What can Veeky Forums tell me about languages?

What can Veeky Forums tell me about languages?

This picture suggests quite a lot.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish-Spokane-Kalispel_language#Phonology
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There's quite a lot to say; you'll have to me a little more precise about what kind of info you want.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

nobody on Veeky Forums has a clue about language.

This map is not very accurate in some places. Livonian is a dead language but it is still shown on this map.

okay, how about the different kinds of syllabic sounds that humans can utter?

I hear there's like 44 or so, and certain cultures learn not to hear certain ones. I can't really distinguish the throaty "chhh" sounds of middle-east cultures for example, as a native english speaker.

"Languages" is too broad a topic, as stated. Even language branches are quite a difficult topic to breach.

Look to the IPA for the amount of sounds a human can utter; and yeah, sounds are learned through cultural proximity.

It took me a couple of weeks to learn how to trill 'r', and to pick up the Japanese 'r'/'l' in ら、り、る、れ、ろ.

Even cognate languages have examples of this, such as the German Ü or Ch which are not present in English (though loch is an example of the latter in English/Scots).

This is mostly true OP. The language threads are always particularly slow/quiet; shame.

Humans can definitely produce more than 44 different syllables. Just look at the IPA and you'll see we can make at least twice that number of consonnants (without even getting into stuff life aspiration, palatalization, labialization, etc.), that when combined with the huge number of vowels we can pronounce, give us a number of possible syllables in the thousand.

On a topic somewhat related to people not being able to easily pronounce sounds they aren't familiar with, people sometimes don't even realize what kind of sounds they make. We see that in English where speakers don't realize words like "better" and "fatty" don't actually contain any /t/, but have a trill (kinda like a japanese l/r) instead or in speakers of Quebec French who pronounce /t/ and /d/ as affricates (/ts/ /dz/ in front of /i/ and /y/ (French u). So, something like "Petit" /peti/ would be more like /petsi/ or even just /tsi/. If you wanna look into it, Quebec French phonology is pretty interesting.

>We see that in English where speakers don't realize words like "better" and "fatty" don't actually contain any /t/, but have a trill (kinda like a japanese l/r)

Flap/tap, not a trill. Though short trill and a flap/tap can sound rather similar.

>All those Indo-European languages

One thing i can tell you is this.

The Caucasus is a linguistic clusterfuck beyond the level of most parts of the world, and no one really knows why. Three different language families unrelated to each other or any family outside the caucasus, and then stuff like the isolated Mongolic language of Kalmyk from Mongol Empire times. It's rather insane.

>those grey areas where turkshits invaded Aryan territory
Faggots. They're not even pure Turks but rather Turko-Aryan mestizos.

>Chechen also presents interesting challenges for lexicography, as creating new words in the language relies on fixation of whole phrases rather than adding to the end of existing words or combining existing words. It can be difficult to decide which phrases belong in the dictionary, because the language's grammar does not permit the borrowing of new verbal morphemes to express new concepts. Instead, the verb dan (to do) is combined with nominal phrases to correspond with new concepts imported from other languages.
JUST

how does this even happen

As a Caucasian I can confirm this. We're special

> no one really knows why
Mountaints. Check New Guinea for same shit.

what about America?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish-Spokane-Kalispel_language#Phonology

Language, you dipshit

One common theory/model is that as language developed, it did so in many, many different places independently, almost on a tribal level, and thus in the beginning of linguistic history, the world was a patchwork of different, unrelated languages.
Now, these languages were spoken by numerically small hunter-gatherer societies, which covered relatively large areas with very low population density.
Some peoples in certain areas however developed agriculture and became settled, and thus were able to grow and maintain much larger population numbers and density. These populations quickly outgrew the land they could feasibly use and the food they could produce from it, leading to migrations and proto-colonizations. These migrant farmer population waves swept across lands formerly populated by hunter-gatherer societies and displaced them not so much through violence (though conflict was certainly a factor) but through sheer numbers, as they could settle areas with many more people and thus occupy it. The hunter-gatherer societies were either displaced into areas not interesting for agrarians (such as mountain ranges and deep forests) or subsumed into the agrarian societies, interbreeding with them and adopting their language.

Mountain ranges like the Caucasus and the Pyrenees, were the Proto-European Vasconic languages survived, but also areas like the Karakoram mountains where Burushaski has survived, are used as examples of this.

Meanwhile, language families like Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Semitic and Austrasian are examples of those languages that belonged to agrarian societies whose language was backed with a population explosion that resulted in the process described above.

Clarification, since there are actually people who argue so and I didn't want to phrase it in a way that presents it as fact: the relation between Caucasic languages and Vasconic ones are unclear, some people maintain relationships while others argue against it.

>It took me a couple of weeks to learn how to trill 'r'
a couple of weeks? dude, it's not that hard. literally mastered that the first time trying to learn it

For some people it is. In fact even some native speakers of languages that have a trilled r never learn it. I had to go to speech therapy as a child to learn it.

>even some native speakers of languages that have a trilled r never learn it

That's not about not learning it, it's a speech defect.

>What can Veeky Forums tell me about languages?
Which type? I can write a few pages on type 3 (i.e. finitely represented) languages for you but I don't know jack shit about type 0 (i.e. unrestricted) languages since it has so little structure.

>tfw i will never learn about Indo-European origins
>tfw i will never discover whole new civilization of Caucasian/Central Asian kingdoms which then spread to the whole world

We must remove the indoeuropean plague

it can take people quite a long time to develop the ability to trill their tongue if they've never done it. Quite literally 6 months to two years.

The problem is that, for instance, a native English speaker might make movements that are extremely similar to the movement needed to trill, and that pattern has now been ingrained for decades and so trying to override that pattern and add in a new movement can be difficult.

What's up with Basque?

What I find weird is that alveolar trill, despite being so difficult, is quite a common phoneme all over the world. English r you'd think would be much easier as the tongue just needs to be still in one place, but it is quite a rare phoneme among world's languages.

100% PURE CONCENTRATED INDO-EUROPEAN

Bonus points: Two Caucasus languages, Georgian and Armenian also have strange writing systems. While we can assume they took influence from Greek and Greek-descended alphabets (Latin, Cyrillic) because of the way they look, there is not much in way of evidence suggesting they are related to each other or directly descended from Greek. So there is a pretty good chance that on two different occasions, a randomly proposed alphabet was chosen to represent the language, for two languages right beside each other. An alphabet being formed like that is already rare enough (I can only think of Hangul), so it really is bizarre.

Fucking brilliant.

In fact, reading a bit more on thr subject, it is actually known for certain that a certain guy MADE the armenian alphabet.

Adding one last thing, if you notice, there are two large language families near the caucasus, Turkic and Indo-European. These language families are not entirely contiguous, but one of the splits in thr Turkic Languages can be explained away by the Russians along the Southern edge of Siberia becoming majority.

But a split in both remains, and where it splits.... are both right beside the Caucasus. How did the native language families remain dominant there?