I learn via Jenny Larsson’s Facebook post that there will be a hybrid symposium “Exploring New Methods – Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics” on May 11; it’s “an event of the research program LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study.” The Collegium’s Events page says:
11 May, 2:15 p.m. SYMPOSIUM – HYBRID EVENT
Exploring New Methods: Quantitative Approaches to Indo-European Linguistics
Oscar Billing, Erik Elgh, Harald Hammarström, Philipp Rönchen
The symposium will be followed by a reception.
Pre-registration is required for the physical event. Please sign up via rsvp@swedishcollegium.se by 6 May 2022 at the latest.
Zoom Webinar: https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/69022550575
This is an event of the research programme LAMP – Languages and Myths of Prehistory and the Centre for Studies in Indo-European Language and Culture at Stockholm University, in collaboration with SCAS.In recent years, quantitative methods developed in the field of biology have been repurposed and applied to linguistic data. The aim of this symposium is to provide an insight into this ongoing work. At the symposium, we will discuss the scientific advances it promises as well the potential limitations to the method, both specifically in relation to the Indo-European language family and to comparative linguistics in general.
The programme will be available shortly.
I’m inherently skeptical of applying the methods of biology to linguistics, but only because it’s so often done badly; I’ll certainly be interested to see the program when they put it online, and I’ll be curious to know the reactions of anyone who knows more than I do about the people involved and the topics (when they’re available).
Ah, but I am nostalgic for the old hand-made artisanal Indo-European linguistics, with its individually crafted sound laws and folklorique laryngeals …
I can’t participate for time reasons (assuming there aren’t any others – I haven’t checked).
At the symposium, we will discuss the scientific advances it promises
And has been promising, since, idk, Warnow 1996?
They keep thinking that you could make soup out of plain water, if only you had a cleverer pot…
Yeah, I confess my reaction was similar, but hope springs eternal…
gotta say that the LAMP (excellent acronym work, i must say) mission also makes me skeptical:
The overarching aim of the project is to attempt to correlate the linguistic and mythological data with the genetic and archaeological map of prehistoric migrations.
first apparently taking as axiomatic that the duplets of genetics & material culture and language & specific stories/story-forms can each be treated as a single element, and then setting a goal (which i can’t but read as a presumption) that the two fake unities will correlate? i’ll take “Integral Nationalist Fantasies Dressed As Research Programs” for SEK 25,000,000, alex.*
(i worried a little that i was being unfair until i saw that LAMP’s first publication was a book called “The great Indo-European horse sacrifice : 4000 years of cosmological continuity from Sintashta and the Steppe to Scandinavian Skeid”. why stop at 4000 years? saratoga’s right there if your continuity needs assonance! they still shoot horses, don’t they?)
(then again, the abstract of the most recent one says: “The werewolf myth contains remnants of all lifecycle rituals – from birth to initiation as warriors, marriage, death and becoming an ancestor. Ethnographically, the cultural and cosmological institution manifested in Kivik can be identified through parts of Europe up to modern times.” about which, um: who today, exactly, is stuck on warrior initiation rituals and werewolf imagery, and loves to fantasize themselves as the noble heirs of scandinavian
aryansindo-europeans? no points for either correct answers or scholarship [sic] encouraging their fantasies.).
* fair’s fair: points for financial transparency (though i’m guessing that the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond probably insisted).
Ouch. That’s the kind of thing that could always be true, but is always indistinguishable from a heaping helping of pareidolia.
Like Dumézil’s three classes of PIE society: eh, perhaps, but soon he started to see the number 3 absolutely everywhere and ran with it…
my own pareidolia always wants dumézil to be connected to dumuzi, but sadly i believe in evidence and have to get out the spray bottle.
Freud’s mystic world of meaning needn’t have us mystified
It’s really very simple what the psyche tries to hide:
A thing is a phallic symbol if it’s longer than it’s wide
As the id goes marching on.
https://www.lyricsmania.com/psychotherapy_lyrics_melanie_safka.html
The werewolf myth contains remnants of all lifecycle rituals – from birth to initiation as warriors, marriage, death and becoming an ancestor.
Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves!
My fourteen-year-old son (who has personally decided, for a number of reasons, not to have a bar mitzvah himself) was singing “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” when I got home just a couple days ago.
I really liked that whenever a fictional song was mentioned on 30 Rock (not that infrequently, for a surrealist show about the entertainment industry), they would play the song during the closing credits.
It makes me feel good about humanity’s potential that “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” and “This Is America” were written by the same person.
I won’t make a separate post for it, but this looks interesting:
The titles in the program are one excitement after another! In the very unlikely event that time & money will permit, I should actually go there.
