Linguistic Family Tree.

Pretty interesting. I didn’t realise that Venetian, Piedmontese, Emiliano, Ligurian, and Lombard belonged on the same branch as French, and on a different branch from Italian, Nap. Cal, and Sicilian.

Pashto and Ossetian do belong together as the two largest Eastern Iranian languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Iranian_languages. These share the innovation of leniting initial voiced stops, as in Pashto and Yaghnobi ɣar ‘mountain’ (I don’t know the Ossetian) = Avestan gairi-, Sanskrit giri-, Proto-Indo-Iranian *grri-.

Not that I know speaker counts for the various languages, I was blindly trusting the artist who seems to have very carefully scaled the size of each leafy clump to match what little I know about speaker numbers.

Sorry, forget what I said about s-plurals. Except for Friulian and Ladin, the northern Italian varieties in question use vocalic plurals.

Why, Y, do you call Faroese joined with Icelandic a quibble? Both certainly have no closer relatives but each other. They don’t easily communicate orally but fairly well in written form.

If a tree were to be historically correct the Scandinavian languages should be grouped into three:
(1) West (Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Norn).
(2) East (Danish, Swedish).
(3) Gutnic.

This was valid in medieval times even if the differences were only minor, dialectal ones, traceable already in runic Norse (earlier monophtongization in East Scandinavian, ‘o’ in East corresponding to ‘u’ in West etc. – in a continuum though not following modern national borders).

The modern tree would be different because of political changes through the centuries. One could mention the strong medieval Low German influence in continental Scandinavia, the Danish sovereignity over Norway (1397-1814) and the Swedish occupation of Gotland (1645), of Scania, Blekinge, Halland, Bohuslän and Jämtland (1658). Today the grouping would be (just as Minna Sundberg shows it):
(1) ‘Atlantic’ (Faroese, Icelandic).
(2) ‘Continental’ (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish).

It’s true that (spoken) Danish is rapidly drifting apart. But we do understand each other in continental Scandinavia, if both parties just want to and don’t aforehand decide otherwise – there is a psychological factor involved.

I think it’s… fairly obvious that IE and Uralic are closely related. From p. 12 of this pdf (I recommend reading the context, I didn’t want to paste at least two pages here):

Since both of the Uralic forms clearly represent Proto-Uralic, and, likewise, both Indo-European forms represent Proto-Indo-European (even Proto-Indo-Hittite, if one agrees with the special status of Anatolian languages within Indo-European), it is clear that these “borrowings” have to be attributed to the oldest layer of borrowings from one family into another (Rédei presumes the direction to have been from Indo-European to Uralic and not vice versa, but this is not really relevant for my purpose here). How many are there? Rédei acknowledges seven [Rédei 1988: 651–654]. Seven easily “identified” old borrowings from one proto-language into another that include words for ‘name’ and ‘water’.

Certainly, cases where the word for ‘name’ has been borrowed are known; likewise, for the word ‘water’; likewise, cases where two or more random items on the 100-wordlist have been borrowed from a single source. But in most, probably even all, such cases borrowing of such basic items has only become possible due to a concentrated “bombardment” of the recipient language by lexical items from the donor language — “bombardment” which, obviously, begins with a large number of technical and cultural terms. A situation under which two ancient languages “meet”, exchange terms for ‘name’, ‘water’, ‘give’, and ‘sinew’, and then part company borders on the ridiculous, and at least requires extra proof.

Brackets in the original.

The only thing confusing me with the tree is the text: Sizes of the branches represent the recorded native speakers before year 0. This can’t refer to the age of the speakers since nobody speaks before birth. It can’t even refer to ‘year 0’ since that one never existed (1 BC was followed by 1 AD). If it’s a typo and she meant a specific modern year, what then does ‘before’ mean.

Great link! Kind of reminded me, design- and content-wise, of this:

https://scontent-b-mxp.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/t31.0-8/s960x960/10700753_1024726127557082_7306940965254024842_o.jpg

I stand corrected on both Iranian and Scandinavian.

Jim, while Sanskrit is close to Proto-Indo-Aryan, it was not the parent language of all languages in the Indian Subcontinent.

