Indian linguist Anvita Abbi writes for Scientific American (June 2023; archived) about the Great Andamanese languages she has been studying, and a fascinating group of languages it is:
When I first met Nao Jr., at the turn of the millennium, he was in his 40s and one of only nine members of his Indigenous group, Great Andamanese, who still spoke the idiom of his ancestors; the youngsters preferred Hindi. As a linguist with a passion for decoding structure, I had researched more than 80 Indian languages from five different families: Indo-European (to which Hindi belongs), Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Tai-Kadai. I was on the islands to document their Indigenous voices before they faded into whispers. What little I heard was so baffling that I returned many times in later years to try to pin down the principles undergirding Great Andamanese languages. […]
Great Andamanese, it turns out, is exceptional among the world’s languages in its anthropocentrism. It uses categories derived from the human body to describe abstract concepts such as spatial orientation and relations between objects. To be sure, in English we might say things like “the room faces the bay,” “the chair leg broke” and “she heads the firm.” But in Great Andamanese such descriptions take an extreme form, with morphemes, or meaningful sound segments, that designate different zones of the body getting attached to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs—indeed, to every part of speech—to make diverse meanings. Because no other known language has a grammar based on the human body or shares cognates—words that are similar in meaning and pronunciation, indicating a genealogical connection—with Great Andamanese, the language constitutes its own family. […]
British officials had observed that the Andamanese languages were a bit like links in a chain: members of neighboring Great Andaman tribes understood one another, but those speaking languages at opposite ends of the chain, in North and South Andaman, were mutually unintelligible. In 1887 British military administrator Maurice Vidal Portman published a comparative lexicon of four languages, as well as a few sentences with their English translations. And around 1920 Edward Horace Man compiled an exhaustive dictionary of Bea, a South Andaman language. These were significant records, but neither cracked the puzzle the grammar posed.
Nor could I. Somehow my extensive experience with all five Indian language families was no help. One time I asked Nao Jr. to tell me the word for “blood.” He looked at me as if I were an utter fool and did not reply. When I insisted, he said, “Tell me where it is coming from.” I replied, “From nowhere.” Irritated, he repeated, “Where did you see it?” Now I had to make up something, so I said, “On the finger.” The reply came promptly—“ongtei!”—and then he rattled off several words for blood on different parts of the body. If the blood emerged from the feet or legs, it was otei; internal bleeding was etei; and a clot on the skin was ertei. Something as basic as a noun changed form depending on location. […]
The grammar I was piecing together was based primarily on Jero, but a look through Portman’s and Man’s books convinced me that the southern Great Andamanese languages had similar structures. The lexicon consisted of two classes of words: free and bound. The free words were all nouns that referred to the environment and its denizens, such as ra for “pig.” They could occur alone. The bound words were nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that always existed with markers indicating a relation to other objects, events or states. The markers (specifically, a-; er-; ong-; ot- or ut-; e- or i-; ara-; and o-) derived from seven zones of the body and were attached to a root word, usually as a prefix, to describe concepts such as “inside,” “outside,” “upper” and “lower.” For example, the morpheme er-, which qualified most anything having to do with an outer body part, could be stuck to -cho to yield ercho, meaning “head.” A pig’s head was thus raercho.
This conceptual dependency did not always indicate physical attachment. For example, if the pig’s head were cut off for roasting, the marker t- for an inanimate object would be attached to er- to yield ratercho; it was no longer alive but still a pig’s head. The suffix -icho indicated truly separable possessions. For example, Boa-icho julu meant “Boa’s clothes.”
Just as a head, a noun, could not conceptually exist on its own, the mode and effect of an action could not be severed from the verb describing the action. Great Andamanese had no words for agriculture or cultivation but a great many for hunting and fishing, mainly with a bow and arrow. Thus, the root word shile, meaning “to aim,” had several versions: utshile, to aim from above (for example, at a fish); arashile, to aim from a distance (as at a pig); and eshile, aiming to pierce. […]
In the Great Andamanese view of nature, the foremost distinction was between tajio, the living, and eleo, the nonliving. Creatures were tajio-tut-bech, “living beings with feathers”—that is, of the air; tajio-tot chor, “living beings with scales,” or of the water; or tajio-chola, “living beings of the land.” Among the land creatures, there were ishongo, humans and other animals, and tong, plants and trees. These categories, along with multiple attributes of appearance, motion and habits, made for an elaborate system of classification and nomenclature that I documented for birds in particular. Sometimes the etymology of a Great Andamanese name bore a resemblance to the English one. For example, Celene, made up of root words for “crab” and “thorn,” was so named because it cracks and eats crabs with its hard, pointed beak. […]
Even “morning” and “evening” were relative, depending on who experienced them. To say, for instance, “I will visit you tomorrow,” one would use ngambikhir, for “your tomorrow.” But in the sentence “I will finish this tomorrow,” the word would be thambikhir, “my tomorrow.” Time depended on the perspective of whoever was involved in the event.
Much more at the link; this kind of thing makes me wish I’d stuck with linguistics. Thanks, Trevor!
Because no other known language has a grammar based on the human body or shares cognates—words that are similar in meaning and pronunciation, indicating a genealogical connection—with Great Andamanese, the language constitutes its own family.
The part no other known language has a grammar based on the human body is not really relevant to whether the language is an isolate, of course; as Abbi is most definitely a Proper Linguist, I don’t expect she meant to imply that it is.
I’m actually the proud possessor of a copy of her (very good) Grammar of the Great Andamanese Language, and very interesting it is too. I’m not totally sold on this idea that all this stuff about body parts makes the language absolutely unique; it’s basically a sort of incorporated classifier system, and the only part where it seems fully operational is in the grammar of inalienably possessed nouns (unsurprisingly) and in verb prefixes, where the relationship to body parts is mostly fairly transparent; but that can easily be paralleled in other language families. Apart from that, quite a lot is rather speculative, and certainty over many points seems unattainable given the moribund state of the language: this is something of a rescue grammar, sadly.