DM: I absolutely agree.
As to the May 11th symposium, the program is now out: Hammarström, “Woes and Virtues of Glottochronology in Indo-European”; Rönchen, “Stop – Replay. Evaluating Models of Indo-European Vocabulary Evolution Using Simulated Data”; Billing, “Computational Anatolian Phylogeny Using Maximum Parsimony”; Elgh, “The Dialect Continuum Tree with an Anatolian Example”.
How do you pronounce Elgh?
Erik Elgh, Uppsala — the h is most likely just decorative, and he’s a moose (älg [/ɛlj/ Alces alces).
WP on Swedish Orthography says, “One change in the spelling at this time [ca. 1700] was that ⟨gh⟩ (indicating [ɣ]) disappeared, because this sound no longer existed in the spoken language.”
If only we Anglophones had benefited from the same sort of common sense.
@Y, exactly, it was ælgher in Old Swedish, but /ɣ/ and /g/ merged into /j/ in that position (cf helg) so keeping the h around in modern Swedish is just for decoration. Or maybe /g/ > /ɣ/ in that position first, but the end result is the same. (ON had g in both those words, but I don’t remember how that would be pronounced),
The moose is not native to Denmark and hasn’t been for hundreds of years (if it ever was). Danish elg was reborrowed from Norwegian, the form elff is attested for Older Modern Danish — nothing comes to mind where older /-Vlg/ has survived into Modern. (Sw helg is Da helligdag, and Modern Danish salg and valg started out as sal [Sw sala in saluhall] and val /val/ [Sw val /va:l/] and only grew the g‘s in the 18th for orthographic reasons, though they can now be pronounced as /salj/ and /valj/ [but often aren’t — whether that’s even moderner or a retention I don’t know]).
@lars
talg is a borrowing from LG but baelg seems to be a survival…
Erik Elgh, Uppsala — the h is most likely just decorative, and he’s a moose
So I guess “Elk” would be an appropriate way to anglicize his surname. (Obviously there’s no way English-speakers are going to say /ɛlj/.)
And bælg /bɛlj/ was spelled bælgh in Old Danish, so the development would seem to be much the same as in Swedish. (ODS says /bɛl(ɣ)/ in 1921 and gives dialectal/vulgar spellings without the {g}, which makes me suspect that the ɣ was a spelling pronunciation of the conservative form; the weakening to /j/ is regular in any case).
In which case I don’t know where elff came from.
Has no one mentioned Miss A. Elk yet?
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2oh8ia
Must have been, because they show up even in northern Austria on occasion (or did in the 20th century).
Those were separate phonemes?
the form elff is attested for Older Modern Danish
i will be [mis]using this, henceforth, to claim that all references to elves are in fact about danish moose.
(here in north america, though, i will then have to explain why i’m not talking about wapiti.)
(it will be worth it.)
I wonder what is the right way to pronounce Kjellberg in ‘Ann Kjellberg’, /’ɕɛl:ˌbærj/ or /’ɕɛl:ˌbærg/.
@DM: Those were separate phonemes?: Very possibly not, as I tried to intimate in the next sentence. I just couldn’t be arsed to find out the timing of the changes, or maybe I should have used []. It was elgr in ON, you probably know better than I how that was pronounced. Wiktionary claims *h₁élḱis, *h₁ólḱis with satem reflexes to prove the palatal, but it’s a long way from PIE to Swedish.
@juha: /’ɕɛl:ˌbɛrj/. Swedes can’t do (IPA) /æ/, but the dictionaries will use the grapheme for [ɛ]. This is a Da/Sw difference, Da has /bɛlj/ but /bjɛrw/ (and Da spells the {j} in bjerg so it’s only the different development of final /ɣ/ that is a trap).
Swedes can’t do (IPA) /æ/
Don’t they?
/ɛː/, /ɛ/ (in stressed syllables), /øː/ (with a few exceptions) and /œ/ are lowered to [æː], [æ], [œ̞ː] and [œ̞], respectively, when preceding /r/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels
OK, they can’t do the Danish /æ/ like in gade, I hear what they say instead as [gɛðə]. But on checking how the IPA symbol is actually defined, you’re probably right and the Danish version has ATR which is where Swedes fail.
I’m so used to vowels lowering before /r/ that I hear the two in Kjellberg as the same, but yeah, the second one is more open.
Looks great; and unfortunately overlaps with me being en transit to a different conference (though in Hamburg; hmm, could be close enough for me to consider a self-funded detour…)
My daughter almost decided to study international politics in Leyden. That would have been a convenient excuse for a trip, but the selfish brat went to South Africa in stead.