Dead And Endangered Languages

mishka   Monday, March 21, 2005, 06:47 GMT
Brennus,

Should we ask the professor why the Yiddish still exist, unabsorbed by more powerful and populous languages, but a language of some distant island people, that has not battled for the last 500 years is dying in rapid pace?
Mishka   Monday, March 21, 2005, 07:18 GMT
Dear Mishka,

Yiddish is on the endagered list. This is partly because of damage caused by the holocaust and partly because many of its speakers are simply being assimilated as in the case of New York where Yiddish and Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) were both vigorous languages as late as the 1930's but now have few speakers there.

I'm sure, that the same thing is happening in Moscow where either assimilation into the Russian population or emigration to Israel has reduced its speaking population. I recall seeing a number of Russian Jewish immigrants in Seattle in the 1980's reading newspapers not in Yiddish but in Russian even though they were published in New York.
Brennus   Monday, March 21, 2005, 07:27 GMT
endagered > endangered
greg   Monday, March 21, 2005, 09:39 GMT
A question about Yiddisch. This European language is akin to German (plus loanwords from Hebrew) and written in Hebraic alphabet. I’ve read there’s no graphic vowel as such in the alphabet used in Hebrew. Yet, the German vowel-system is copious. Do you know how Yiddischophones cope to write German vowels in Hebraic alphabet ? The same question would apply to Hebrew : I doubt there isn’t any vocalic phoneme in spite of the lack of graphic vowels.

I found another endangered language called Michif or Méchif or Méchif-Cree. Michif shares some ‘similarities’ with Yiddisch :
“About 500 Metis people in North Dakota and scattered locations in Canada still speak Michif, a unique French-Cree creole using French nouns, Cree verbs, and some local vocabulary borrowed from Indian languages like Ojibway or Dene. Unlike most creoles, Michif shows little if any grammatical simplification – the polysynthetic verb phrases of Cree are preserved in their full complexity. It's likely that Michif originated, not as a pidgin between Crees and Frenchmen trying to communicate with each other, but as a badge of identity and occasionally-necessary secret code among Metis raised in both languages (similar to Yiddisch in Europe). Most Michif speakers today are fluent in neither Cree nor French. Children are no longer learning Michif, leading linguists to class the language as "moribund" (headed for extinction), but there have been efforts to revive its use as a cultural language in some Metis communities. Once widely spoken, the language is endangered with under 1.000 native speakers reported in 1997”.
English <one> - Michif <an> - Cree <peyak> - French <un>
En <two> - Mi <deu> - Cr <nîso> - Fr <deux>
En <three> - Mi <trwa> - Cr <nisto> - Fr <trois>
En <four> - Mi <kat> - Cr <newo> - Fr <quatre>
En <five> - Mi <sank> - Cr <nîyânan> - Fr <cinq>
En <water> - Mi <lo> - Cr <nîpîy> - Fr <eau> (or <l’eau> = <the water>).
Travis   Monday, March 21, 2005, 10:11 GMT
greg, change in the modal system of spoken American English is primarily in the form of the addition of new modal phrases onto the old modal system, and at the same time effectively replacing some of the old modal verbs with new modal constructions in most usage. Note that in the writing below, I'm going to use the formal written equivalents to various modal constructions, in that I'm not going to mark their actual current pronunciation. For example, I'm going to write "have to" instead of "hafta" and "going to" rather than "gonna", because I'm not primarily concerned with pronunciation here and cliticization, but rather with primarily syntax and semantics.

Examples of "new" modal constructions, most of which most who have any significant contact with spoken American English will be quite used to, are:

"to have to" (which replaces "must" in most usage, but is less strong in its connotations)
"to be going to" (which replaces "shall" in the vast majority of informal usage)
"to have got to" (which also acts to replace "must")
"to be used to"
"used to"
"to be supposed to" (which indicates obligation, but that such obligation is not truly as critical as "must" would indicate)
"to need to" (which is yet another "must" replacement)
"to tend to"
"to seem to"

In addition, "to get" is used as an auxiliary verb for passive constructions alongside the standard "to be" used for such.

One note about these is that they're generally not spoken like they're written above, in that the word "to" at the end generally does not stay as an independent word, but rather merges with the preceding word phonologically (and probably grammatically as well, today, as illustrated by the case of "have to" being pronounced differently from "have two").

All together, these form a set of new modal phrases and quasi-modal verbs (such as in the case of "to have to" --> "to hafta") which partially add onto and partially supplant the old system of "will", "shall", "can", "may", "would", "should", "could", "might", "must", and so on, which is shared overall, with some variation, with other West Germanic languages. The supplantation is in the form of "shall" and "must" being generally deprecated except in rather limited circumstances, and being functionally replaced for most spoken usage with "to be going to" and "to have to" respectively.

In general, this is a set of major grammatical changes, except they do not seem particular major simply because most people, in the US, are used to using such things and hearing such things in everyday speech, even though such things are generally deprecated in formal writing as a whole. However, the fact that such things are deprecated in formal writing overall, but are extremely prevalent in spoken American English, help indicate the actual grammatical distance between the two.
greg   Monday, March 21, 2005, 18:09 GMT
Travis,

If grammar ‘accuracy’ was subject to elections and ballots were open to non-native speakers, I’d cast my vote for forms like <hafta> = [haefte] and <oughtta> = [ode] instead of <have to> and <ought to> respectively. The main ‘advantage’ would lie in the lexicalisation of a verbal periphrase, without losing the modality imparted. Still, using the 3rd person singular would be an irregularity since <hafta> = [haefte] should be replaced by ?<hazta> = [haezte] – a bit like in French [lwazo] = <the bird> = <l’oiseau> versus [lezwazo] = <the birds> = <les oiseaux>.

That was far from your point : syntax and semantics, not graphics nor phonetics.

Suppose there’s somebody called A who says : <Paul must drink much wine>
Graphic phenotype : <Paul must drink much wine> = sentence uttered by A
Semantic genotype : {Something requires that A thinks Paul drinks much wine} = meaning conveyed by A.

Now suppose A is saying : <Paul may drink much wine>
Graphic phenotype : <Paul may drink much wine>
Semantic genotype : {Nothing requires that A thinks Paul doesn’t drink much wine}.

The two sentences above involve epistemic modality : deduction in the former, possibility in the latter.

The problem with En <must> is that this modal verb may render non-epistemic modality as in <Paul must pay now> (obligation, not deduction). This kind of modality is called radical modality (or root modality).
Suppose A is saying : <Paul must pay now>
Graphic phenotype : <Paul must pay now>
Semantic genotype : {A thinks something requires Paul to pay now}.

The addition of the progressive form drives us back to epistemic modality :
Graphic phenotype : <Paul must be paying now>, A says
Semantic genotype : {Something requires that A thinks Paul is paying now}.

So the modal verb <must> can perform different functions. Do you think the North American use of <have to>, <have got to> and <need to> is ‘intended’ to differentiate the various modal acceptations of <must> ?
Travis   Monday, March 21, 2005, 18:45 GMT
As for the functioning of <hafta> (/h{ft@/ --> [h{ft@]) as a new modal verb, yes, it would be irregular, as it would have the form <hasta> (/h{st@/ --> [h{st@]) with a subject in the first person singular when in the present tense, and would have a simple past form of <hadta> (/h{dt@/ --> [h{:t@]). And yes, in practice, a lot of forms like this almost certainly act as single words, not as phrases like <have to> and <ought to> and like; at least, that's how it seems to be around here in actual speech.

Speaking about different forms replacing <must>, one main factor is that today in actual speech <must> seems to be regarded as too strong for most purposes, generally indicating strong necessity (and possibly strong obligation, depending on context), except when it is used in questions and some other rather specific cases. In comparison, forms like <have to> generally are not as strong, in comparison to <must>, overall, and hence is more likely to actually get used for most purposes.

Another factor is that <to have to>, <to have got to>, <to need to>, <to be supposed to>, and like do have slightly different senses, like you suggested, and thus act to serve different purposes which <must> itself cannot differentiate except by context. <to have to> is just a general purpose replacement for <must>, it seems, for most purposes, except that it isn't strong overall as <must>. However, the rest of the four vary in their meaning in ways that are often useful. For example, <to have got to> and <to need to> both strongly indicate necessity, but do not indicate much obligation of any particular sort. The two differ though, it seems, in that <to need to> indicates necessity more strongly connected with the subject of the clause in question than <to have got to>, but there could be more to it than just that. On the other hand, <to be supposed to> indicates obligation of one sort or another, but does not indicate much actual necessity per se, and in this way significantly differs from the other three <must> replacements above.
Brennus   Tuesday, March 22, 2005, 09:09 GMT
Yiddish does not have any of the German omlaut and umlaut sounds. Both Yiddish and Ladino leave out the vowel sounds when they are written in the Hebrew alphabet.
DJW   Thursday, March 24, 2005, 11:47 GMT
Polabian and Kashubian are/were in Poland, not Germany. At least in modern-day boundaries of Poland, even if some of that belonged to Germany at one time. Kashubian still has some speakers left! Don't write them off!!
Brennus   Thursday, March 24, 2005, 23:08 GMT
DJW,

Thanks for your reply. You are right that Kashubian was spoken in territory that is now Polish. Throughout history, Pomerania has gone back and forth between the Holy Roman Empire / Germany and Poland. There was also the independent kingdom of Wendtland in there for a while too. At the time the last Kashubian speaker died in 1913, Pomerania was still a province in the Kaiser's Germany. By that time, there were probably more ethnic Germans living there than Slavs but after World War II they were all deported as you probably know.

Polabian was spoken in north-central Germany within a stone's throw of Denmark and Sweden. It is the strangest of all the Slavic languages having numerous Low German and Dutch loan words as well as a Low German / Scandinavian-style sentence structure. It had even incorporated the German omlaut and umlaut sounds not found in any other Slavic languages as in Böze maxt "God's power" and dübro "good". It became extinct around 1750 and most of the information we have about it comes from one French linguist and one German linguist who studied it in the 1600's and wrote everything down that they could. Both of them apparently sensed that the language was dying out.

Sorbian is still spoken in some communites in eastern Germany. I think that was the Slavic language you were thinking about. It is midway between Czech and Polish. Many of it's speakers have gone over to German too and I recently saw an internet article on a German-American in Texas who later found out that his ancestry was really Sorbian and so now he's into eveything Sorbian instead. Another name for the Sorbs is the "Wends".
DJW   Friday, March 25, 2005, 04:17 GMT
Apparently it is non-PC to call them Sorbs or Wends. The preferred term is Lusatian. No I was not thinking of them. You said the last speaker of Kashubian died in 1913, but there are still a few thousands speakers left. See http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=Poland
Brennus   Friday, March 25, 2005, 05:28 GMT
DJW,

I think I found out where the probelem is.

Nationmaster.com says, in part: " Slovincian died out and was replaced by Low German at the turn of the 20th century...Slovincian was so closely related to Kashubian that it could be regarded as its dialect."

I glanced through a book on Kashubian many years ago and it said that the last speaker died in 1913. It probably did say that it was just the last speaker of the Slovincian dialect who died in that year and I didn't read the fine print. Anyhow, after 15 years I can't really remember.

Sometimes there is not total agreement on when a language becomes extinct. For example, most people accept the December 1777 death of Dolly Pentreath as the end of Cornish. However, a few people dispute this claiming that it may have had a few speakers left for an additional 10, 20, even 30 years. They base their belief partly on a comment by an English traveler to Cornwall in 1783 who wrote that met a young woman who told him that she knew of a man in a nearby village who could speak Cornish.
Brennus   Friday, March 25, 2005, 06:38 GMT
who wrote that HE met a young woman...
Kirk   Friday, March 25, 2005, 09:20 GMT
Travis, about your post concerning the degree US dialects are drifting apart--I agree that as a whole they're drifting further apart but it also fascinates me how at least in some ways it seems people are speaking more alike.

I'm from California and in my daily circle of acquaitances and friends I don't come into contact with that many non-Californians (my college is something like 95% Californians, undoubtedly because of the way cheaper tuition for in-state residents). But when I studied abroad last year I found myself in a program with 35+ other American college students from all over the country so it was really interesting listening to the way people varied and didn't vary in their speech.

I was actually surprised at (what I perceived to be) the relative homogeneity of everyone's speech--having studied phonetics and phonology I was usually aware of subtle sound differences that everyone had, but the only people whose speech consistently stood out to me were those who were advanced in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and one girl who was a native New Yorker.

Besides my somewhat more attuned ear, what was almost more interesting was observing popular perception regarding language issues in the group. Consensus amongst those in the program seemed to be that, besides small differences in vocabulary, everyone generally "spoke the same" except for the northern cities people and the New York girl. I myself am quite aware of technical details (especially relating to sounds) where my speech diverges from other dialects and was told by several people I had a California accent but in saying so most implied that it was still what they perceived as "normal." As far as I know I was never identified as "that guy with the accent" as was often used to refer to the northern cities and NY girl.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the social context had something to do with this perceived homogeneity...I'm guessing those who had grown up in areas with stigmatized dialects probably were more likely to be conscious of their origins and were more likely to adjust their speech accordingly. In fact, one of my friends, who was from Connecticut, told me she had learned to speak "normally" (her words) when she had first gone to college several states away and had been playfully mocked for her accent. By the time I knew her there were few obvious markings of her home variety, altho in a few instances it came out. Students from the south seemed most eager to downplay their origins, and I honestly didn't hear any features which fit into the national stereotype of "southern" speech (things like monophthongization of [aI] to [a]) in any of the students from the south, altho, once again, they could very possibly speak quite differently with their families at home.

Numerous linguistic studies done on American speech over the years have been showing emerging divergent trends, which I do believe are happening...however, I also do wonder to what degree people are becoming more similar in speech patterns, especially with the high degree of mobility in this country (a lot of people are really not "from anywhere", but have just spent several years of their lives in separate places).

