Date: 2008-11-25 21:52 Subject: GIP: Linguistics geekery! Security: Public Tags: linguistics geekery

Here's something that's been missing from my blog so far: a linguistics geekery icon. It took me two evenings to put together, and was sufficiently interesting doing so that I think I'm going to blog about it here. [Now edited to add Mycenaean Greek.]

The first of the scripts in the animation—all of which mean the same thing—is the Wadi el-Hol script, the oldest known exemplar of our alphabet's ancestors. It was written ca. 1800 BCE in Middle Egypt, and consists of a small subset of the Egyptian hieratic characters, which were used to represent the first sound of their names in the Semitic language of the writers. Hence the first character of my text is aleph (to give it its name in Biblical Hebrew), meaning ox, the second hillul, celebration, the third beth, house, and so forth. By switching from using thousands of hieroglyphic characters to just twenty-something letters, the writers were laying the foundations for mass literacy, and later scripts including (but not limited to) Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Ge'ez (Ethiopian) and Cyrillic.

Transcribed into modern Hebrew characters, my text reads אהבת לשנת—actually almost disappointly similar to modern Hebrew: this short phrase doesn't demonstrate many of the differences between Proto-Semitic and Biblical Hebrew. It would have—probably—been pronounced ahabat liʃānāt. (I'm not an expert on Semitic languages of this period, but from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Wikipedia and the relevant etymologies in Klein's Comprehensive Etymologyical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, I think I've got this right.)

A thousand years later, the characters in the first text had become streamlined from pictures into abstract signs. My second text is Hebrew, written in the Palaeo-Hebrew script; it would have been written this way in about the tenth century BCE before matres lectionis (consonants written to indicate the presence of vowels) had taken off. Or maybe it's Canaanite, not Hebrew. In modern characters, it's the same as the previous text, but would have been pronounced: ahăvaθ lŏʃɔnɔθ. The splitting of ב into ב (/v/) and בּ (/b/), ת into ת (/θ/) and תּ (/t/), and likewise for כ, ד, ג and פ is apparently unique within the Semitic languages to the Canaanite subfamily (Hebrew, Phoenician/Punic, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite).

During the Babylonian Exile, the Jews ditched the original Hebrew Script for the Assyrian Script still used for Hebrew today. My third text, אַהֲבַת לְשֹׁנֹת , features matres lectionis, and would be pronounced ahavas ləʃaʊnaʊs by me, and ahavat ləʃɔnɔt by most of my Hebrew-literate readers.

The Phoenicians carried the Palaeo-Hebrew script all over the Mediterreanean, and introduced it to the Greeks, under whom the forms of the letters continued to evolve. They in turn brought it to the countries they colonised, including Etruria (in Italy), where the Etruscans learned it from them, and then the Romans from the Etruscans.

My first text on the second screen is archaic Latin, written in an Old Italic script. (Actually, the early Romans wrote boustrophedonically, so maybe I should have had that text go from right to left.) It reads AMŌS DINGUASŌM, though it uses a C instead of a G, because the letter G hadn't been invented yet. (The third letter of the alphabet used to have a G sound, but as that sound was lacking in Etruscan, the Romans inherited an alphabet with no letter for G.) Note also that the letter U then looked like a Y: in many ancient languages, from Greek to Old English, and some modern ones, like Swedish, the letter Y has the value /ü/.

Dingua, meaning "language", is actually cognate to English "tongue". (I didn't realise this before I looked up the archaic form of Classical Latin lingua for this icon; it's not obvious because of the consonant change in Latin.) I think that's a cool little fact.

The second text on the second screen is the same text in Classical Latin: AMOR LINGUĀRUM—intervocalic and final S in archaic Latin becoming R, and -os, -om becoming -us, -um. I wrote this text in capitals, because Roman lower case is all bar unreadable to our eyes.

The final text on the second screen is of course French: the result of Vulgar Latin getting worn down over the years, then mangled, corrupted and mispronounced by a bunch of invading Germans.

The first text on the third screen gives the phrase in Mycenaean Greek (for which, thanks to rochvelleth), written in Linear B, the script the Bronze-Age Greeks used, three thousand years ago. Linear B is an adaptation of Linear A, the script used to represent the Minoan language, and hopelessly unsuited to Greek: the text, which is glōssōn kharis, ends up represented as ko-ro-to-no ka-ri. (A similar mangling of language happened in the Middle East, where the cuneiform invented for representing Sumerian was shoehorned into representing Semitic languages too.)

Following the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation, Greece entered a dark age so severe they even lost the art of writing. When they took writing back up centuries later, it was with a derivative of the Phoenician script. The second text shows the form of the phrase in Homeric Greek—hē glōsseōn kharis—using characters from the Dipylon inscription—one of the oldest inscriptions in the Greek alphabet, dating from not long after Homer himself, and is written from right to left.

The third text on the third screen shows the phrase in two different dialects of Ancient Greek (hē glōsséōn kháris in Ionic, and hē glṓttōn kháris in Attic); it also shows the form (hē glṓssōn kháris) in the Koine: the lowest-common-denominator language which, according to Wikipedia, arose amongst the soldiers of Alexander the Great's army, and is best known for being the language of the New Testament. (Thanks to darcydodo for helping me out with these.) The Ionic form is in fact the same as the Homeric one, but since Homer's time, the alphabet had changed, with new letters (Ω and η here), and diacritic marks.

The fourth screen is of course English, starting with Old English: lufu sprǣca. Medial and final F in Old English was vocalised to /v/ (in the same way medial and final S in both Old and modern English are pronounced /z/), so the first word would be pronounced /luvu/. The second word of course literally means "of ways of speaking" rather than "of languages"; I'm not entirely sure why the R later dropped out of the word.

I took the letters for this from a first-millennium manuscript written in Insular Script: the form of the letters used in the British Isles. I'm not 100% certain I've got this right: Old English, unlike Modern English, was highly inflected, and I attempted to reconstruct my phrase with the aid only of Wikipedia!

The second text is Middle English. I took the letters for this one from a manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Indeed, I took the dialect of Middle English from Chaucer too: It was the success of Caxton's printing of the Canterbury Tales, and his concious choosing of forms in this dialect that led to it becoming the one which evolved into modern English.

The final text, is, of course, Modern English. According to the Jargon File, "geek" originally referred to a carnival performer who bit the heads off chickens. Neal Stephenson evidently buys into this, when he uses this meaning in one of his Baroque Cycle books, as does Wikipedia; however I can't find the word in my first edition big OED.