Christopher, I haven’t read neither Campbell nor Vovin and my views are miles from expertise. It’s the Moscow school’s own description of proper methodology I appreciate (like here in a commemorative of Sergey Starostin). http://altaica.ru/personalia/e_starostin.htm

By these measures I’m a little hesitant when it comes to Greenberg and Ruhlen.If we ever are going to trace origins of the languages of the earth, I think we have to stick to the methods proposed by the Moscow school. Whether they themselves follow them or not I can’t tell. But the days of Nikolay Marr are hopefully gone. The future’s not ours to see (as Doris Day sang) but here as a teaser is a historic linguistic scheme from the University of Moscow: http://starling.rinet.ru/images/globet.png

I think it’s… fairly obvious that IE and Uralic are closely related.

I would say they are promising candidates, but my chief reason for thinking so is the partial similarity of their pronoun systems and inflectional morphology. I’m not particularly impressed by the “water, name, sinew, salt…” set. Some of the similarities are certainly accidental. For example, PIE ‘sinew’ is morphologically complex and quite evidently derived within PIE from a PIE verb root using productive suffixation. *sneh₁-wr-/-wen- vs. Uralic *sïxni doesn’t look good to me, and some of the other “cognates” may be similarly analysable in PIE (but not in Uralic).

As for the tree — it’s beautiful, but hardly accurate as a representation of anything. Indo-Iranian vs. “European”? Why only extant languages? And if extant (supposing that Cornish and Sanskrit qualify), where are, for example, the Sorbian languages?

I wondered about Sorbian, and Nuristani too. Sorbian has ca. 50,000 speakers, more than Scots Gaelic. Nuristani has 25,000, so I could see leaving it out, though as a significantly high-level clade I feel it would have deserved a leaf.

SH: I’m a little hesitant when it comes to Greenberg and Ruhlen.

I am not at all hesitant to describe their “methods” as laughable. Ruhlen has made much of the method of setting “tests” for non-linguists, grouping carefully chosen sets of words in such as a way as to make the results (identifying their families) evident, and then saying “See? you too can be historical linguists!” or words to that effect.

JC: From what I understand, Lyle Campbell never thinks any languages are related unless they’ve been well-known to be related for at least a century.

That’s just about it.

*sneh₁-wr-/-wen- vs. Uralic *sïxni doesn’t look good to me

Lehtinen has observed that many cases of Proto-Uralic *x, including this one, are unnecessary (and are reconstructed thanks to placing too much weight on Finnic evidence): lengthening of Pre-Finnic *ä *a, into the latter of which *ï merged, was regular before a non-semivowel sonorant plus *-i. See Aikio (2012) for more on this. So it’s *sneh₁-wr vs *sïni ([sɨnə] ?), which is a little better.

(Though on the general question of Indo-Uralic, at least as something we’ll ever recover, I’ll stand with LH in hesitation.)

Dammit, even English sinew is just accidentally similar to Skt. snā́van- ‘sinew’, not related to it!

Huh, Wikipedia thinks it is. How should we trace sinew?

Bjorvand & Lindeman compare Germanic *sinu- to Av. hinu. I’d say that FU *sinë- looks like another old IIr loan.

Oh, I have heard of this “European clade”. It’s defining “innovation” is the “split” of “PIE” *a, “faithfully preserved” by Sanskrit, into *e, *a and *o. That’s right, it’s a long-forgotten 19th-century idea that was founded on nothing more than “but the Vedas are so ancient”. Verner took it for granted in the famous paper on his law.

It can’t even refer to ‘year 0′ since that one never existed (1 BC was followed by 1 AD)

Not if you’re an astronomer. 🙂

From what I know of their works the Muscovite nostraticists are professionals. Far from exercising mass comparison the easy way, they examine each item in every detail (phonetics, semantics, morphology) being faithful to the comparative method.

There is one problem I can see: not their method, but their data. For PIE, they use Pokorny’s etymological dictionary published in 1959. The reason is that nothing has replaced it as a one-stop source. There are two big problems with it: it’s outdated several times over, almost completely lacking laryngeals – to pick the most obvous issue –, and it consistently errs on the side of inclusion, containing everything Pokorny or Walde could find that might conceivably go back to PIE even if, AFAIK, that required ad-hoc assumptions about analogy or such. Somewhat similarly, for Proto-Uralic they use Rédei’s etymological dictionary from 1988; not only has Ante Aikio alone successfully reconstructed a really large number of Proto-Uralic roots since then, but even the basic dichotomy of Uralic into Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric has come under heavy fire. Proto-Altaic is still shaky, and the state of the art of Proto-Afro-Asiatic reconstruction is in a really bad shape, because large branches of that family are woefully underresearched. And while there are two or three reconstructions of Proto-Afro-Asiatic, each with its own problems, there’s no reconstruction of Proto-Eskimo-Aleut at all, so the Moscow School simply ignores Aleut and resorts to Proto-Eskimo… And so on and so forth.