So I’m not convinced Great Andamanese is particularly unique, compared with all the other unique languages out there. Still very interesting, though.
certainty over many points seems unattainable given the moribund state of the language: this is something of a rescue grammar, sadly.
If the language is moribund, rescue is unlikely. The book must be a palliative morphine grammar.
I’m not totally sold on this idea that all this stuff about body parts makes the language absolutely unique
Oh, me neither, but I write that off as the understandable exuberance of a linguist trying to convey the wonderfulness of her chosen language group. Totally forgivable!
Exuberance or not – for those who like it a bit more sober: Bernard Comrie and Raoul Zamponi, ›Typological profile of the Great Andamanese family‹, Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4 (2017) 1, 55-83 [DOI 10.1515/jsall-2017-0002] or by the same authors A Grammar of Akajeru (open access).
“absolutely unique”
I don’t think it’s wrong to describe any given person as unique. Why not languages? (including typology – except maybe very close languages)
“The part no other known language has a grammar based on the human body is not really relevant to whether the language is an isolate, of course;” – borrowable, but when there are not any other languages with such a property, likely it is an isolate.
English DOES use content words where my language uses suffixes (…-berry, …-tree etc.), but mostly not body parts. English teapot, Russian chay-nik. -Nik really does the very same job as -pot (and there is some specialisation, like a dedicated suffix for berries).
I guess there must also be “a nosebleed” (UPD: I guessed right, but maybe I saw this word already). Such words have to do with that in Enlgish you (I assume) can say “I have/got a XY” or “my X is Ying” where in Russian you say “by me blood flows from nose”.
Is there other evidence of the Great Andamanese/Germanic link you’re proposing?
Why not languages?
Sure. There are hundreds of unique languages. If not thousands …
when there are not any other languages with such a property, likely it is an isolate
I think that this doesn’t follow at all. It’s a variation on the age-old error of relying on typology to determine genetic affiliation. More specifically, it’s pretty easy to identify rare or even possibly unique traits in an individual language which is by no means an isolate. I don’t, for example, know of any language apart from Kusaal that has six distinguishable enclitics with no segmental form whatsoever; but Kusaal has well over a thousand proven relatives (including some so close that the resemblance is obvious even to local people completely untrained in linguistics.) It’s about as far from an isolate as a language well can be.
Just recently we were discussing Udi endoclitics. Even if you stretch a point with the definition of “endoclitic” to make it as inclusive as possible, still I’ve never come across another language which is quite so hardcore about having honest-to-God bona fide unexplainable-away endoclitics. But Udi is not an isolate either …
A well-known example of typology not matching phylogeny is Celtic, where the initial mutations led to a lot of initial doubts about whether they should be classified as Indo-European or not.
“Is there other evidence of the Great Andamanese/Germanic link you’re proposing?”
need to read the
Englishgrammar first…P.S.”A well-known example of typology not matching phylogeny is Celtic,”
I’m not sure it is so unique cross-linguistically… (surely, the system as a whole (the part of the system shared by Brittonic and Goidelic, that is) is unique. Simpler things are not).
I don’t know of an initial-mutation system elsewhere which is quite as elaborate as in Insular Celtic, but there certainly are others (Mende and its close relations, for example.) Fulfulde (famously) is a kinda-example, but there it’s all in the morphology, rather than mixed in with the syntax the way it is in Celtic and Mende.
Mind you, with Celtic it wasn’t just the mutations that confused people: there was the whole VSO thing, conjugated prepositions and what have you. That still gets people wittering about imaginary substrates. It was quite late in the day that people realised that much of this tends to go together in one package typologically anyway, regardless of the actual origin of the language.
Czech ř.
I wrote about English -berry as a suffix because of “But in Great Andamanese such descriptions take an extreme form, with morphemes, or meaningful sound segments, that designate different zones of the body getting attached to …“. I don’t mean that Englihs is exotic or that Andamanese is not.
I just look for parallels almost mechanically.
The choice of “head” as the lexeme she pursues through a Great Andamanese declension in order to explain how these languages use “categories derived from the human body to describe abstract concepts such as spatial orientation and relations between objects”, is certainly interesting. For me, it raises more questions than it answers.
In such a system, I might have expected head was a core bodily concept that would have been used to define these other things. I’m surprised to learn it works the other way — that you need to know something spatially about a head (in relation to the rest of the body?) to even call it a head.
It does leave me wondering to what degree -er = outer is truly bodily, and not just spatial. Maybe “bodily” in the already somewhat abstract sense of “related to a physical thing” rather than bodily in the sense of “related to a (human) body”? But she clearly says “human body”.
And the fact that a head is an “outer” -cho rather than an “upper” -cho also has me flustered and wondering what I’m misunderstanding, how much is left out/oversimplified (which would be reasonable). But also wondering whether something is being misinterpreted in how this all works. It’s hard for me to consider “outer” as a defining quality of heads.
The choice of -cho, without ever defining it, adds to the confusion. I find myself wondering what “-cho” means, how it might help me understand ercho. And immediately, I come across her mention of -icho, meaning “separable.” Are -icho and -cho related? Probably not, since I’m even less drawn to the idea that Andamanese think of separability as one of the defining qualities of heads. But of all the forms she might have used for examples, did she need to use two that were nearly identical, right next to each other, and only define one of them?
It’s very possible that if I learned one of the dialects of Great Andamanese, I would understand that her description is spot on. But at this point, I’m left scratching my outer -cho.
Andamanese think of separability as one of the defining qualities of heads
That’s only seen in Sentinelese.
Did you even consider that there might be a Sentinelese reader here who would not take kindly to your jokes?
Edited – I reflect after a moment that my joke does tend to further marginalize them, but weighing the balance of funny vs. real-world impact, I’m content that the flaps of my wings will not cause a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal.
Jokes? I’m just reporting on my own fieldwo
Turner ✔
Eddyshaw ✔
Lukashenko ☐
More technical and pleasingly detailed discussions of Abbi’s work are here and here.
Turner ✔
Eddyshaw ✔
Lukashenko ☐
Enemies List. David seems to an expert on tv tropes. I find the site funny in small doses, but its exhaustive coverage of ephemera is exhausting. This is a job for Galactic Housewife Brain.
I see that Abbi has also written a paper on a Nicobarese language, coauthored with Vysakh R. I have never seen that single-letter surname before.
But you have seen Y. It’s not that different.
The link has “languagehat.com” in the URL; replacing it by “academia.edu” does not help.
Oops. How’d I do that?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339857949_Aspects_of_word_formation_processes_in_Luro_The_endangered_language_of_the_Nicobar_Islands
Stu, “Y” is my first name. “Y.” is my full name. “.” is my surname.
Thanks Y. The “Partonomy of human body and grammaticalisation in PGA” chart (the second one) helps. The grammatical classes themselves are already considerably more abstract than might be suggested by the idea of body-part classes. Abbi writes “It is generally seen that in the process of grammaticalisation lexical units are desemanticised and decategorialised.” I don’t know whether that statement is accurate, but it does help me understand what’s going on.
It would be fascinating to understand the boundaries between classes, since they’re not intuitive to (a westerner/me). Even if they’re partly “desemanticised and decategorialised,” they likely make some intuitive sense to Andamanese, and I’d be interested to understand how.
A little more explanation would have been helpful. I can understand why the mouth-part clitic might be part of the word for greedy. I’m still not clear on whether a-tutlup (greedy) has a host of related forms with tutlup and different clitics, carrying different meanings.
I’m not very comfortable with Abbi’s interest in using genetics and physiology as evidence for linguistic groupings. But this factoid is fascinating (if true) regardless of why it’s in the paper:
>Studies have shown that the Jarawas and the Onges have distinct physiological and genetic signatures from the Great Andamanese, like a low blood pressure prole, low body temperature, low pulse rate and very low frequency to absence of the B gene in the ABO blood group (Kashyap et al. 2004: 3)
As to Abbi’s idea that the body-part classification is archaic and “indicative of the early times when human beings conceptualised their world through their body and its divisions,” well… hopefully the linguistics is on a more solid basis.
And I guess in retrospect, the low blood pressure profile stuff may belong to the same category of science. It does make me worry a bit more about the quality of the linguistics, and whether the body-part classification stuff is depicted accurately.
The genetics she discusses is pretty archaic. Our ancestors in the early 2000s were fond of quoting genetic studies in linguistic ones.
Comrie and Zamponi’s paper has a nice diagram of the semantic evolution of one somatic affix in Akabea (e.g. mouth > food > food source > tree > canoe > seaman). They also say, “Somatic affixes constitute a typologically unusual feature, otherwise attested, to our knowledge, in various languages of the Pacific Northwest of North America (Wakashan, Salishan, Chimakuan families, and Takelma), the isolate P’urhépecha/Tarascan and the Totonacan family of Mesoamerica, and the Panoan family of South America…” For P’urhepecha, Paul Friedrich’s paper, Shape in Grammar, is excellent and deep, like everything he did.
The Friedrich paper is interesting. I’ll need to read it again to take more of it in.
The Comrie paper link also has languagehat.com as the domain. I wonder what is causing that?
It’s understood today that various Andamanese groups are closely linked by their overall genetic composition but their small sizes resulted in bottleneck effects which often cause big frequency differences between specific genetic factors (like the ones used 20+ years ago, before the whole-genome scans)
The Comrie paper link also has languagehat.com as the domain. I wonder what is causing that?
There’s no https to create a link.
“Partonomy of human body and grammaticalisation in PGA”
Or partonymy? Hmm, there may be a difference. A principled one, since the part–whole relations are less relevant here? At that location, in a section headed “Meronymy”:
The relevant fully Greek terms to contemplate (are there more?):
Compare mereology, etc., in philosophical talk.
Other links seem to be paywalled, but here’s a free link to the Comrie paper
>Or partonymy? Hmm, there may be a difference. A principled one, since the part–whole relations are less relevant here?
She uses partonomy, and defines class 4 (ut=) as bodily products and part-whole relationships.
‘I’m not sure it is so unique cross-linguistically…’
drasvi, what was at stake was not cross-linguistic distinctiveness as understood in the 21st century, but how unusual these languages seemed to linguists in the early 19th century. It’s not like Bopp or Rask could just turn to Iosad 2010 for a convenient overview of mutation around the globe. And it wasn’t increased typological knowledge that eventually solved the issue, but Bopp’s explanation of Irish mutation with reference to Sanskrit endings, which showed that however strange mutation might seem, it clearly developed within these Indo-European languages. I’m inclined to think those earlier 19th-century philologists did a pretty decent job of things on the whole, given what was available to them.
here’s a free link to the Comrie paper
Thanks, Ryan. (Good paper, as you’d expect. The verb root ellipsis thing is interesting: in fact, that seems rather harder to parallel cross-linguistically than the body-part business.)
@Nelson, my logic is that IF (I have no idea if she’s right!) a language is really unusual today, then:
– the scenario “it is an old feature, and it is not observed in other languages because of recent migration” becomes somewhat more likely.
– the scenario “it is a young feature that developed recently (even though surrounding langauges don’t have it)”
becomes somewhat less likely.
But of course, the fewer languages you have examined the less qualified you are to speak of what is “unusual”. People of 19th century were less qualified to rely on cross-linguistical uniqueness (to the limited extent it can be relied upon. We have a good reason to be humble here. Their reason was better).
On the other hand, their a priori assumption could be that the Celtic system must be something ancient.
You know a number of things about Celtic mutation (particularly that it is unusual among IE langauges).
So you have some a priori probability that this feature is “old”.
Now, in light of new information (is it unusual cross-linguistically?) you modify your probability somehow. I’m speaking about how we can modify it.
Part of the joy of comparative linguistics is that it can often shed light on how some very odd synchronic feature arose (in the process demonstrating that it isn’t very ancient.)
The Celtic mutations are a good example. So, in fact, are the Kusaal zero-form enclitics, the odd properties of which are pretty easy to explain as consequences of the loss of word-final short vowels, which is presumably recent enough that such oddities have not yet been levelled away. Harris’ account of Udi endoclitics also leans greatly on comparison to explain how things got that way, and Evans’ grammar of Kayardild (a language with a pretty good claim on being Weirdest Language Evah) has a whole section of comparative stuff which he says he put in because unless he had a diachronic explanation of the weirdness, he thought that “otherwise open-minded linguists” might have some trouble accepting it at all.
So perhaps any apparent association between a lsnguage being an isolate and a lsnguage being very unusual is an artefact of not being able to explain how it got that way.
DE, if a property can easily develop in many languages, you expect to see it in many languages.
If some property P is extremely rare/unique, then:
(a) it requires another rare property P’ as a pre-requisite – and we repeat the same about P’
(b) it takes time to develop
(c) levelling influence of neighbouring languages prevents it
(d) it is just rare:)
Regarding (b) : we know thousands languages. This sample is large and diverse when we are discussing properties that develop quickly (b), don’t have pre-requisites absent from our sample (a, c), and are not rare ((d) – of course, when a property is found in 1 language out of 10 000 we don’t expect to find it among our “thousands”). For something “slow” (10 thousands years) we need to count language families or areas to determine our effective sample size.
The option (d) is especially interesting to people who aspire to find biological or logical limitations on the space of all possible languages (or cultural…, but then we have to deal witht he space of possible cultures, and also with relativism). When I draw attention to b and c instead, I’m actually being sceptical.
Universals are informative.
They can be trivial (“no language has a word kjksjks in the sense “beer”) and they exist (some arrangements are clearly inconvenient).
When you find an universal (or almost universal), is it an element of the universal grammar, or absolutely arbitrary retention from proto-world or maybe it correlates with culture (or climate or…)? The suggestion that it can be a retention may seem totally shameless to you. But I think, assigning an universal to the “universal grammar” (unless we understand it just as “universally observed grammar”) is even more shameless. And what other options are there?
When someone says: “there are no words without vowels!” (indeed such words may seem ‘clearly inconvenient’ and impossible) and I can’t (in this case I can) point at numerous counterexamples, I can say: it is not necessary a restriction on the space of possible languages, it is not “clearly” inconvenient, it can be just a retention.
With an isolate, there is no way of telling whether anything is a retention or not. In fact, the question doesn’t even make sense with isolates. Retained from what, exactly?
You end up in the territory of all those people who solemnly inform us that Proto-Human had clicks because “click languages” are all so wonderfully primitive and hunter-gathery and that anyway it all follows from the genetics in some way. Or all those pretend-historical-linguistics papers that Nature has perpetrated, that explain to us how Bayesian Methods have Solved Historical Linguistics.
There aren’t any non-trivial absolute universals in human language (by “non-trivial”, I mean, things that aren’t obvious consequences of languages being used by creatures with our own particular physical limitations, so it is “trivial” that there are no natural languages which use gamma rays as their medium, for example.)
There are numerous very interesting statistical tendencies, some of which are so strong that they surely must mean something. Though It’s hard to think of any plausible meanings that have actually been identified. I mean, sure, languages with VSO word order are much more likely to have prepostions than postpostions, for example. From which it surely follows that …. well, what follows?
DE, I agree.
But when the list of possible explanations is “A or B” and you insist that B is silly, you are saying “A” (even if you intended to say “we don’t know”).
But it is never just “A or B”. I think it is Pirsig who says there are an infinite number of rational hypotheses that can account for a given set of phenomena (though Dr. Google is not helping me here).
From ZAMM:
#
“The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” (p. 139)
#
Found by Goggle search of “pirsig infinite number rational hypothesis”.
https://books.google.com/books?id=M69poeV1UhoC&pg=PA179&dq=%22For+every+fact+there+is+an+infinity+of+hypotheses
I think it is Pirsig who says there are an infinite number of rational hypotheses that can account for a given set of phenomena (though Dr. Google is not helping me here).
John doesn’t give his search terms. I took the search terms from his complaint.
This is a strategy I often use: when I don’t succeed at getting something done, I complain about it to myself in an exaggerated, whiney manner. Inspecting these complaints gives me new ideas about how to get the thing done. Usually after a few rounds of this I hit on a solution.
If at first you don’t succeed, whine, whine again.
@stu
This works if your problem is best solved by technical means. If not, you need to moan about it to your manager. Having to listen to your moaning is why she earns more than you.
Ad hoc ingenuity. Works for me.
The thing is to shake off cognitive constraints, aka obstacles épistémologiques [Bachelard]. As a dog shakes off rainwater. There are other techniques – I imagine autoflagellation is one such in matters of faith.
PP: this is not limited to technical matters, and managers are not a constraint. I get things done in despite of adversity. As Noe says, it’s ad hoc ingenuity – in which method can be found, as I will add.
Behind many a silk purse is a sow’s ear.
