A bit of Aesop

A little something I cooked up for those of you walking out of the shallow end of the Greek pool. Should I make more?Fable of the Ants and Cicadas  

wh-movement in Ancient Greek

Last week for school, I wrote a terribly flawed paper about wh-movement in Ancient Greek. There are two problems.

First, I was limited to questions about the direct object. A necessary operation when most students are writing about English. Subject questions don't display much wh-movement in English. I had to throw out a lot of potential data points. I would have killed to find a question like this

poi-on     su    cyon.a akou.eis
what.sort you dog      hear.you
What sort of dog do you hear?

Something relatively simple that showed strong wh-movement. I found one (sentence 1 on the paper), but it was complex. The qu-word related to a direct object alright, but the direct object of a participle. Probably not my hour of glory.

The other problem is that a lot fo the data looked like this

ti       ph-ēs
what say.you
What are you saying?

Now this looks like wh-movement to me, but I'm a native English speaker. After all, the ti is the first word, how isn't is wh-movement? My intuitions probably aren't right here. But at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that Ancient Greek shows wh-movement even if it doesn't look like it.

The problem is that a speaker of a language that is 1) pro-drop (like Ancient Greek) 2) uses  SOV order (like Ancient Greek can) and 3) leaves interrogatives in situ may see things quite differently. As in anyone who speaks Persian. To them, most of my data points would appear to be in-situ questioning.

All I can say is this: Dammit. Why hadn't I thought of that sooner?

Asper spiritus

Rough breathing. δασὺ πνεῦμα. Spiritus asper. Whatever you like. It's all the same.

Sometimes I get down on Ancient Greek grammarians when compared to their Indian counterparts. After all, how am I supposed to take the Greek descriptions of the language seriously when they didn't know the proper difference between voiced and voiceless consonants. (/p/ and /b/ are the same except /p/ is voiceless and /b/ is voiced.)

On the other hand, they did get something quite right. Instead of inflicting a separate letter for /h/ like the Romans, they gave us the rough breathing because /h/ isn't a real consonant.

Wait. /h/ isn't a consonant?

Isn't /h/ called a glottal fricative on the IPA chart? Well…yeah…it is. We call it a fricative, even though we know better. The wikipedia article addresses the concerns well enough for my purposes. If you're all tl, dr on the wiki link the argument is this: the /h/ sound is produced at the glottis which is where the sound is made but there is no constriction of the vocal tract as with other fricatives like /s/ or /z/. It's all free flow. (Wait. It's a vowel?)

Anyway. The Greeks get it right with the breathing mark.The Romans screw it up. They promote /h/ to full blown consonant with its own letter—and then to keep things simple it later marks aspiriation. After all, "ph" represents /p^h/ and not /f/.

(And yes, I'm aware of the development of the breathing marks out of actual letters. I'm just trying to give some credit to the Ancient Greeks for hitting on something kind of odd.)

Cisalpine Gaul's modern existence

I"m sure it's occurred to others, but am I the only one to notice that Cisalpine Gaul's border roughly corresponds to the La Spezia-Rimini Line?

On the east side of the red line, Italy juts north. Toward the middle Gaul just dips south of the line. On the west, the Rubicon flows to the Adriatic just north of the line. Of course this isn't quite the course the line takes on this map, but it's a reasonable first approximation.

Is it possible that this is some sort of relict of the Celtic language speaking population that lived here way back when? (Don't you hate these Latin/Celtic language contact posts? I always bring up questions and never give answers.)

Universal Grammar

I'm taking a typology course. One of the focuses of the class will be the existence of Universal Grammar. UG is one of those ideas that has a lot of appeal on first glance.

Everyone you've ever met, with so few exceptions that it might as well be everyone, speaks at least one language. There is very little variance in basic language skills: do you know anyone who only knows part of their language? No one knows just the words but not the syntax. All adults are competent speakers of their native language. When children learn their first language, they seem to follow enough of the same track that you get presentations like this. Languages also seem to fall into a few basic groups (e.g. if verbs come before objects, your language probably has prepositions and not postpositions).

It would seem like there is something to this notion of UG.

