Re:Our language, our world
by retrac on Monday January 15, 2024 @08:09PM
(#39008178)
With English and French, it's often unclear whether a word or expression is originally French or English. So many speakers of both languages have known the other language. When a new word or concept is needed, the process of word formation often leads to the same result in both languages.
For example, the French know the whole King Arthur story - et la table ronde - just as well as the British and Americans do, really. Not surprising - much of the Arthurian cycle was developed in France and written in Old French. A thousand years of shared literature.
In some cases, words were borrowed back and forth multiple times. Ward/guard. Warranty/guarantee. Quite a few pairs like that when you go looking for them. Sound change often obscures it today - attach/stick.
This overall effect of co-developing together is known as a sprachbund [1] in linguistics. Sprachbunds can overlap and are fuzzy in their definition. The Romance languages all form a close-knit sprachbund today. They continue to influence each other, even though they split apart long ago. They are part of a larger western European sprachbund, which draws on the Greek and Latin roots. That's part of a much looser and larger Western-Arabic-Hebrew-Russian-Indian sprachbund which is spread across half the world, going back a couple thousand years at this point. For a perhaps unusual, but I think relevant example, all of these cultures write with (more or less) the same numerals, shared and refined over many centuries now.
China is the centre of another sprachbund. Japanese and Chinese - despite being ultimately unrelated ancestrally - share lots of vocabulary and expressions and metaphors and so on. Many modern words in Chinese were actually coined in Japan first and borrowed "back".
With that said, having learned some Chinese, many metaphors and ideas are cross-linguistic and just universal. For example: social organizations are like organisms, with a core/trunk, and limbs/branches, and the fingers/leaves can be chopped off without too much injury to the body as a whole. Anything based on that metaphor translates effortlessly in both directions, because people innately think that way. (I suspect.)
For example, the French know the whole King Arthur story - et la table ronde - just as well as the British and Americans do, really. Not surprising - much of the Arthurian cycle was developed in France and written in Old French. A thousand years of shared literature.
In some cases, words were borrowed back and forth multiple times. Ward/guard. Warranty/guarantee. Quite a few pairs like that when you go looking for them. Sound change often obscures it today - attach/stick.
This overall effect of co-developing together is known as a sprachbund [1] in linguistics. Sprachbunds can overlap and are fuzzy in their definition. The Romance languages all form a close-knit sprachbund today. They continue to influence each other, even though they split apart long ago. They are part of a larger western European sprachbund, which draws on the Greek and Latin roots. That's part of a much looser and larger Western-Arabic-Hebrew-Russian-Indian sprachbund which is spread across half the world, going back a couple thousand years at this point. For a perhaps unusual, but I think relevant example, all of these cultures write with (more or less) the same numerals, shared and refined over many centuries now.
China is the centre of another sprachbund. Japanese and Chinese - despite being ultimately unrelated ancestrally - share lots of vocabulary and expressions and metaphors and so on. Many modern words in Chinese were actually coined in Japan first and borrowed "back".
With that said, having learned some Chinese, many metaphors and ideas are cross-linguistic and just universal. For example: social organizations are like organisms, with a core/trunk, and limbs/branches, and the fingers/leaves can be chopped off without too much injury to the body as a whole. Anything based on that metaphor translates effortlessly in both directions, because people innately think that way. (I suspect.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund