
The fifty shades of Latin - drjohnson
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-fifty-shades-of-latin.html
======
fortes
As a native Portuguese speaker, it's fun to look at the dialectic continuum
you can construct as you go across the Iberian peninsula.

It's imperfect, but you can travel with a very soft "language gradient":
Extremaduran -> Portuguese -> Galician -> Asturian -> Castillian (Spanish) ->
Valencian -> Catalan -> Aragones -> Occitan -> French ...

Each individual step is pretty easy, but it adds up to a huge difference.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great analogue for English. You can kinda
construct a small jump by looking at Scots, but it ends quickly and is (at
least to my ears) a jump on par with Portuguese to Galician.

~~~
dangerbird2
English is member of a language continuum, albeit a disjointed one by virtue
of the English Channel and the Norman conquest. The Ingvaeonic languages is a
"gradient" including Scots, English, Frisian, and Low German/Plattdüütsch.
Frisian is certainly legible to an Anglophone with a wide exposure to English
dialects and historical periods.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_languages)

~~~
jacobush
Don't forget
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse)
and its influence on English. (I say) some of the contemporary Norwegian is
very close to some contemporary Scots.

------
gumby
This variation was quite common in France until the commencement of an active
program of linguistic assimilation (beginning with Luis XIII but really
accelerating in the 1930s). Outside the Romance Domain, Britain held out well
into the 50s (I still remember being shocked by the Yorkshire "thou" as a kid)
but TV wiped it out -- the accents remain but the grammar and, mostly, the
vocabulary, have all converged.

Ironically I hear much more variation in Germany where there is an "offical"
German that everybody learns at school but almost nobody speaks at home.

America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents
abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear to
be Californian. That's _definitely_ due to TV and the fact that US/UK TV
doesn't need translation. After decades in the US I go back to Australia and
people tell me, "wow, you've really kept your accent." Actually, it's just
that they're very much used to hearing US speech on TV.

~~~
dragonwriter
> America and Australia are, to my ear, in the same boat as the UK: accents
> abound but if you were to transcribe people's speech they would all appear
> to be Californian.

While regional variations in mainstream, WASPy, middle-class-and-above speech
may be more accents (in the vocal sense rather than the linguistic sense) than
dialects, American English has a number of clearly distinct dialects (notably
Chicano English and African American Vernacular English) and accents (in the
linguistic sense that includes patterns that would be distinct in
transcription; including a couple different American Jewish English accents,
among others).

~~~
adrienne
Also Ozark English! Which is a super interesting dialect, it turns out.

------
samch
From my dad, linguist: "This is the classic example of an L-complex. A chain
of mutual intelligibility can be established from Normandy to Sicily and over
to Portugal, and in fact across all of Latin America, though Brazil is linked
through Portugal and the rest of Latin America through Spain. An L-simplex is
a grouping of dialects that are all mutually intelligible. In an L-complex
there may be dialects that are not mutually intelligible. But on occasion you
find a maximal L-complex that is also an L-simplex. Israel is one. The Basque
country is another. But it's rare."

~~~
unscaled
Interesting terms. I've never came across them in my linguistic study, but I
see they were heavily employed by C.F. Hockett, so that might be less exposure
to American Structuralism.

I want to make a small correction here. Israel is a special case not because
all regional dialects are mutually intelligible, but because it has no
regional dialects at all (unless you're talking about Arabic, but then it's a
far cry from an L-Simplex).

This is due to the history of Modern Hebrew in Israel being relatively recent.
It only reached a stable grammar with a sizable generation of native speakers
in the 1920s and 30s, and until the 60s at least non-native speakers probably
outnumbered the native speakers. By then Television was unleashed, and killed
whatever budding dialects that existed.

Practically speaking, there used to few minor dialectal variations in
Jerusalem. It pretty much amounted to about 20-30 words, a default feminine
form for the noun 'cat' and a different pronunciation for the number 200. But
even these features are barely left in Jerusalem, which had seen large
population exchanges.

------
umanwizard
The traditional languages of France are basically an infinite fractal to the
extent that many of the forms are basically unheard of outside of the areas in
which they're spoken.

I lived in a (largely rural) department of France called Mayenne for a year.
Old people there universally believe that they grew up speaking something
called "patois mayennais" (let's translate this as "Mayennese dialect") before
they had to learn French to get jobs in the city.

However, I can find very little reliable information about this Mayennese
dialect on the internet, in French or English. There are a few "local color"
type newspaper articles that reference it, but that's about it. French dialect
maps I've seen don't mention Mayennese dialect at all, and claim that Mayenne
spoke either Gallo or Angevin.

~~~
schoen
French Wikipedia seems to have an article about it

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayennais](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayennais)

including some purported vocabulary, plus a few books that discuss it! Some of
them discuss it as "bas-mainiot" or "patois du Bas-Maine", of which Wikipedia
says "Il [Département de la Mayenne] correspond essentiellement au Bas-Maine,
qui formait la moitié occidentale de la province du Maine"... I guess you're
probably very familiar with these geographical designations, but I'm
definitely not!

Google has a scan of a 1975 reprint of an 1899 book about "les parlers du Bas-
Maine" which includes tons of references to speakers and lexical items
observed in Mayenne.

[https://books.google.fr/books?id=mcykCmekgioC](https://books.google.fr/books?id=mcykCmekgioC)

(It's sad that some pages are missing from the preview... maybe Google
algorithmically concluded that the book might still be in copyright because it
was "published" in 1975.)

