Frozen Old English, Frozen Tibetan
I just finished reading a fascinating book, forwarded to me by a good friend: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (The Untold History of English), by John McWhorter. Rather than copying the entirety here (which is approximately how much of it I found interesting), I'll instead pick just a few tidbits that have import to those of us who are interested in Tibetan and/or carry a fledgling interest in linguistics...
1. English has pronunciation kinks that no other Indo-European language possesses—kinks, McWhorter surmises, that came from adult, non-native speakers who began speaking Proto-Germanic (Phoenecians, perhaps?). Those "mispronunciations" caught on, and subsequent generations grew up speaking them (PIE "pa" sound becomes "fa" & "ta" becomes "tha", as in "father", etc.).
Questions for Tibetan:
1.a Why did "standard" pronunciation of "pya/phya/bya" become "ca/cha/ja"? What changed "pra" and "kra" (and their fellows "phra", "bra", "khra", and "gra") to "tra" and so on? Why are nearly all prefixes, headletters, and suffixes (not to mention post-suffixes) elided, sloughed off, disappeared?
In remote Himalayan regions, "islands" of old pronunciation remain (Ladakhi, Balti, et al)—why should central, standard pronunciation have changed so dramatically? So completely? Is this just an example of natural linguistic drift magnified by a Lhasa-cosmopolitan influence (the explanation often heard)? Or is something else going on?
"Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic eddas in Old Norse written almost a thousand years ago." (p. 184)
1.b One of the biggest changes from "classical"-era Tibetan to the modern language, in terms of grammar, is the formation of the auxiliaries. While literary Tibetan marks case by spelling, spoken Tibetan uses auxiliaries.
Is it mere coincidence that the silencing of many letter combinations, which would have resulted in many vague and ambiguous utterings, coincided with the formation of auxiliaries which provide speakers with this same information?
Some auxiliaries exist in literary already; I'm also told the future tense "died" quite early, so phonetic leveling alone may not explain it. But there seems to be SOME connection...
For example:
1.b.i Transitivity: The difference in 'gyur (to be changed) and sgyur (to change) is no longer pronounced; however, an added auxiliary communicates the difference: i.e., gyur-song (it changed) vs. gyur-yin ([I] changed it).
Many other transitive/intransitive distinctions (reflected by Tibetan spellings, which used to be pronounced) have been rendered moot by their mute-ness ('grig/sgrig, nub/snub, etc, etc).
1.b.ii Tense: The difference in byed (to do, present) and byas (past) is no longer pronounced; however, an auxiliary communicates the difference: i.e., je-ki-yö ([I'm] doing it) vs. je-pa-yin ([I] did it).
Many other past/present/future verbs are no longer pronounced distinctly, yet are distinguished by their auxiliary helpers.
2. English has grammar kinks—again, the culprit is non-native speakers learning the language. From the Celtics adding our peculiar "meaningless do" (why do we insert a "do" into questions and negative constructions?) and Old Norse speakers dropping the grammar of Old English (very little of which survived), Modern English has very little inflected grammar left.
This is something we have in common with Tibetan language speakers. Both our languages are uninflected. Ironic, then, that we go out of our way to learn explicit grammar rules; explicit grammar isn't native to either our mothertongue (English) nor to Tibetan! Perhaps there's a better way...
3. Diglossia strikes again. Although McWhorter never uses the actual word "diglossia," he definitely talks a lot about the subject. We Tibetan learners are more than familiar with a difference between "formal, literary language" and "modern, spoken dialects." In case we're wont to forget, this was the case in English, too:
"In ancient times, few societies had achieved widespread literacy. Writing was primarily for high literary, liturgical, and commercial purposes. Spoken language changed always, but the written form rested unchanging on the page. There was not felt to be a need to keep the written form in step with the way people were changing the language with each generation.
For one, each language was actually spoken as a group of dialects very different from one another, such that there was no single spoken variety to keep up with. As long as the written form was relatively accessible to the general population, however they actually spoke, then the job was done.
Old English, for example, came in four flavors: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Most Old English documents are in the West Saxon dialect, because Wessex happened to become politically dominant early on. But this means that what we know as Old English is mostly in what is properly one dialect of Old English, and the speakers of the other dialects just had to suck it up. They did, and there is no evidence that anyone much minded.
In addition, there was always a natural tendency, which lives on today, to view the written language as the “legitimate” or “true” version, with the spoken forms of the language as degraded or, at best, quaint—certainly not something you would take the trouble of etching onto the page for posterity with quill and ink. As such, the sense we moderns have that language on the page is supposed to more or less reflect the way the language is spoken would have seemed peculiar to a person living a thousand years ago, or even five hundred.
In Europe, for example, it was the technology of the printing press and the democratic impulses in the wake of the Reformation that led to calls for written material in local languages. Until then, people in France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal readily accepted Latin—a different language entirely from what was spoken “in the street”—on the page." (p. 71)
In other words, language is, primarily, oral; literature becomes "frozen", formal, scripture... We can't look to literature, especially ancient literature, to clues of pronunciation and grammar of ever-evolving spoken dialects.
Some final quotes that will ring true:
"The way Vikings rendered English sounded at first, to anyone without Scandinavian ancestry, 'other' at best and 'wrong' at worst. People writing Old English, poised to engrave the high, 'proper' language on the page, would have been loath to waste ink on what they would have regarded as come-as-you-are colloquialisms that not all people use.
