Languoid
Does the launch of the World Loanword Database (WOLD) solve that pesky “it’s a language / it’s a language family” problem? You know, the one that leads to asserting the existence of mutually unintelligible sub-“dialects” of Cantonese. WOLD says
“Languoid” is a (relatively new) cover term for “language” and “language family”.
The Mandarin languoid, anyone?
Well, maybe not. I’m not sure how languoid helps us in the direction of dialects that should probably be called languages. In any case, WOLD’s detailed documentation of lexical borrowing and lending looks promising. Check out hé (河, river) which it documents as coming from Altaic (language family to which Manchu belongs).
he2 (1)
a word from Vocabulary Mandarin Chinese
Word form: he2 (1) Original script: 河 LWT meaning(s): Word meaning: river, the Huanghe (Yellow river, one of the major rivers in China) Analyzability: unanalyzable Age: Shang oracle bone inscriptions (-1400–-1050) Register: General
Loanword Information Borrowed status: 4. very little evidence for borrowing Calqued status: 0. No evidence for calquing Source words:
- Unidentifiable ‘river’, from Altaic
Reference(s):
- Schuessler 2007
Effect: No information Salience: Present in pre-contact environment Other comments: Norman 1988 gives Mongolian ɣol ,river’ as related word; according to Schuessler, this is only 1 out of 3 etymologies for he2, the other two being (1) cognate to Tibeto-Burman-Written Tibetan rgal-ba ,to pass or ford a river, Coblin 1986, (2) derived from hu2 ,lake’ (Matisoff 1995) Contact situation: Ancient Proto-Altaic contact
h/t Glossographia for the WOLD link
I haven’t had a chance to dig through this yet. I’d like to see more information, but I guess it’s only as good as current understanding of the borrowings. The map is just about useless since it reduces languages to single points, but whatever.
Interesting when one looks up Wu. “This language is a member of a macrolanguage; see Chinese [zho].”
Should I be understanding the “[zho]” part?
I’m pretty wary of the Chinese classifications too. It poses problems even for borrowings into “Chinese”. The word “lemon”, it says, was borrowed into “Chinese” from English. Fair enough, but borrowed into which flavor of Chinese would be interesting from many standpoints.
zho is just the code for Chinese. there are a couple different ISO standards here. the 2 letter is zh, which you’re likely more familiar wth if you’ve ever opened up the Mandarin version of Wikipedia.
Agreed on that last bit. Apparently 三明治 sounds a lot like “sandwich” in Cantonese, or at least I’ve been told. Same for 沙发 as “sofa”.
“I’m pretty wary […] too” when it comes to applying the terminological wisdom of zoology to the science of languages. on the face of it, it looks so simple: there is a tree of life, its leaves being labeled the ‘species’. and there surely *are* species, like the bear, the horse, the dog, the shark, the fly. yes there surely *are* languages like the chinese, the french, the suahili, the thai languages.
which is about as far as you can walk on this thin ice of spring.
i strongly feel it to be a grave mistake to model the evolution of languages as if they were entities on a par with zoological species. basically, the image is here that when entities branch, they part ways forever, like when carnivora split into the feliformia and caniformia, ur-cats and proto-dogs got unable to successfully reproduce at some point in time.
this led people to believe that you can, for example, distinguish ur-japanese (大和, yamato) words from loans. and it works, a bit. except that unlike kittens and puppies, now we have japanese-english offsprings, like 漫画, manga, that has chinese in its pedigree as well. so this makes english (to an ever so slight degree) an offspring of chinese and japanese. which shouldn’t have happened, speaking zoologically. it is just not true that languages are historically like cats and dogs; it is just so that historically, many geographically separate tribes of man came into existence, who chose to settle in regions apart from the others, and developed their own linguistic and cultural identity. however, all human languages seem to have kept the ability to take up words, concepts, and grammatical structure from each other, much like all kinds of humans, all kinds of cats, and all kinds of dogs are thought to be able to breed within their group. so if you insist on the tree-of-life calque, then languages are not “like species”, all human languages are rather mere “like varieties”.
in all brevity, i want to point out two things: the very concept of species has been, from darwin onwards, a point of contention, and is far from settled. there are odd things like the ring of species formed by the arctic seagulls: in neighboring regions, seagulls look very similar. you travel on a few hundred kilometers, they look more distinct. you go halfway around the globe, and they look like another species. you can’t draw the line here; all these gulls seem to interbreed except where the two ends of the geographical circle meet in europe. so if that should shatter your trust in “biological species”, it should also help to shatter your confidence in the factual existence of “languages”, and “languages” as distinguished from “dialects”; these are just handy concepts.
point two: it has become common, as said above, to distinguish “ur-japanese”, “real japanese”, “original japanese” words from items borrowed from “other languages”. pratically, that makes sense: tera てら, ji 寺, tenpuru テンプル are recognizably words of yamato, chinese, and english descent. so far so good. except for tera: the only thing that makes it “more japanese” than the other two words is our ignorance. humankind did not originate on honshu; people from all directions came to the islands over the course of uncount centuries. similarly, there is a discourse in german about the so-called “fremdwörter”, “foreign words”. some sprachpolitik-proponents have gone so far as to suggest to strip the german language of *any* “foreign” words, which lead to suggestions like “gesichtserker” for “nase” and “windauge; tageleuchter” for “fenster”. clearly, the foundation myth is that there “is” a positively, physically, ontologically existing entity, the german people (sometimes even termed a “race”, whatever that might be), who use a positively, physically, ontologically existing “language”, which should not be tainted with non-native content. basically, the entire movement can be summed up like this: if we can not remember where a word came from, it is called native and allowed; but if we *can* trace a word’s origin back to some place in italy or otherwise, we dub it “foreign” and replace it. which is really stupid because we only rather recently learned that “nase”, “fenster”, “kiste”, “ziegel” are not “native”. i do not touch here the icky subject of how such a frame of mind informs politics. it can become quite disastrous.
so while i welcome, of course, inquiries into the history of words, i get to feel quite uneasy with maps that identify “languages” like chinese (whatever that may be) with mathematical points on a map. i mean how wrong can a concept go? a mathematical point, much like an elementary particle, is defined by very simple, very few parameters. an electron does not have identity: if i take away your electron and put another in the same place, you won’t be able to tell the difference. in contrast, whatever “chinese” may “be”, it is spoken by roundabout 1,000,000,000 individuals, each of which dedicates around 10,000,000,000 neurons (might be much more or less) with 10,000 neuronal links to the production of what is considered meaningful sound, and they have been doing that over the course of many thousands of years.