Carme Jiménez Huertas on Language

how language "emerged"
Will take a look. There's something called "emergent properties" in complex system studies. You probably know that - when you combine different elements, new non-linear properties emerge. One example I can think of was a friend who was quite tame when we were in a group of 3-4 people. But then there was a threshold, when 6+ people joined the group or party he started to go wild and in most people's experience, quite unpleasant:lol2:

Anyways,this term from the C's may not just be quite descriptive, but also a big clue.

See what you think:

Hah! I remember reading this thread, but can't remember anything that connected in this specific way. That got me quite curious! will take another look at it.

I would like to recommend another book: "Cognitive Semantics", by Langacker
Keep'em coming! Out of lack of discernment from my part, I rarely read academic linguistic stuff. Had a hard time simming through the more-of-the-same content. That makes me extra glad you're recommending it. Creating such discernment will be very helpful to unveil so many mysteries.

Yogananda says there's a practice in Bharat ("Indian") tradition called Shabda Yoga. He describes it in words as "he who follows language to its very origin, will find God". I feel we're onto something.

Thank again! I'm overjoyed I can even talk to somebody about all this:clap:
 
1) the existence of elfdalian (a germanic lgg with 4 cases in the middle of Sweden)
2) the persistence of some languages such as Basque and Maltese
about Basque: why was this the only pre-aryan language to remain in Europe? How come it wasn't crushed in colonizing efforts?
For Maltese, similar question. How come 800 years of European rule were fine with speaking Arabic in the island to this day?

For elfdalian, it may also be a case of "persistence", I think. There are several examples of "older versions" of languages that for some reason, resist change. My guess is that it has to do with a) the frequency of the territory, b) the genetics of the speakers, and more generally for other phenomena, c) some link to the information field, d) the way speakers' antennae (DNA) are configured to perceive and interact with reality, e) each group's "lesson profile", f) how symbols (phonemes and graphemes) are a 3D representation of something much more complex at 4D, and much more. But I have no proof. :whistle:

3) the extremely effective linguistic-imperial measures in Brazil.

That is, how come they can make a region the size of Europe have 99+% of whole people speak a single language? As far as I know, this is unique in the world today, as for example Russian has its many Federations inside it, and 25% of the US pop learns Castillian as first language. Maybe China could be similar, proportionally.

I don't know, but in Brazil, there are also Amazonian tribes like the Piraha, who have resisted linguistic change for centuries. Sure, it's still maybe the 1%, but the 99% is not that unusual in that region. Look at Argentina, Bolivia, Chili, etc. In most of those countries, it's also a 95-99% "takeover", just that it's Spanish.

And Russia is also different, in that it's the only country in the world (to my knowledge) where in spite of the vast territory, the phonemic system and prosody are practically the same. There are minimal regional differences, but much less important (and not "imposed by the government") than in other places. That to me speaks of a natural national unity that we don't have in the West, for example.

China, I'd say is different still. There are MANY languages and pronunciations. They are all united by written Mandarin, but the spoken languages are different in many regions.

4) How did the Brazilians stop speaking the "lingua geral", the indinginous-portuguese mix that's supposed to have lived from the inception of the colony until 1850 here. Supposdely, this Marquis of pombal guy decreed people should speak portuguese, and in 50 years it was said and done in a millions, million and million of square kilometers of a country.

I don't know enough about it, but from what I heard, the "lingua geral" was more like a pidgin. If that's the case, then pidgins are fragile, only used as vernaculars, but never a mother tongue, never fully formed, etc. In that case, with the imposition of Portuguese as the official language, I can imagine its disappearance.

5) If analytical languages could have a different origin as fusional ones, then why are the pronouns usually quite flexional as well? Most romance cases have at least 4 cases in their pronouns (Cast.: el (nom.), lo (acc.), le (dat.), su (gen.))

I think here you get into "cognitive grammar". Sometimes the subtle differences are important enough (like with pronouns) as to resist change, and be more complex because of the way our minds structure the world. Pronouns are VERY "personal" (duh!:lol:) They have to do with our identity, and basic ways of relating to the world (that's why the gender-neutral nonsense is a bad sign of the times!)

And why some aryan languages have up to 10 cases, and some have only 4?

No idea, but I keep coming back to the "different way of reading and interacting with reality".