My experience is just anecdotal and in no way scientific, but I think that even considering the possible masking of dialects people in my program may have grown up with, that can't account for everything. What's your take on this? Are people just getting better at emulating "General American" when the appropriate context arises or is something more deep-seated happening here? I can't seem to completely wrap my mind around the contradiction that based on the evidence I believe dialects are ultimately diverging, yet in a lot of ways they seem to becoming closer. Maybe it's a mix.
Travis   Friday, March 25, 2005, 10:37 GMT
One thing here is that the distinction that I was speaking of above doesn't seem to really be a regional one /within/ the US, but rather a "low" versus "high" one within North American English in general, in that the differences in question are less a matter of location within the US than between two different registers in parallel to each other. I really am not aware of the above changes in the modal system of American English being really particularly limited to any specific locales, but rather being a primarily register-linked matter overall.

For example, the "new" modal system does not seem to be used much in writing at all, informal writing like chatting aside, even though it is far more prevalent than the "old" modal system in speech, it at least seems here. The reason why this is more interesting than any old vowel system changes is that is not simple shifting of the vowels that are used, but rather basically the wholesale creation of new grammar, and partial replacement of old grammar. It is interesting also in that it also is an example of two different significantly different portions of grammar that are still maintained in parallel to each other, one in informal speech, the other in formal speech and writing. Hence it indicates significant grammatical separation between the "high" register and "low" register in North American English, as a whole. Furthermore, because these grammatical changes do not extend beyond North American English, they also indicate actual grammatical divergence of North American English as a whole from the rest of English, at the spoken language level.

As for what you're saying above, it does not seem like there is any movement /towards/ any kind of "General American" here in Wisconsin. If anything, the "high" register here seems very close to such in the first place, with just some phonological differences and like (/aI/ becoming [@I] before /r/, /o/ being [o] rather than [O] before /r/, and so on). Note that the differences between "low" and "high" forms here seem to be more a matter of grammar, cliticization, elision, and so on, rather than simply being primarily a matter of how various vowels are pronounced and like. Anyways, people from here at the same time do not seem to speak using "high" forms most of the time. Rather, it appears that the same "low" speech forms seem to be used at home, with friends, at school, and at work here, and that there seems to be very little codeswitching in speech here, for the most part, and excluding the use of different forms in writing than in speech. In general, the "high" forms are more a spoken representation of writing here, for most purposes, and really are not used in most speech in general here in the first place.

I myself at least find it rather tiring to have to speak using "high" forms for any extended period of time, and I generally speak far faster when using "low" forms than "high" forms, partially because such requires "turning off" cliticization, elision, and assimilation which normally occurs in my speech overall, as well as making sure to replace various words that differ at times in "low" speech forms from their "high" forms with their "high" versions (for example, "probably" being /prAb@bli/ rather than /prAli/, "yesterday" being /jEstr=de/ rather than /jEStSr=de/, and so on). Hence I tend to avoid speaking using "high" forms except with non-native speakers of English, who I don't necessarily expect to understand (simply due to not necessarily having been taught about such in detail, and to not necessarily being used to the particular manner in which such happen in the dialect here) that [dj{:vE~ITI~ND{?j@wU~?wO~?mit@teIk] (vowel nasalization matters here, packing there separate words into a single syllable is not uncommon either; also mind you that those glottal stops there may not be very clear there as glottal stops go, either, as they may just happen to sort of disappear at some point along the way) to mean "do you have anything that you would not want me to take?", for example. (No wonder people say American English sounds like French...)

But anyways, I cannot say anything really about any parts of the US except for Wisconsin, besides from what I have read, as I really have not lived anywhere besides Wisconsin. However, at least for the English spoken here, there seems to be no impetus at all for any kind of movement /towards/ some kind of "General American". Here, it seems like such is identified less as either someone else's dialect, *or* as some kind of "accentless" dialect, and more it seems to be in the position of basically the formal spoken form, some slight phonological differences aside, right here. It is effectively just the spoken analogue of written American English, here. But being in the social position of being the formal spoken form of American English, it is thus opposed with the informal spoken forms which most people here actually speak on an everyday basis, which would be likely to actually provide an impetus /away/ from rather than /towards/ it, as being overly formal seems to be often avoided on a social level, at least here.

On another note, the informal spoken form used here does have the social effect of marking where one is from, that is, for example, whether one is from southern Wisconsin or not, and then, whether one is from the Milwaukee area. For example, it's been made clear that if one is from the Milwaukee area, one /specifically/ does not pronounce the "l" in the word "Milwaukee", and often the "i" is dropped as well, making the word start with a /mw/ consonant cluster. As a result, such differences in speech may very easily become associated with identification with various areas, and with separating people from Wisconsin from people who are not from it (Wisconsin is actually rather insular as a society, overall), and thus this is likely to actually help reinforce differences in speech patterns, as a whole, rather than cause them to converge on some center point.