Frequent commenter Y wrote me as follows:
Two interesting bits. I don’t know if they are blog material but I hope you’ll find them interesting in any case:
— First one comes from Pystynen’s Xitter (I don’t have an account there. I use nitter to browse it.) […]:
Has there ever been work in something like documentary linguistics that was not downstream of the European missionary–colonial tradition? That is, someone producing a description/grammar at some detail of a previously unwritten language foreign to the writer?
We find occasional snippets about foreigners’ languages for long time (Greeks writing down a handful of words of Scythian, etc.), but is going beyond that basically single-invention?
Al-Kashgari comes sorta close (at least a dialect documentation pioneer), but he is both a native speaker and this is early enough that presumably most Common Turkic varieties would have been still intelligible with the centuries-extant Old Turkic literary language.
I was curious about that, and after poking around a bit, found this. More specifically, the first Manchu grammar was written by Shen Jiliang, of whom you can read here. He seems to have been the sort of person Pystynen was looking for, a language enthusiast at a time and place when that was unusual.
— Second one is an article in Science, still firewalled. But somehow I was able to get it through this link, from the first author’s LinkedIn. The gist of the article is that there was a peak in global language diversity around 2000 years ago. There are details to quibble about, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.
You can learn more about it from the accessible supplementary materials; also from an older article it’s based on, and from secondary coverage:
The lost golden age of language diversity
Study uncovers lost ‘golden age’ of languages
Thanks, Y!
IIUC, they are basically asking “when was there the largest number of people not subject to homogenizing empires?” That’s all well and good, but I’m not seeing anything about how they accounted for pre-state homogenization. Surely the linguistic diversity in Central Europe collapsed around 2700 BCE, and it wasn’t because the Proto-Indo-Europeans had an empire. Am I missing the part where they consider and rule out this effect? Unless I read it wrong it looks like they’re basing linguistic diversity on the number of social groups within an idealized holocene population.
They have several different models for the change in the distribution of language sizes through the Holocene, very approximately accounting for different historical models. These are enumerated in the supplement. In general, on the one hand you have a growing population, and on the other hand you have a tendency for larger languages. They find that all the models give approximately the same time for maximum diversity (about 0 AD), though with different numbers of languages at the peak (ranging from low tens of thousands to high tens of thousands).
You can tell I’ve been out of academia for a while. I should ask my toddler for reading advice.
“image not available” – wrong country, wrong week.
(I’ll try other TLDs later.)
In the glamour mags, the “papers” are just extended abstracts, and the “supplements” – routinely of 100 pages – are the actual papers. If you’re lucky, they’re even peer-reviewed.
[I think you mean paywalled]
Claudius Caesar* famously wrote a detailed account of Etruscan, which was certainly a foreign language to him, though not, of course, a previously unwritten one.
The Romans seem to have been more interested in barbarian languages than the Greeks had been; I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been actual treatises on such languages which (like Claudius’ account of Etruscan) failed to be regarded as worthy of copying by mediaeval monks.
* He’d have loved the Hattery; alas, it was not to be, as he was murdered by his wife before Hat set up this blog.
Claudius wrote an Etruscan history, the Tyrrhenika, now lost. A very small consolation is that the Etruscan dictionary never existed, rather than existed and lost. It was Robert Graves’s invention (per the Kiwi Hellenist, who makes a specialty of such things.)
How about Evliya Çelebi? Not sure anything he wrote reaches the level of a language description, but he was definitely seriously into recording words and phrases in unwritten languages.
I don’t know whether a phrase book like the Pariser Gespräche fits the bill. It’s a 10th century document containing vocabulary and phrases in Old High German with a Latin translation as well as an OHG text, probably meant as learning material for Romance-speaking travelers to the German-speaking parts of the former Frankish empire. The orthography does not follow the conventions used in native OHG literature, but looks like something meant to enable a Romance speaker to pronounce spoken OHG. (So, it’s European, but pre-colonial. OTOH, it’s not created due to an abstract interest in languages, but for the practical needs of travelers.)
The first time that a Ryukyuan language was written down that we know of was in an appendix to Haedong Jegukgi (海東諸國紀, 해동제국기, “Record of the Countries East of the Sea”) that was first published in 1471 by Korean scholar-official Sin Sukju.
