Category: Language

Back to the Basics

Today I took the opportunity to visit one of the public libraries in Espoo.

Although there’s a great number of language related sites and pages in the Internet, the language books are still the primary source of information when it comes to grammar and language details.

From all the interesting books there, I picked the book A Guide to Old English by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson…

“§87 Like MnE, OE has two types of verbs — weak and strong. The weak verb forms its preterite and past participle by adding a dental suffix, the strong verb by changing its stem vowel; cf. MnE ‘laugh, laughed’  and ‘judge, judged’ with MnE ‘sing, sang, sung’. The strong verbs are nearly all survivals from OE; new verbs when made up or borrowed today join the weak conjugation. Thus the strong verb ‘drive, drove, driven’ survives from OE. When in the thirteenth century ‘strive’ was borrowed from the French, it followed the pattern of ‘drive’ because the two infinitives rhymed; hence we get MnE ‘strive, strove, striven’. But we conjugate the comparatively new verb ‘jive’, not ‘jive, jove, jiven’, but ‘jive, jived’, i.e. as a weak verb.”

New York, Maps, Languages

I visited New York a month ago or so.

New York City is home to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.
New York City is home to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.

What’s amazing is that your hear so many languages and people from different parts of the world there.

Not only are there tourists coming from all over the world, but a lot of people have found their home there. New York City is home, for instance, to the largest population of overseas Chinese outside of Asia.

I took the photo at the right in Chinatown, where you could hardly see any text in English.

While Chinatown is in the South-East of Manhattan Island, the largest concentration of Hispanics is in the north, as seen on the map.

Hispanic people in Manhattan Links:

Armenian, the Cradle of Indo-Europeans?

 

Typical Armenian terrain
Typical Armenian terrain

Despite the harshness of winter in most parts, the fertility of the Armenian plateau’s volcanic soil made Armenia one of the world’s earliest sites of agricultural activity. This is the reason that there have been many great civilizations there in the region.

Today the Armenians live there, surrounded by the Caucasus mountains. In Armenia they mostly speak Eastern Armenian. While Western Armenian was the language spoken on the Turkish side of the border and of many people living abroad in diaspora.

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language,

Read more:

PS: To conjugate some sample verbs in Armenian, install Verbix for Windows.

Caucasian Languages

I had one day off from the work and spent some time trying to find websites that I frequently visited 15 years ago. (Regarding this, see another blog post).

Caucasus Mountains, Dagestan, area where Lezgian languages are spoken
Caucasus Mountains, Dagestan, area where Lezgian languages are spoken

Finally I found my way to The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire. On that website I found my way to some minor languages spoken in the Caucasian Mountains. These Lezgian languages today struggle for their lives to survive and keep their own culture.

Read more:

European Languages 7000 Years Ago

After the latest ice age, Europe got free from the ice and the population could move to new areas from the refuges — or the inhabited areas during the ice age.

The language situation in Europe around 5500BC. IE = Indo-European languages, Bs = Basque languages, SU = Ugric languages
The language situation in Europe around 5500BC. IE = Indo-European languages, Bs = Basque languages, SU = Ugric languages

During this era Europe underwent the neolithic revolution, the time when people switched from hunter gathering to domestication. It is assumed that the Indo-Europeans brought the domestication to Europe and therefore won terrain over the other linguistic groups.

 

Union of Poland and Lithuania

I read in the newspaper about the history of the Ukrainian language, and how it become different from the Russian during the Polish-Lithuanian Union.

The nations of Europe in 1493
The nations of Europe in 1493

That reminded me that I had saved years ago some maps from a site called “Historical Atlas of Europe and the Middle East”. Unfortunately that site no more exists, it existed back in 1997.

Anyway, I post the map that I had in my mind.

… and more maps are found here.

Language Sites I Miss

I was cleaning my old PC from files that I downloaded years ago.

The main language groups of the Indo-European family of languages
The main language groups of the Indo-European family of languages

Guess what I found? Well, old files from The Indo-European Database website. I kept spending time on this site in the beginning of this millennium. The site that focused on Indo-European languages featured language overviews, linguistic maps, and much more.

Unfortunately this website no more exists.

 

Nordic Languages

My son yesterday brought a leaflet about Nordic languages, “Nordens språk”.

When reading this paper I just recalled how close to each other the Nordic languages are. We have been travelling in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. And in all those countries I have had no problem in making myself understood in Swedish variant that is spoken in Finland.

Old map with the Nordic countries
Old map with the Nordic countries

Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (in Sweden) — no problem in communicating with the people in Swedish there.

In the leaflet, I checked the verb ‘to forget’:

  • Swedish: glömma
  • Danish: glemme
  • Faroese: gloyma
  • Norwegian: glemme
  • Icelandic: gleyma
  • Finnish: unohtaa
  • Greenlandic: puigorpaa

Yes, the Finnish and Greenlandic differ from the other Nordic languages. They don’t belong to the Germanic language family.

 

 

Where Do They Speak, vol. 2

Almost three years ago I updated the a webpage that tells where a specific language is spoken.

This page ws called “Where on Earth Do They Speak…”. The page itself consists of a list of languages, and clicking the language name would show the location on map.

Now there’s a new page that lets the user zoom and pan the world and see what language(s) are spoken on an area of interest. This new Languages of the World page is available here: http://maps.verbix.com/languages.html

Links: