Nicholas Ostler is one of LH’s favorite authors of language books, as I said here (see that post for further links), so of course I was interested in The best books on The History and Diversity of Language recommended by Nicholas Ostler. After an introductory interview, he discusses his five chosen books, Dying Words by Nicholas Evans, La Révolution Technologique de la Grammatisation by Sylvain Auroux, The Stories of English by David Crystal, Linguistic Diversity by Daniel Nettle, and Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter. I’ll quote his remarks about the second and leave you to discover the rest for yourself:
The author is a French linguist and historian and this book explores the new view of language which was adopted about the time of the Renaissance. The big figure here is the Spaniard Antonio de Nebrija (1444 – 522). He did two things that nowadays don’t seem so extraordinary but represented at the time a completely new view of language. First, he wrote a grammar of his own language, which was Spanish. Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin. These grammars had been written more than 1,500 years earlier.
The Greeks first worked out what the structure of language was with nouns and verbs and inflections of various sorts and how the syntax of sentences worked. Then the Romans came along and it was done for Latin too. You might have thought that people would have come from all directions thereafter and done the same for their own languages, but it stopped dead there. The only languages thought worthy of having grammar were Greek and Latin. Even languages like Hebrew, which you’d have thought would have some credibility, were not analysed in this way.
What Nebrija said was that you could do this for any language, and argued that, above all, any language which is the language of an empire ought to have a grammar. He did this for Spanish, but later, as a result of his work, the Spanish missionaries who went out to the Americas started writing grammars of all the languages they encountered there. This was an amazing thing: Nobody had ever done this with such a wide variety of languages before, and certainly not with languages they considered to be used by savages.
The other thing that Nebrija did was write a grammar of Latin. That had been done before, but he happened to do it at the time the printing press was taking over the production of books, and so effectively he ended up creating one of the first student textbooks. The idea took root that language could now be learnt from books and that there could be a technology or system of learning languages. This began to be applied all over Europe, where all the major powers wanted to analyse the grammar of their language and provide textbooks for students.
Auroux looks at the process of how this development spread across Europe and the world. This is a very important work and I’m just sorry that this book doesn’t seem to be available in English.
I’m sorry too.
I remember by Douglas Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, but have not read “I Am a Strange Loop”. I am also surprised that “Le Ton Beau de Marot” is not available in English. When they closed the British Council’s library in Sofia I was heartbroken I could not borrow Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” any more. It was a five-minute walk from my home.
Nebrija did have some predecessors (even if not printed) and I wonder if Auroux mentions them – notably the Occitan grammarians such as Guilhem Molinier with the Leys d’Amors – who I strongly suspect influenced Nebrija’s contemporary Pedro de Alcalá in his Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua araviga (an attempt to describe Andalusi Arabic in mostly Latin grammatical terms), notably in the use of abitutz/abitud for the prepositions/articles which – from the point of view of the grammars – expressed the Latin cases in these languages. (Disclaimer – I wrote a thesis on this tradition, at https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/275256)
You might have thought that people would have come from all directions thereafter and done the same for their own languages, but it stopped dead there. The only languages thought worthy of having grammar were Greek and Latin. Even languages like Hebrew, which you’d have thought would have some credibility, were not analysed in this way.
Eh? Just off the top of my head …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_ben_David_Hayyuj
Auroux sounds like the most interesting of the bunch. I can’t stand Hofstadter, and the other three, I suspect, merely repeat familiar stories.
I am also surprised that “Le Ton Beau de Marot” is not available in English.
Sure it is. it’s the Auroux book that isn’t available in English.
I can’t stand Hofstadter
You are not alone …
I can’t stand Hofstadter
I wouldn’t go that far — I enjoyed GEB — but this particular book irritates me intensely, as does the fact that people keep recommending it to me.
Well, the interviewer does preface Ostler’s praise of Hofstadter with a “quirky and often exasperating” (according to some unnamed third party) disclaimer, so no one can say they weren’t fairly warned.
To David E.’s point, presumably “people” is intended in context to be read to mean something more restrictive than the entire human race, like “respectable (Western) European people.” Your Moroccan’s grammar of Hebrew would hardly be more relevant than Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. But I’m not sure why Ostler thought Hebrew would “have credibility.” Nebrija came along just when a critical mass of Western European intellectuals were starting to think it might be useful to acquire reading knowledge of Greek after a near-millennium of illiteracy in that tongue, and it wasn’t really until the following century that any material number of non-Jews in Western Europe started trying to learn Hebrew. St. Jerome had learned Hebrew a thousand years earlier so that you wouldn’t have to, they would previously have thought to themselves if they’d stopped to consider the issue.
Your Moroccan
actually lived and worked in Córdoba, somewhat to the north of where Nebrija was born (several centuries later.)
I take your point, but the implication that Nebrija (great humanist though he was) invented the grammatical study of languages other than Latin and Greek strikes me as somewhat analogous the the claim that Columbus discovered America. In a manner of speaking, perhaps …
Particularly unfortunate to pick Hebrew to illustrate the point, I thought …
I read GEB many many years ago and the only thing that sticks in my mind is that he referred to the United States and the Soviet Union as US and SU, and harped endlessly on the fact that they were mirror images of each other, signifying something enormously deep. You know, the way God is dog spelled backwards.
Gödel was a brilliant mathematician, but the Incompleteness Theorem is math, not philosophy, and has nothing to do with consciousness or such elevated things.
Escher was a wonderful artist who drew beautiful drawings. The geometric playfulness is secondary. The soul is in the art itself.
Bach was one of the greatest counterpoint artists of all time, who had no interest in rhythm whatsoever, even for his time and place. The very opposite of funky.
Linking all three makes one come off as a caricature of a name-dropping pseudo-intellectual BSing nerd.
(I’ve wanted to vent about this for a long time. Thank you.)
Y : I’m not quite sure what you vented about, but good for you 🙂
“the Incompleteness Theorem is math, not philosophy, and has nothing to do with consciousness or such elevated things” — Sorry but I’m extremely unreligious. I hope you’re not offended.
Listening to Bach in the Koeln cathedral was, in a way, a religious experience.
Y: Gödel was a brilliant mathematician, but the Incompleteness’ Theorem is math, not philosophy, and has nothing to do with consciousness.
Gödel’s incompleteness’ theorem is pure mathematics, my friend Y. What gave you the idea it has anything to do with Philosophy? Muahahahaha (or something?)
[we might as well slide into Dresden Codac] -> I’ll be tiny Carl Jung. Well, good night.
https://www.deviantart.com/mitumi/art/Tiny-Carl-Jung-160430460
I think Hofstadter tries to get deep about what Gödel means for the workings of the mind and the nature of consciousness and such. It’s all a metaphor for navel-gazing, as if that were a good thing.
I read GEB as a teenager, when it was first published. I thought it was a great introduction to Gödel, and it explicated connections between music and math that I had not considered previously. It’s fair to say GEB helped inspire many people my age to pursue a career in AI-related technology, even though Hofstadter himself is now considered a (minor) footnote in the history of AI.
I recall being deeply disappointed with his work after GEB, and not even bothering to check after that.
When I was just entering my teens, GEB was my first introduction to both Godel and Escher, and to the notion of formal systems in general. I enjoyed it enormously and learned a lot from it; never mind his speculations about artificial intelligence or how they turned out to be on the wrong track (mainly because he wanted AI to stem from actually explaining how thought works, which doesn’t work.)
I share David Eddyshaw’s puzzlement. Nick Ostler of all people surely knows better than to use “people” to mean “respectable Westerners”.
One may hope venting was therapeutic. But.
Schweitzer on Bach (ET, 1911, v.2, 380):
“The first thing necessary to give life and rhythm to Bach’s themes and periods is his own phrasing. It has a character of its own. If this is disregarded….”
For me (psychologically, that is: in terms of the effect on me) Bach is the very epitome of funky, but if it is because we are on the same side of stupid, that’s fine.
I agree with Lameen that one might have expected a more cosmopolitan take from Ostler. On the other hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if the questions/answers as published were edited down from a more wide-ranging discussion and maybe something that got cut out would have made clear that that Ostler was talking about a more specifically Western tradition of producing grammar books rather than addressing the entire world. Seemingly universal words like “people” and “everyone” (or “nobody”) can in actual use have a much more restricted scope if the context makes a narrower reading plausible.
he referred to the United States and the Soviet Union as US and SU
I’ve never read GEB, but I can relate to that as a bit of cleverness. Except for the pun, it works all the better nowadays. After being artificially pumped up by the Cold War, America and Russia are now settling into their natural state as semi-peripheral countries with a small shiny display window toward Europe, backed by vast expanses of squalor and enlivened by political lunacy.
Upper Volta*, maybe, but don’t forget the rockets.
* It goes without saying that I regard this famous saying as a calumny on Burkina Faso. But then, I’ve been to Burkina Faso much more often than I’ve been to Russia**, and my Mooré is better than my Russian, too …
** And I’ve never been to the US at all. Too scary …
It might once have been thought Highly Significant that the initials of Upper Volta were UV, which when reversed yield VU, in an obvious reference to the Velvet Underground.
But the Illuminati then tried to throw us off the scent by changing the place’s name to Burkina Faso, which = BF, which when reversed = FB, which I daresay is an obvious reference to noted polymath, playwright, and probable Illuminati affiliate Francis Bacon. Aha!
The true name, Haute Volta, leads to VH: Visual Hallucination. Do I have to spell it out?
a completely new view of language. First, he wrote a grammar of his own language, which was Spanish. Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin. These grammars had been written more than 1,500 years earlier.
chiming in on this, to say that i think this is the first time i’ve ever heard someone who is (or should be) reasonably well-informed describe nebrija as if he were a product of a purely christian/roman/greek intellectual lineage. if ostler or/and auroux are claiming that his project wasn’t directly modeled on arabic & hebrew grammars (and the centuries of grammatical and philological work on those languages in al-andalus*), that’s a very big revisionist claim, and needs some pretty big evidence to back it up.
the same, of course, is true of dante and his De Vulgari Eloquentia, as maría rosa menocal established decades ago, and probably of all the founding christian european vernacularist writings (especially the ones from mediterranean europe). none of which is surprising, since the literary genres & forms (lyric love poetry, above all) that made it impossible for the literate christian upper classes to keep dismissing romance vernacular languages were directly adopted from arabic models (again, menocal’s work isn’t exactly obscure).
.
* personally, i’m inclined to think nebrija, dante, et al would also be impossible without ibn khaldun, but i don’t know that anyone’s gone out & demonstrated that in a rigorous way.
In what way? I’ve been a few times, up to 2 months at a time, and barely got scared at all.
The worst actually was when I booked a suspiciously cheap Airbnb accommodation that turned out not to exist when I was about to arrive. Fortunately I found out early enough in the evening to spontaneously book something not outrageously expensive elsewhere.
Bach wrote so many pieces that he experimented with a ton of different techniques, even if not all of them are tremendously well known. Back in school, one of my violinist friends was a huge professed fan of Bach; however, when we started learning about fugues, he was surprised to learn that Bach had made extensive use of stretto in his fugues, because there are plenty of Bach fugues that don’t use stretto across the voice changes. Personally, my favorite Bach piece to play is a concerto grosso for strings, which is my favorite precisely because the viola concertino parts include some beautiful syncopation.
As to America and the Soviet Union (or its most prominent successor state, Russia) becoming increasingly equivalent, that claim is probably as old as the Cold War, maybe even older. I remember an introductory essay in a mid-1950s edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which averred that while America was, at the time of writing, more like Brave New World, while the Soviet Union was more like Nineteen Eighty-Four or We, the differences were becoming increasingly unimportant. Leo McKern’s Number Two in “The Chimes of Big Ben” expounds on the idea that both sides in the Cold War are much the same, although McKern,* fresh off playing Thomas Cromwell, makes no apparent attempt not to seem disingenuous. Of course, the idea of the relative immorality of Western intelligence practices was, more generally, the most important underlying theme in British “stale beer” spy fiction of the 1960s, which The Prisoner was alluding to.
* Leo McKern went impressively far as an actor, becoming famous in both Britain and America, for somebody who had a pronounced Australian accent when he started working and, more amazingly, a missing eye
Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin.
I agree with others above who take issue on this point, and add the case of Uc Faidit’s 13C Donatz proensals which graces my shelves – or a box somewhere. To say nothing of Panini. Ostler is wonderful, but I have censured him on matters of detail here at LH. (Years ago, when the world was young and free.)
A notable pre-Cold-War European instance of the US-SU equivalence is “”Seen metaphysically, Russia and America are both the same: the same desolate frenzy of unbounded technology and of the unlimited organization of the average human being.” Thus Martin Heidegger in 1935, in the same piece in which he referred to Germany as “the most metaphysical of nations.”
It’s a long time since I read Nebrija (his work wasn’t particularly relevant to my research) but a brief renewed glance shows a pretty Latinate model – though he is freer in accepting differences between Latin and the vernacular than some of his European predecessors. If he knew much about the Arabic and Hebrew grammatical traditions he does a fairly good job of hiding it. (Though it is quite possible he knew about their _existence_, which might indeed have helped to validate the idea of a vernacular grammar – though this was hardly such a radical idea by then in Occitania and Catalonia at least).
His contemporary Pedro de Alcalá – who is of course describing Arabic – does show some awareness of Arabic grammatical terms, despite his claim to ‘enseñar la lengua de la gente comun y no los primores dela gramatica arauiga’, but makes no attempt to use them correctly, so his grammar is also pretty Latinate even where this is far from helpful. When he gets to the cases, he insists on recognising the six cases of Latin but decides to cite them with Arabic terminology which of course does not form any sort of equivalent list in Arabic grammar (I am afraid I have forgotten the details of what they did originally mean -it’s been a while): ‘Los casos son seys. mubtede. mudaf. maxror. mafuul. munede. darf. los quales corresponden alos seys casos dela lengua latina que son. Nominatiuo. genitiuo. datiuo. acusatiuo. vocatiuo. ablatiuo’ (As he is describing the colloquial language, we don’t even get forms with the Arabic 3 cases; his 6 ‘cases’ are expressed by forms like a, al, mital, la, lil (articles and prepositions and their combinations, but described by Pedro as ‘abitudines’ – in a piece of grammatical terminology from the Occitan tradition, probably via Catalonia).
I apologize for the inability to render Pedro’s diacritics in his rather creative transliteration of Arabic (which includes for instance three diacritic dots above ‘c’ to render Arabic tha, not that it occurs in my quotes above).
@J.W. Brewer: Like Heidegger knew anything about America in 1935! He never visited America in his lifetime, and his intellectual and cultural contacts with the New World in the 1930s were pretty minimal (although after the Second World War, southwestern Germany was crawling with Americans). He may had not have had a single American student until around 1937 or 1938.
Los casos son seys. mubtede. mudaf. maxror. mafuul. munede. darf.
“The cases are six: topic, annexed, oblique, object, vocative, adverbial.”
(Nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative)
Like Heidegger knew anything about America in 1935! He never visited America in his lifetime, and his intellectual and cultural contacts with the New World in the 1930s were pretty minimal
I’m not a Heidegger fan myself, but it’s possible to know about a country by reading…
That said, the kind of criticism you quote is typical for early 20th century German intellectual / conservative anti-Americanism and not original to Heidegger, so he may have ingested the prejudice together with the reading.
Los casos son seys. mubtede. mudaf. maxror. mafuul. munede. darf
I’m not sure whether to lament this as a horrid specimen of the perennial tendency to fit the data into a beloved preexisting model, regardless of whether it really fits or not, or to applaud it as a pioneering effort in the unending struggle to properly distinguish form from function.
Even in these enlightened days, it’s often tempting (not to say clearer for the poor reader), rather than trying rigorously to describe a language in its own terms, to say things like “indirect speech in High Martian is expressed by …”) – all the more so if you believe that some of the categories you’re using really are universal (and people still do believe this, very often, even now that they no longer believe that those categories were perfectly instantiated in Latin.)
Indeed “describing a language entirely in its own terms” is one of those things that sounds obviously the right thing to do, but is unfortunately not only practically impossible, but starts producing headache-inducing theoretical questions once you start really thinking about what it could mean.
– Not that that means there isn’t a whole lot of scope for improvement in that direction …
… the unending struggle to properly distinguish form from function. …
if you believe that some of the categories you’re using really are universal …
Those who are devoted to category theory are egregiously retrograde in that respect. They claim to have universally distinguished a well-formed formula from a functor.
[Sorry. I am drawn to high-class cornpone as a sloth to blame.]
@hans, brett
From “Einführung in die Metaphysik”
Dieses Europa, in heilloser Verblendung immer auf dem Sprunge, sich selbst zu erdolchen, liegt heute in der großen Zange zwischen Rußland auf der einen und Amerika auf der anderen Seite. Rußland und Amerika sind beide, metaphysisch gesehen, dasselbe; dieselbe trostlose Raserei der entfesselten Technik und der bodenlosen Organisation des Normalmenschen. Wenn die hinterste Ecke des Erdballs technisch erobert und wirtschaftlich ausbeutbar geworden ist, wenn jedes beliebige Vorkommnis an jedem beliebigen Ort zu jeder beliebigen Zeit beliebig schnell zugänglich geworden ist, wenn man ein Attentat auf einen König in Frankreich und ein Symphoniekonzert in Tokio gleichzeitig »erleben« kann, wenn Zeit nur noch Schnelligkeit, Augenblicklichkeit und Gleichzeitigkeit ist und die Zeit als Geschichte aus allem Dasein aller Völker geschwunden ist, wenn der Boxer als der große Mann eines Volkes gilt, wenn die Millionenzahlen von Massenversammlungen ein Triumph sind – dann, ja dann greift immer noch wie ein Gespenst über all diesen Spuk hinweg die Frage: wozu? – wohin? -und was dann?
So basically, Europe finds itself forced to adopt a hectic and “now-focused” consumer or collective lifestyle epitomised by films like Metropolis and Modern Times, although Heidegger probably did not recommend these films to his students.
This passage follows a series of arguments around the correct phrasing and meaning of the question: why is there something and not nothing?
The section has the grandiose title:” 11. Die nähere Bestimmung der Frage: »Wie steht es um das Sein? Ist Sein nur ein Wortklang oder das Schicksal des Abendlandes? « “, a clever example of the academic suggesting, but not stating his research is more important than could be objectively justified.
… wenn jedes beliebige Vorkommnis an jedem beliebigen Ort zu jeder beliebigen Zeit beliebig schnell zugänglich geworden ist, wenn man ein Attentat auf einen König in Frankreich und ein Symphoniekonzert in Tokio gleichzeitig »erleben« kann
H. would have had a nervous breakdown if confronted with our life of “breaking news” and, even worse, “live coverage”.
On the other hand, you can just ignore these and merely glance at stale headlines from time to time. Some people are horrified that I don’t read the stale articles under those headlines, but H. would have understood.
Unfortunately for him, “Wie steht es um das Sein?” is itself one of those headlines, along with “What to do about anti-vaxxers?” and “How long, O Lord?”
would have had a nervous breakdown if confronted with our life of “breaking news”
In the perversely memorable* Das Glasperlenspiel, the annoying narrator describes our present age as das feuilletonistische Zeitalter, which at the time I read it (and was more Hesse-friendly), made no sense at all to me. But now it does.
* I have tried to reclaim the storage space.
I admire your perseverance, Sir ! I collapsed from exhaustion after 50 pages of that.
That’s obviously straight from Arabic. It’s also been used in Greek dialect writing.
The Greatest.
dann, ja dann greift immer noch wie ein Gespenst über all diesen Spuk hinweg die Frage: wozu?—wohin?—und was dann?
Und hast du jemal wirklich auf deine Hände geschaut, Mann—ich meine, wirklich geschaut?
jemals. Like “niemals” (“sag niemals nie!”) and “oftmals”, but unlike “einmal” and “muttermal”.
Note 1. He made another strong claim.
“He did this for Spanish, but later, as a result of his work, the Spanish missionaries…”
Is this true? Ostler mentioned something that I personally find fascinating: the work of Jesuit missionaries. Lameen elsewhere noted comparative/historical linguistics and its methods as an unique contribution of European tradition. Not something unprecedented: people compared Arabic to Aramaic to even Berber and speculated about common roots before. Thousands or millions more such conversations and comparisons happened in kitchens and were never documented, but Europeans made a system which is comprehensive enough to produce any number of new results and be reproduced, and secondly a system which have been reproduced and which we keep
mindlesslyreproducing today.I wanted to add that another contribution is systematical (and yes, modelled on Latin..) description of “insignificant” languages, be that European dialects and languages of natives/aborigines. Missionaries contributed greatly here. It is one more thing that we keep mindlessly reproducing. Is work of a modern PhD student any different from that of a missonary grammarian 400 years ago? (likely it is…) Meanwhile it is about the most interesting things modern linguistics can offer….
Note 2: “ He did two things that nowadays don’t seem so extraordinary but represented at the time a completely new view of language. First, he wrote a grammar of his own language, which was Spanish. Up to this time, the only languages that had explicit grammars were Greek and Latin.”
Depends not only on our defintion of “everybody” but also on our definition of a “grammar” and an “explicit grammar”. He at least used the word gramatica….
Of course, O. misrepresented N.’s context by not mentioning his Arabic and troubadour predecessors*. But this does not affect the claim (ture or false) that N’s work contains some important novelty or is otherwise courageous.
—
* Not that those were unaware of each other: troubadours wrote about Moroccan knights massively (cf. by Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun). Actually, Andalusia and troubadours are both important images of lost artistic paradise in modern perception.
Note 3: until today it never occured to me to compare Spaniards to Ottomans. Meanwhile, the fall of Granada is not too far in time form the fall of Constantinople (and teh associated influx of Greek refugees with Greek books in Italy). Not to say about the extensive warfare between them, all over the Mediterranean….
Gödel was a brilliant mathematician, but the Incompleteness’ Theorem is math, not philosophy, and has nothing to do with consciousness.
Y, not many people here would say, for example, that “triangles [ideal] have nothing to do with real life [hairy, curvy]”. I can’t say if you are right or wrong here, because I do not understand a shit about the nature of my own consciousness. But I am suspicious about such claims.
“It has something to do with philosophy” would mean that the theorem is an instance of a more general scheme and this more general scheme can be applied to consciousness too. Identity is not necessary: one can, for example, learn a mathematical proof and apply the same method of proving (say: “by induction”) to her own reasoning about say, boys and girls. And this is a meaningful application of math to real life. If you have a good reason to think that nothign of this happens to Gödel and consciousness, I am surprised.
A much stronger claim would be: Gödel’s approach can be used to prove some result about our consciouness.
Two related questions:
– what mathematics studies? Does it study humans or the world (as seen from within human brain which is embedded in the world and is fed by sensory input) and is it thus a sort of “humanities” or of “natural sciences”? I do not know. For me mathematics is a more or less honest study of patterns in our imagination. Everything is mathematics.
– how do we resolve the quiestion of whether an idea is “contained” in an utterance?
Say, a little girl said something, and when you interpreted her words in light of your interests you came up with a Great idea. Now, is it her idea (and you are merely a translator) or your idea? If we assume that utterances can’t “contain” anything, they are mere sequences of letters, the idea either originates from the speaker’s mind or the listener’s (interpreter’s) mind or both.
Practically, when you read the theorem in a book, you decide that it is the author’s idea, not yours. Practically, when the girl says “apple” and nothing more and by some crazy chain of associations it makes you invent a theory you decide that the theory is yours.
I still often face situations when a girl shares an observation and I reformulate it and think “wow!” I do not have a better way of telling who’s the author than assuming that “I am clever and she is dumb, and all great ideas are mine by definition”. I prefer to credit the girl. The opposite leads to those bearded scientists who appropriated results of their female assistants because bearded scientists are people who publish in journals, and female assistants are people who wash dishes.
the fall of Granada is not too far in time form the fall of Constantinople (and teh associated influx of Greek refugees with Greek books in Italy).
The Barbarossa brothers make a nice link between the two – born in Chios to a Greek mother and a Turkish father, they grew up to harry the Spanish fleet and rescue Andalusi refugees, and finish by sailing back to Istanbul to become the Sultan’s admiral.
(I have reason to believe my ancestors on one side included Andalusi refugees. Sadly, they did not leave any exciting manuscripts as far as I know.)
Yes, I was greatly surprised to discover that there are Andalusians in North Africa.
Linguistically that means both Andalusian Arabic in certain dialecs – and cities in Africa where Romance was still spoken 200 years ago. I mean specifically Moriscos – but there is a story of Christian presence in Africa as well. I know a guy whose ancestors were Spanish Muslims (and indeed he has ligher eyes and hair than the African average, but that means little).
What I do not know is whether there were Berber populations that moved to Spain and back. Some features of North Moroccan phonologies (and Northern Berber spirantization maybe) make me wonder about contact with Romance, but that does not need movement.
The most popular language in Arab world is Jebli.
Sometimes it is Arabic. Soumetimes South Arabian. Sometimes it is Berber.
No, no confusion.
“Ruṭāna” is another strong contender; it can be Berber, Neo-Mandaic, Nubian, or any number of Sudanese languages.
There definitely were Berber populations that moved to Spain and back. It is doubtful whether they still spoke Berber by the time they moved back, though.
I have some difficulty myself understanding my fellow-Vlachs. They have an almost impenetrable accent.
Yes, I was imprecise here. Speakers go to Spain and back today and surely did that in the Middle Ages.
What I “do not know about” then is if there were dialects that spent sufficient time outside of Africa or did it and influenced some modern variety in a traceable way.
@drasvi: The rapid economic development in Italy in the late Middle Ages, culminating in the Renaissance, was made possible, in part, by the simultaneous declines of Muslim Spain and Christian Turkey at either end of the Mediterranean. The subsequent stagnation in Italy from the mid-sixteenth century onward was similarly related to the reemergence of Christian Spain and Muslim Turkey as the preeminent powers in Europe.
@Brett, it does not explain the relative influence of medieval Italy compared to medieval Spain and North Africa. We can say that the Genoese built castles in Crimea because Andalusians did not, but why not vice versa? And then the Spain of gold galeons showed how you can be powerful but not developed (unless we count the success of Spanish langauge as “success” which it surely is). And some would say: how you can have invincible infantry and unimpressive fleet…
Napoleon and Hitler would have something to say about that.
No, that was because of Byzantine weakness. If you can’t stop people from sailing through your capital city, you have a problem.
In fact the Genoese were allies of the Byzantines, and obtained significant privileges in exchange for helping the Palaiologos family retake Constantinople from the Latins.
As to the larger question, I’m not sure that it’s even possible to imagine an alternate timeline in which Spain rather than Italy becomes the locus of influence and development in the early modern period. It’s difficult to imagine the Renaissance starting anywhere other than in the former Imperial centre. Plus it no doubt helped that Italy was divided into many small polities in contrast to the centralized unified state that Spain had become by the early 16th cent.
Los casos son seys. mubtede. mudaf. maxror. mafuul. munede. darf
I’m not sure whether to lament this as a horrid specimen of the perennial tendency to fit the data into a beloved preexisting model, regardless of whether it really fits or not, or to applaud it as a pioneering effort in the unending struggle to properly distinguish form from function.
Try Classical Tibetan, where the eight cases of Sanskrit were transferred without change, even though 2, 4, and 7 (which have been dubbed Objective, Beneficial & Purposive, and Locative) have identical endings, and 1 and 8 (Nominative and Vocative) both have no endings at all.
I vaguely recall reading that the vast translation effort from Sanskrit into Tibetan was done so mechanically that it is often possible to reconstruct the Sanskrit Vorlage from the Tibetan alone with considerable confidence.
(I expect you know a lot about this, which I certainly don’t.)
On the contrary, I am quite ignorant of both Sanskrit and Tibetan. Life is a continual discovery. (Like my belated discovery of the history of Arabic linguistics.)
I have been told that the Mongolians mechanically followed the Tibetans in the matter of cases but I haven’t followed this up or confirmed it.
Pedro de Alcalá – … when he gets to the cases, he insists on recognising the six cases of Latin but decides to cite them with Arabic terminology which of course does not form any sort of equivalent list in Arabic grammar
-u -i -a NOM GEN ACC is no less funny Latinization.
AFAIK there is no premodern Latin grammar in Arabic. If there were, one imagines that it would explain that Latin has two nominatives and three genitives, and that the nominative is often used as an accusative.
David, sounds cute (and polygamous).
Ah, a sign of past but recent weakness, then.
Worse – Tibetan is ergative/absolutive, leading to some interesting contortions.
Relying on Italian thalassocracies’ support was very much a sign of late Byzantine weakness. In 1285, Android II Palaiologos completely dismantled the Byzantine navy, basically subcontracting all naval operations out to the Genoese. For the next several decades, the Venetians and Genoese (and sometimes even the Pisans) received various trading and taxation concessions in Byzantine territory. The Venetians typically strong-armed the empire militarily into such agreements, whereas the Genoese were more likely to demand such concessions in exchange for providing galleys to fight the Venetians (or other enemies). The Italian states held onto some of the concessions they received in this period right up to the fall of Constantinople.
Cupertino effect FTW.
A perfect example. Now I’m imagining Andronikos as an Android. That would make a good Doctor Who episode.
@V: In “The Kings Demons,” King John was actually a shape-changing android.
(I’m actually not sure how the emperor’s name got autocorrected at all, because rather than trying to spell it correctly, I just copied and pasted his name. I would have thought that would normally have made it immune to autocorrect. However, I was doing all this on my phone, so maybe I accidentally pressed on the word and selected an suggested alternative spelling.)
I thought about another Genoese town (a much later of course, 1500s): the island of Tabarka in Tunisia. It too was bought.
In Spain there is an island “Tabarca”, named after it.
On my phone I have to actively deny the autoincorrect suggestions, or they get implemented.