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> Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language. It's Semitic, to be precise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages https://en.w
by arbuge 1y ago
> Maltese, interestingly, is the only Afro-Asiatic derived language.
It's Semitic, to be precise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
- UebVar 1y agoArabic, even. An outlier, as it is AFAIK the only arabic dialect that is not written with the arabic alphabet. Also it's far removed from other arabic dialects.
- findyoucef 1y agoIt's not at all far removed from the North African dialects of arabic which is the dialect that it's derived from. Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.
- arbuge 1y ago> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well. Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all. Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
- findyoucef 1y agoWell well these Arabic speakers Tunisians and Algerians?
- skissane 1y agoMaltese isn’t an Arabic dialect. Yes, the grammar and phonology and core function words derive from Arabic, but more than half of the vocabulary comes from Italian/Sicilian-North African Arabic may borrow a few words from Italian here and there (just like English does), but not >50% of their vocabulary.
- englishrookie 1y agoBy your reasoning, English isn't a Germanic language since over half of its vocabulary comes from Latin or French.
- argsnd 1y agoYou certainly wouldn’t call English a “dialect”
- Archelaos 1y ago"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" -- Max Weinrich In the Yiddish original: "אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- exasperaited 1y agoBest not to needle the Maltese about their army and navy. They are tiny but tough (and still significant). So tough that "siege of Malta" needs a disambiguation page on Wikipedia.
- skissane 1y agoCan’t read the Hebrew alphabet, but transliterated to Latin: “a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey un flot” - I find it fascinating that despite knowing close to zero Yiddish, it makes complete sense.. well, I know a handful of German words (which covers “mit”)… and “flot” contextually makes sense as “navy”, especially if one knows English “flotsam and jetsam” (not navy but at least nautical)
- englishrookie 1y agoI would certainly call it a Germanic dialect.
- ogogmad 1y agoI think the family tree model of linguistic history is not very useful for English. Saying English is Germanic to the exclusion of everything else is not very useful. The family tree model seems to assume that every language has only 1 direct ancestor. It seems to have been inspired by phylogenetic trees in biology. In phylogenetics, single-parent trees work fine because distantly related species can't breed with one other. By contrast, different languages borrow features from one another all the time. It could perhaps be useful for some languages, but not for English. I reckon.
- beeforpork 1y agoOh, stop it! What are you really trying to say? 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim. Ask yourself: what is the advantage of a language over a dialect or vice versa? Why are you fighting for it (or against it)? Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect.
- coldtea 1y ago>'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language. >Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect. That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants.
- jonathanstrange 1y ago> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants. As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact. Although you can sometimes find typological criteria to further argue that a variety is a language on its own, for example there are good grammatical reasons for not counting Swiss German as a variety of German, you will also find examples the other way around where two varieties have large lexical and grammatical differences and still count as the same language. The strongest criteria for what counts as a language are based on language origins (as opposed to typology), and these do not generally suffice or make meaningful distinctions to varieties (~dialects). Mutual comprehensibility can be very low for speakers of the same language, which is why most research focuses on varieties or on speaker groups that are of particular sociolinguistic interest. I don't get why you talk about "academic linguistics" as if there was a non-academic one and why you think linguistics "had to pay lip service into several ideologies." What are you talking about?
- saturnite 1y agoI looked it up. It was surprising to see that it's written left to right in basically the Latin alphabet with a few changes.