On the other hand, I don't think I've seen any evidence of the particular circuitry in the brain that is associate with language in humans—and no other animal.

And that's the crux of it.  There's no physical evidence for UG—just a bunch of speech that might be more simply explained other ways. Don't get me wrong. If solid physical evidence for UG were presented, I'd get on board. Right now. Until then, color me skeptical. Right here and right now, UG seems like the ether that 19th-century physicists were proposing as a way to allow light waves to spread.

Adding a page about Ancient Greek

You can get to it here or via the links at the top. 

What Latin Isn't

In a recent discussion about teaching Latin, someone made the comment, "The sooner students get past seeing Latin as encoded English, the better they will do." (I forget who said it, but it's a great comment and I want to give credit where it is due. Anyway.)

No matter what method you're using, this will be a road block: how do I get students to see that Latin is a language and not merely English in a tricky code.

Why dead langauges?

Over at a language learners' forum, someone asked "what do you like about dead langauges"? And here, somewhat edited and expanded, is my reply:

Knowing dead languages allows me to gain a perspective that I otherwise couldn't get. I feel the continuity of humanity stretching over the centuries that I am a part of. I can touch artifacts of antiquity. I can engage them in my home without specialized scientific tools. I can see how we are all human through the centuries—facing the same challenges of our common humanity. I am connected to minds from the remote past who still have vital things to say. 

Does it get better than that?

Strike of the Modern Languages: Italian

I've been working on upping my abilities to read Italian lately. I've found a book I really like. For those of you who know about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, it will look familiar. Really familiar.

Since I've primarily only seen commercially available materials for learning Italian, L’italiano secondo il «metodo natura» is like coming home again. And the differences are shocking.

L'italiano is like Lingua Latina. They're both very repetitive. Everything is in context. Many things are explained simply. Shades of meaning, while in the text, are not discussed at any length. In fact, L'italiano is even more minimalist in its approach to grammar than Lingua Latina. The other big difference between L'italiano and other materials is that there is more Italian in the first few chapters of it than in an entire series of other materials. Or so it seems to me. 

I checked out Living Language Italian Intermediate from the library, since I thought that my skills were fairly basic and that an intermediate level was right. Apparently not. The article and verb conjugation are topics of instruction. Twelve chapters into L'italiano, and that's done. Of course at that point you've seen a lot of Italian. A lot. Living Language Italian has some short dialogs and comprehension passages. Though admittedly I only checked this out to listen (and relisten) to the audio.

I'm not maligning the Living Language offering. It looks good, just not to my style of learning.  And that's no small matter. If people are learning languages with programs like Living Language, I'm falling down somehow. (Again, I'm not maligning the program. It looks pretty solid.)

I'm beginning to realize that the only way languages come into my brain is brute force. The less recourse I have to English, the better. For what it's worth, Benny Lewis seems to take this approach too, but he's far more interested in the social and spoken end of it. If I wind up being able to speak, that's bonus points. 

Continental Celtic Languages

I realize I've been on about Celtic languages in contact with Latin and haven't bothered to tally up a family tree. So here goes. First, I'm going to ignore all of these still living languages for the simple reason that they weren't spoken in ancient Gaul. If I get around to Latin and Britain, well, that's another story. So these are out.
     Insular Celtic
          Goidelic
               Irish
               Manx
               Gaelic
          Brythonic
               Welsh
               Cornish
               Breton

These are the languages I'm talking about.
     Continental Celtic
          Celtiberian
          Gaulish
          Lepontic
          Noric
          Galatian

Well, not the Galatian group either. They were in Turkey. Or the Noric. They were in Noricum—er, more or less Austria. Or the Celtiberian. They were in Spain and Portugal.

Lepontic however was spoken in Cisalpine Gaul (more or less northern Italy) and Gaulish was spoken across the whole rest of Gaul. This presents a problem: what does Gaulish mean? Is it one language? Or a group of related dialects? Or, worse, a dialect continuum. If Gaulish is one language, why does Caesar make pains to say "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres" and then delineate which is which. I'm highly dubious of one Gaulish language at this stage, but I'm not informed enough to say so.

Whatmough provides a great map, but it isn't digital. A big task will be to digitize it in a useful form.