6 ms·

Dante's Peek

51 points by pcmaffey 6y ago

phaemon 6y ago
> Our English masks this because anciently it seems never to have had such a high-low division What an odd assertion. There's a massive difference between "proper English" and how it's commonly spoken. Reading something like Trainspotting makes that evidently clear if you happen not to chat with ordinary people regularly.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  I thought this strange as well. It makes me wonder if "proper English" is much closer to our various dialects than in these other high/low language pairs.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    English definitely has two registers, that you might find in use in the same sentence. This becomes clear if you e.g. translate a scientific text into Dutch or German. "Carbon" becomes "Kohlenstoff", and "metabolism" becomes "Stoffwechsel" in German. These might be literally translated back as "Coal-stuff" and "stuff-change" but that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English because it remains in the lower register, not derived academically from old Latin and Greek.
    - throwaway894345 6y ago
      I don’t buy this argument. No one says “Coal-stuff” or “Stuff-change” in the Anglophonic world, so to the extent that those constructs form a lower register, the lower register isn’t spoken anywhere or by anyone. I can believe the idea that there is a gradient of formality that exists across the anglophonic world—I grew up in a rural area and my original dialect would be considered uneducated and low class, but I learned how to speak in a more educated manner in college (not deliberately mind you—I just adapted via immersion). There are probably more French-derived words in my “higher” dialect, but I don’t think that’s the biggest distinction between the two (probably the higher dialect has fewer irregularities and a larger vocabulary in general). Still, I get the impression that the author is describing an altogether different phenomena.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
        > I don’t buy this argument. No one says “Coal-stuff” or “Stuff-change” in the Anglophonic world, so to the extent that those constructs form a lower register, I think you're missing the point entirely. Of course no-one says those. Did you miss the "that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English" part? We do say "coal" and "stuff", but we just switch up when talking about carbon, the stuff of coal. The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages. This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs".
        throwaway894345 6y ago
        I do think I'm missing your point, but it wasn't because I missed your 'unfamiliar' remark so much as it's confusing (how can a manner of speech be universally confusing unless it simply doesn't exist, and presumably you aren't arguing that it doesn't exist while also arguing that it does exist?). > The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages. I don't understand the distinction you're describing in English. You give an example of "coal" and "stuff" and "carbon", but I don't understand why you're arguing that "carbon" belongs to a higher/academic register. Your examples seem to support the inverse of your argument, which is that German (and presumably other languages) has a distinction between a higher and lower register (one could choose between "Carbon" or "Coal-stuff") and English doesn't have this distinction (you must use "carbon" when talking about carbon and "coal" when talking about coal). > This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs". I don't disbelieve the author's premise, but that's not your premise. English doesn't have a single "high dialect" or a single "low dialect", but again, I don't think that's what TFA is talking about with respect to other European languages. Rather, I'm guessing the author is arguing that because Latin was the written language for continental Europe, and because the scribal class was markedly different than the illiterate masses, there was a considerable divergence between formal/written Latin and vulgar Latin which was persisted as vulgar Latin became the Romance languages--indeed, this division has deep historical roots into Latin itself (scribal/educated Latin was different than spoken Latin) and perhaps even earlier. On the other hand, in England, that educated Latin tradition never took root--the English vernacular quickly became the language of literacy hundreds of years before written French, Spanish, Italian etc came into existence (continental scribes were clinging to written Latin). Again, I'm not sure if that's what the author is driving at, but it seems that way to me.
- Sniffnoy 6y ago
  I think you've missed the word "anciently" in that sentence. He's talking about pre-modern English.
  - phaemon 6y ago
    Well, they say "Our English masks this", which suggests they're talking about contemporary English and offering the lack of past division as an explanation for a lack of current division. I don't buy it. In fact, prior to broadcasting, the differences were greater I reckon.
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  "Proper English" i.e. Received Pronunciation is not a high dialect. It was not used in court or government before the development of modern English some 700 years ago. Before then, that role was filled by French, thanks to the Norman conquest - so the need for a high-low distinction never developed in English to its typical extent. In general, English in England does not display the variety of dialect found in mainland Europe or elsewhere in the world. Despite a variety of accent, it is overwhelmingly homogeneous in grammar and vocabulary (outside of slang). There is no equivalent for English to the difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch, or between Tuscan Italian and its other variants - in both of these cases, the overwhelming part of the population learns both their local low dialect and the high dialect as distinct "languages".
  - prox 6y ago
    What is interesting though is that middle and old-english sound a lot more similar to German / Saxon. Things like good morning is very similar in german, dutch and Scandinavian languages.
michael2l 6y ago
Is it just me or does the article seem to end rather abruptly as if much more was intended and perhaps accidentally left off or just published before completion?
- namenotrequired 6y ago
  I was wondering if I missed some "next page" button somewhere
dredmorbius 6y ago
Aside: The Online Etymological Dictionary, to which this blog is attached, is one of the rare true gems of the Internet, and harkens back to the Early Web in both time and spirit. It's a tool I make heavy use of --- the Mastodon toots hashtagged #OccasionalEtymology are only a very small fraction of these (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymolo...) And it's mostly a labour of love by Douglas Harper. Yes, there are some ads, but the Paypal, Patreon, and Swag links do help out. And if you can contribute to something on the Internet that Does Not Completely Suck, it would be a Good Thing. https://www.etymonline.com https://www.etymonline.com
- pcmaffey 6y ago
  Absolutely. It’s one of those rare sites that I still enjoy “wandering around” on. It’s an archeological park of language and tattered remnants of stories.
- fenomas 6y ago
  Agreed, I love the site greatly as well. As a data point though, the one time I found an error there I mailed the maintainer a fairly detailed writeup with sources, but I never heard back and the entry never changed. (The error was for "anime", which etymonline has being derived from French, but which Japanese sources widely agree is just an abbreviation of "animation".)
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I've actually had a couple of email exchanges with Doug. Mail might have been caught in a spamfilter or just buried.
golergka 6y ago
> he might have added Hebrew and Yiddish Unlike all other examples, these languages are not that close; it would have been Yiddish and German, or Ladino and Italian: both Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. A better example would be Modern Hebrew and Torah Hebrew.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. Yiddish is basically German in the same way that Dutch is basically German: it's often possible to directly translate a word with some simple letter substitutions, but the choice of different letters in each language's orthography reflects an underlying difference in pronunciation. E.g. אוי וויי is often transliterated as "oy vey" while the corresponding Standard German pronunciation would be "au weh". If you ignore the usual Hebrew letter values and pretend that it's actually an unorthodox orthography for Standard German (א glottal stop, וי au, וו w, יי eh), I've found written Yiddish quite easy to get used to as a native German speaker, but understanding it spoken aloud is much more difficult.
agustif 6y ago
As a native bilingual of Catalan/Spanish, who speaks some English and French, it's pretty awesome how much stuff is the same in all languages. I love etymology and usually all the higher-language words come just from latin and are the same in all of them. English might not sound frenchy, but it has a lot of words coming from it, (-ation, -tion, -ssion, -able, -isme, -if/-ive
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> The fuel that took fire from the spark of insight in William Jones's astonishing paragraph had been gathered over generations, since about 1500, by scattered minds in Europe and South Asia. "William Jones's astonishing paragraph" must be the following: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Scholarly_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Sc... Wikipedia says its "often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies".

51 points by pcmaffey 6y ago

> Our English masks this because anciently it seems never to have had such a high-low division What an odd assertion. There's a massive difference between "proper English" and how it's commonly spoken. Reading something like Trainspotting makes that evidently clear if you happen not to chat with ordinary people regularly.

throwaway894345 6y ago
I thought this strange as well. It makes me wonder if "proper English" is much closer to our various dialects than in these other high/low language pairs.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  English definitely has two registers, that you might find in use in the same sentence. This becomes clear if you e.g. translate a scientific text into Dutch or German. "Carbon" becomes "Kohlenstoff", and "metabolism" becomes "Stoffwechsel" in German. These might be literally translated back as "Coal-stuff" and "stuff-change" but that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English because it remains in the lower register, not derived academically from old Latin and Greek.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    I don’t buy this argument. No one says “Coal-stuff” or “Stuff-change” in the Anglophonic world, so to the extent that those constructs form a lower register, the lower register isn’t spoken anywhere or by anyone. I can believe the idea that there is a gradient of formality that exists across the anglophonic world—I grew up in a rural area and my original dialect would be considered uneducated and low class, but I learned how to speak in a more educated manner in college (not deliberately mind you—I just adapted via immersion). There are probably more French-derived words in my “higher” dialect, but I don’t think that’s the biggest distinction between the two (probably the higher dialect has fewer irregularities and a larger vocabulary in general). Still, I get the impression that the author is describing an altogether different phenomena.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      > I don’t buy this argument. No one says “Coal-stuff” or “Stuff-change” in the Anglophonic world, so to the extent that those constructs form a lower register, I think you're missing the point entirely. Of course no-one says those. Did you miss the "that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English" part? We do say "coal" and "stuff", but we just switch up when talking about carbon, the stuff of coal. The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages. This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs".
      - throwaway894345 6y ago
        I do think I'm missing your point, but it wasn't because I missed your 'unfamiliar' remark so much as it's confusing (how can a manner of speech be universally confusing unless it simply doesn't exist, and presumably you aren't arguing that it doesn't exist while also arguing that it does exist?). > The point is not that there are different dialects (although there are to an extent, but that's an entirely sperate discussion) It's that English vocabulary can be sorted into these two registers, a common and an academic one, and that this distinction is largely absent in several other European languages. I don't understand the distinction you're describing in English. You give an example of "coal" and "stuff" and "carbon", but I don't understand why you're arguing that "carbon" belongs to a higher/academic register. Your examples seem to support the inverse of your argument, which is that German (and presumably other languages) has a distinction between a higher and lower register (one could choose between "Carbon" or "Coal-stuff") and English doesn't have this distinction (you must use "carbon" when talking about carbon and "coal" when talking about coal). > This may be "an altogether different phenomena" to what the author is describing, though that should not stop you buying it. Equivalently, it should not impede your purchase of the concept that English does have some form of "high/low language pairs". I don't disbelieve the author's premise, but that's not your premise. English doesn't have a single "high dialect" or a single "low dialect", but again, I don't think that's what TFA is talking about with respect to other European languages. Rather, I'm guessing the author is arguing that because Latin was the written language for continental Europe, and because the scribal class was markedly different than the illiterate masses, there was a considerable divergence between formal/written Latin and vulgar Latin which was persisted as vulgar Latin became the Romance languages--indeed, this division has deep historical roots into Latin itself (scribal/educated Latin was different than spoken Latin) and perhaps even earlier. On the other hand, in England, that educated Latin tradition never took root--the English vernacular quickly became the language of literacy hundreds of years before written French, Spanish, Italian etc came into existence (continental scribes were clinging to written Latin). Again, I'm not sure if that's what the author is driving at, but it seems that way to me.
Sniffnoy 6y ago
I think you've missed the word "anciently" in that sentence. He's talking about pre-modern English.
- phaemon 6y ago
  Well, they say "Our English masks this", which suggests they're talking about contemporary English and offering the lack of past division as an explanation for a lack of current division. I don't buy it. In fact, prior to broadcasting, the differences were greater I reckon.
ivanbakel 6y ago
"Proper English" i.e. Received Pronunciation is not a high dialect. It was not used in court or government before the development of modern English some 700 years ago. Before then, that role was filled by French, thanks to the Norman conquest - so the need for a high-low distinction never developed in English to its typical extent. In general, English in England does not display the variety of dialect found in mainland Europe or elsewhere in the world. Despite a variety of accent, it is overwhelmingly homogeneous in grammar and vocabulary (outside of slang). There is no equivalent for English to the difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch, or between Tuscan Italian and its other variants - in both of these cases, the overwhelming part of the population learns both their local low dialect and the high dialect as distinct "languages".
- prox 6y ago
  What is interesting though is that middle and old-english sound a lot more similar to German / Saxon. Things like good morning is very similar in german, dutch and Scandinavian languages.