Btw, is it a sort of threshold? I don't know about an Aryan langauge that has one 3 cases. It's either 1/2, or 4+

Pretty sure Romanian has 3.

6) I saw the thread here about the cognates in Basque, Etruscan, Minoan. If that's correct, its speaks for itself

Maybe... or maybe it has something to do with Phonosemantics too ?

7) Why Brazilian Romance especially analytical? probably the most I know. Even if we write in a more flexional matter, we don't speak like that. In Southern urban areas, the less educated somebody is, the more analyitcal they speak. In Northern areas, sometimes it's actually the opposite.

Interesting. Can you give an example of the difference?

8) Why is Br romance so different from portuguese romance? There are syntactical constructions that are just mutually impossible. And it's easy to hear how they sound different. How come there's not a single place in Br that people speak like portuguese do? How come there's not a single place in portugal that hey speak like Br do?

That's not uncommon for ancient colonies, I think. Have you tried comparing Brazilian Portuguese with the portuguese of the time of the conquest? In Spanish, for example, you can see similarities between texts from the 12th century, and modern castillian in South America. It's details, but it says something about how colonies preserve the original language (perhaps because it was learnt as a second language and made official), than the colonizers themselves.

9) How come there's not A SINGLE place in Br that people speak an African language? It has only been preserved liturgically. I suppose this same question applies to all nations with high level of ex-slave populations.

Yeps. It depends on the degree of assimilation, I think.

10) Why were the languages chosen for writing usually fusional instead of analytical?

Hmm, I don't know if that's a rule or not. Isn't Hebrew more analytical? And we'd have to see about other regions too. Most often it's just the script that it's taken (like devanagari, Arabic, etc.), rather than the whole language, I think.

11) Why was the chronology (according to mainstream academia) usually 700 hundred years from a language starting being written and then "becoming" more analytical?

Because they have the whole History wrong? I don't know.

12) Bulgarian, Macedonian and Romanian share 3 genders (different from other romance language, similar to other Slavic), and a noun in the end of the word. They're neighbors.

Yes, there are many groupings like that, that to me are a clue of "the frequency of the territory", among other things. Spanish, Italian, Basque and Greek could make up a "family" if you took only their phonemic systems, for example. Yet, they are "unrelated".

13) How come the word for Mother and Father is so similar around the globe? It's not just Ma and pa, it's also Anna and Atta. I'd have to look it up, but from the top of my head, almost 80% of all langauges have a word from Mother that's either Ma or Anna (or slight variations), and for Father pa or Atta (or slight variations).

I think Magnus and Abehsera get the closest to the answer. Something in the sounds reflect the concepts. And when there are exceptions, the concepts themselves are different.

14) How come different languages from supposedly differing branches have N meaning negation? That's the case of Tokyonese ("Japanese"), Tupi (pre-colombian people in S. America), Aryan Languages, and in Hungarian if I'm not mistaken. I think there are more, that I don't remember.

Again, phonosemantics, I think.

15) English. Oooooh English. Well, let's open that padonra's box.

First, the pronunciation. It's the only language I know people can't say /e/ and /o/ and /u/ straight, they have to say /ey/ or /ow/ or /uw/
the /r/ is not only retroflex, but it doesn't touch the palate and it's rounded (!?)
at the same time, it has lots of vowels. It's a combination I've never seen of many vowel, but not being able to pronounce some very common vowels, but being able to pronounce uncommon ones.

the phonetics in the end become quite... windy. Speaking English feels like you're taking winds and turns. Very different from speaking Castillian for example.

[...]

The magic of sounds... The language families would be a lot different if languages were distributed according to their sound systems.

But I don't think that English is THAT unusual in that sense. Other languages use lots of diphtongs too, like Mandarin. What is a bit strange is that English is the least Germanic of all Germanic languages, given its pronunciation and grammar.

It has 50% of vocab from latin-romance-greek origins. that's similar to Maltese... but Maltese having about 50% European vocab... but they are a tiny island under Euro rule for 800 years!
It has very simple verb conjugation. Only Scandinavian langauges are simpler in that regard, that I know.

It supposedly borrowed prounouns (!) and 'to be' conjugations (!!?) from old nordic. So it was 'thou bist', and then become 'thou art'... and until some time ago, or even today, in some small enclaves in England, people still spoke not only 'thou', but 'thou bist' (????!!!!!)

I can't remember the points exactly, but I find it also easy to see that English is a lot more similar in grammar to Scandinavian languages than the West Germanic ones.

Buuut at the same time, (I don't remember the specifics for this one either), there's a lot of core vocab that's typical West Germanic.

And like many other languages, it's supposed to have undergone revolutionary change in, what, 100 years or something? Great vowel shift, grammatical changes, etc... and then stay almost the same for 800 years.

English seems to simply fly on the face of all mainstream academia says how languages evolve.

Yes. And the percentages or this or that in vocabulary are just guesses, remember.

16) Irish is supposed to have a lot of commonalities with Hebrew
17) Old Irish is supposed to have many idiosyncrasies, which I don't remember now, that some researchers say that it's clearly not even an Aryan language.

Yes. Well, what you are listing, is "exceptions" that conform the rule, I think. The idea that languages are so similar is a bit of a generalization, I think. The exceptions and the mixing and matching of characteristics across families are far more common, OSIT.

18) What the heck happened to phonetics in French? The grammar stayed pretty much the same as the neighboring romance languages, but the sounds changed quite a lot, and made so many words much shorter

Altair already responded, and I would add the "frequency of the territory" as a possibility too.

19) French spelling is of course not very transparent, and if you read for example Fulcanelli's work, he hints that this is very much on purpose, for both STO and STS reasons

I don't know about that. The same is said about Hebrew, but is it true? Some people try to find a "magikal" meaning when the causes could be more mundane (like imitating Latin spelling to sound cultured).

20) How come Castillian is quite similar in the whole Latin America? Maybe even generally more similar between countries, than Br Romance is between different states.

Some of the answers above may give you some ideas about this one.

21) How come there are not MORE enclaves of languages like Elfdalian, Basque and Maltese?

Well, it depends on how you define enclaves. Cypriot could be one, in the sense that the language is extremely resistant, in spite of years of occupation by everyone except for the speakers of the language they adopted (Greek). Maybe Cornish too, although I think it was "resuscitated". Dogon in Africa is also an interesting "enclave".

22) How come does Faroese share only SOME linguistic innovations with Icelandic? (such as the sounds of a double "LL", which is a rare one, but not the /ski/ becoming [shi], such "ski" become "shi")

Same questions as above. Phonosemantics, territory, etc. Maybe even chunks of history that would link them more together but that is not known at the moment.

23) Why is Faroese and Danish so... unclear when spoken? I read a Danish guy saying that they themselves don't know how they can understand each other, considering how unclear some phonemes are (such as their version of "th" which sounds almost exactly like /l/), and how much they just mumble when they speak. Many ending syllable in Faroese become just mmrrhhmrhrm

I don't know about Faroese, but I speak a little Danish and lived there, and it was perfectly clear. They DO have more vowels than others, the glottal stop, and very "lazy" consonants like the "d/th". But it's nothing too unusual.

I don't know that any of this can help, they are just my thoughts from the little I know. But I would recommend digging into one anomaly after the other more deeply, and that will problably provide you with clues for the others. At least, that is how I approach it, or else, the whole things is too much of a mess to be untangled.
 
Out of lack of discernment from my part, I rarely read academic linguistic stuff. Had a hard time simming through the more-of-the-same content. That makes me extra glad you're recommending it. Creating such discernment will be very helpful to unveil so many mysteries.

Great! But in that case, you may want to start with the one I recommended here (Metaphors we live by), and THEN read "Cognitive Grammar", because that one is a lot denser. All the others I listed are not super dense nor academic, so have fun!
 
1) “to have” as the most common aux. verb for composite past sentences. Some use “to have” and “to be”, such as French and German. AND almost always, when French used one of the aux., German uses the same. This must the case to many other lggs as well.

I have done
Ich habe getan
Je ai fait

I have gone
Ich bin gegangen
Je suis allé

Pretty "funny", eh? So much for being such different branches, when Spanish differs much more from French in this case, by NOT using "to be".

2) Use of aux. verb to indicate necessity. “I must do this”. What’s the big deal about this one? Well, see how different it is in Tokyonese:

“Watashi wa kore o shinakereba narimasen”
Transliteration: I this not do doesn’t develop
Half-way translation: Me not doing this isn’t good
Semantic translation: I must do this

They use this double negation in many different forms to indicate necessity. But they don’t have an aux. verb. As Aryans languages do.

In Chinese, they also have auxiliary verbs. So, again, the families overlap depending on which point of phonology, syntax, semantics, etc you analyze.

It is truly remarkable that so many lggs decided to leap! And then at the same time, to the same place!

Yeps. Now, I also read an interesting take in Harper's The History of Britain Revealed: the possibility that what we see now in terms of linguistic locations, is what WAS back then too. As in, each of the languages spoken now in each territory, was already spoken during Roman times. I think it is possible in many cases, because change is so slow. The problem is that, we still have the isue of not knowing how far back to go before there IS a change in the linguistic landscape.

(Btw, you may like his book. The problem is that he doesn't cite any single source, and is pretty angry with the Academia to the point where he rejects everything it says. BUT, he exposes pretty much the same problem as Huerta and Cortez did, except that he does it for Anglo-Saxon and English.)

I’m curious, could you name a few? I know so lottle of agglutinative lggs.

Basque and Japanese are the most famous, but here you can find a long list:

I very rarely remember how important syntax is to organizing the mind. Before hearing Huertas talking about this, I grossly underestimated the power of syntax on the mind. I keep some awareness on it, in myself and others.

And now, if you add all of grammar, hidden meanings in words because of sounds, etc... it's pretty fascinating how it all connects to "mind". An most likely to information, consciousness, etc. The problem is that we can't even define THOSE!

To expand a little on this, I think it’s necessary to kinda go back to square one in trying to answer of questions

1) What makes a lgg change?
2) How quickly does it change?
3) What are aspects of language that are more fundamental, and others more superficial?
4) Is there a limit to the directions a language can change?
5) How does language come to be?
6) What is the origin of language?

If you ask me, the answer is a big "I don't know" for all. Some of these questions were actually banned in England at around the time of Darwin, because they were considered dangerous. Imagine now, not much has changed.

1) Internal phonetics processes: erosion, assimilation, conflation, etc.

Yes, although, as you'll see in Rulhen and Magnus, a big chunk of that is pure speculation, taken as a given because they ASSUME that Latin led to the Romance languages, or that cognates MUST mean that there is a "root", etc.

2) Foreign influence, such as gen Z belgians using uvular /r/ instead of tap (influence from Dutch, French and German)

Agreed. But then the question is, why that influence, and not many others? Same problem.

3) Cultural changes (Br Romance is becoming more ergative (not demanding an object) in general, some say because ergative verbs are descriptive of how machines work. Ex in English: “the TV turned off!” [by itself], “my OS just updated”, etc)

Is it "becoming" more ergative, or was it always like that, especially in the Portuguese of several centuries ago? Spanish has that too...

Here’s a few less well-attested but I’m fairly confident on:

1) Deliberate changing it. French spelling is a clear example, and Sanskrit (which supposedly means “cultivated”), if truly deliberately cultivated, is the prime example of how pervasive those changes are. I also suspect English is the victim of conflicting interests that ended up creating a beautiful, very useful abomination.

My guess is that deliberate change applies more to writing than to speaking.

2) F(requency)R(essonance)V(ibration), as the C’s put it. I have little to no evidence for this, but somehow I’m tremendously confident that there are sources of vibration going on (from people, planets, machines or what have you) that affect lgg, like a sounding board affects the patterns of sand. That’d be another way to change lgg.

Yes.

3) Changes in thought patterns. Syntax and mind interact vigorously, as you pointed out

Yes.

As I write this, maybe a big part of the confusion is because we’re looking for a common origin. While it’s much more fruitful to look at common AFFINITY. Affinity and common affinity are quite close, but not the same thing.

Yes!

So, would the AAL (analytical aryan lggs) have a common ancestor? By the gods, I don’t know. I suppose at least partly yes. The C’s say sth on the lines of “yes, but further than what [the timeline of] your line of questioning allows”.

A possible clue is that the C’s said Germanic lggs look the most like the proto-Aryan lgg. I thought that was very curious!

Well it could be both: just a few common ancestors, for example. The problem I see is that the tendency is for languages to die, not to be "created" and proliferate, at least not in recorded history. So, it's possible it was different back then if, say, the brain hemispheres were connected differently as Laura talked about in the Wave. THAT, I can imagine creating new languages, possibly even helping people "download them", and learn them. But even then, some of the problem is pushed back: did Kantekkians have one, or several languages? And how did they acquire it or create it? Etc.

