Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an intriguing post questioning whether the Omotic languages of eastern Africa are (as they are said to be) part of the Afro-Asiatic family, linking the skeptical paper “Is Omotic Afroasiatic? A Critical Discussion” by Rolf Theil (pdf, HTML cache). I haven’t got time or energy to actually read Theil’s paper at the moment, so I’ll just accept Lameen’s judgment that it’s a “pretty good… argument against the hypothesis” (the discussion in his comment thread supports that judgment as well). I like Theil’s final passage:
My conclusion is that Omotic should be treated as an independent language family. No convincing alternative has ever been presented.
Hayward (1995: 11) writes that «[i]t is, of course, a relief not to have Omotic as an isolate; we do not need a whole family of ‘Basques’ on our hands!» An alternative point of view is possible. Africa is the cradle of mankind. Why are there no language isolates on a continent where humans have lived since language was invented?
The Hayward quote is bizarre. What could it possibly mean to say “we do not need a whole family of ‘Basques’ on our hands”? Are isolates somehow a threat to our well-being? Should we shove them into closets where they don’t belong just so they won’t stare at us from the abyssal depths of their mysterious eyes?
I haven’t studied this in detail, but the isolates all seem to be in parts of northern Eurasia and the Middle East which have been pretty thoroughly mapped. In the Americas, Africa, and Australia, and possibly in SE Asia and India, I doubt that we know enough to identify isolates.
Most of which will turn out to be, of course, of Dravidian origin.
Erm, how could a language family be an isolate? If it’s a family, then it consists of a number of relatives, which are thereby not isolates.
I understand what he means, of course, but I’ve never heard the term “isolate” applies to families rather than individual languages. And I find the notion absurd: if you go high enough up the tree, every language family is unrelated to every other. (Unless you believe in Proto-World.)
I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, the only solution is to nuke language isolates from orbit. Then, and only then, will the eldritch influence of the dread Cthulhu be cleansed from the Earth.
“the isolates all seem to be in parts of northern Eurasia and the Middle East which have been pretty thoroughly mapped”
I agree that in much of the world we probably don’t know enough to identify isolates, but that certainly hasn’t stopped anyone in the Americas, which are absolutely full of “isolates”. In Africa, it depends who you ask, but there are certainly people who argue that Hadza (a click language of Tanzania), in particular, and maybe Shabo (in Ethiopia) are isolates.
“if you go high enough up the tree, every language family is unrelated to every other. (Unless you believe in Proto-World.)”
There isn’t a single attested case of a spoken language emerging out of nothing in human history (even the one artificial language that has gained a few native speakers, Esperanto, still has a largely Indo-European vocabulary). On the plausible assumption that there haven’t been notably more artificial language fans in the past than there are today, and that all human beings descend from a fairly small common ancestral population that spoke a language, it seems quite likely that every language family is related to every other one. Discernibly related – now that’s another story.
“it seems quite likely that every language family is related to every other one.”
That’ll probably never get past the hypothesis stage, since all evidence seems to show otherwise. 🙂 I have no problem with the idea that the world’s proto-languages emerged independently 6,000 years ago among their respective tribes and ethnic groups.
Isn’t Meroitic generally regarded as having been an isolate? You don’t get much more African than that.
“I have no problem with the idea that the world’s proto-languages emerged independently 6,000 years ago among their respective tribes and ethnic groups.”
Do you really think people were painting, sculpting, building boats, making spear-throwers, living in villages, conducting complex funerary rites, and hunting mammoths to extinction without even having a language to speak to each other in? And that we didn’t start using a language until hundreds of thousands of years after the common genetic endowment that allows all of us to learn a language emerged? Or was there a sudden craze for making up new languages 6000 years ago (“OK, everyone, we need to come up with a new way to form the accusative… how about we add an -m to the stem? The ayes have itm – let’s use that suffixm from now on.”)?
The least implausible way I can think of for the world’s spoken languages not to have a single origin would be if the original Homo sapiens expansion only used sign languages, and different populations independently came up with spoken languages to replace their existing sign language in much the way that different villages with large deaf populations have independently come up with sign languages to replace their parents’ spoken language. But if that had happened anywhere near as recently as 6000 years ago, you’d expect at least some areas (Australia or the Andaman Islands should easily be isolated enough) to have kept a sign language as their first language despite having hearing populations, and that too is unattested as far as I know.
Nothing new under the sun? It’s probably true that all languages are linked. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t evolved so distantly from the parent as to make them independent. Some of them may choose to leave their families all together with a clean break. The term ‘isolates’ may be more about severed ties than about the language having been immaculately conceived. I’ve been inventing my own language for 30 years, incorporating a grammar based on cycles. Though Tapissary has many links to Indo-European languages, I believe its cyclic grammar and pictographic script make it an isolate.
Ockham Billy? Thy razor, please.
If you mean 60,000, that is AFAIK barely imaginable.
Are there any non-IE words in Esperanto, apart from proper names?
Last I looked, Wikipedia cited something saying recent that both Hadza and Sandawe are indeed Khoisan.
Fool! There is no hope — but to be eaten first.
“Are there any non-IE words in Esperanto, apart from proper names?”
Define “IE words”. Would arabric borrowing through Spanish count as IE or non IE?
A less obstructionist answer would be ‘some, but not that many’. For historical reasons relating to the time and place the language was worked out and started to be used, IE roots predominate.
Also, due to the mechanics of the language and the linguistic ethos of most users, there’s a tendency for new concepts to be expressed by compounds made up of existing roots. New roots are not borrowed that easily.
I’ve read that at one time that the Japanese borrowing hashio(j)? was generally accepted for chopsticks by IE-speaking esperanto users but that Asian users preferred the compound (mangho)bastonetoj ((eat)-little-sticks). IME bastonetoj is the more commonly used term.
“Most of which will turn out to be, of course, of Dravidian origin”
KONGO, Dravidian, Welsh: triglossia in Proto-World.
They were probably different registers of the same language. KONGO for kings, Welsh for druids/linguists/programmers, Dravidian for peasants.
The notion of a unitary Proto-World is of course already further weakened by the presence of numerous superstrate loanwords from pre-Hyperwar Korean, obviously most pronounced in Modern Korean despite its genealogical unrelatedness but still found all over the world. Pronounced in the literal sense that many of these loanwords elsewhere are only present as zero morphemes, a testament to the highly advanced pre-Hyperwar cloaking technologies.
(Pre-Hyperwar Korean, as everyone knows I hope, doesn’t descend from Proto-World but is a pre-Proto-World de novo creation and hence does not technically itself qualify as a natural language.)
Tracing the /ko-/ of KONGO to the apparent /ko-/ of Pre-Hyperwar Korean is of course a well-known trap for the unwary.
@J Pystynen: Is there a peer-reviewed manhwa that explains the situation in detail?
Are there any non-IE words in Esperanto, apart from proper names?
There aren’t in Zamenhof’s original stock, but there are some now for what WP calls “specialized and regional words”: it cites haŝioj ‘chopsticks < Japanese hashi plus noun plural suffix -oj and boaco ‘reindeer’ < South Saami båatsoe, cf. North Saami boazu. Both of these originally culture-bound concepts have traveled far and wide since, of course.
Z’s dominant sources were French, English, and German/Yiddish. Some Eo words reflect the [aj ~ ej] distinction that collapsed in Standard German but was preserved in Yiddish and the dialects, e.g. hejmo ‘home’ vs. fajfi ‘to whistle’. Some are English/German compromises, e.g. strato ‘street/Straße’, which comes out looking Dutch.
About a dozen original roots are direct from Latin (e.g. sed ‘but’), but many more have been added since, including a large number from binomial nomenclature (e.g. ardeo ‘heron’), with the result that the vocabulary as of 1987 was about 85% Romance. Only kaj ‘and’ is from Classical Greek.
Another few handfuls are from Russian (e.g. kartavi ‘speak with [ʀ] or [ʁ]’) and Polish (e.g. barĉo ‘borsht < barszcz); some are indeterminate between the two, like celo ‘aim, goal’. Perhaps four roots are from Lithuanian.
There is, however, a Russian semantic substrate in many words: the Plena Vortaro (where -aro is ‘coherent collection’) is not the ‘full dictionary’ but the ‘complete (unabridged) dictionary’, a sense not found in French plein but present in its rough Russian translation полный ‘full, complete’.
There are also some real weirdies like edzo ‘husband’. All agree that this is a back-formation < edzino ‘wife’, like fraulo ‘bachelor’ < fraulino. But what is the origin of edzino? Z said it too was a back-formation < kronprincedzino ‘crown princess’, arbitrarily distorted from German, but a more likely source is thought to be Yiddish rebbetzin ‘rebbe’s wife’. Prudentially, Z never conceded that Eo owed anything at all to Yiddish.
See also this StackExchange question from 2016; the answers mention the two WP examples, as well as zorio “flip-flops” (of the footwear variety) from Japanese zōri, and a few even more obscure examples.
There are of course probably many Esperanto words derived from (e.g.) Arabic via Spanish.
That’s the wrong way around, though, as home & pipe will show you right away.