Only after the post-Norman Conquest blackout of written English, when institutional memory of fashions in how one scribed the language had dissolved, would people allow themselves to put a more honest version of the language on paper. That is, what appears to be a stepwise evaporation of Proto-Germanic features in Middle English is actually a record of writers’ increasing comfort with putting things in writing that had happened to the language before the Norman Conquest." (p. 193)
1. English has pronunciation kinks that no other Indo-European language possesses—kinks, McWhorter surmises, that came from adult, non-native speakers who began speaking Proto-Germanic (Phoenecians, perhaps?). Those "mispronunciations" caught on, and subsequent generations grew up speaking them (PIE "pa" sound becomes "fa" & "ta" becomes "tha", as in "father", etc.).
Questions for Tibetan:
1.a Why did "standard" pronunciation of "pya/phya/bya" become "ca/cha/ja"? What changed "pra" and "kra" (and their fellows "phra", "bra", "khra", and "gra") to "tra" and so on? Why are nearly all prefixes, headletters, and suffixes (not to mention post-suffixes) elided, sloughed off, disappeared?
In remote Himalayan regions, "islands" of old pronunciation remain (Ladakhi, Balti, et al)—why should central, standard pronunciation have changed so dramatically? So completely? Is this just an example of natural linguistic drift magnified by a Lhasa-cosmopolitan influence (the explanation often heard)? Or is something else going on?
"Among Germanic languages, Icelandic, spoken on a remote island, has (1) rarely been learned by foreigners and (2) is also the least simplified member of the family. Even today, its grammar is so little changed from Old Norse that Icelanders can read the epic eddas in Old Norse written almost a thousand years ago." (p. 184)
1.b One of the biggest changes from "classical"-era Tibetan to the modern language, in terms of grammar, is the formation of the auxiliaries. While literary Tibetan marks case by spelling, spoken Tibetan uses auxiliaries.
Is it mere coincidence that the silencing of many letter combinations, which would have resulted in many vague and ambiguous utterings, coincided with the formation of auxiliaries which provide speakers with this same information?
Some auxiliaries exist in literary already; I'm also told the future tense "died" quite early, so phonetic leveling alone may not explain it. But there seems to be SOME connection...
For example:
1.b.i Transitivity: The difference in 'gyur (to be changed) and sgyur (to change) is no longer pronounced; however, an added auxiliary communicates the difference: i.e., gyur-song (it changed) vs. gyur-yin ([I] changed it).
Many other transitive/intransitive distinctions (reflected by Tibetan spellings, which used to be pronounced) have been rendered moot by their mute-ness ('grig/sgrig, nub/snub, etc, etc).
1.b.ii Tense: The difference in byed (to do, present) and byas (past) is no longer pronounced; however, an auxiliary communicates the difference: i.e., je-ki-yö ([I'm] doing it) vs. je-pa-yin ([I] did it).
Many other past/present/future verbs are no longer pronounced distinctly, yet are distinguished by their auxiliary helpers.
2. English has grammar kinks—again, the culprit is non-native speakers learning the language. From the Celtics adding our peculiar "meaningless do" (why do we insert a "do" into questions and negative constructions?) and Old Norse speakers dropping the grammar of Old English (very little of which survived), Modern English has very little inflected grammar left.
This is something we have in common with Tibetan language speakers. Both our languages are uninflected. Ironic, then, that we go out of our way to learn explicit grammar rules; explicit grammar isn't native to either our mothertongue (English) nor to Tibetan! Perhaps there's a better way...
3. Diglossia strikes again. Although McWhorter never uses the actual word "diglossia," he definitely talks a lot about the subject. We Tibetan learners are more than familiar with a difference between "formal, literary language" and "modern, spoken dialects." In case we're wont to forget, this was the case in English, too:
"In ancient times, few societies had achieved widespread literacy. Writing was primarily for high literary, liturgical, and commercial purposes. Spoken language changed always, but the written form rested unchanging on the page. There was not felt to be a need to keep the written form in step with the way people were changing the language with each generation.
For one, each language was actually spoken as a group of dialects very different from one another, such that there was no single spoken variety to keep up with. As long as the written form was relatively accessible to the general population, however they actually spoke, then the job was done.
Old English, for example, came in four flavors: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon. Most Old English documents are in the West Saxon dialect, because Wessex happened to become politically dominant early on. But this means that what we know as Old English is mostly in what is properly one dialect of Old English, and the speakers of the other dialects just had to suck it up. They did, and there is no evidence that anyone much minded.
In addition, there was always a natural tendency, which lives on today, to view the written language as the “legitimate” or “true” version, with the spoken forms of the language as degraded or, at best, quaint—certainly not something you would take the trouble of etching onto the page for posterity with quill and ink. As such, the sense we moderns have that language on the page is supposed to more or less reflect the way the language is spoken would have seemed peculiar to a person living a thousand years ago, or even five hundred.
In Europe, for example, it was the technology of the printing press and the democratic impulses in the wake of the Reformation that led to calls for written material in local languages. Until then, people in France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal readily accepted Latin—a different language entirely from what was spoken “in the street”—on the page." (p. 71)
In other words, language is, primarily, oral; literature becomes "frozen", formal, scripture... We can't look to literature, especially ancient literature, to clues of pronunciation and grammar of ever-evolving spoken dialects.
Some final quotes that will ring true:
"The way Vikings rendered English sounded at first, to anyone without Scandinavian ancestry, 'other' at best and 'wrong' at worst. People writing Old English, poised to engrave the high, 'proper' language on the page, would have been loath to waste ink on what they would have regarded as come-as-you-are colloquialisms that not all people use.
Only after the post-Norman Conquest blackout of written English, when institutional memory of fashions in how one scribed the language had dissolved, would people allow themselves to put a more honest version of the language on paper. That is, what appears to be a stepwise evaporation of Proto-Germanic features in Middle English is actually a record of writers’ increasing comfort with putting things in writing that had happened to the language before the Norman Conquest." (p. 193)
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