On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Steven Brust wrote:
#At 02:48 PM 9/3/2002 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote:
#>
#>Hungarian is "much different" from most other European languages, being,
#>as far as modern linguistic science knows, totally unrelated to them.
#>(Distant kin to Turkish, Finnish, and Estonian.)
#
#Mark, are you certain? Finnish and Estonian I have known about for years;
#this is the first time I've heard of a relationship with Turkish (although
#it makes a certain amount of sense).
The link to Turkish is hypothetical, assuming a Ural-Altaic family. It
is not universally accepted. I should say that I don't know enough to
have an informed opinion on the question.
#Yes and no. Consider Quebcois and, for that matter, Hungarian. You know
#(in fact, you know better than I) that when I cultural group transported
#whole to a new location, one of the things that can happen is that the
#language "freezes." There are no dialects of Hungarian, and the language
#stopped evolving (with the exception of foreign loan words) some thousand
#of years ago.
Hunh. I find that dubious, but I haven't the resources to check it out
here and now. Languages don't freeze. What *does* happen is that after a
couple centuries someone from the more urbanized motherland visits the
colony, observes a number of features that he knows have been lost back
home, and says "Wow! These guys are stuck in time!"... without noticing
the developments that have occurred in the colony that are parallel to,
or independent of, ones in the motherland. Icelanders can read the
sagas... but the pronunciation has changed drastically. An Israeli woman
I know says she reads the Bible ("Old Testament" to most Americans, that
is) without difficulty, but her children, who have learned their Modern
Hebrew at home but gone to American schools and not studied Biblical
Hebrew, cannot understand it.
# That is, according to the linguists I've read, and according
#to my late father, a magyar of five hundred years ago could understand a
#contemporary Hungarian with no difficulty.
Um. Well, I don't want to argue with specialists in their specialty! But
I'm still dubious till I check it out. Thank you.
# That is some of what I was playing with. I very carefully did not
#assert that this had happened with every language in the East.
And I have a much harder time applying it with a factor of 50-- apart
>from magical (or genetic or what-have-you) intervention.
-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel