Language roots and growth discussion (from Funny Welsh Expressions thread)

Loved the expressions, but

A primitive form of the Welsh language was spoken as far back as 550AD,

I wonder if some language historians might question the attribute “primitive”.

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Agreed. Linguistics has shown that languages have simplified over time.

In fact it has shown that isolated languages become more complex and languages in frequent contact with others (most languages, admittedly) become more simple, probably due to multilingual people learning ‘unnaturally’ outside of the ‘hearth’.

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Some nice colorful vocab there. :smiling_imp:

I’m a Welshman who was brought up in Aberdeen which shared (in the 50s and 60s) the Caernarfon practice of using the c word to describe or address people (not necessarily pejoratively). The Aberdonian/Doric for “every” was “a’” (short for all), so “everybody” became “a’ xxxx” If you wanted to add emphasis to this you would split it in two and insert another profanity - “a’-yyyyyyy-xxxx”

I used to be such a well-spoken young boy. :smile:

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In general terms, yes. Isolated languages can vary quite a bit in that regard. They usually map to the complexity of the culture. A very small, simple culture doesn’t have much need for complex language. Some aspects may be complex while others not as much.

As an example, there is a South American tribe that has number words for one, two and many. They have no need for anything more specific.

And surely it went back a lot further than 550AD. What was spoken by those moving north as the ice caps melted? The young man buried in Paviland Cave was before the Ice drove them south, but once the people followed game back to what became islands, they were speaking a language, a proto language. Surely a precursor of Cymraeg? Yees/No?

I don’t think we’re going to get very far starting from Pirahã :wink:

I think the generalisation about complexity/isolation sounds interesting - any generalisation is bound to have exceptions, but it could be a good rule of thumb.

The predecessor of Welsh was Brythonic. It was very inflected like Latin. The loss if word endings is where the line between Brythonic and Old Welsh happens. So yes, the language certainly existed long before then but it wasn’t called Welsh. Semantic nitpicking, I know. :wink:

Agreed, always exceptions to ‘rules’. Always fun to add color to discussions though. :slight_smile:

The isolation thing explains how languages got so complex and then started to suddenly simplify.

I’ve heard a similar explanation as to how English went from the heavily-inflected Anglo-Saxon (Old English) to the relatively more simple Middle English, because of interaction with the Norse of the Viking invaders. Because it was another branch of Germanic, there was some mutual understanding at a basic level, but dropping or simplifying endings eased the process of assimilation.

Yes, I have heard that too. Another theory as to why Old English and Middle English are so different is that written Old English was never actually spoken. Many languages have a formal written form which can differ significantly from colloquial forms.

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I’ve heard this, too, but it also misses out the fact that Old English had developed a relatively stable and fairly standard late written form based on late West Saxon, so there’s bound to have been some scribal conservatism masking changes that were actually already happening in the language. Old English had a pretty strong stress accent (important in the poetry), which fell on the root syllable of verbs and the first syllable of nouns – meaning that grammatical endings were always low-stress. Even despite scribal tradition you get things in late OE where they can’t remember/decide whether to spell an ending -an or -en or -on, for example, so it looks like they’d all begun to fall together into, effectively, ‘grunt + -n’. Those final -ns went silent by some time in the Middle English period (and again, maybe a fair bit earlier), leaving most of your accidence being reduced to the presence or absence of a grunt.

I think the Vikings probably helped, and the face that English was reduced to the status of a peasant language for a few hundred years certainly ‘helped’, but a lot of it was probably just the way the language was moving anyway.

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Crossed in posting! Written Old English probably wasn’t that artificial – given, for example, how we can see changes within the period and between different dialects – but there’s some clear conservatism going on, too.

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I am not sure where this fits in, but for a long time, was it not true that very few could read or write, basically the monks, and it was in Latin, so English developed as a speaking language.

Clergy may have used Latin but English was the language of State.

Laws were still written in Latin, together with a lot of official documents as late as Tudor times, I thought. After that, I’m not sure!

In the Old English period I know that things like charters – say, grants of land to a monastery in someone’s will – would be recorded in Latin with a heavy admixture of vernacular place & personal names (the equivalent in Welsh, where it survives, is the sort of thing we can use to try to give us clues about what was happening to the language before it tended to get written down much as continuous texts).
Laws, I’m not so sure about – I’ve definitely seen texts of laws in Old English, but they may have been translated from Latin.
The thing was, there was an active use of Latin in relation to the church, for ‘proper’ theology (as opposed to popular sermons), for early science and medicine, and in relations with foreign powers – think Alcuin of York corresponding with Charlemagne, or Asser’s role at Alfred’s court. But there was also an active use of the vernacular in many spheres, including by monks and clergy, and including translations from Latin. King Alfred the Great, who recruited the Welsh monk Asser to the circle of learned men whom he was gathering at his court, wrote in the introduction to his translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care that he had found that the state of Latin learning in England was poor, even among the clergy, and that he had therefore organised a programme of translations of key works into Old English, as well as trying to improve the level of Latin learning in the kingdom. Asser records that King Alfred himself decided to learn Latin, and the king is credited (I don’t know how reliably) with having done some of the translations himself, including the Pastoral Care (on the duties of the clergy) and parts of the version of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. There were histories and geographies (Orosius, for example), an Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and I forget what else.
Later on, in late West Saxon, I can immediately think of things like sermons (Wulfstan’s sermon blaming English sins for Viking depradations, much like Gildas victim-blaming the Britons for the Saxon invasion, entitled in Latin ‘the Sermon of the Wolf to the English’ but all written in English), Ælfric’s sermons and lives of saints, translations of the Gospels and the Pentateuch, and of course the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was written in monasteries (as far as we know) but entirely in English. There was also, although it is now almost entirely lost, an Old English version of Apollonius of Tyre, which was a secular prose adventure story and the nearest thing the late antique world had to a novel.
How much of this wealth of vernacular literature could have been paralleled in Welsh of the same period is not clear – as far as I am aware we simply don’t have anything like the same number of Welsh (in terms of known origin) manuscripts from that early a period, and so whatever proportion of them may have contained anything in the vernacular has been lost along with all the others. I don’t know why this is the case.

Are you a history professor, a linguist or ??? :wink: you are very, very well informed and I learn a lot from you. My knowledge is so patchy, picked up here and there by happenstance in a lot of cases! Diolch yn fawr, and sorry to others for twisting the thread…more funny expressions needed now!

I thought that French or Norman French was actually the official language in England for quite some time - from William the Conqueror to at least Henry V and French continued in Legal work alongside latin until the 19th century - hence a lot of French and Latin words in Legal English.

A lot of manuscipts wghich were rescued from the monasteries such as Tintern etc, were moved to places like the library at Raglan castle and these were destroyed when Oliver Cromwell burned the library there (I always live in the vain hope that some of those may actually have been stolen and may now live on in someones stately home library). There are still quite a reasonable number of Welsh manuscipts all things considered, but there must have been a lot more and unfortunately a large number have presumably either perished or perhaps even been deliberately destroyed.

No, I teach Maths and a bit of English in FE – but I started learning Old English at the age of about 13 (I blame Tolkien), and when I realised that I didn’t want to carry on with biochemistry (shortly before finals) I managed to parlay my prior learning into an unofficial year of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic (the Head of Department at the time had started out as a chemist, I think, and the Professor as an engineer, so they were sympathetic), which is when I did some Middle Welsh. I used that to blag my way onto an MPhil in Old English, but eventually decided it was all too ivory tower and rather dropped out of the DPhil. But I did use to know the chap who’s now Professor of Old English at Oxford, although I haven’t seen him for about 25 years, and I once went climbing at Symonds Yat with the then-boyfriend of the woman who’s (I think) head of ASNaC at Cambridge. Dunno if that counts for anything…