Then I remember proto-Germanic only has four cases, and even Icelandic has a definite article, which is missing in I(nflected)A(ryan)L(anguages). Maybe Germanic is like a middle-branch, and some languages relied more on inflection and developed more cases and dropped articles, while other relied on analytical structures and developed more articles, and all other grammatical aspects that are common to those two groups of lggs.

Lithuanian is said to have spontaneously created two extra cases… and to drop them 200 years later. This speaks to “what directions can a language change?”. My wild guess is: any! No need to stick to academic insistence that lggs tend to become “simpler” over time, and ONLY
become inflectional again when tremendous amounts of fossilization and phonetic erosion has happened.

Agreed. Besides, every linguist knows that there is no real way to measure "complexity" in language: is a language with 30 sounds more complex than one with 10? Is a language with ideograms more complex than a language with a Western script? Are cases more complex than conjugations? Etc. Etc.

That’s a lot of help! I was burning to have somebody at least to talk about this. I feel we’re already making some progress in this! Some already the answers to all this… but I don’t! Thank you so much for diving in as well!

Well, I can't say that we're making progress. If anything, you have added even more questions, LOL! But I share your pain. These questions bug me too. For now, I figure that digging a bit more deeply into a few aspects may lead to a better understanding of something, at least. It's not like that you have to ignore the other 10000 questions you have, but that taking a step back to understand one single point better, might add something to the bigger picture. OSIT. Thanks for sharing. :flowers:
 
For elfdalian, it may also be a case of "persistence", I think. There are several examples of "older versions" of languages that for some reason, resist change. My guess is that it has to do with a) the frequency of the territory, b) the genetics of the speakers, and more generally for other phenomena, c) some link to the information field, d) the way speakers' antennae (DNA) are configured to perceive and interact with reality, e) each group's "lesson profile", f) how symbols (phonemes and graphemes) are a 3D representation of something much more complex at 4D, and much more.

Reading Magnus’ dissertation is tremendously instructive. Had an experience of frequency of territory lately, and looking back it explains why I felt so good or bad in some places.

d) and e) are quite clear to me in Icelandic. They refuse to use words like “republic” and will use words such as “allthing” instead. The gov., académie de lettres and the people are all behind it in almost unison!

But I have no proof

Precise perception is key. Yet I see no need to get hung up in one specific way of precisely percieving. Of course, we’d have to have quite the voyance or travel to “Elfdalia” to verify any of those, but I feel we’re def onto something!
I don't know, but in Brazil, there are also Amazonian tribes like the Piraha, who have resisted linguistic change for centuries. Sure, it's still maybe the 1%, but the 99% is not that unusual in that region. Look at Argentina, Bolivia, Chili, etc. In most of those countries, it's also a 95-99% "takeover", just that it's Spanish
Yes. There may be over 100 lggs in Brazil, and São Gabriel da Cachoeira is a small city famous for its citizens speaking originary lggs.

And Russia is also different, in that it's the only country in the world (to my knowledge) where in spite of the vast territory, the phonemic system and prosody are practically the same. There are minimal regional differences, but much less important (and not "imposed by the government") than in other places. That to me speaks of a natural national unity that we don't have in the West, for example.

China, I'd say is different still. There are MANY languages and pronunciations. They are all united by written Mandarin, but the spoken languages are different in many regions.

I didn’t know that about Russian. I’m learning Russian rn… I’m so excited about the doors it’s been opening! Finding this forum was one of them. I found it through thread about relationships between Sanskrit and Russian.

About China, I knew there was diversity, but I didn’t know how proportionally prevalent it was (for a 1.3billion ppl country, a language/dialect with “only” 30 million speakers is not all thaaat much)

I don't know enough about it, but from what I heard, the "lingua geral" was more like a pidgin. If that's the case, then pidgins are fragile, only used as vernaculars, but never a mother tongue, never fully formed, etc. In that case, with the imposition of Portuguese as the official language, I can imagine its disappearance
I’ve heard it has a simpler grammar. I’m yet to check it out. I’m learning Tupi, the superstrate language for Lingua Geral.

A small story that underscores why I’m surprised by its disappearance is that, in Tupi and Guarani, the word for dog is “Jaguá(ra)”. Which means jaguar. And the word for jaguar is “Jagua(r)-eté”, meaning true Jaguar.

This indicates that the colonists were so far removed from Europe that they called the dog a “jaguar”, instead of calling the jaguar a dog! Then to differentiate the two, the big gracious cat was labeled “eté”, the real one. This happened with many other animals. Also, toponyms in tupi/lingua geral abound to this day. The language was tremendously prevalent, not to mention Tupi itself.

It was supposed to have been spoken for about 300 hundred years. Even if there’s a 3d causation to this, I find it remarkable!

As I read and respond your comments, I realize that I’m fascinated not just by the linguistic aspect of language, but by the cultural assimilations. And how little I know about it.

When watching carnival parades once, my dad said “the pope should come and canonize this thing every year”. He was referring to the fact that samba schools have sometimes 6 thousand people parading, finish almost exactly in 70 minutes, with huge “allegorical cars”, no motors, with 99% amateurs, innbriated on all kinds of stuff! I find the fact that colonization (and linguistic assimilation) worked as well as it did, nothing short of a miracle, definetely beyond the grasp of my mind! Of course this is not just a Brazilian thing.

I think here you get into "cognitive grammar".
Will be able to respond more educadetly when I get to the book

Pretty sure Romanian has 3.
Oh, yeah. Nom-acc, da., and gen. So yes.

Well, it has a vestigial vocative as well, not sure how that fits in. I suppose it’s not as simple is my statement implies.

For instance, what if a languages has 4 cases in the article, but two affecting the nouns? (Hochdeutsch)
What if a language has no declension on nouns, but declensions on pronouns? (Castillian)
What if a language only decline some pronouns, but not others? (Br Romance)
What if declensions are inferred by specific uses, but their form is identical to other declensions with different uses? (Russian)

Maybe... or maybe it has something to do with Phonosemantics too

I need more knowledge to assess that, but I’d bet on it now!

Interesting. Can you give an example of the difference

Hah! A funny one.

Ungrammatical in Br:

O pai da Maria disse que está grávida
The father of the Mary said is pregnant
Mary’s father said she’s pregnant

In Br this is very jarring. Like “wut? Did you just say her father’s pregnant??”, because Br needs the explicit noun here, and Pt doesn’t

In Br: O pai da Maria disse que ela tá grávida

Ungrammatical in Pt:

Eu vi ela hoje
I saw she today
I saw her today

In Pt, it makes no sense to use the pronoun like that. Like in any other Romance I know.

In Pt: eu a vi hoje
I her saw today
I saw her today

In some dialects in Br, the differences are much starker.

That's not uncommon for ancient colonies, I think. Have you tried comparing Brazilian Portuguese with the portuguese of the time of the conquest? In Spanish, for example, you can see similarities between texts from the 12th century, and modern castillian in South America. It's details, but it says something about how colonies preserve the original language (perhaps because it was learnt as a second language and made official), than the colonizers themselves.

There’s much written stuff from Pt from that time. For the educated Br, it’s readable with some persistence, but it’s quite different. Their spoken lgg now is quite similar to written language then. Of course, maybe they spoke differently from they wrote then.

I sure didn’t know about the 12th cent Cast.

I’d need to take a look at more examples of colonies to see if there’s actually really anything unusual about what I’m pointing out.

What comes to mind is I can see standard US accent somehwre in Great Britain, canadian and acadian French in Normandy. In fact, there may be somewhere in Pt where people speak like in Br, maybe I’m just not aware.

Yeps. It depends on the degree of assimilation, I think
Can’t wrap my head around it! I find it just astounding! This is more a sociological phenomenon, but I’d like to have a better insight in it.

Hmm, I don't know if that's a rule or not. Isn't Hebrew more analytical? And we'd have to see about other regions too. Most often it's just the script that it's taken (like devanagari, Arabic, etc.), rather than the whole language, I think
Write… I mean, right! I wasn’t specific, I had only Europe in mind. Those counterexamples are important just the same - shows the trend could be localized, if there’s one.

Because they have the whole History wrong? I don't know
😂 well, well, now. I’d bet on it. One explanation could be that 1) it wasn’t that long because of added time, and 2) after cataclysm people were busier surviving than writing chic. It’s ok to write as you speak if you don’t know if you’ll have a meal tomorrow!

Probably more complex than that, but for now this explanation seems to cover it.

Spanish, Italian, Basque and Greek could make up a "family" if you took only their phonemic systems, for example
Love to see this paradigm of group lggs!

I think Magnus and Abehsera get the closest to the answer. Something in the sounds reflect the concepts. And when there are exceptions, the concepts themselves are different
Very curious for Abehsera’s book!

Other languages use lots of diphtongs too, like Mandarin
Curiosity: is there a limitation in Mandarin p
to saying one of the 5 typical vowels ( /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) plainly? Such as in English ‘amigo’ becomes ‘amigow’, etc?

The exceptions and the mixing and matching of characteristics across families are far more common
right… maybe it’s more like very few people learn lggs from other families, and even among thise, fewer notice the similarities, even fewer remark on them and even fewer are vocal about it.

I would add the "frequency of the territory" as a possibility too.
Maybe by just looking at the local lgg, you can infer what mane of those frequencies are.

Also, would be interesting to see how in groups of people who go to far-away lands but preserve their lgg, their languages change… controlled for contact with other local lggs😂

Such a momentous task. Often times, I think it’s easier to do a lot of sādhana/spiritual practice and just hope to get direct perception.

I don't know about that. The same is said about Hebrew, but is it true? Some people try to find a "magikal" meaning when the causes could be more mundane (like imitating Latin spelling to sound cultured
Right… well, Fulcanelli’s book was quite dense, and I read it in French which still isn’t one of my strongest lggs, so I certainly missed a lot.

Still - and I could be off track on this - but I do get the sense there’s so much more than meets the eye to French spelling. Even it it’s clever red herrings!

Well, it depends on how you define enclaves. Cypriot could be one, in the sense that the language is extremely resistant, in spite of years of occupation by everyone except for the speakers of the language they adopted (Greek). Maybe Cornish too, although I think it was "resuscitated". Dogon in Africa is also an interesting "enclave
Reading this, here’s an impression I have, to which I have very little evidence. Maybe the enclaves are a cause-and-consequence of linguistic homogeneity. Maybe it stabilizes the dominant language somehow. Don’t know.

In complex systems, homogeneity equals efficiency… and fragility. The more homogenous, the more a system is a very efficient machine waiting to be broken down by an unexpected breeze.

I don't know about Faroese, but I speak a little Danish and lived there, and it was perfectly clear. They DO have more vowels than others, the glottal stop, and very "lazy" consonants like the "d/th". But it's nothing too unusual
I see. So that was running on low-quality info from my part.

Chu, it’s so generous that you answers EVERY each of these points! I wasn’t expecting that by a long shot. Please don’t overstretch yourself.

These searches for answers like I’m in right now occur in bursts. And I seem to be in one, so I’m sure I’ll dig deeper. The books you’ve pointed out are a great place to start. I’ll keep you posted😁

And will seek to respond to your respondes as well.
 
from link we learn:
10 septembre 2009
Etymologie des langues indo-européennes

Chers amis, chers linguistes,

C'est avec une très grande tristesse que je vous annonce le décès d'Yves Cortez, survenu en Mai 2009, à la suite d'une longue maladie.

Avant de nous quitter, il a réuni toutes ses forces pour mettre par écrit son dernier ouvrage, intitulé :

Etymologie des langues indo-européennes

par la méthode oronale


que je vous invite à découvrir à l'adresse suivante: http://www.etymologie-langues-indo-europeennes.fr/

L'ouvrage reste cependant à compléter et il comptait sur une jeune génération de linguistes, passionnés comme lui par l'étymologie pour reprendre le flambeau et poursuivre ses recherches.

Annabelle Cortez, sa fille (annacortez@yahoo.fr)
English translation:
10 September 2009
Etymology of Indo-European languages

Dear friends, dear linguists,

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Yves Cortez in May 2009, following a long illness.

Before leaving us, he had gathered all his strength to write his last book, entitled :

Etymology of Indo-European languages

by the oral method


which I invite you to discover at the following address: http://www.etymologie-langues-indo-europeennes.fr/

The work remains to be completed, however, and he was counting on a young generation of linguists, passionate as he was about etymology, to take up the torch and continue his research.

Annabelle Cortez, his daughter (annacortez@yahoo.fr)

The link to the writing is broken but it can be found here: link

I haven't read it yet.
 
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