There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
From: Peter Collier
1b. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
From: BPJ
1c. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
From: Peter Collier
1d. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
From: Alex Fink
2a. Re: vowels: five to three?
From: BPJ
Messages
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1a. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
Posted by: "Peter Collier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2013 12:10 pm ((PST))
Perhaps the term should be changed to Lingua Angla...
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of George Corley
Sent: 01 February 2013 19:34
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
[snip]
I imagine that when it falls it will follow a similar course to Latin --
lingering around after the Anglophone powers have retreated as a lingua
franca of elites before eventually dying.
Messages in this topic (7)
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1b. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2013 1:10 pm ((PST))
Þe Ynglisc tung is already forcom, behwerved wiþ a cunnyng Normannisc
bastard-laad crafted for werld lordscip, forþij nobody can tell hweþer its
a Þeedisc reerd or a Romanisc.
Den fredagen den 1:e februari 2013 skrev Peter Collier:
> Perhaps the term should be changed to Lingua Angla...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List
> [mailto:[email protected]<javascript:;>]
> On
> Behalf Of George Corley
> Sent: 01 February 2013 19:34
> To: [email protected] <javascript:;>
> Subject: Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
>
> [snip]
>
> I imagine that when it falls it will follow a similar course to Latin --
> lingering around after the Anglophone powers have retreated as a lingua
> franca of elites before eventually dying.
>
Messages in this topic (7)
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1c. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
Posted by: "Peter Collier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2013 5:42 pm ((PST))
Whither did you come by that?
-----Original Message-----
From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of BPJ
Sent: 01 February 2013 21:11
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
Þe Ynglisc tung is already forcom, behwerved wiþ a cunnyng Normannisc
bastard-laad crafted for werld lordscip, forþij nobody can tell hweþer its a
Þeedisc reerd or a Romanisc.
Den fredagen den 1:e februari 2013 skrev Peter Collier:
> Perhaps the term should be changed to Lingua Angla...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Constructed Languages List
> [mailto:[email protected]<javascript:;>]
> On
> Behalf Of George Corley
> Sent: 01 February 2013 19:34
> To: [email protected] <javascript:;>
> Subject: Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
>
> [snip]
>
> I imagine that when it falls it will follow a similar course to Latin
> -- lingering around after the Anglophone powers have retreated as a
> lingua franca of elites before eventually dying.
>
Messages in this topic (7)
________________________________________________________________________
1d. Re: THEORY: Models of language spread.
Posted by: "Alex Fink" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2013 5:52 pm ((PST))
Meant to comment sooner. Life.
Actually, some years ago while I was playing around with NetLogo
<http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/>, I made a language spread simulation or
two. They were probably around as simple-minded as the ones you describe
below. I'd have to pore over my past self's undocumented code to remember what
I actually did, at this level of detail, but I could attempt this, or throw the
files up somewhere, if there was interest.
Something I should like to do is read through these papers and see if they give
support to a claim I often make (based on mathematical intuition) when
long-range comparativists are about, as follows.
Suppose that monogenesis is true, and that history is completely
uniformitarian. Draw out the phylogenetic tree of all modern-day languages,
trimming away any branches which have gone completely extinct (and ignoring
horizontal transfer and mixed languages and whatnot). Then, as you go back in
time in one language's history, the nodes should become spaced *exponentially*
further apart in time from each other; i.e., since only nodes are
reconstructible, comparative reconstruction should get exponentially harder the
further back you go. Therefore there really shouldn't be much we can discern
left.
(In fact, history is not uniformitarian, but I think it's mostly in the
direction of making deeper reconstructions than we have now harder than they
might otherwise have been. The sweeping historical expansion of the PIE
speakers has handed a plethora of descendants to us on a silver platter, making
PIE's reconstruction anomalously easy, and in so doing probably erased a bunch
of what could've become useful evidence for PIE's sisters, making the next
stage more harderer by comparison.)
On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:48:05 +0100, Leonardo Castro <[email protected]>
wrote:
>I would like to hear some comments on how realistic do you think that
>the assumptions of computational simulation of language spread are:
Well, as you already mentioned, the fact that none of them actually account for
sociolinguistic factors is an unrealistic element of all of them. I wonder how
you'd modify them to track that? I suppose, to a first approximation, each
culture should have values for how well it esteems the other cultures which
which it comes in contact, which drift over time in some fashion. And these
should in turn affect the patterns with which that culture's members are
bilingual, and (therethrough?) the patterns in which its language is influenced
by the other languages. Given a feature model like [2] or [3], the features
themselves could be set up to have different susceptibilities to cultural
replacement etc.
>-> Viviane model [1]:
"Fitness" leading a group to occupy sites seems to be the core element of this
one (and its successor), so the big question would be what "fitness" is
supposed to represent. I suppose it's something like economic might?
>* probablility of language mutation (creating a new language labelled
>with another unused integer) inversely proportional to its fitness.
That is particularly bizarre. You can't actually retard language change by
being rich. I wonder if Viviane was thinking of language standardisation here
-- if so, the better outcome to simulate would be some sort of diglossia.
>-> Modified Vivane model [2]:
>* if the bit strings of the languages of two sites are the same, they
>are the same language (so I presume that the original language can be
>reobtained from one of its mutated versions);
Not a bad assumption. In fact, the closer two languages are, the likelier one
is to displace the other: you know, if you speak, say, Aramaic it'd be easier
for you to switch to pick up Arabic than Nuuchahnulth.
But 16 bits are too few for this to be really realistic, I think, in number of
characters and especially in number of their values (at least for lexical-like
characters). (Both Schulze's F and Q.)
>-> Schulze model [3]:
About as good as anything simple I can imagine, really, if you don't try to
account for any of these social factors.
Alex
Messages in this topic (7)
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2a. Re: vowels: five to three?
Posted by: "BPJ" [email protected]
Date: Fri Feb 1, 2013 12:28 pm ((PST))
Now don't you go and give me any crazy ideas, you hear me! ;-)
Den torsdagen den 31:e januari 2013 skrev Jörg Rhiemeier:
> Hallo conlangers!
>
> On Wednesday 30 January 2013 18:35:00 BPJ wrote:
>
> > Sicilian comes close with
> >
> > ī ĭ ē > i
> > ū ŭ ō > u
> > ā ă > a
> >
> > Had only ĕ ŏ merged with a it would have been a done deal.
>
> That would be a lostlang idea. A romlang with only three vowel
> qualities!
>
> --
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
> http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
> "Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
>
Messages in this topic (11)
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