Science > Linguistics
English language
D:
This is a fascinating thread!
My mother language is Farsi but I learned English at a very early age, so English has become almost second nature to me. I think in English (most of the time) I only write in English. I kind of forgot how to write Farsi over the years, because when I moved to Canada I chose to forget Farsi in order to 'make room' for English. I kind of regret it now... and would one day like to perhaps learn it again. I do speak Farsi, though somewhat broken. I can understand it VERY well, but I can't speak it as well as I understand it. Like Laura, I have to think about what I'm going to say first in English- then translate it in my head in Farsi and communicate.
One thing I've always found quite funny/interesting is the translation of certain things from Farsi to English that are conveyed in one or two words, express an entire sentence in English. For example: the saying "jat khali"
jat (informal) = your place jaye shoma (formal)= your place
khali = empty (formal/informal)
Let's say a few people are going out and and they invite one of their friend (Timmy) to come with them. But Timmy can't go, so they go without him. Later they are talking to Timmy after the event, and Timmy asks so how was it? And the answer comes, "it was fun, your place was empty." Meaning you were missed and everyone thought about you the entire time there.
That line of thought is expressed SO well in Farsi using those 2 simple words. But in English it makes no sense at all!
I've been trying to learn Japanese and I must say it's pretty easy for me to pick it up, but I can't imagine ever learning German even though German has very close sounds to Farsi, particularly the kh sound. But maybe that's because I just really love the Japanese language. Japanese also has a lot of similarities to Farsi. An example being that in Japanese you have both formal and informal way of speaking, and just like in Farsi- you're taught the formal first, and informal second.
ps: Writing about how things sound is hard :nuts:
thorbiorn:
--- Quote from: Laura on December 02, 2010, 06:52:24 PM ---For me, English is actually a super interesting language because it is a hybrid and we have information about its hybridization available to us. Many other languages are hybrids also, but far in the past and we have lost the clues. We can learn how these things occur organically by tracking what happens with English.
What is also interesting is that there is a very old language that is still spoken that is almost identical to English: Frisian.
Explain that.
--- End quote ---
Taking a look at _http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_European_history there are a long series of historic maps from different sources. A few give one ideas as how to explain a link between the English and the Frisian language:
The first map is imported from the German Wikipedia:
--- Quote ---Map shows the migrations in Europa from 200 till 500 AD
--- End quote ---
The area from where the Anglos came on the continent was a part of Denmark until 1864. It is called Schleswig-Holstein, and is today the northern most part of Germany. For an outline map: _http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schleswig-Holstein
There are various sources used for the next artwork which one can find on _http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Invasions_of_the_Roman_Empire_1.png The main difference from the other maps is that the Jutes, another Germanic tribe, invaded Britain at the same time as the Anglos and the Saxons.
The last is a presentation of what Europe might have looked like in 526 AD, I included it because one can see where the Frisians are and one can also see that the Anglos and Saxons control most of what is know as England, that is leaving aside Scotland and Wales.
--- Quote ---This image is a part of a map from the map collection of the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) of the University of Texas at Austin.
--- End quote ---
So if Frisian language is similar to English it can be explained by people from Frisland having remnants of the language that was spoken by the Anglos, the Saxons or the Jutes and that somehow the Anglos etc. who moved from the continent gained so much influence in Britain that their language became a strong influence in the hybrid language we today know as English, or should we really say Anglish?
TheFetch:
Long time reader at SOTT - recommended site in my world view. I miss the old format headlines though...
English is indeed a fascinating study.
From my perception, English is a deeply Qaballistic language and should be viewed and studied as such. The idea of fusing letters to numbers to sounds enables for the transmission of esoteric "truths" to be silently carried to the four corners without having to encode such truths into stone - which may be destroyed with time or through planned destructions or plain ignorance. Remember the "giant Budda" that was blown up by the "Taliban"?
It is clear (to me) that English is a hyper-dimensional binary code set into sound and shape (the letters and their phonetic relations). Letters have meanings, archetypes, gender orientations, and so forth.
What is missing in the historical puzzle is the influence of Secret Societies on the language.
Just a simple analysis of the Letters reveals precise patterns based on a most important constant - PI.
The Letters are divided into asymmetrical and symmetrical design.
The asymmetrical letters of "BCDEFG", for instance, are mirrored against an equal 6 digit letter string of symmetrical letters "TUVWXY". These are clues to the larger esoteric construction and design.
When we pair these Letters, we reveal PI.
JKL = 3
M
N = 1
O
PQRS = 4
TUVWXY
Z = 1
A
BCDEFG = 6
HI
This is a clear and rational pattern.
JKL N PQRS Z BCDEFG = 3.1416
Words have, then, esoteric constructions that further support the design. Some schools of Freemasonry posited the idea of "The Pi Proportion", a way of encoding Pi into words via astronomic observation.
Words are esoteric cryptograms - not based on Phi as Eisen posited in his word English Qabalah, but rather, Pi.
For instance, if we view the Letter D, we can trace the phonetic back equally to Egypt, which showed the phonetic "t" as being as the Letter D rolled 90 degrees to the left. This is the SUN as it appears on the horizon.
HORIZON, then, becomes a form of esoteric cryptogram, or code.
H is as the Greek Letter Pi
ORIZ = ZIRO = ZERO
ON = ON(E)
The word HORIZON has an esoteric construction of "I, the Greek Letter Pi, am comprised of the Zero and the One".
IMO, English comes to life when one applies Hermetic and Qaballistic insights into the design
Gandalf:
Hi TheFetch,
Welcome to our forum. :)
We recommend all new members to post an introduction in the Newbies section telling us a bit about themselves, how they found the cass material, and how much of the work here they have read.
You can have a look through that board to see how others have done it.
Graalsword:
This article appears linked here --
_http://www.livescience.com/5342-oldest-english-words-revealed.html
Oldest English Words Revealed?
--- Quote ---A game of Scrabble might not have been all that different in Stone Age times.
Using a computer simulation, a British researcher says he's examined the rate of change of words in languages to reveal the oldest English-sounding words, which would have been used by Stone Age humans 20,000 years ago.
Among the Stone Age words that presumably would've sounded then much like they do now in the English language: I, we, two and three.
The study concludes that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones. While it cannot necessary predict exactly what words were used 20,000 years ago — there's little to go on, since writing was invented only about 5,000 years ago — it makes some interesting guesses.
"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, in a BBC article. "We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language."
The ability to speak arose about 300,000 years ago, scientists think, thanks to a pair of anatomical changes that separate humans from other primates: the development of the hyoid bone, which supports the tongue, and a drop in the larynx that made it easier to choke but also easier to speak.
The computer program's reasoning, arguably speculative, predicts words that will eventually become extinct too, because they are changing rapidly nowadays: squeeze, guts, stick and bad.
"You type in a date in the past or in the future and it will give you a list of words that would have changed going back in time or will change going into the future," Professor Pagel told BBC News.
Pagel thinks some of the simple words (like the first list above) involve sounds that may have been in use 40,000 years ago.
For the record, the most common five words used in English today, according to "The Reading Teachers Book of Lists": the, of, and, a, to.
--- End quote ---
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