General Language Thread

Wikipedia says that "Zantar" was one of the names that Burroughs had considered for the character before eventually settling on "Tarzan", though.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 29th 2023 at 2:33:50 PM

Yep! After discarding the option, Burroughs might have decided to at least use it as the basis for an example of Mangani.

I did something similar for one of my own fantasy settings, though it wasn't really a full conlang - all the main characters were from the matriarchal culture, so it was mostly a translation convention with some extra rules like "all nouns for people are default-feminine unless they have a masculinising suffix, e.g. actor (f) vs actrid (m)".

The detail I was most pleased with myself for was that their demonym for the nearest patriarchy, who called themselves the Rephir, was based on the latter's feminine form "Tuarephir" due to a cultural misunderstanding. By the time anyone realised there was a mistake, it had already become the established term, and the only people with any interest in correcting themselves were diplomats, merchants, and pedants.

I see. Where was that revealed, incidentally?

And regarding my actual question, is there really no existing trope that could apply to this seemingly arbitrary assigning of human-pronounceable phonemes as representations of a language's unpronounceable phonemes?

I don't know which Burroughs book was the primary source, but Philip José Farmer referred to it in Tarzan Alive! And I'm unsure if this site has the precise sort of trope you're describing, but Starfish Language might point the way to some works that tackle it.

I did look up Starfish Language; the only example I could find that more or less qualifies is the Star Wars Legends entry for the Ssi-Ruuk language, and I couldn't find any useful results for that when I googled it.

I made flota as a New Latin neologism meaning "fleet", derived via comparing the various major Romance languages' words for "fleet" that were all derivations of said English word's Germanic root^* French flotte, Italian flotta, Portuguese frota, and Spanish flota. Is there a term for this? It's basically an inversion of the usual process of morphological change that many words undergo when a parent language gives way to a child language.

Edited by MarqFJA on Jul 21st 2023 at 4:07:35 PM

According to Google Translate, Latin already has a word for fleet - classis.

But to your question, I don't see that being terribly distinct from a loanword.

Speaking of neologisms, I want to ask if anyone is versed enough in Sanskrit to convert the names of the Vasu into prefixes?

Alas no.

On another note, I was very confused when I learned that a sleeveless undershirt was called a "wife beater" in English. Turns out the name as an… interesting history.

now I'm starting to wonder if Hank Pym was wearing a wife beater while being a wife beater...

EDIT turns out he was in costume at the time of the infamous incident. nvm

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 5th 2023 at 7:52:23 AM

This might be old news but I think these are pretty big news.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has made a new finding in regards to the origin of the indo-european languages.

Previously, it was thought that the oldest ancestor of the indo-european languages came from the steppes of Ukraine around 6000 years ago, but newer research shows that the possible oldest ancestor might have been in the farming communities of the Caucasus around 9000 years ago.

So the new theory goes that from this older ancestor, one branch would have migrated towards the Pontic steppes and this branch would have been the one that spawned the various languages of Europe and of the Tocharians while other branches would have created the other lines like Greek, Armenian or Iranic.

So a north-south split, huh.

Honestly, I can't help but be reminded a bit of the story of Noah and how the Ark supposedly rested on the mountains of Ararat/Armenia before his sons migrated across the world.

Considering just how diverse the linguistics of the Caucasus regions are, it wouldn't surprise me if it was a nursery for many of the other big language families of the world.

I wouldn't get too excited yet, there's been papers pushing PIE's origins between Anatolia and the Black Sea Steppe and Georgia for decades.

I thought it came from Central or Southern Asia? Did I confuse it with something else?

Very interesting article! Of course, though, genetic descent & language transmission are often correlated, but not always—conquered foreigners pick up a conqueror's language, migrating ethnic groups lose their language and get absorbed by the locals, and so on.

The Caucasus theory has come up more than once before ... but a lot of past competing PIE origin theories have involved linguists who had nationalist axes to grind.

We have dyad, triad, tetrad, pentad, etc. for groups of things that reach certain numbers (2, 3, 4 and 5 respectively for the aforementioned examples). I curiously can't find any such word for a group of twenty, though. Does anyone know? Or does it not exist in the first place?

That's an ikosad in Greek. From Ikosi/Eikosi. You can see it in ikosahedron too!

In english-greek, that would be icosahedron, of course.

I was amused when I remembered the film Alexander (I think?) where in one scene you had a map of the Greek world with the regions’ names written in English with angular Latin letters. Like, you’re not even trying, guys.

Seems like "ikosad" hasn't entered the English lexicon yet. That's unfortunate.

TIL that there was a Latin/Romance dialect spoken in Roman North Africa that persisted through the Muslim conquest and was spoken up till the 12th century, possibly as late as the 14th-15th. It remained as an administrative language for some time before being displaced by Arabic: the linked article mentions 7th century Umayyad coinage bearing the shahada written in Latin. And a good number of Latin loanwords still survive today in Maghrebi Arabic, Tamazight and Maltese, with roots that predate later bouts of colonialism by Romance-speaking Spain and France.

The dinar is also the unit of currency in several west Asian and north African countries. It's derived from the Roman denarius.