The Moscow School Nostraticists know that Pokorny erred on the side of inclusion. That’s why their own etymological dictionaries do the same. If you don’t know this and open one of those books at random, you’re likely to conclude that it’s all garbage, because the robust comparisons only make up maybe half of the total number!

From what I understand, Lyle Campbell never thinks any languages are related unless they’ve been well-known to be related for at least a century.

I don’t know much about Campbell; from what little I do know, however, he strikes me a phylopessimist.

Biology was going in that direction throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century: people started out looking for “reliable characters” that would let them know the true phylogeny effortlessly, found that one candidate after another didn’t hold up, and resigned to “we can’t ever know anything”. Of course it’s true that everything can evolve convergently – if it can evolve once, it can evolve twice – or be inherited by lateral gene transfer. Sure, the probability of this happening isn’t equal for all characters, but outside the molecular realm the probabilities are hard to impossible to quantify, and they’re never zero. Likewise, every word and every grammatical feature can be borrowed or evolve convergently, and Campbell is by no means wrong in pointing that out.

What happened next in biology is that a method was (very gradually) adopted which turned phylogenetics from an art into a science. It amounts to drawing a lot of trees, counting the ad-hoc assumptions that are needed to explain the data from each tree, and then by Ockham’s Razor preferring the tree(s) that require(s) the smallest number. I’m running such an analysis right now so I can present the results at a conference next week.

The funny part is that historical linguistics has had such a method for so long it doesn’t even have a name, it’s just called “the comparative method”. The difference seems to be that, while the principle of parsimony is quite transparently the whole motivation behind the comparative method, its practitioners are less conscious of that and tend not to actually count their assumptions, so they can’t quantify how unlikely an unlikely hypothesis is – and consequently tend to think in absolutes of “proven” vs. “unproven” like creationists, the only other people who still use the p word when talking about science. The founder of phylogenetics in biology had a heavy philosophical bent (to the point of inventing a whole load of terminology just for the fun of it), and philosophy of science already existed as a field by then; it did not when historical linguistics got going about a hundred years earlier.

I remember reading (about?) Campbell’s critique of Vajda’s Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis. Absolutely, that hypothesis requires more work, for instance because there are currently three pretty different reconstructions of Proto-Yeniseian out there, of which Vajda’s own is just one. But Campbell, IIRC, didn’t go into that. He was more like “this could be a chance resemblance, so it must be a chance resemblance”. For instance, he appeared to insist that all roots that are too short (without quantification) must be ignored, because they are more likely to be chance resemblances than longer ones. Of course they are, but that doesn’t decrease their value to 0! Most PIE roots consist of two consonants sandwiching a vowel that different languages preserve in different ablaut grades. Throw them all into the analysis; as you add data, the signal adds up, and the random noise cancels itself out.

I’m a little hesitant when it comes to Greenberg and Ruhlen.

Their method is great at generating hypotheses that are worth looking into. It’s incapable of testing them; and I don’t think Greenberg or Ruhlen have ever pretended otherwise.

So it’s *sneh₁-wr vs *sïni ([sɨnə] ?), which is a little better.

Even so, it’s not obvious if the PU *n should be compared to the *n in the PIE root or to the one in the *wr/*wn suffix, and the PU *s to the PIE *s or to the whole cluster *sn, initial clusters not being allowed in PU. And this holds both for common inheritance and for borrowing from PIE to PU.

Aren’t all three PIE laryngeals supposed to correspond to PU *k (in “the earliest loans”, some or all of which have of course been proposed to be cognates on occasion)?

Also, I’ve been reading the comic the whole evening. Reading the prologue in these days of Ebola demagoguery, I was uneasy with the implied politics, but she somehow managed to make me stop bothering.

I agree that the rendering of linguistic difficulties is good, but it would be even more interesting to read it in Scandinavian, since she obviously has a clear idea of what the different characters are saying in their respective (or eachothers) mother tongues. This would allow the exploration of some interesting new sociolinguistics in the surviving parts of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. In all three countries the capital and its surroundings were wiped out and new statelets were formed centered in a part of the country with a distinctly different dialect and deep-rooted local pride. In the cases of Norway and Sweden these dialects are even conservative in ways that makes them shear features with Icelandic, the new language of education, trade and public service.

I’m not too much bothered by the inaccuracies of the tree. It’s a service to readers, most of whom have at best a faint idea of these relationships from before, and they’ll come out of it with a much better understanding, even if some details that they probably won’t notice anyway are wrong.

Dude, that’s the previous page on the same site!

You see? I have a great eye for these things!

I would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me re some of the comments above on sanskrít, specifically regarding how sanskrít is not the mother of indic languages.

I always thought sanskrít evolved into the north Indian languages. Sort of like Latin is to French as sanskrít is to Hindi.

Apologies if this is historical linguistics 101.

Thank you

I remember reading (about?) Campbell’s critique of Vajda’s Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis. Absolutely, that hypothesis requires more work, for instance because there are currently three pretty different reconstructions of Proto-Yeniseian out there, of which Vajda’s own is just one. But Campbell, IIRC, didn’t go into that. He was more like “this could be a chance resemblance, so it must be a chance resemblance”.

I don’t think it’s a fair summary. Campbell actually wrote a pretty thorough review of the Dene-Yeniseian conference volume. He shows much respect for Vajda and his hypothesis, and though he doesn’t think the evidence is sufficient at present, the bottom line is:

Vajda’s and the other papers of DYC are fun to read and to contemplate, and the hypothesis undoubtedly will continue to stimulate much discussion about proposals of distant genetic relationships and appropriate means and methods for assessing them.

In his earlier publications (especially the oft-cited article on the IE an Uralic tree names in Diachronica, 1990) Campbell regards a deep historical connection between IE and U as demonstrated, though he leaves the question open if the correspondences are due to contact, common ancestry, or both.

David: Oh, I have heard of this “European clade”. It’s defining “innovation” is the “split” of “PIE” *a, “faithfully preserved” by Sanskrit, into *e, *a and *o. That’s right, it’s a long-forgotten 19th-century idea that was founded on nothing more than “but the Vedas are so ancient”. Verner took it for granted in the famous paper on his law.

It’s true that Verner alludes to “the common European period” once in his article. Note, however, that he was fully aware of Indo-Aryan innovations such as Grassmann’s Law (1863), so invoking the antiquity of Vedic as an argument was already a thing of the past. The secondary character of the Indo-Iranian vowel system (“the Law of Palatals”) was demonstrated at the same time as Verner’s Law, in several separate papers independently (historians of linguistics sometimes refer to 1876 as annus mirabilis), so the idea must have been in the air for some time. The first IE family tree sketched by August Schleicher in the early 1860s had {Balto-Slavic + Germanic} and {Aryo-Greek + Italo-Celtic} as the primary subfamilies, with Indo-Iranian two bifurcations away from the root.

Thanks for the link to Campbell’s review, I’ll read it. I’ll also try to read Stachowski’s papers, though not during the conference next week, when I won’t even have enough time to sleep. 🙂

The other thing I like about Vovin is his snarkiness, which is very refreshing. “Any kind of a body part term can be compared in EDAL to any other body part, e.g. ‘horn’ is compared to ‘gum’. Proto-Altaic speakers apparently were bestowed with a unique physiological feature unknown to any other types of homo sapiens, with horns instead of teeth growing from their gums.”

I like snark, too, but it’s really easy to overdo. Semantic drift between “horn” (the material at least), “cartilage”, “tough connective tissue” and the like – or even “gnarly growth on a tree trunk” – is not uncommon in Indo-European.

A. Dybo and G. Starostin replied to Vovin (and one of the arguments by Georg in the talk I linked to) in this pdf of 140 pages, titled “In Defense of the Comparative Method, or The End of the Vovin Controversy”. I highly recommend it. (It’s much less snarky than the title suggests.)

G. Starostin has also given a conference talk on Dené-Yeniseian; the much, much shorter pdf of the slides is here.

He also has some very good constructive ideas at the end of the article.

Sensibly, he says Altaic is not a question of life and death 😀

Now that’s weird. Only mag. art. is in italics in the original.

Amir: I always thought sanskrít evolved into the north Indian languages. Sort of like Latin is to French as sanskrít is to Hindi.

Sort of. The Romance languages developed from what we call Vulgar Latin — a collective term for the varieties spoken by the Romanised population of the provinces. The Classical Latin of Cicero & Co. was the literary emanation of the everyday language of educated upper-class speakers, artificially standardised and written rather than spoken.

Classical Sanskrit was the standarised version of Old Indic, defined and codified by Indian grammarians (the culmination of that tradition was the work of Pāṇini in the 4th century BC). It was based on, but not identical with, the Vedic language in which the sacred lore of India had been composed and transmitted for centuries. By the time of Pāṇini Old Indic was the archaic language of the high (oral) literature. Classical Sanskrit became the formal medium used by priests, poets and scholars, but it wasn’t really ancestral to anything. The very point of standardisation was to fix the high language and prevent it from evolving. The spoken Indic languages contemporary with Classical Sanskrit were descended from Old Indic vernacular dialects closely related to Vedic. It wouldn’t be correct to say that Vedic is directly ancestral to Middle and Modern Indo-Aryan (just as, say, Old Church Slavonic must not be confused with Proto-Slavic). Other, unattested varieties of Old Indic also contributed to their development. It is possible, for example, to identify features lost in Vedic but preserved in some more recent (even modern) forms of Indo-Aryan.

The meanings of words for various meals seem to be constantly evolving toward later and later times. Pretty soon people will have breakfast before going to bed and dinner upon arising. Eventually after a complete trip around the clock they will return to their original times!

I agree with the opinion charging the Moscow School for relying too much upon doubtful data like Pokorny. But I still admire their (claimed) methodology.

It is a firm belief of mine that we are on the edge of a breakthrough in historical linguistics. The key is cooperative schoolarship between linguistics, paleontology, genetics, archeology, climatology, biology and other disciplines. Stupid things will appear (and have appeared) but among them some pearls of divine luster will be hidden Behaviourist anti-Chomskyans may complain but I stay optimistic about finding the source of language in our species, the Homo Sapiens.

Allons enfants!

TR: perhaps so, but then the anti-attaicists say that both (proto-?) Tungusic and Mongolian borrowed their pronouns from Turkic.

On Campbell: although he indeed gets very set in his ways, I appreciated his nuanced review in his American Indian languages (mentioned by m.-l.) of various lumping hypotheses for languages of the Americas. He gives each a “probability” score (from -100% to 100%) and a “confidence” score (0–100%), the latter apparently gauging his own ability to judge the matter. Thus, Tarascan-Quechua rates -90% with 80% confidence, Tlingit-Eyak-Athabascan rates 75% (40% conf.), though adding Haida to these rates 0% (25%). Oddly, at the time the book was written he was much more sanguine about Takelma-Kalapuya (80% / 60%) than LH’s resident Penutianist appears to be at present.

John Cowan, Marie-Lucie: I think you are both too harsh on Lyle Campbell. He does accept the validity of the Algic family (Algonquian + Yurok + Wiyot), which was only proposed by Sapir in 1913, and only came to be universally accepted at a much later date.

A comparative study of Algic and other proposed long-distance relationships (such as Altaic or Nostratic…), comparing the nature of the evidence presented, the nature of the objections presented, and the threshold required in order for the proposal to be accepted as worthy of further study, and then ultimate acceptance, would probably make for a most illuminating study in the methodology as well as the sociology of linguistics. If any reader of this thread is looking for a challenge, well, go ahead! As a famous scholar once said, “I’d rather read such a book than write it!”.

Amir: actually, Classical Latin is definitely the ancestor of Vulgar Latin and of the various Romance languages, whereas the relationship between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit on the one hand and (Medieval and Modern) Indo-Aryan languages on the other is slightly more nuanced.

Piotr: you may be interested to know that a fellow countryman of yours, Witold Manczak, is the scholar whose work convinced me that Classical Latin is indeed the ancestor of Vulgar Latin and the Romance languages.

Oh, I agree that it’s a trivial idea absent proven recent relationships; it’s just that I’ve found that a lot of people react to it with surprising hostility.

m.-l., Oh, I certainly trust you on that. The ‘odd’ thing to me is that it’s a rare case of the naysaying Campbell being over-optimistic about a putative language family (and “60%” confident about it).

Etienne: John Cowan, Marie-Lucie: I think you are both too harsh on Lyle Campbell. He does accept the validity of the Algic family (Algonquian + Yurok + Wiyot), which was only proposed by Sapir in 1913, and only came to be universally accepted at a much later date.

Perhaps JC’s mention of a century was a little exaggerated! But I think that LC likes to wait until he really knows which way the wind is blowing before he makes up his mind.

doesn’t the idea of so many separate glottogenesis events seem pretty unlikely? Is it really more of a null hypothesis to assume hundreds of such events than to assume a smaller number?

Full sign languages are now known to have sprouted completely independently in a great many places. I don’t see why spoken languages couldn’t have done so as well, though the social circumstances for that happening nowadays don’t exist anywhere.

TR: perhaps so, but then the anti-attaicists say that both (proto-?) Tungusic and Mongolian borrowed their pronouns from Turkic.

Do they say this about interrogative pronouns, or just personal pronouns? Cases of the latter getting borrowed are indeed well attested, but I don’t know of any case of a borrowed interrogative pronoun in a spoken language (apparently ASL gets some of its interrogative pronouns from English-based finger-spellings).

Lazar: By similar reasoning, one might conclude that there must have been a time when only one human existed; otherwise we would have to assume that multiple humans “arose” independently. Even having a couple of “first parents” would be a problem (solved in Genesis by deriving Eve from Adam’s rib).

But humans have always existed as a sizeable population. When our distant ancestors diverged from the chimpanzee lineage, they did so as a non-homogeneous population, not as a single proto-human whose brother happened to be a proto-chimp. The same goes for later speciations: we passed through all of them as a normally variable population.

The language faculty did not pop into existence overnight but evolved gradually from pre-linguistic modes of communication. Languages are not designed or invented: they are collectively shared cultural patterns that emerge, through self-organisation, from repeated interactions within a community. There is no treason why numerous individual languages should not have evolved in parallel in the numerous communities of early humans.

Self-correction: treason => reason 🙂

It’s not quite the fifth of November yet.

Heh, the article on pronoun borrowing strays into the Moluccas (Maluku) without once mentioning that they are Papuan 🙂

Piotr: from what I can tell, Stachowski’s account stops just at the beginning of the recent flurry of work by Martine Robbeets, on what she calls Transeurasian languages, a construct which is similar to Altaic. I haven’t read her works in detail. Stefan Georg is critical of her recent work just as he is of older Altaicist work.

I’m dying to know some! ???? Is [r] one, as opposed to the [ɻ] used in all except maybe the very earliest Vedic?

To answer my own question, this is about things like the Vedic megamerger of something like six different consonant clusters into kṣ while various Prakrits distinguished at least ggʰ from kkʰ. In Vedic chanting today, at least, [ɻ] isn’t used at all – instead r is a just slightly retracted trill, among other surprises.

The Chinese character 牙 ‘fang’ has LMC reading /ŋia:/, so the Altaic hypothesis seems to be vindicated and emerges victorious,

The part I found hard to follow about this was that I kept blinking my eyes, wondering how 牙 could possibly have the reading “fang”, and how you get there from /ŋia:/. Took me for ever to realise that of course it’s the English word “fang”.

The part I found hard to follow about this was that I kept blinking my eyes, wondering how 牙 could possibly have the reading “fang”, and how you get there from /ŋia:/. Took me for ever to realise that of course it’s the English word “fang”.

Having no idea of Chinese character readings, and used to ludicrous correspondences of Old Chinese versus current forms, I didn’t realize that until seeing your comment…

my understanding is that nones orig. meant the whole period from midday to halfway between then and sunset, so 3 roman hours. the bell + service represent the end of the period. in purgatorio dante speaks of the time when he and virgil climb out of hell as “mid-tierce” i.e. 1.5 roman hours before tierce bell. so a meal just after sext bell would be within nones already.

(fell on ice, minor fractures of shoulder elbow rib, typing one handed, all should be well soon.)

Yes, get better soon!

I assumed John was dictating his entries to a cockroach jumping on the keys.

Do get well! It’s said about everything, but fractured shoulders and ribs really do get worse before they get better. But they do get better.

So what do all of you call an ice surface like that? I keep touting Norwegian hålke as a non-compound word meaning that sometimes bumpy layer of ice that’s formed on sidewalks, local roads and outdoor stairs after thawing and freezing of packed snow, e.g. (or especially) when a rainfall melts the snow on frozen ground and it freezes again almost immediately,

But the concept isn’t unique to Scandinavian. Siganus recently taught me the brilliant French word verglas < verreglaz “glass-like ice”. This made English black ice more interesting, since I think it contains ‘black’ in its older meaning “shining”, something I hadn’t realised even if we have blankis as a partial synonym to hålke.

So what do all of you call an ice surface like that?

I’d call it an ice slick, a general term. Black ice is clear and nearly invisible.

OED’s earliest quotation for black ice is from 1822 (“Black ice is discovered between banks of snow, and ramified into numerous transverse, oblique, semicircular, or elliptical branches.”) I think the term does mean literally ‘black’, since at certain angles the ice appears dark through internal refraction.

The black in black ice does not mean shining; it means invisible.

Black ice has come up here incidentally twice previously: http://languagehat.com/king-lehar/
http://languagehat.com/fog-where-fog-means-fog/

David M.: I’m used to Glatteis, “smooth-ice”; here in Berlin, interestingly, it’s Glätte “smoothness”.

We have both glattis m. and glatte f., and they’re used frequently, but they don’t mean exactly the same as hålke f..

Glattis is any smooth and slippery ice surface, It’s mostly used metaphorically in havne på glattisen “be on thin ice”. Non-metaphorically it’s more a concept than a concrete, showing subtly in that I wouldn’t say Det er glattis på gata “It’s slippery ice in the street”, but I might say Det er reine glattisen på gata “It’s pure (or “literally”) slippery ice in the street”. I might be warned Hold deg unna glattisen “Stay away from the slippery ice”, and when I don’t, I can say Jeg falt på glattisen “I fell on the smooth ice”.

Glatte is also more abstract than concrete, describing the slipperiness of the surface rather than the ice causing it. Vær forsiktig på glatta “Be careful on the ice” is another common (useless) warning. You might say jeg falt på glatta “I fell on the slippery surface”, but hardly få vekk glatta på fortauet “remove the slipperyness from the sidewalk”, Or if you did, you’d probably mean sprinkling sand on it.

Another useful non-compound concept is føre n. “surface conditions for travelling”. Hvordan var føret over fjellet? “How were the roads in the mountains?”. It’s wildly productive, with lots of old and new compounds:
tørt/vått føre “dry/wet roads”
snøføre “snowy roads”
hålkeføre “icy roads”
sørpeføre “slushy roads”
tælaføre “frozen ground (as being navigable by foot and maybe even a car across a swampy area)”
støvleføre “conditions for rubber boots”
(godt/dårlig) skiføre “(good/bad) snow conditions for skiing”
silkeføre “ideal snow conditons for skiing”
nullføre “the kind of slope conditions you have around 0°C”
klisterføre “wet snow conditions where you need sticky wax for grip”
blå-extra-føre “not too cold but dry snow conditions, perfect for the ski wax ‘Swix Blå Extra’ (= silkeføre)”
Vi har ikke sommer. Vi har ti måneder med vinter og to måneder dårlig sledaføre. “We don’t have summer. We have ten months of winter and two months with bad conditions for sledge transport.”

When it comes to Eskimo words for snow, I’m firmly in the “Well, duh” camp.

(Also because it’s more about the definition of word than anything else. English can make descriptive compounds just as easily as Norwegian, and I’m sure Alaskans and Canadians have a huge vocabulary for all sorts of snow related phenomena, but they are not counted as words.)

Aside on Eskimo: I just learned that Greenlandic qallunaatut means ‘Danish language’, while its Inuktitut cognate qallunaatitut means ‘English language’. Literally, they both mean ‘foreignese’.

I was once told by a (Canadian) Inuktitut speaker that qallunaatitut could refer to either English or French, but apparently the translation has been codified specifically for the former.

I just learned that Greenlandic qallunaatut means ‘Danish language’, while its Inuktitut cognate qallunaatitut means ‘English language’.

The word skræling is the only word surviving from Greenlandic Norse, the Old Norse dialect spoken by the medieval Norse Greenlanders. In modern Icelandic, skrælingi means “barbarian”, whereas the Danish descendant, skrælling, means “weakling”. The origin of the word is not certain.

Skræling

Greenlandic qallunaatut means ‘Danish language’, while its Inuktitut cognate qallunaatitut means ‘English language’. Literally, they both mean ‘foreignese’

The Kusaal word Nasaal similarly means “French” or “English” depending on whether you are in Burkina Faso or Ghana at the time. (“Europeanese”, of course; etymologically, in fact “Christianese.”)

bocleden….