The group of dialects Comasco-Lecchese is part of the Western Lombard language and is spoken in the province of Como and province of Lecco in Italy , especially around the capital cities and north of them. In other parts of this provinces, other Western Lombard varieties are spoken ( Brianzoeu , Bustocco and Legnanese dialects ).
96-753: The most important dialects are: This article about Romance languages is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about culture in Italy is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Romance languages Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Romance languages , also known as
192-425: A clade and the discovery of clades was cladistics . Greenberg began writing during a time when phylogenetic systematics lacked the tools available to it later: the computer (computational systematics) and DNA sequencing ( molecular systematics ). To discover a cladistic relationship researchers relied on as large a number of morphological similarities among species as could be defined and tabulated. Statistically
288-490: A dialect continuum , where the speech variety of a location differs only slightly from that of a neighboring location, but over a longer distance these differences can accumulate to the point where two remote locations speak what may be unambiguously characterized as separate languages. This makes drawing language boundaries difficult, and thus there is no unambiguous way to divide the Romance varieties into individual languages. Even
384-484: A "natural arrangement" based on evolution. He says: "It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be
480-425: A and b, which are closest only to each other, are assumed to have a common ancestor, a-b. The next closest language, c, is assumed to have a common ancestor with a-b, and so on. The result is a projected series of historical paths leading from the overall common ancestor (the root) to the languages (the leaves). Each path is unique. There are no links between paths. Every leaf and node have one and only one ancestor. All
576-527: A biological hierarchy under several phyla , or most general groups, branching ultimately to the various species. The basis for this biological classification was the observed shared physical features of the species. Darwin, however, reviving another ancient metaphor, the tree of life , hypothesized that the groups of the Linnaean classification (today's taxa ), descended in a tree structure over time from simplest to most complex. The Linnaean hierarchical tree
672-430: A considerable number of such items ... we necessarily draw a conclusion of common historical origin. Such genetic classifications are not arbitrary ... the analogy here to biological classification is extremely close ... just as in biology we classify species in the same genus or high unit because the resemblances are such as to suggest a hypothesis of common descent, so with genetic hypotheses in language." In this analogy,
768-399: A dialect continuum rather than from linguistically isolated child languages of a single language. Augustine of Hippo supposed that each of the descendants of Noah founded a nation and that each nation was given its own language: Assyrian for Assur , Hebrew for Heber , and so on. In all he identified 72 nations, tribal founders and languages. The confusion and dispersion occurred in
864-801: A language family is like a clade , the languages are like species , the proto-language is like an ancestor taxon , the language tree is like a phylogenetic tree and languages and dialects are like species and varieties. Greenberg formulated large tables of characteristics of hitherto neglected languages of Africa, the Americas, Indonesia and northern Eurasia and typed them according to their similarities. He called this approach " typological classification", arrived at by descriptive linguistics rather than by comparative linguistics . The comparative method has been used by historical linguists to piece together tree models utilizing discrete lexical, morphological, and phonological data. Chronology can be found but there
960-618: A language in all parts, ... may very well be doubted." By then, discovery of the New World and exploration of the Far East had brought knowledge of numbers of new languages far beyond the 72 calculated by St. Augustine. Citing the Native American languages, Browne suggests the "confusion of tongues at first fell only upon those present in Sinaar at the work of Babel ...." For those "about the foot of
1056-603: A number of reconstructive activities by the scholars of the times: "The learned Casaubon conceiveth that a dialogue might be composed in Saxon, only of such words as are derivable from the Greek ... Verstegan made no doubt that he could contrive a letter that might be understood by the English, Dutch, and East Frislander ... And if, as the learned Buxhornius contendeth, the Scythian language as
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#17328515567841152-591: A potential source of separatist movements; therefore, they have generally fought to eliminate it, by extensively promoting the use of the official language, restricting the use of the other languages in the media, recognizing them as mere "dialects", or even persecuting them. As a result, all of these languages are considered endangered to varying degrees according to the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages , ranging from "vulnerable" (e.g. Sicilian and Venetian ) to "severely endangered" ( Franco-Provençal , most of
