I’ve recently found Cassiopaea blog when looking for relationships between Sanskrot and Russian, and I was quite blown away.
To be straight to the point, I’d like your help in figuring out this likely huge hap in Aryan languages history:
Possibly, every single language branch in the traditional “Indo-European” family-tree is flat-out wrong.
I just read Yves Cortez (“Le Français ne vient pas du Latin”) and Huertas (“We don’t come from Latin”). They show what seems like very strong evidence that romance languages (Castillian, Romanian, Italian, etc) don’t come from Latin, but from a different and common language which they call both “Old Italic” and “Romance”.
(If anybody wants to know the basics for their assertions, I can list them here briefly)
I realized it had very deep implications. And only today after sleeping over it I could articulate what some of those implications. So again, here’s the gap:
Possibly, every single language branch in the traditional “Indo-European” family-tree is flat-out wrong.
To use only one fenomenon to explain this, let’s take syntax. As far as I know, almost every Aryan (“Indo-European”) language branch has much more syntactically fusional, as well as much more syntactically analytic languages. That is, languages with at least four noun cases, and languages with two or only one.
But as the authors strongly indicate in their books, syntax take much, much more than a thousand years to significantly to change. So Old Norse would unlikely lose two of its cases in just about 700 years as wikipedia suggests.
In fact, this same time-frame is suggested for Latin, Old Slavic and Primitive Irish. What’s up with 700~800 years from (at least supppsedly) just starting being written to then losing cases?
I know almost nothing about other Aryan branches such as Iranian languages, and very little about Bharat languages (usually called “Aryan”, as in being found in India), but I do know Hindi has an overall much simpler grammar.
Could that mean the same kind of dyglossia (speaking one language, writing/formally speaking a other) happened in all these places as well, and hordes of people were led to believe one language (the popular one) came from the other (the educated one), while they were just somewhat close and simultaneous languages?
That is, did the Northern Germanic people speak a different language than the literary Old Norse? And so did the Irish, Slavs, Bharat, etc?
Then how come the written languages were so consistently the fusional ones?
Also, how come some peoples maintained heavily declined languages such the Russians and the Icelanders?
What on Earth is the deal with Elfdalian? (A language with four cases in the middle of Sweden, with about a thousand speakrs) - and why don’t we see more aberrations like Elfdalian, at least in the Romance-speaking world?
Does that also mean that Brazilian Romance (frequently labeled “Portuguese”) could be from an even further strain of Romance, considering it’s even more analytical than other romance languages?
And what on Earth is the English language? It has 50% romance-or-latin vocab, core vocab that mixes germanic and romance (“grand-mother”), conjugation paradigms from scandinavian languages (“thou art” vs “thou bist”, “they are” vs “they sind”), core vocab from West-Germanic, a (as far as I know) unique among Germanic lggs -s plural… and exceptions to many of those rules!
What are observations you made that could help see this linguistic phenomenon more completely?
What are mistakes in my thinking that you have spotted?
Da hek’s goin on?
To be straight to the point, I’d like your help in figuring out this likely huge hap in Aryan languages history:
Possibly, every single language branch in the traditional “Indo-European” family-tree is flat-out wrong.
I just read Yves Cortez (“Le Français ne vient pas du Latin”) and Huertas (“We don’t come from Latin”). They show what seems like very strong evidence that romance languages (Castillian, Romanian, Italian, etc) don’t come from Latin, but from a different and common language which they call both “Old Italic” and “Romance”.
(If anybody wants to know the basics for their assertions, I can list them here briefly)
I realized it had very deep implications. And only today after sleeping over it I could articulate what some of those implications. So again, here’s the gap:
Possibly, every single language branch in the traditional “Indo-European” family-tree is flat-out wrong.
To use only one fenomenon to explain this, let’s take syntax. As far as I know, almost every Aryan (“Indo-European”) language branch has much more syntactically fusional, as well as much more syntactically analytic languages. That is, languages with at least four noun cases, and languages with two or only one.
But as the authors strongly indicate in their books, syntax take much, much more than a thousand years to significantly to change. So Old Norse would unlikely lose two of its cases in just about 700 years as wikipedia suggests.
In fact, this same time-frame is suggested for Latin, Old Slavic and Primitive Irish. What’s up with 700~800 years from (at least supppsedly) just starting being written to then losing cases?
I know almost nothing about other Aryan branches such as Iranian languages, and very little about Bharat languages (usually called “Aryan”, as in being found in India), but I do know Hindi has an overall much simpler grammar.
Could that mean the same kind of dyglossia (speaking one language, writing/formally speaking a other) happened in all these places as well, and hordes of people were led to believe one language (the popular one) came from the other (the educated one), while they were just somewhat close and simultaneous languages?
That is, did the Northern Germanic people speak a different language than the literary Old Norse? And so did the Irish, Slavs, Bharat, etc?
Then how come the written languages were so consistently the fusional ones?
Also, how come some peoples maintained heavily declined languages such the Russians and the Icelanders?
What on Earth is the deal with Elfdalian? (A language with four cases in the middle of Sweden, with about a thousand speakrs) - and why don’t we see more aberrations like Elfdalian, at least in the Romance-speaking world?
Does that also mean that Brazilian Romance (frequently labeled “Portuguese”) could be from an even further strain of Romance, considering it’s even more analytical than other romance languages?
And what on Earth is the English language? It has 50% romance-or-latin vocab, core vocab that mixes germanic and romance (“grand-mother”), conjugation paradigms from scandinavian languages (“thou art” vs “thou bist”, “they are” vs “they sind”), core vocab from West-Germanic, a (as far as I know) unique among Germanic lggs -s plural… and exceptions to many of those rules!
What are observations you made that could help see this linguistic phenomenon more completely?
What are mistakes in my thinking that you have spotted?
Da hek’s goin on?