michael2l 6y ago

Is it just me or does the article seem to end rather abruptly as if much more was intended and perhaps accidentally left off or just published before completion?

namenotrequired 6y ago
I was wondering if I missed some "next page" button somewhere

dredmorbius 6y ago

Aside: The Online Etymological Dictionary, to which this blog is attached, is one of the rare true gems of the Internet, and harkens back to the Early Web in both time and spirit. It's a tool I make heavy use of --- the Mastodon toots hashtagged #OccasionalEtymology are only a very small fraction of these (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymolo...) And it's mostly a labour of love by Douglas Harper. Yes, there are some ads, but the Paypal, Patreon, and Swag links do help out. And if you can contribute to something on the Internet that Does Not Completely Suck, it would be a Good Thing. https://www.etymonline.com https://www.etymonline.com

pcmaffey 6y ago
Absolutely. It’s one of those rare sites that I still enjoy “wandering around” on. It’s an archeological park of language and tattered remnants of stories.
fenomas 6y ago
Agreed, I love the site greatly as well. As a data point though, the one time I found an error there I mailed the maintainer a fairly detailed writeup with sources, but I never heard back and the entry never changed. (The error was for "anime", which etymonline has being derived from French, but which Japanese sources widely agree is just an abbreviation of "animation".)
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  I've actually had a couple of email exchanges with Doug. Mail might have been caught in a spamfilter or just buried.

golergka 6y ago

> he might have added Hebrew and Yiddish Unlike all other examples, these languages are not that close; it would have been Yiddish and German, or Ladino and Italian: both Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. A better example would be Modern Hebrew and Torah Hebrew.

yorwba 6y ago
> Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it. Yiddish is basically German in the same way that Dutch is basically German: it's often possible to directly translate a word with some simple letter substitutions, but the choice of different letters in each language's orthography reflects an underlying difference in pronunciation. E.g. אוי וויי is often transliterated as "oy vey" while the corresponding Standard German pronunciation would be "au weh". If you ignore the usual Hebrew letter values and pretend that it's actually an unorthodox orthography for Standard German (א glottal stop, וי au, וו w, יי eh), I've found written Yiddish quite easy to get used to as a native German speaker, but understanding it spoken aloud is much more difficult.

agustif 6y ago

As a native bilingual of Catalan/Spanish, who speaks some English and French, it's pretty awesome how much stuff is the same in all languages. I love etymology and usually all the higher-language words come just from latin and are the same in all of them. English might not sound frenchy, but it has a lot of words coming from it, (-ation, -tion, -ssion, -able, -isme, -if/-ive

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> The fuel that took fire from the spark of insight in William Jones's astonishing paragraph had been gathered over generations, since about 1500, by scattered minds in Europe and South Asia. "William Jones's astonishing paragraph" must be the following: The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Scholarly_contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Sc... Wikipedia says its "often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies".