Language Evolution, it's Fantastic, it's Incredible

[S485122]

Originally Posted by a1call

It depends on language and even race.
...

Calling on the concept of race in this discussion is absurd, the concept of race is meaningless of course, but thinking that the capacity to pronounce certain sounds is genetic is absurd as well.

The capacity to pronounce various phonemes depends on education only (except if there are malformations babies can learn to pronounce any sound.)

Jacob

[a1call]

Here is a discussion on the subject
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-gen...ish-or-Italian


I can give you a 1st account opinion. I can easily pronounce "h".

I have lived ask my life among people whom non of which had any problem pronouncing "h", except for my grand mother which passed away when I was perhaps 8, 9 years old.

Yet there are occasions when my pronunciation of "h" sounds like "kh"

You can attribute this to what you want, but I think there is a genetic factor of the way the throat is formed.
(matter of fact, no racism intended.)

I can mimic the pronunciation of "th" but when speaking unattractively it always sounds like "D"
This is common among most Persians.
I think this is a matter of learning and not genetics. Since Persians don't have that sounds on their language.

[Nick]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic...iod_hypothesis

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by kladner

I had a similar reaction to the word "growing" changing from a thing organisms do within themselves, to something externally imposed. I remember this starting with Bill Clinton talking about "growing" the economy.

EDIT: I have to admit that I would say things like, "I am growing many house plants." Perhaps I was more bothered by the change from living organisms to abstract concepts like "economy".

Usages like "growing the economy" affect my brain in a manner similar to wrong-wordisms like "learning your students." You can teach students, but you can't do their learning for them! The government, or its agencies and minions, can do things to (try to) stimulate "the economy" (which you rightly peg as an abstraction), but the effects are not very predictable.

In the transitive verb usage that one can grow plants or crops, it is implicit that, if they are not entirely under your control -- due to vagaries of the weather, unpredictable insect infestations, diseases etc -- they are at least in your care; and, if not for that, they wouldn't be there at all. And, of course, the response of plants to proper care is fairly predictable.

Not so with "the economy." The aggregate of the decisions of hundreds of millions of people is not anything like under the control of any government. Governments can do things like make tax policies, impose tariffs, sanction some unethical practices while ignoring others, or criminalize certain products or services. When governments try to direct peoples' decisions based on an ideological view of how people should think, the results will probably render manifest a sentiment often attributed to economists: "If my theory does not agree with reality, then so much the worse for reality." IMHO, this sentiment applies to ideologues in general.

[chalsall]

So, our pool sprung a leak. My guy and I dug up where we suspected the leak was. Found it!

Turns out the pool installers installed the piping in a manner which didn't take into consideration soil settlement, and the 90 degree turn join failed (after heavy load).

I photo-documented this, and marked the part which I cut off with "North", "South", "Zenith" and "Nadir".

Any three of four of these would define the orientation of the piping I removed.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by rudy235

Today the speed of light is a Constant

Not only it is "constant", but everybody can measure it with general-use toys that exists on the desk of any electrician or electronic engineer, like few LEDs and an oscilloscope...

Edit: Whoaaa. when did you all posted 8 pages here? I have to read this all... hehe..

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by CRGreathouse

First, German is no closer to Germanic than English -- don't let the name fool you, it's just a label.

Correct. Contrarily we could say, English is (arguably) the most Germanic language spoken today. That is because the Germans adopted this "Greek" grammar style somewhere two centuries ago, and from that point onward, they started drifting away from the "Germanic" part. Nowadays, German grammar is much (and I mean MUCH) closer to Romanian, for example, than to English. It has the same grammar constructions, it keeps 4 of the grammar cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative) from old Greek/Latin (Romanian has 5, including Vocative, but there is no distinction between declension of the nouns on Nom/Acc or Gen/Dat, so we can say we actually have 3 cases, some other languages have 6 or 7 cases).

That means, due to grammar cases system, German phrases are more flexible in the sense that the order of the words in the sentence is not really important for understanding, which is the same in Romanian (and other romance/Slavic/eastern languages) but not in English. Therefore, a mot-a-mot translation from German to Romanian (without changing the order of the words, just keep the cases) will always be correct, but almost never correct if you do it from German to English. Practically, Germans speak Romanian (or vice-versa, I am not biased here in any direction ) except they use another (Germanic) words. But the structure of the language is not "Germanic" anymore.

If I say in English for example (let me chose the nouns to have only some "neutral" thingies, who can do some action by themselves): "the cat gives the dog the mouse" you may have no trouble to understand it. But changing the position of the nouns will change the meaning, you will not know anymore who is giving what to whom. But you can say that in German in all 6 different ways, and it will mean exactly the same thing. In fact, they use this permutations for stressing, placing the stressed part at the beginning of the sentence. For example, "die Katze gibt dem Hund die Maus" would be the "neutral" affirmation, but yet, "dem Hund gibt die Katze die Maus" will mean the same thing, except that "the dog" will be stressed (i.s. the mouse was given to the dog, and not to anybody else). No matter the order, the object that is given and the direction, where the object comes from, and where it goes, is fixed by the "cases" (i.e. "the dog" can not be the subject, because that would be "der Hund", etc). And this is not Germanic, but Greek/Latin.

[rudy235]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Not only it is "constant", but everybody can measure it with general-use toys that exists on the desk of any electrician or electronic engineer, like few LEDs and an oscilloscope...

Edit: Whoaaa. when did you all posted 8 pages here? I have to read this all... hehe..

Am I wrong or is the speed of light in a vacuum the one that is exactly 299,792,458 m s^-1?

So whatever can be measured, it will be less. It should be ~299,700,000 m s^-1 in air at sea level.

[LaurV]

Nitpicker!

(edit: now I know why I was never able to measure it! hehe, just kidding)

[rudy235]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Nitpicker!

(edit: now I know why I was never able to measure it! hehe, just kidding)

You know what?
If light did not have different speeds for different media there would be no twilight, no telescopes, no cameras and even no eyesight. So, be thankful. LOL

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Correct. Contrarily we could say, English is (arguably) the most Germanic language spoken today. That is because the Germans adopted this "Greek" grammar style somewhere two centuries ago, and from that point onward, they started drifting away from the "Germanic" part. Nowadays, German grammar is much (and I mean MUCH) closer to Romanian, for example, than to English. It has the same grammar constructions, it keeps 4 of the grammar cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative) from old Greek/Latin (Romanian has 5, including Vocative, but there is no distinction between declension of the nouns on Nom/Acc or Gen/Dat, so we can say we actually have 3 cases, some other languages have 6 or 7 cases).

...

It sounds as if you're arguing that the inflected grammar of Deutsch, with free word order, makes it not-germanic?

I fail to follow this argument. Proto-Germanic was inflected just like all the original PIE descendants. It had 5-6 cases, and word order was more or less free, again, like most all PIE descendants. In fact Old English, the original Anglo-Saxon language, was also inflected, retaining the same 5 cases as most other germanic languages.

Modern languages like English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, etc are rather strange exceptions to the PIE rule of inflection. Dutch only lost the last of its cases in the last hundred years or so in the written standard (following the spoken varieties which had not truly used case for hundreds of years); English lost its inflections in the first centuries of the second millennium, as a result of significant language contact with both Old Norse and Old Norman French (the former with similar-but-different inflections, and significant non-native vocabulary introduced by the latter, made inflected endings untenable).

So really, it seems to me that modern Deutsch retains the most Germanic/archaic grammar of all the descendants of Proto-German. And I'm slightly surprised to learn that Romanian retains case inflections as well, I had previously assumed it was like the more western romance languages, which lost their inflections long ago. Maybe in the next 500 years its cases too will go the way of the dodo (they are already highly simplified from Latin).