1248-439: A series of essays beginning about 1950. Since the adoption of the family tree metaphor by the linguists, the concept of evolution had been proposed by Charles Darwin and was generally accepted in biology. Taxonomy , the classification of living things, had already been invented by Carl Linnaeus . It used a binomial nomenclature to assign a species name and a genus name to every known living organism. These were arranged in
1344-461: A significant number of characters, which could not be explained by genetic descent from the group's calculated ancestor, were borrowed. Presumably, if the wave model , which explained borrowing, were a complete explanation of the group's characters, no phylogeny at all could be found for it. If both models were partially effective, then a tree would exist, but it would need to be supplemented by non-genetic explanations. The researchers therefore modified
1440-836: A single country. Portuguese is the official language of six African countries ( Angola , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique , Equatorial Guinea , and São Tomé and Príncipe ), and is spoken as a native language by perhaps 16 million residents of that continent. In Asia, Portuguese is co-official with other languages in East Timor and Macau , while most Portuguese-speakers in Asia—some 400,000 —are in Japan due to return immigration of Japanese Brazilians . In North America 1,000,000 people speak Portuguese as their home language, mainly immigrants from Brazil, Portugal, and other Portuguese-speaking countries and their descendants. In Oceania, Portuguese
1536-421: A single parent." The purpose of phylogenetic software is to generate cladograms , a special kind of tree in which the links only bifurcate; that is, at any node in the same direction only two branches are offered. The input data is a set of characters that can be assigned states in different languages, such as present (1) or absent (0). A language therefore can be described by a unique coordinate set consisting of
1632-566: A tree of languages appears fully developed short of being a professional linguist's view: "I will now hoist sail for the Netherlands, whose language is the same dialect with the English, and was so from the beginning, being both of them derived from the high Dutch [Howell is wrong here]: The Danish also is but a branch of the same tree ... Now the High Dutch or Teutonick Tongue, is one of the prime and most spacious Maternal Languages of Europe ... it
1728-424: A unique path from root to leaf, but its origin could be either the root under consideration or a contact language. If all the states of the experiment could be accounted for by the network, it was termed a perfect phylogenetic network. The generation of networks required two phases. In the first phase, the researchers devised a number of phylogenies, called candidate trees, to be tested for compatibility. A character
1824-521: A universal descent from the language of paradise, located in Kashmir central to the total range of the 500. Young begins by pointing out Adelung's indebtedness to Conrad Gesner 's Mithridates, de Differentiis Linguarum of 1555 and other subsequent catalogues of languages and alphabets. Young undertakes to present Adelung's classification. The monosyllabic type is most ancient and primitive, spoken in Asia, to
1920-734: Is Spanish , followed by Portuguese , French , Italian and Romanian , which together cover a vast territory in Europe and beyond, and work as official and national languages in dozens of countries. In Europe, at least one Romance language is official in France , Portugal , Spain , Italy , Switzerland , Belgium , Romania , Moldova , Transnistria , Monaco , Andorra , San Marino and Vatican City . In these countries, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Romansh and Catalan have constitutional official status. French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian are also official languages of
2016-731: Is an official language in Spain and in nine countries of South America , home to about half that continent's population; in six countries of Central America (all except Belize ); and in Mexico . In the Caribbean , it is official in Cuba , the Dominican Republic , and Puerto Rico . In all these countries, Latin American Spanish is the vernacular language of the majority of the population, giving Spanish
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#17328515567842112-478: Is compatible when its origin is explained by the phylogeny generated. In a perfect phylogeny, all the characters are compatible and the compatibility of the tree is 100%. By the principle of parsimony, or Occam's razor , no networks are warranted. Candidate trees were obtained by first running the phylogeny-generation software using the Indo-European dataset (the strings of character states) as input, then modifying
2208-422: Is limited, and the literature is often hard to interpret or generalize. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, and forced resettlers, and more likely to be natives of conquered lands than natives of Rome. In Western Europe, Latin gradually replaced Celtic and other Italic languages , which were related to it by a shared Indo-European origin. Commonalities in syntax and vocabulary facilitated