In this appendix, some dialogue in Ryukyuan (probably the Okinawan variety spoken in Shuri, the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom) was written down in the Korean alphabet Hangul that had been invented a few decades earlier. Sin himself was heavily involved in some of the earliest works using the new writing system, and was known as a polyglot, with some knowledge of languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Jurchen, and Mongolian.
However, from the excerpts I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to go much deeper in terms of linguistic description than writing down some phrases.
How about non-European-origin missionary translators, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kum%C4%81raj%C4%ABva? Maybe he didn’t separately leave a grammar/lexicon of the Sinitic tongue he was translating into, but he must have done the work necessary to generate one? Or is it too unclear how much he actually worked in that direction versus just helping subordinates who were L1 Sinophones get enough reading knowledge of Sanskrit to do translation from that side?
AFAIK, that tradition, rich as it is, did not produce any written language description at all, no textbook, no phrasebook, nothing. Even dictionaries are late.
there are certainly language-learning tools among the texts from the cairo geniza that might hint at some other paths to description (iirc we’ve talked here about some of the ones involving armenian), but they indicate possibility rather than existence. (and i wonder whether anything in that vein has showed up in southeast asian texts)
—
i haven’t yet read the article from Science, but its proposed date of maximum diversity makes a certain kind of gut sense to me, thinking about how expanding states have contributed to proliferating ethnogenesis and lect-genesis among those evading their control – but only as long as there are many non-state-controlled regions to move into. so it seems like there would have to be inflection points where their inadvertent positive effects on diversity would equal and then outweigh the effects of their homogenizing imperative.
The Greek papyrus in Armenian script is not from the geniza, and it’s just lists of completely uncommented Greek words without so much as a gloss.
Here LH links an article by La Vassière that says “Bactrian was taught in Marw (Herrmann & Kurbansakhatov 1994: 69) “, referring to (jstor):
“No. 274, from MEK: 1, Context 92. Fragment of a rib, size 4 x 1.4 cm.
One line in Bactrian cursive script drawn in black ink: abbbo abbaba abbb[. The inscription makes no sense. Most probably it is a school exercise, with someone learning how to connect the letters a and b. ”
I’d say as a language description it suffices. aaaaaaaaa would be better.
akh, so much for my memory (who now misremembers the armenians)… but i wasn’t entirely wrong, i (still) think, to recall some glossings and maybe glossaries from the geniza.
Wikipedia gives me the impression that the first grammars of many South Asian languages were written by native speakers in their own languages well after the languages were first written. According to legend, the Tibetan scholar Thonmi Sambhota invented the first Tibetan writing system and wrote on Tibetan grammar, but he was a native speaker.
Another close one is the anonymous Lilatilakam, written in Sanskrit on the grammar and poetry of Manipravalam, which was a literary blend of Sanskrit and Malayalam.
Re the Bowern-et-al. piece, it’s conceptually interesting but I resist the notion that a “golden age” means the most possible languages simultaneously existing via keeping the population-per-language as modest as possible.* By way of parallel, I am not convinced that a continent with 150 different species of frogs, each of which is so fragile that it will die if it travels outside its own small home territory that it is optimized to live in, is somehow morally superior to a continent with a mere 20 or 25 species of frogs which are hardy enough to survive and thrive in a more diverse range of ecological conditions.
*In other words, it’s not just “empire bad, because it obliterates pre-existing languages.” It can be “empire good because pax romana or equivalent enables a given group speaking the same language both to grow in absolute numbers and to spread out over a larger territory without immediately fragmenting into mutually incomprehensible daughter languages.”
Diversity is interesting. If everyone spoke the same language and had the same culture, there wouldn’t be much for us all to talk about here, would there?
Panini.
A grammarian of an unwritten language.
Without biodiversity we wouldn’t have bodies, we would be minds in the void communicating about the void.
[and God saw that it was good]
@drasvi: I assume Pystynen is aware of Panini and similar language descriptions by people from inside a culture that is using a language and that’s why he is asking about examples of descriptions of a “language foreign to the writer”.
@Hans, you know that I know that Pystynen knows who’s Panini:)
It was a comment on the nature of the criterion of unwrittenness.
(note al-Kashgari – mentioned by Pystynen)