Turns out there’s a bit of Sentinelese data after all, maybe:
https://twitter.com/adam_farris1/status/1664242843194638336
So being portrayed is like being in prison – you sit even if you’re standing, lying or walking. Somehow fitting that both situations involve capturing…
@Hans: That was meant for here, I presume?
Yes, I mixed up the threads.
…and it’s practically identical to the Jarawa and Onge comparanda. Either something is wrong, or the island was settled just a few centuries ago.
~:-|
Or it’s all bogus, which is what I suspect.
Or the island wasn’t actually that isolated, and used to keep in regular contact with the bigger island next door until they realised it was being consumed by the Singularity.
I mean, there’s considerably more sea separating Jarawa from Onge than from Sentinel Island.
Or the island wasn’t actually that isolated, and used to keep in regular contact with the bigger island next door until they realised it was being consumed by the Singularity.
Islands (with Hungarian translation for your convenience)
#
Old saints on millstones float with cats
To islands out at sea
Whereon no female pelvis can
Threaten their agape.
Beyond the long arm of the Law,
Close to a shipping road,
Pirates in their island lairs
Observe the pirate code.
Obsession with security
In Sovereigns prevails;
His Highness and The People both
Pick islands for their jails.
Once, where detected worldlings now
Do penitential jobs,
Exterminated species played
Who had not read their Hobbes.
…
#
The guy on the seaworthy millstone may be Saint Piran. I don’t see where the cat comes in.
#
The Irish tied him to a mill-stone, rolled it over the edge of a cliff into a stormy sea, which immediately became calm, and the saint floated safely over the water to land upon the sandy beach of Perranzabuloe in Cornwall. His first disciples are said to have been a badger, a fox, and a bear[25]
#
I don’t see where the cat comes in.
Perhaps a reference to Lear:
#
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
On a beautiful pea-green millstone,
#
…Oh. Oh. I had quite misremembered the geography.
(Interesting, too, that that map shows an “anchorage” on North Sentinel Island. And one on South Sentinel Island for good measure.)
I assume nobody lives on the more properly isolated island of Narcondam?
As soon as their language is described an contact is established they will cease to be everyone’s dream!
So please, people, contact them secretly.
Be a head of their intelligence servise if you like and supply them with data about our big world and help them plant their agents among us – but never publish anything!
(I know, there are folks who stand against contacting the uncontacted, but they get everything wrong.)
Turns out there’s a bit of Sentinelese data after all, maybe
The following item from Devy and Sreenathan
gave me pause. Its general phonetic shape recalls Odia ଡଙ୍ଗା ḍaṅgā, Bengali ডোঙ্গা ḍoṅga, Hindi-Urdu डोंगा ڈونگا ḍõgā, all ‘dugout canoe’. A recent Indic loanword diffused through the languages of the Andaman archipelago, or sheer coincidence? There is an overview of the forms in the Indo-Aryan languages in Turner here. Note the early meanings ‘betel box’ and ‘water container or carrier made from a coconut shell’ in Prakrit, so the unifying sense seems to be ‘hollowed-out wooden vessel’ or the like. This family of Indic words is doubtless of non-Indo-Aryan substrate origin, but there is nothing old in Dravidian or Munda to compare, and superficially, the initial retroflex speaks against any borrowing from an early Dravidian or Munda source.
There is also the very remote possibility of a loanword into Indo-Aryan from an unknown substrate source on the mainland akin to source of the Ongan word—Austroasiatic? One could go looking… For a lark, I did this. On the maritime Nicobarese side, the Car word for ‘canoe’ is apparently ap. Shompen has a düe ~ rüe ‘canoe’, apparently. As for mainland Austroasiatic, H.L. Shorto (A Mon-Khmer comparative dictionary) reconstructed *t₂ʔɔɔŋ for ‘tree, wood’ in Proto-Mon-Khmer. But in his reconstruction, *t₂ is a consonant that shows sibilant and lateral outcomes in northern Austroasiatic, such as s in Mundari, so not immediately attractive for a Munda source of the Indic words. Shorto gives no Nicobarese reflex for this protoform, either. Anyway, enough fun for now.
For the typology ‘tree’ > ‘boat’, there is this very enjoyable LH thread on дуб and дубок here.
Shompen has a düe ~ rüe ‘canoe’, apparently.
Akajeru roːɔ /roːɔ/, Akacharu /roɔ/, Opuchikwar /ro/…
Sen. ḍāŋ ~ ṭāŋ [etc.] Odia ଡଙ୍ଗା ḍaṅgā [etc.]
…Akabea /roko/.
There’s another option: Nihali or what’s left of it.
Wiktionary has a lengthy wordlist that features “boat”, and yes, it’s ḍong. It is marked as a loan from an unspecified Indo-Aryan language, but one wonders.
Nihali replaced so much of its vocabulary with loanwords, I doubt that a cultural item like a canoe would retain an old native name.
I assume nobody lives on the more properly isolated island of Narcondam?
There is, officially, one village, population 16. It contains, officially, one household, a police station. All 16 inhabitants are “supervisory police personnel” who maintain a subsistence plantation of coconuts and bananas. I’m not sure who or what they supervise, or what they police for that matter. The island is a wildlife sanctuary, so they probably protect it. Perhaps they are also the ones who arrest you if you try to trespass on North Sentinel.
Xerib: For the typology ‘tree’ > ‘boat’, there is this very enjoyable LH thread on дуб and дубок here.
Toward the end of that thread we briefly discussed a mysterious Proto-Indo-European *dʰanw-, introduced by Andrej Bjelaković from unknown source (unknown to me, that is). Such a word for boat or dugout canoe (maybe just in Eastern IE) might have been derived from PIE *dʰenh₂- (or *dʰeh₂n-) “flow, run”, If so, it could also plausibly have yielded the form in Indic that became the source for an Andamanese wanderwort ~ḍāŋ, I’ll admit it’s not strong without further evidence, but it’s not nothing either.
