrelated ones, is mentally enriching

Just as being able to play an instrument or dance or actually reading literature from other cultures, even in English.

Re: Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

#70

Post by aboardRat4 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #64
aboardRat4 wrote: post #13

The golden age of languages is when there is only one language left, and everyone can understand everyone without cunning translators and hallucinating llms.

A thought experiment I sometimes think about is if it'd ever be possible for the world to somehow, in some way, agree that every country would switch over to the same constructed language over the course of generation or two. A modern conlang without all the idiosyncrasies, irregular verbs, exceptions to rules, etc. that's endemic in current organic languages. Of course, how long a language like that could stay relat…

We are already switching to English slowly, but steadily.
Post reply on HN