2304-401: Is no absolute date estimates utilizing this system. Glottochronology enables absolute dates to be estimated. Shared cognates (cognates meaning to have common historical origin) are calculate divergence times. However the method was found to be later discredited due to the data being unreliable. Due to this historical linguists have trouble with exact age estimation when pinpointing the age of
2400-1011: Is spoken by many residents of Alghero , on the island of Sardinia , and it is co-official in that city. Galician , with more than three million speakers, is official together with Spanish in Galicia , and has legal recognition in neighbouring territories in Castilla y León . A few other languages have official recognition on a regional or otherwise limited level; for instance, Asturian and Aragonese in Spain; Mirandese in Portugal; Friulian , Sardinian and Franco-Provençal in Italy; and Romansh in Switzerland. The remaining Romance languages survive mostly as spoken languages for informal contact. National governments have historically viewed linguistic diversity as an economic, administrative or military liability, as well as
2496-491: Is the second most spoken Romance language, after French, due mainly to the number of speakers in East Timor . Its closest relative, Galician, has official status in the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain , together with Spanish. Outside Europe, French is spoken natively most in the Canadian province of Quebec , and in parts of New Brunswick and Ontario . Canada is officially bilingual , with French and English being
2592-449: The (London) Quarterly Review of late 1813–1814, Thomas Young published a review of Johann Christoph Adelung 's Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde ("Mithridates, or a General History of Languages"), Volume I of which had come out in 1806, and Volumes II and III, 1809–1812 , continued by Johann Severin Vater. Adelung's work described some 500 "languages and dialects" and hypothesized
2688-610: The European Union . Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan were the official languages of the defunct Latin Union ; and French and Spanish are two of the six official languages of the United Nations . Outside Europe, French , Portuguese and Spanish are spoken and enjoy official status in various countries that emerged from the respective colonial empires . With almost 500 million speakers worldwide, Spanish
2784-465: The Galapagos Islands , who had appeared to be modifications of a common ancestor. Selection of domestic species to produce a new variety also played a role in his conclusions. The first edition of Origin of Species in 1859 discusses the language tree as though de novo under the topic of classification. Darwin criticises the synchronic method devised by Linnaeus , suggesting that it be replaced by
2880-495: The Indo-European languages . However, this is largely a theoretical, qualitative pursuit, and linguists have always emphasized the inherent limitations of the tree model due to the large role played by horizontal transmission in language evolution, ranging from loanwords to creole languages that have multiple mother languages. The wave model was developed in 1872 by Schleicher's student Johannes Schmidt as an alternative to
2976-531: The Kurgan theory and the Anatolian theory , both claiming origins of Info-European languages. The comparative method compares features of various languages to assess how similar one language is to another. The results of such an assessment are data-oriented; that is, the results depend on the number of features and the number of languages compared. Until the arrival of the computer on the historical linguistics landscape,
Comasco-Lecchese dialects - Misplaced Pages Continue
3072-498: The Latin or Neo-Latin languages , are the languages that are directly descended from Vulgar Latin . They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family . The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of native speakers are: The Romance languages spread throughout the world owing to the period of European colonialism beginning in
3168-582: The Occitan varieties). Since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, increased sensitivity to the rights of minorities has allowed some of these languages to start recovering their prestige and lost rights. Yet it is unclear whether these political changes will be enough to reverse the decline of minority Romance languages. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Roman Empire , together with its administrative and educational policies, made Latin
3264-639: The Republic of Moldova , where it is the dominant language and spoken by a majority of the population, but neighboring areas in Serbia ( Vojvodina and the Bor District ), Bulgaria, Hungary, and Ukraine ( Bukovina , Budjak ) and in some villages between the Dniester and Bug rivers. As with Italian, Romanian is spoken outside of its ethnic range by immigrant communities. In Europe, Romanian-speakers form about two percent of
3360-459: The Stammbaum in an article of 1853, six years before the first edition of Origin of Species in 1859. The concept of descent of languages was by no means new. Thomas Jefferson , a devout linguist himself, had proposed that the continual necessity for neologisms implies that languages must "progress" or "advance." These ideas foreshadow evolution of either biological species or languages, but after