If so, it would also be the other way around, “boat” > “tree”.
Very interesting! If there has been a former *nw in the Slavic ‘oak’ word, that would also radically improve the already existing proposal that western Uralic *tammə ‘oak’ is a loan from its Balto-Slavic precedessor or a lost Baltic cousin (the versions currently stitched together need severe back-and-forth developments via reanalysis and re-compounding with the native #pawə ‘tree’).
In PIE terms, “*dʰanw-” would look to me just maybe massageable, even without substrata, into something like *dʰh₁-nh₂w- and an original meaning to the effect “makes boats” (or more verbosely, “that which is made into boats”). But a verb root and a noun stem simply mashed together in zero-grade is probably not very good morphology for anything. And this is all built on sand in the absense of any details for why we should consider *mb < *nw in the first place, either in this word or at all.
I could only find this *dʰanw- in English Wiktionary, in the entries for даб and дуб.
I am skeptical about “that which is made into boats”. Are there any other examples of this kind of construction used for any IE plant? Also, oak is a versatile wood, and boats were probably a marginal part of PIE life.
@Y
*dʰegʷʰ “to burn”
*gʷʰer “warm, hot”
Oak (or wood) = that which is burnt?😊
oak is a versatile wood, and boats …
Indeed: “hearts of oak”.
IIRC oak was used in boat building for the main timbers giving strength, and the awkward ‘knuckles’ holding the transverse framing to the longitudinals. But it’s too heavy and rapidly became too expensive (because slow-growing) for the planking.
If the earliest PIE boats were dugouts, oak is just too hard to work — neither very buoyant. I’d expect pine/spruce.
“a mysterious Proto-Indo-European *dʰanw-, introduced by Andrej Bjelaković from unknown source”
“I could only find this *dʰanw- in English Wiktionary”
The proposed root *dʰanw- is here in Pokorny: *dhanu- “eine Baumbezeichnung (?)“. Basically, it was invented for German Tanne and its cognates in adjacent Germanic languages. (And I am curious, in which OHG texts is tanna found in the meaning “Eiche”?) Sanskrit dhanvana- refers to one or more species of the genus Grewia—and in particular, Grewia eriocarpa (= G. elastica)? The Sanskrit tree-name is nowadays usually derived from dhanvan- “desert, wasteland”. There is a more detailed exposition here. Another evaluation of the material here.
On the Sanskrit word dhanvana- “Grewia spp.”, see the entries for dharmaṇa “species of snake” and dharmaṇa “the tree Grewia elastica” in Turner. In his review of Turner’s dictionary (in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland no. 1/2, 1967), Thomas Burrow added a great deal to our understanding of these words; see page 42 of his review:
(Bhpr. is the Bhāvaprakāśa a very very late (16th cent. CE) medical and pharmacological treatise. ŚāṅkhŚrS is the Śāṅkhāyana-Śrauta-sūtra, from the latest layer of the Vedic texts. Susr. is Suśruta. Apologies for any uncaught OCR errors.)
The fine-grained wood of species of Grevia is apparently used for making bows and other weapons (cf. the South African species G. occidentalis, in Afrikaans apparently once assegaaibos, booghout, in English assegai wood, bow-wood, among other names).
(I see that the spam filter has eaten a longish comment I posted on the “root” *dʰanw-, as seen for instance here in Pokorny or here in DWDS, written in response to Trond Engen and Y’s comments. I hope my comment will reappear soon. Just the link for now for the curious.)
Norw. dugout canoes are mostly made of pine (Pinus sylvestris), but the oldest and largest finds were made of oak (Quercus, i don’t know which of the two native species) . But the oldest specimen is merely 2200 years old, so made with iron tools. Both pine and oak are hard and durable materials. Spruce (Picea abies) would probably not work for dugouts since its easily splntering, but it’s good for planks and boards and veneers,
There are Danish boats from around 4000 BCE made of linden (Tilia cordata), which I learn is an easy material to form by carving but not very robust. The world’s oldest known boat, the 10 000 y.o. Dutch Pesse canoe, was made from pine with tools made by flint and horn.
To the dossier of this “Indo-Germanic” etymology (dhanvana- + Tanne, as seen in Pokorny and DWDS, linked to above), Günter Neumann suggested adding a Hittite word. From Alwin Kloekhorst, Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon, p. 827:
Here is Neumann’s treatment (“Hethitische Etymologien III” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 77; apologies for any uncaught OCR errors; we will see if German quotation mark formatting is maintained after posting):
The alanza-tree occurs relatively frequently in Hittite texts, but its identification is uncertain too.
@Trond Danish boats from around 4000 BCE made of linden … an easy material to form by carving but not very robust.
Yes wp favours linden for the earliest dugouts — at least in mid-to northern European Latitudes and Western Asian.
The ‘not very robust’ means they’ve rotted out of the archeological record. This perhaps explains why the oldest finds were oak.
Around the Med, linden grows only at higher elevations — but perhaps rather lower immediately post-glacial retreat?
@Xerib: apologies for any uncaught OCR errors; we will see if German quotation mark formatting is maintained after posting)
This line contains at least 2 OCRrors, or maybe printing errors:
und bes ihren Rechtsschutz zu sichern. In es in Zusammenhang mit Weide
For “und bes ihren Rechtsschutz zu sichern” I surmise “um ihnen Rechtschutz zu sichern“.
For “In es in Zusammenhang” I would have guessed “In Zusammenhang mit“. But the remainder of the sentence is missing: “Riemschneider ebd. 363 vermutet in den … Bäumen Nutzhölzer wie” can’t be the continuation of it, because the word order is wrong. It would have needed to be “In Zusammenhang mit Weide vermutet Riemschneider ebd. 363 in den … Bäumen Nutzhölzer wie“.
Maybe a combination of editorial mistake and OCR.
Otherwise, that annoying “German quotation mark formatting” has been preserved.
apologies for any uncaught OCR errors
There were quite a few, as it turned out when I found a copy of the article and compared; I hope I caught them all (a notable one: “heth. arana-” was actually “heth. arau̯a-”). A good opportunity to exercise my copyediting skills so they don’t get rusty!
And have some ecological similarities in e.g. preferring drier ground. A shift ‘oak’ > ‘pine’ is probably reflected in Samic *āikke̮, today ‘large lonely pine’ but probably from Germanic ‘oak’. Probably does not generalize for connecting ‘oak’ with ‘fir’, though. If OHG has tanna also attested as ‘oak’, I’d suspect a connection first of all thru oak and fir both being good material for load-bearing beams and logs.
In Finnish thru Northern Russian archeology, I’ve seen aspen (Populus tremula, rather soft like linden, much better range) mentioned the most as the wood of choice for dugout canoes; off the top of my head I have no idea about preferred wood material for constructed boats. — I do not mean to suggest though that ‘oak’ could be immediately derived as ‘boat-making wood’, after all Slavic *dǫbъ seems to be an innovation in this sense, replacing the root *aiǵ- (Wiktionary’s *h₂eyǵ- ²) of at least Germanic *aiks, Lith. ąžuolas, Latin aesculus (even if this is itself maybe more likely a Western European substrate term than actual PIE).
It would be nice if Oti-Volta dugouts (Dagbani ŋarima) were made out of Vitex doniana trees (Dagbani ŋarinsi), but, alas, I have no reason at all to think that they are.
(The proto-Oti-Volta roots don’t actually quite match: *ŋát- and *ŋáad- respectively; but that could probably be finessed with a bit of ingenuity: it’s actually quite possible that the “boat” word has incorporated some sort of derivational suffix. But AFAIK you grow ŋarinsi for the fruit, not the wood, anyway.)
“Both pine and oak are hard and durable materials. ”
Is not it good, Norwegian wood…
But wait, cheap timber, lightweigt, not very strong and looking as if I can incise in it with fingernails it is called “pine”. I don’t know what species it is.
J.Pystynen: [Oak and pine also] have some ecological similarities in e.g. preferring drier ground. A shift ‘oak’ > ‘pine’ is probably reflected in Samic *āikke̮, today ‘large lonely pine’ but probably from Germanic ‘oak’. Probably does not generalize for connecting ‘oak’ with ‘fir’, though. If OHG has tanna also attested as ‘oak’, I’d suspect a connection first of all thru oak and fir both being good material for load-bearing beams and logs.
I wrapped up my previous comment in haste this morning, and the follow-up has been working in the back of my head today. I was aware of the ‘fir’ word (Norw. furu) < *perkʷ- and planned to repeat previous speculations about similarities of oak and pine, including how they grow to big trees in protruded places and attract the hammer of Perkúnas, but a semantic connection through carving or dugouts didn’t occur to me before today, and the similar properties as timber in buildings wasn’t on my mind at all.
[Edit: Oops, edited out a paragraph replying to Xerib about Tanne. The editing window is about to close, so suffice to say “thanks”, and unfortunately it’s not cognate with Sw. tall etc.]
Now we have some four IE words for oak, and they all sooner or later get extended to a conifer.
I’ll add that the spruce is thought to be a late arrival in southern and western Scandinavia, and I’ll assume without further research that this goes for all of Western Europe.
@drasvi: Pinewood is hard compared to e.g. spruce, but not that hard, but it’s extremely durable due to the content of resin, especially in natural (or carefully managed) malmfuru.
Oti-Volta dugouts (Dagbani ŋarima) were made out of Vitex doniana trees (Dagbani ŋarinsi)
Are small boats or coracles woven of wicker in local use? Young flexible rods of some Vitex species are commonly used for wicker. This is the origin of the Latin name vītex itself (cf. vieō ‘bend together, plait, weave’). Just a thought, and I have no idea whether it accords with the facts of the local use of V. doniana and local boat building traditions.
(Short comment because I am on the road.)
On the whole *dʰanw- business, I have a few comments. First, *nw > *nn is regular in Germanic. Second, the *a is highly suspicious, but the Germanic and the Hittite sides require *a or *o, while the Vedic side requires *a or *e; *o would trigger Brugmann’s law, i.e. we wouldn’t expect the short first vowel in dhánuḥ – assuming it can’t be explained away as analogical from the other forms of the word, dhánvan-, where the closed syllable would have blocked Brugmann’s law, or…
The DWDS entry for Tanne “fir”, regionally “spruce” or “needle-leaved tree” in general, – OHG “needle-leaved tree”, MHG additionally “mast” (of a ship) – considers Avestan θanvan-, θanvar- comparable; it points out the “divergent initial consonant” but doesn’t care. Iranian *θ, when followed by a vowel, is usually cognate with Indic *tʰ; in words inherited from PIE, that was long thought to occur only as the regular reflex of the cluster *th₂. But not only does *th₁ evidently have the same outcome, so do – but this time in Iranian only – clusters of *d and *dʰ with *h₁ and *h₂ according to pp. 2 and 7 here or pp. 3–5 here or almost this entire work. If we can set up a |dʰh₂én-w-| “bow-related”, we’ve explained the *a and the Avestan θ at once.
This would separate Tanne f. “fir” from Tann m. (obsolete) “dense, spooky forest” and Tenne f. “threshing-floor” (the cognate of English den, and of Middle Low German denne “forested valley, lowland”); the latter two could then continue a laryngeal-free |dʰén-w-| “flat”, along with OHG tenar, MHG tener “flat hand”, Greek θέναρ “palm, sole”, Vedic dhánuḥ “sandbank, island”, Vedic dhanū́ḥ “sandy, tall riverbank” and further Vedic dhánvan- “dry land, desert”, as the DWDS suggests.
What I can’t judge is whether the distribution of *e- and *o-grades I’m implying here (*e for all the Indo-Iranian reflexes and the “hand” word, *o for all Germanic reflexes of the “flat land” word) makes morphological sense.
No, because a single consonant isn’t long enough to be the root of a content word in PIE. (Unlike in, say, Northwest Caucasian.)
Rather “und bes. ihren Rechtsschutz zu sichern”, abbreviating besonders: “and to, especially, ensure their legal protection”. That sounds better in English than in German, but academic German writing is in fact often clunky.
Anyway, the “Garte-flächen” in the line above should be Gartenflächen.
No, the remainder of the sentence is the Hittite quote.
The latter is a famous Italo-Celtic innovation.
It’s at home in the mountains, where its very flat roots are an advantage.
Oh. I repaired a link in my comment and retroactively sent it into moderation, it seems. It’s completely gone…
On the whole *dʰanw- business, I have a few comments. First, *nw > *nn is regular in Germanic. Second, the *a is highly suspicious, but the Germanic and the Hittite sides require *a or *o, while the Vedic side requires *a or *e; *o would trigger Brugmann’s law, i.e. we wouldn’t expect the short first vowel in dhánuḥ – assuming it can’t be explained away as analogical from the other forms of the word, dhánvan-, where the closed syllable would have blocked Brugmann’s law, or…
The DWDS entry for Tanne “fir”, regionally “spruce” or “needle-leaved tree” in general, – OHG “needle-leaved tree”, MHG additionally “mast” (of a ship) – considers Avestan θanvan-, θanvar- comparable; it points out the “divergent initial consonant” but doesn’t care. Iranian *θ, when followed by a vowel, is usually cognate with Indic *tʰ; in words inherited from PIE, that was long thought to occur only as the regular reflex of the cluster *th₂. But not only does *th₁ evidently have the same outcome, so do – but this time in Iranian only – clusters of *d and *dʰ with *h₁ and *h₂ according to pp. 2 and 7 here or pp. 3–5 here or almost this entire work. If we can set up a |dʰh₂én-w-| “bow-related”, we’ve explained the *a and the Avestan θ at once.
This would separate Tanne f. “fir” from Tann m. (obsolete) “dense, spooky forest” and Tenne f. “threshing-floor” (the cognate of English den, and of Middle Low German denne “forested valley, lowland”); the latter two could then continue a laryngeal-free |dʰén-w-| “flat”, along with OHG tenar, MHG tener “flat hand”, Greek θέναρ “palm, sole”, Vedic dhánuḥ “sandbank, island”, Vedic dhanū́ḥ “sandy, tall riverbank” and further Vedic dhánvan- “dry land, desert”, as the DWDS suggests.
What I can’t judge is whether the distribution of *e- and *o-grades I’m implying here (*e for all the Indo-Iranian reflexes and the “hand” word, *o for all Germanic reflexes of the “flat land” word) makes morphological sense.
No, because a single consonant isn’t long enough to be the root of a content word in PIE. (Unlike in, say, Northwest Caucasian.)
Rather “und bes. ihren Rechtsschutz zu sichern”, abbreviating besonders: “and to, especially, ensure their legal protection”. That sounds better in English than in German, but academic German writing is in fact often clunky.
Anyway, the “Garte-flächen” in the line above should be Gartenflächen.
No, the remainder of the sentence is the Hittite quote.
It’s at home in the mountains, where its very flat roots are an advantage.
Are small boats or coracles woven of wicker in local use?
I don’t think so, but to be honest, I don’t really know.
In the Agolle Kusaasi area, the only river is the White Volta, which accordingly doesn’t even have a specific name: it’s just called kɔlig “river.” And much of the year it consists of mere puddles, so boats aren’t really in evidence at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Volta#/media/File:White_Volta_in_the_Dry_Season.jpg
Moreover, until recently, the whole riverine area was thinly populated, because of onchocerciasis. (I suspect this accounts for the existence of two very different dialects of Kusaal in what is really only a very small area: the White Volta divides Agolle from Toende much more effectively than you would imagine. There’s a thesis in that for somebody: Eye Disease and Dialect Diversity.)
Rather “und bes. ihren Rechtsschutz zu sichern”, abbreviating besonders: “and to, especially, ensure their legal protection”. That sounds better in English than in German, but academic German writing is in fact often clunky.
No, you need to go back and reread my copyedited version.
the only river is the White Volta, which accordingly doesn’t even have a specific name: it’s just called kɔlig “river.”
Avon/Arfon
Ouse
Guadalquivir
A plenitude of watercourses doesn’t seem to stop locals calling one _the_ (big) river. A language universal?
True.
The White Volta is labelled as the “Nakambé” in French maps on the Burkina side, but I don’t think that’s Mooré; it doesn’t look like it comes from any Western Oti-Volta language. Maybe Bisa (though it’s not in André Prost’s dictionary.) Like its southern neighbour Kusaal, Bisa is divided into two surprisingly different dialects by the river in question.
Ah, I’ve never seen an OCR leaving large holes before.
The comment I thought had disappeared is simply what I posted next. I must have clicked on “delete” instead of “save” when I edited it.
That’s the only river that deserves to be called “big” – specifically, “navigable” – on the whole Iberian Peninsula, IIRC.
Hmm? The river with the highest flow is the Douro, whose etymology might ultimately derive from proto-Celtic for water, speculates wp. (There we go again.)
Anyhow it’s far more important: for floating the barrels of Port down from the vineyards.