But it's true that a Wikipedia article isn't the same thing as finding a
thriving language community online.

~~~
umanwizard
Not sure how I missed that Wikipedia article... thanks for digging up those
references!

------
gabaix
Growing up in the French side of the Pyrenees, I concur with the article.
Traveling on the other side of the border was barely special. The road signs
would have a dialect very similar to our own _Gascon_ , and there was no need
to switch to Spanish.

One thing not mentioned in this article is how much these dialects have been
losing ground over the past 50 years. My grand-mother spoke almost exclusively
in her local dialect ( _Bearnais_ ), my mom spoke it with my dad when they
didn't want me to understand, and I barely know a few words. There are schools
and local initiatives to revive the old languages. The reality is that less
and less people speak the dialects. Most people stick to Spanish, French, and
are now expected to know English well.

------
schoen
If you'd like to see a few of the lesser-known Romance languages in action
(especially from Italy, because that's apparently a strength of this company
-- I think they're based there, judging by their motto _Non solo parole_ 'not
just words'), take a look around Logos Quotes, where they used to translate a
different quotation every day into as many languages as they could manage.
There are a _LOT_ of Romance languages out there!

[http://www.logosquotes.org/](http://www.logosquotes.org/)

~~~
JoeDaDude
Italian itself has an interesting spectrum of shades seeing as how it was
"standardized" a relatively short time ago (mid 19th century), at the same
time there was massive emigration from the country, with the result that the
Italian spoken by the expats is quite different from the standard Italian.

[0] [http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-
gab...](http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-
italian-new-jersey-accent-explained)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523661)

~~~
toyg
And because of its geographical position and history, indigenous languages
show influences coming from worlds as geographically distant as Arabia and
China.

------
panglott
The term of art is "language shift", but it's nearly always a case of internal
colonialism. Nearly any time you see a linguistic minority abandon its
language for the majority language, you can bet that the government was taking
kids away from their parents and beating and shaming them if they dared utter
the language their parents spoke to them as babies.

Occitan in 1860 was spoken by 39% of the population of France, and now has
about 100k speakers.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha)

~~~
umanwizard
This is true sometimes but not "nearly any time". For example rate of Spanish
fluency in Arizona among second-generation residents is much lower than among
their parents, without any kidnapping and beating going on.

~~~
panglott
The situation can be a bit different with 2nd generation immigrants,
especially based on the parents' attitudes towards English. I do see
occasional reports in the US of punishing and shaming students for speaking
non-English languages, though, and many Americans are very hostile to any
accommodation of languages other than English (Spanish signage, "press 1 for
English"). And there is a clear, unstated language policy in the US of making
immigrant children into English speakers (with no regard to
preserving/increasing their mother-tongue proficiency), as well as a general
policy of making everyone English-language monolinguals (if we wanted
bilingual kids we would have bilingual elementary schools).

Minority-language communities really refers to communities where there is a
long, stable history of intergenerational language transmission, and where
functional bilingualism is possible or likely. Such as any Native American
language, or something like Louisiana French.

A sane educational policy in this case would be something like "most
instruction is conducted in the majority language, but kids aren't punished or
shamed for speaking their mother tongue at recess, and there's maybe even an
occasional minorty-language literature class".

------
data_hope
I wonder how different / similar these romance languages are, compared to the
reference frame I have: German dialects. German dialects can be mutually
unintelligible, young germans typically know standard german and thus have a
"common ground" for communication, also they usually speak a form of the
dialect that is already considerably closer to the standard "high" language of
newspapers and televisions, than what their grandparents or their great
grandparents speak / spoke. Sometimes (typically in documentaries), they even
subtitle dialect speakers.

So yeah, I wonder if depending on the context, the classification of languages
and dialects differs.

~~~
pmontra
Italian dialects can be mutually unintelligible too. TV and internal
migrations consolidated standard Italian to the point that local dialects are
basically dead in some areas (for example Milan) but there are people in
smaller cities that are actively bilingual, their dialect and Italian.

My father remembers that they could tell the town of origin of somebody by
little variations of accent and vocabulary, over distances of less than 10 km
in a well populated and well connected area centered around Milan.

~~~
toyg
_> local dialects are basically dead in some areas (for example Milan)_

 _Uela_ , you have to consider that Milanese dialects basically overlapped
modern Italian already - as standardized on the works of Alessandro Manzoni, a
writer from Milan. The accents still survive though, and even a few words.

It's incredibly funny to observe language in motion. At one point in the '90s,
a few rappers living in the city I come from (Bologna) popularized a bunch of
local slang in their songs. Nowadays, youngsters from Milan use that slang as
native and strongly believe it originated there.

~~~
pmontra
Do they use it correctly? Example: the roman "sti c...i" is very often used
with the opposite meaning of the original here, that is: as a surprise,
probably by guessing.

And by the way, "bagaglio" always surprises people here.

For the non Italians, among the other things the Milan accent basically swaps
the open and closed e sounds. I have to change the way I say spaghetti when
I'm outside region :-)

------
vondur
All of these various languages that sprang fort from Latin after the
dissolution of the Roman Empire illustrate just how much the former Roman
world shrank into small kingdoms.

------
microcolonel
It would be interesting to construct a many-dimensional language map of
vectors. You could add two spherical (or three cartesian!) dimensions to your
word vectors, and interpolate languages based on the known data.

Computational interpolation between english dialects, or chinese languages, or
indian languages, sounds like a heck of a lot of fun.

~~~
schoen
Or extrapolation!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brithenig)

(although that was manual, not computational)

~~~
microcolonel
And actually, with good enough data, you could probably shove in some text and
figure out where it was written (or at least where the writer learned to
write) within pretty good margins.