3456-417: The declension system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure and make extensive use of prepositions . By most measures, Sardinian and Italian are the least divergent languages from Latin, while French has changed the most. However, all Romance languages are closer to each other than to classical Latin . Documentary evidence about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of comprehensive research
3552-596: The lingua primaeva or the lingua primigenia. In English it was the Adamic language; in German, the Ursprache or the hebräische Ursprache if one believed it was Hebrew. This mysterious language had the aura of purity and incorruption about it, and those qualities were the standards used to select candidates. This concept of Ursprache came into use well before the neo-grammarians adopted it for their proto-languages. The gap between
3648-436: The tree model (also Stammbaum , genetic , or cladistic model ) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree , particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species . As with species, each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent or "mother" language, with languages that share a common ancestor belonging to the same language family . Popularized by
3744-477: The 15th century; there are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas , Europe , and parts of Africa . Portuguese, French and Spanish also have many non-native speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas . There are also numerous regional Romance languages and dialects. All of the five most widely spoken Romance languages are also official languages of
3840-669: The European Union (with France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain being part of it). The term Romance derives from the Vulgar Latin adverb romanice , "in Roman ", derived from romanicus : for instance, in the expression romanice loqui , "to speak in Roman" (that is, the Latin vernacular ), contrasted with latine loqui , "to speak in Latin" (Medieval Latin, the conservative version of
3936-474: The German linguist August Schleicher in 1853, the tree model has always been a common method of describing genetic relationships between languages since the first attempts to do so. It is central to the field of comparative linguistics , which involves using evidence from known languages and observed rules of language feature evolution to identify and describe the hypothetical proto-languages ancestral to each language family, such as Proto-Indo-European and
Comasco-Lecchese dialects - Misplaced Pages Continue
4032-653: The Indo-European language family. It could range from 4000 BP to 40,000 BP, or anywhere in-between those dates according to Dixon sourced from the rise and fall of language, (Cambridge University Press). As seen in the article here. Possible solutions for Glottochronology are forthcoming due to computational phylogenetic methods. Techniques such as using models of evolution improves accuracy of tree branch length and topology. There for, using computational phylogenetic methods computational methods enable researchers to analyze linguistic data from evolutionary biology. This further assists in testing theories against each other, such as
4128-448: The Indo-European phylogeny with greater confidence. To obtain a reasonably valid phylogeny, the researchers found they needed to enter as input all three types of characters: phonological, lexical and morphological, which were all required to present a picture that was sufficiently detailed for calculation of phylogeny. Only qualitative characters produced meaningful results. Repeated states were too ambiguous to be correctly interpreted by
4224-688: The Romanian and Italian languages, as well as their common Latin origin. The total of 880 million native speakers of Romance languages (ca. 2020) are divided as follows: Catalan is the official language of Andorra . In Spain, it is co-official with Spanish in Catalonia , the Valencian Community (under the name Valencian ), and the Balearic Islands , and it is recognized, but not official, in an area of Aragon known as La Franja . In addition, it
4320-558: The Science of Language." In a scenario reminiscent of that between Darwin and Wallace over the discovery of evolution (both discovered it independently), Schleicher endorsed Darwin's presentation, but criticised it for not inserting any species. He then presented a Stammbaum of languages, which, however, was not the first he had published. The evolution of languages was not the source of Darwin's theory of evolution. He had based that on variation of species, such as he had observed in finches in
4416-540: The adoption of Latin. To some scholars, this suggests the form of Vulgar Latin that evolved into the Romance languages was around during the time of the Roman Empire (from the end of the first century BC), and was spoken alongside the written Classical Latin which was reserved for official and formal occasions. Other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. With
4512-399: The author of the successful German-language candidate, Indo-Germanisch, who criticised Jones for his uncritical method, knew Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan and a number of other languages with their scripts.) The concept of a Biblical Ursprache appealed to their imagination. As hope of finding it gradually died they fell back on the growing concept of common Indo-European spoken by nomadic tribes on
4608-470: The best compatibility scores. The incompatibilities were all lexical, and A's were a subset of C's. Subsequent generation of networks found that all incompatibilities could be resolved with a minimum of three contact edges except for Tree E. As it did not have a high compatibility, it was excluded. Tree A had 16 possible networks, which a feasibility inspection reduced to three. Tree C had one network, but as it required an interface to Baltic and not Slavic, it
4704-448: The concept of species classification in biology. The limitations of the tree model, in particular its inability to handle the non-discrete distribution of shared innovations in dialect continua , have been addressed through the development of non-cladistic (non-tree-based) methodologies. They include the Wave model ; and more recently, the concept of linkage . An additional limitation of
4800-426: The contact of Schleicher with Darwin's ideas, and perhaps Darwin's contact with the historical linguists, Evolution and language change were inextricably linked, and would become the basis for classification. Now, as then, the main problems would be to prove specific lines of descent, and to identify the branch points. The old metaphor was given an entirely new meaning under the old name by Joseph Harold Greenberg in
4896-462: The criterion of mutual intelligibility can become ambiguous when it comes to determining whether two language varieties belong to the same language or not. The following is a list of groupings of Romance languages, with some languages chosen to exemplify each grouping. Not all languages are listed, and the groupings should not be interpreted as well-separated genetic clades in a tree model . The Romance language most widely spoken natively today
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#17328515567844992-464: The dominant native language in continental Western Europe. Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain , the Roman province of Africa , western Germany , Pannonia and the whole Balkans . During the Empire's decline, and after its fragmentation and the collapse of its Western half in the fifth and sixth centuries, the spoken varieties of Latin became more isolated from each other, with
5088-772: The early 21st century, the Computational Phylogenetics in Historical Linguistics (CPHL) project, a consortium of historical linguists, received funding from the National Science Foundation to study phylogenies. The Indo-European family is a major topic of study. As of January, 2012, they had collected and coded a "screened" database of "22 phonological characters, 13 morphological characters, and 259 lexical characters," and an unscreened database of more. Wordlists of 24 Indo-European languages are included. Larger numbers of features and languages increase
5184-423: The east of Eden, in the direction of Adam's exit from Eden. Then follows Jones' group, still without a name, but attributed to Jones: "Another ancient and extensive class of languages united by a greater number of resemblances than can well be altogether accidental." For this class he offers a name, "Indoeuropean," the first known linguistic use of the word, but not its first known use. The British East India Company
5280-593: The eighth and ninth centuries Latin gave way to Romance. During the political decline of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, there were large-scale migrations into the empire, and the Latin-speaking world was fragmented into several independent states. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by Huns . Tree model In historical linguistics ,
5376-557: The end of the colonial domination. As a result, Italian outside Italy and Switzerland is now spoken only as a minority language by immigrant communities in North and South America and Australia . In some former Italian colonies in Africa—namely Libya , Eritrea and Somalia —it is spoken by a few educated people in commerce and government. Romania did not establish a colonial empire. The native range of Romanian includes not only
5472-588: The exceptionlessness of the sound laws and the regularity of the process. The linguist perhaps most responsible for establishing the link to Darwinism was August Schleicher. That he was comparing his Stammbaum , or family tree of languages, to Darwin's presentation of evolution shortly after that presentation, is proved by the open letter he wrote in 1863 to Ernst Haeckel , published posthumously, however. In 1869, Haeckel had suggested he read Origin of Species . After reading it Schleicher wrote Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft , "Darwinism tested by
5568-475: The gradual uncovering of an ancient master language from which all the other languages derive. Browne undoubtedly did his writing and thinking well before 1684. In that same revolutionary century in Britain James Howell published Volume II of Epistolae Ho-Elianae , quasi-fictional letters to various important persons in the realm containing valid historical information. In Letter LVIII the metaphor of
5664-435: The greater the number of similarities the more likely species were to be in the same clade. This approach appealed to Greenberg, who was interested in discovering linguistic universals . Altering the tree model to make the family tree a phylogenetic tree he said: "Any language consists of thousands of forms with both sound and meaning ... any sound whatever can express any meaning whatever. Therefore, if two languages agree in
5760-460: The hills, whereabout the ark rested ... their primitive language might in time branch out into several parts of Europe and Asia ...." This is an inkling of a tree. In Browne's view, simplification from a larger aboriginal language than Hebrew could account for the differences in language. He suggests ancient Chinese, from which the others descended by "confusion, admixtion and corruption". Later he invokes "commixture and alteration." Browne reports
5856-611: The language of paradise, and brands it as mainly speculative. Young's designation, successful in English, was only one of several candidates proposed between 1810 and 1867: indo-germanique ( Conrad Malte-Brun , 1810), japetisk ( Rasmus Christian Rask , 1815), Indo-Germanisch ( Julius Klaproth , 1823), indisch-teutsch (F. Schmitthenner, 1826), sanskritisch ( Wilhelm von Humboldt , 1827), indokeltisch (A. F. Pott, 1840), arioeuropeo ( Graziadio Isaia Ascoli , 1854), Aryan ( Max Müller , 1861) and aryaque (H. Chavée, 1867). These men were all polyglots and prodigies in languages. (Klaproth, for example,
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#17328515567845952-578: The language used in writing and formal contexts or as a lingua franca), and with barbarice loqui , "to speak in Barbarian " (the non-Latin languages of the peoples living outside the Roman Empire). From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice , or "in the Roman vernacular". Most of the Romance-speaking area in Europe has traditionally been
6048-489: The lineages and alter the classification to reflect them, which it did under the overall guidance of the Nomenclature Codes , rule books kept by international organizations to authorize and publish proposals to reclassify species and other taxa. The new approach was called phylogeny , the "generation of phyla," which devised a new tree metaphor, the phylogenetic tree . One unit in the tree and all its offspring units were
6144-534: The most native speakers of any Romance language. In Africa it is one of the official languages of Equatorial Guinea . Spanish was one of the official languages in the Philippines in Southeast Asia until 1973. In the 1987 constitution, Spanish was removed as an official language (replaced by English), and was listed as an optional/voluntary language along with Arabic. It is currently spoken by a minority and taught in
6240-540: The mother tongue runs throughout the nations of Europe, and even as far as Persia, the community on many words, between so many nations, hath more reasonable traduction and were rather derivable from the common tongue diffused through them all, than from any particular nation, which hath also borrowed and holdeth but at second hand." The confusion at the Tower of Babel was thus removed as an obstacle by setting it aside. Attempts to find similarities in all languages were resulting in
6336-570: The network was highest. As it turned out, the number of compatible networks generated might vary from none to over a dozen. However, not all the possible interfaces were historically feasible. Interfaces between some languages were geographically and chronologically not very likely. Inspecting the results, the researchers excluded the non-feasible interfaces until a list of only feasible networks remained, which could be arranged in order of compatibility score. The researchers began with five candidate trees for Indo-European, lettered A-E, one generated from
6432-515: The numbers in both cases were necessarily small. The effect was of trying to depict a photograph using a small number of large pixels, or picture units. The limitations of the Tree Model were all too painfully apparent, resulting in complaints from the major historical linguists. In the late 20th century, linguists began using software intended for biological classification to classify languages. Programs and methods became increasingly sophisticated. In
6528-615: The official languages and government services in French theoretically mandated to be provided nationwide. In parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti , French has official status, but most people speak creoles such as Haitian Creole as their native language. French also has official status in much of Africa, with relatively few native speakers but larger numbers of second language speakers. Although Italy also had some colonial possessions before World War II , its language did not remain official after
6624-402: The only possible one. Yet it might be that some very ancient language had altered little, and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others (owing to the spreading and subsequent isolation and states of civilisation of the several races, descended from a common race) had altered much, and had given rise to many new languages and dialects. The various degrees of difference in the languages from
6720-584: The other continents to such an extent that about two-thirds of all Romance language speakers today live outside Europe. Despite other influences (e.g. substratum from pre-Roman languages, especially Continental Celtic languages ; and superstratum from later Germanic or Slavic invasions), the phonology , morphology , and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin. However, some notable differences exist between today's Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost
6816-424: The perfect phylogeny. If not, then one or more contact edges, or bidirectional interfaces, could be added to the phylogeny. A language therefore might have more than one source of states: the parent or a contact language. A tree so modified was no longer a tree as such: there could be more than one path from root to leaf. The researchers called this arrangement a network. The states of a character still evolved along
6912-454: The phylogenetic software, two modifications of it and two suggested by Craig Melchert , a historical linguist and Indo-Europeanist. The trees differed mainly in the placement of the most ambiguous group, the Germanic languages, and Albanian, which did not have enough distinctive characters to place it exactly. Tree A contained 14 incompatible characters; B, 19; C, 17; D, 21; E,18. Trees A and C had
7008-543: The plains of Eurasia, and although they made a good case that this language can be deduced by the methods of comparative linguistics, in fact that is not how they obtained it. It was the one case in which their efforts to find the Ursprache succeeded. The model is due in its most strict formulation to the Neogrammarians . The model relies on earlier conceptions of William Jones , Franz Bopp and August Schleicher by adding
7104-584: The population in Italy , Spain , and Portugal . Romanian is also spoken in Israel by Romanian Jews, where it is the native language of five percent of the population, and is spoken by many more as a secondary language. The Aromanian language is spoken today by Aromanians in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, and Greece. Flavio Biondo was the first scholar to have observed (in 1435) linguistic affinities between
7200-437: The precision, provided they meet certain criteria. Using specialized computer software, they test various phylogenetic hypotheses for their ability to account for the characters by genetic descent. One endemic limitation of the tree model is the very founding presumption on which it is based: it requires a classification based on languages or, more generally, on language varieties . Since a variety represents an abstraction from
7296-429: The researchers. In order to find the factors that did bear on phylogeny the researchers needed to have some measure of the accuracy of their results; i.e., the results needed to be calibrated against known phylogenies. They ran the experiment using different assumptions looking for the ones that would produce the closest matches to the most secure Indo-European phylogenies. Those assumptions could be used on problem areas of
7392-403: The resultant tree into other hypotheses to be tested. None of the original candidate trees were perfect phylogenies, although some of the subtrees within them were. The next phase was to generate networks from the trees of highest compatibility scores by adding interfaces one at a time, selecting the interface of highest compatibility, until sufficiency was obtained; that is, the compatibility of
7488-549: The rise of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin spread first throughout Italy and then through southern , western , central , and southeastern Europe , and northern Africa along parts of western Asia . Latin reached a stage when innovations became generalised around the sixth and seventh centuries. After that time and within two hundred years, it became a dead language since "the Romanized people of Europe could no longer understand texts that were read aloud or recited to them." By
7584-406: The roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; ...." He went on to postulate that they sprang from "some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists." To them he added Gothic, Celtic and Persian as "to the same family." Jones did not name his "common source" nor develop the idea further, but it was taken up by the linguists of the times. In
7680-462: The same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue." Schleicher had never heard of Darwin before Haeckel brought him to Schleicher's attention. He had published his own work on
7776-434: The school curriculum. Portuguese, in its original homeland, Portugal , is spoken by almost the entire population of 10 million. As the official language of Brazil , it is spoken by more than 200 million people, as well as in neighboring parts of eastern Paraguay and northern Uruguay . This accounts for slightly more than half the population of South America, making Portuguese the most spoken official Romance language in
7872-405: The software and method to include the possibility of borrowing. The researchers introduced into the experiment the concept of the interface, or allowed boundary over which character states would flow. A one-way interface, or edge, existed between a parent and a child. If only one-way edges were sufficient to explain the presence of all the states in a language, then there was no need to look beyond
