Your Weekly Dose of Linguistics #1 (YWDL)
Last updated: Monday February 20th, 2023
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Introduction
Hello! I'm starting this series since writing a profile of a whole language or analyzing its features is hard, but I still want to talk about languages, so I will be giving some random facts about languages from around the world and explaining a bit about them.
There are so many languages with strange features or origins, or even more normal ones that can get a spotlight, but it'll be interesting to see them.
I am definitely not an expert on anything linguistics, but since I'm very interested in it and have learned some things about it, I think I know some facts or info that might not be known by people who aren't obsessed with languages lol
Let's talk about one fact about a language, family, or feature, for each region of the world. Note: This first episode will be a bit shorter and will have to be split in 2. Let me know if you want me to alternate between either half of the world, or have a fact from every region for each episode. Some of them could be serious linguistic topics and some could just be some fun facts to share with your friends if they're also language nerds
At the end, I'll also give a profile of a random linguistic concept and a language. We could start anywhere, but let's start in South Asia, which happens to be home to the world's best language :)
South Asia
Topic: The Order of Consonants in Brahmi-Derived Scripts
This is a region of many languages, so today I'm talking about one feature that a lot of them have in common, which is the style of their writing systems.
Specifically, I am referring to most of the scripts derived from the Old Brahmi script used to write Sanskrit and Prakrit in ancient times.
This is not at all the same as the still undeciphered Indus Valley script, but came about after the formation of larger kingdoms in the 3rd century BC(E).
This script would end up splitting into many other scripts, such as Devanagari (now used to write Sanskrit, as well as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali) Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, and even Tibetan, Odiya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhala, Burmese, Thai, Lao, Khmer, and the no-longer used Javanese and Baybayin scripts, the latter being used for Filipino languages.
Many of these might seem quite different from Devanagari, probably the most famous one, so how did they change so much? North Indian languages were carved, like the example above, allowing them to get their distinctive straight lines that can easily be carved. But South Indian, Sri Lankan, and Southeast Asian scripts were more often written in palm leaves, hence the curvy lines not to break the leaves.
Anyway, that wasn't the topic. What I wanted to talk about is the order of consonants in most of these languages. If you're not familiar with them, this is the order:
• Line 1: Ka, Kha, Ga, Gha, Na
• Line 2: Cha, Chha, Ja, Jha, Ña
• Line 3: Ṭa, Ṭha, Ḍa, Ḍha, Ṇa
• Line 4: Ta, Tha, Da, Dha, Na
• Line 5: Pa, Pha, Ba, Bha, Ma
Notice anything? The order of the lines goes with the place they are made in your mouth. The first line is produced at the back, the technical term being Velar. Line 2 is at the palate, hence Palatal, and so on. So... that's interesting I guess, and that's pretty much this entry. Let's go to Indochina!
Southeast Asia
Topic: The Khmer Writing System
I just mentioned the Khmer writing system, but what's so special about it in particular? It happens to be the world's largest script excluding crazy hieroglyphic/logographic systems, meaning it has more letters than any other. It has even been given this unique honor by Guinness World Records, having 74 letters in total.
As I mentioned, this script is also a descendant of Brahmi. More specifically, it comes from the Pallava script, developed from Brahmi during the 6th century in the Pallava dynasty in Tamil Nadu to write Tamil, and it would spread to Southeast Asia and give birth to the aforementioned Southeast Asian scripts as well as modern Tamil.
So why does Khmer in particular need so many letters? It doesn't have a particularly huge sound inventory, it has a similar layout to Indian scripts that I mentioned earlier, and it's not even tonal.
After a google search some research, I found two reasons. One is that each consonant is repeated twice in Khmer, in the 1st series with an A sound attached, and in the 2nd with an O sound. Khmer also has separate attachments to give vowel sounds to consonants, so those attachments combined with the vowel that a consonant already has determines a vowel's sound. if that sounds difficult just remember that english has "through tough thorough thought though"
That brings us to the other reason, vowels. You might expect a lot of consonants, but Khmer also has a lot of vowels. Out of those 75, Khmer has 24 vowels, including many strange diphthong (2 vowel) and triphthong (3 vowel) combinations, even including glottal stops.
It's a pretty cool writing system though, right? There are even 4 different styles to write it in!
On to Oceania!
Oceania
Topic: The "Dog" Coincidence
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Oceania is home to some of the world's smallest alphabets, but I'm a bit tired of scripts, so for now I have a more fun and random fact for you.
The Mbabaram language is a now sadly extinct native language that was spoken in Queensland, Australia. Before it went extinct, it was studied by a few linguists, one of whom discovered the word for Dog in the language is... Dog. That's their own native word, which happened to be the same as another language across the world... that would end up being spoken in their land.
East Asia
Topic: Japanese Numbers
I have another random fact from Japan. Since they use Kanji Chinese characters, they have multiple ways of reading each word for reasons I don't really understand, and this applies to numbers as well. They use the Chinese characters to write a number, but there are 2 pronunciations, one which is closer to the Chinese pronunciation, and one which is closer to a native pronunciation or something like that. For example, 1 can be pronounced either Ichi or Hito, while 4 can be pronounced either Shi or Yon. And for some numbers the first reading is preferred, while for other's the second is. For example, 1 is generally called Ichi, the first one, while 4 is generally Yon, the second. It's actually only 2 numbers for which the native reading is preferred, 4 and 7. The reason is that the Chinese readings for these words sound like the word for death.
So that's all I knew before, but I actually discovered an even more interesting and obscure fact today. The Chinese characters for 1, 2, and 3, are just one, two, and three lines respectively, while 10 looks like a cross. Can you see where this is going? To avoid fraud with people adding more lines to change the number, there are different characters used in finance and legal documents in Chinese numbers.
Central Asia
Topic: Turkic Branches
If you're not familiar, the major Turkic languages are Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tatar, and Uyghur. Not Tajik, as Persian is spoken in Tajikistan.
Most of these are spoken in Central Asia, where the family originated, but how exactly did it split up?
As you can see, there are 4 major branches. The Southwestern Oghuz (pronounced Oz) in Red, the Southeastern Karluk in Green, Northwestern Kipchak in Orange, and the Northeastern Siberian in Blue. So out of those aforementioned languages, Turkish, Azeri, and Turkmen are Oghuz, sometimes considered the same language (although there are many differences), Kazakh, Tatar and Kyrgyz are Kipchak, while Uzbek and Uyghur are in the Karluk. The Siberian family has some smaller languages such as Yakut. So how did these languages spread so far, even reaching Anatolia and Thrace? And why are Uzbek and Uyghur in the same branch? I'll try to briefly explain their expansion and the languages' relationship.
Turkic languages originated in Mongolia, and split into two branches. The Shaz languages, languages, which include all of the sub-branches and languages I mentioned earlier, and the Oghuric languages, solely including Chuvash, spoken in Russia's Republic of Chuvashia, pictured in Purple above. Anyway, they would expand a lot in the 6th century thanks to the Göktürk Khanate. That brings us to the question of how the Oghuz language spread.
Oh hey! It's a bird, it's a plane, iiiit's the Seljuk Turks! Yup, the Seljuk Turks were Oghuz Turks from Central Asia who spread with their empire the Oghuz language into Anatolia. The empire was highly Persianized, but they settled Turks in Anatolia and Azerbaijan, leading to the modern Turkic languages there.
I couldn't find a very interesting answer for the Karluk/Kipchak distinction, other than ethnic and tribal differences. Kazakh and Kyrgyz are also quite similar and almost the same language, by the way.
Middle East time!
Middle East
Topic: The Anatolian Languages
I just talked about the arrival of Turks to Anatolia, but what was spoken before that? You probably know that Greek was prevalent in areas around modern day Greece, but Anatolia was also home to the (wait for it...) Anatolian languages.
These have sadly been extinct for a long time, but they are pretty interesting. They are Indo-European languages and formed a separate branch, not having a closer relationship to any other Indo-European languages.
The most famous might be the Hittite language. The Hittites had a large empire across modern Anatolia, and they were ethnically Anatolian. However, their language would be replaced by the closely related Luwian language, which would dominate the region afterwards (although not on the map above)
The Anatolian languages were quite interesting, having features such as laryngeal consonants, and being written in Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics. However, they would go extinct before the First Millennium AD, not because of the later Turkic invasions but actually because of the growing influence of Greek. This makes it one of only Indo-European branch to go completely extinct along with Tocharean, which I may talk about next time.
East Africa
Topic: The Ge'ez Abugida
I mentioned the scripts descended from Brahmi earlier, but notice how I avoided the word "Alphabet" while talking about them. This is because not all scripts are alphabets, as alphabet is a specific type of writing system, and applies to scripts such as Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek. An alphabet is a system with separate letters for vowels and consonants that are treated the same in a word. The aforementioned Brahmic scripts are Abugidas. An Abugida is a language where consonants and vowels are both letters, but when in a word, vowels are treated as add-ons to a consonant, depending on a line or curve you draw going off of the letter.
The reason this is relevant to East Africa is because the Ge'ez script of East Africa is considered to be the ancestor of all Abugidas, or at least the oldest. Abugida actually comes from You might recognize it as being used for Amharic, the main language of Ethiopia, as well as some other languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Ancient Ge'ez language it was made for, as well as modern Amharic are Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic, so how did their writing system develop into an Abugida?
It actually started out as an Abjad, like Arabic or Hebrew. This means that vowels are almost never included in writing, and must be figured out by the reader. When Ge'ez was developed in the 1st century, it was written like this, but it would develop into an Abugida. Texts written in the Abugida form start from the 4th century, and coincide with the arrival of Christianity. Another interesting difference from other Semitic languages that Ge'ez has is that it is written Left-Right, like English and most languages, rather then Right-Left like Arabic and Hebrew.
Outro
I will end the first episode here, so let me know if you like this. In the next episode I will continue with the rest of the world and also have a profile of Burmese that you voted for in my Telugu blog.
Also, this probably won't be released every week, probably once every 2 weeks or even further apart, so I may change the name. There will still be other stuff in between though :)
Thanks for reading! Here's some more stuff to check out:
Bye!
It's saddening that Anatolian and Tocharian are extinct. The latter one was a very interesting language and you should definitely add it in your next edition!
Not sure if other abugida languages have similar font
Me:
This blog is amazing. Just that.
The universal word in the world is "mother", which sounds "ma" in many languages.
Also you listed Telugu twice in the fourth paragraph :)
Whoops lol
that's how important it isNice blog.
Thanks!
period.
I'll try to continue :D