7968-473: The software; therefore characters that were subject to back formation and parallel development, which reverted a character to a prior state or adopted a state that evolved in another character, respectively, were screened from the input dataset. Despite their care to code the best qualitative characters in sufficient numbers, the researchers could obtain no perfect phylogenies for some groups, such as Germanic and Albanian within Indo-European. They reasoned that
8064-464: The state values for all of the characters considered. These coordinates can be like each other or less so. Languages that share the most states are most like each other. The software massages all the states of all the characters of all the languages by one of several mathematical methods to accomplish a pairwise comparison of each language with all the rest. It then constructs a cladogram based on degrees of similarity; for example, hypothetical languages,
8160-429: The states are accounted for by descent from other states. A cladogram that conforms to these requirements is a perfect phylogeny. At first there seemed to be little consistency of results in trials varying the factors presumed to be relevant. A new cladogram resulted from any change, which suggested that the method was not capturing the underlying evolution of languages but only reflecting the extemporaneous judgements of
8256-453: The time of Peleg , son of Heber, son of Shem , son of Noah. Augustine made a hypothesis not unlike those of later historical linguists, that the family of Heber "preserved that language not unreasonably believed to have been the common language of the race ... thenceforth named Hebrew." Most of the 72 languages, however, date to many generations after Heber. St. Augustine solves this first problem by supposing that Heber, who lived 430 years,
8352-438: The totality of linguistic features , there is the possibility for information loss during the translation of data (from a map of isoglosses ) into a tree. For example, there is the issue of dialect continua . They provide varieties that are not unequivocally one language or another but contain features characteristic of more than one. The issue of how they are to be classified is similar to the issue presented by ring species to
8448-430: The tree model involves mixed and hybrid languages, as well as language mixing in general since the tree model allows only for divergences. For example, according to Zuckermann (2009:63), "Israeli", his term for Modern Hebrew , which he regards as a Semito-European hybrid, "demonstrates that the reality of linguistic genesis is far more complex than a simple family tree system allows. 'Revived' languages are unlikely to have
8544-404: The tree model that incorporates horizontal transmission. The tree model also has the same limitations as biological taxonomy with respect to the species problem of quantizing a continuous phenomenon that includes exceptions like ring species in biology and dialect continua in language. The concept of a linkage was developed in response and refers to a group of languages that evolved from
8640-465: The western dialects coming under heavy Germanic influence (the Goths and Franks in particular) and the eastern dialects coming under Slavic influence. The dialects diverged from Latin at an accelerated rate and eventually evolved into a continuum of recognizably different typologies. The colonial empires established by Portugal , Spain , and France from the fifteenth century onward spread their languages to
8736-519: The widely divergent families of languages remained unclosed. On February 2, 1786, Sir William Jones delivered his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society as its president on the topic of the Hindus . In it he applied the logic of the tree model to three languages, Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, but for the first time in history on purely linguistic grounds, noting "a stronger affinity, both in
8832-456: Was not feasible. Tree A, the most compatible and feasible tree, hypothesizes seven groups separating from Proto-Indo-European between about 4000 BC and 2250 BC, as follows. Trees B and E offer the alternative of Proto-Germano-Balto-Slavic (northern Indo-European), making Albanian an independent branch. The only date for which authors vouch is the last, based on the continuity of the Yamna culture ,
8928-441: Was still alive when God assigned the 72. St. Augustine's hypothesis stood without major question for over a thousand years. Then, in a series of tracts, published in 1684, expressing skepticism concerning various beliefs, especially Biblical, Sir Thomas Browne wrote: "Though the earth were widely peopled before the flood ... yet whether, after a large dispersion, and the space of sixteen hundred years, men maintained so uniform
9024-404: Was synchronic; Darwin envisioned a diachronic process of common descent . Where Linnaeus had conceived ranks , which were consistent with the great chain of being adopted by the rationalists , Darwin conceived lineages . Over the decades after Darwin it became clear that the ranks of Linnaeus' hierarchy did not correspond exactly to the lineages. It became the prime goal of taxonomy to discover
9120-453: Was the language of the Goths and Vandals , and continueth yet of the greatest part of Poland and Hungary , who have a Dialect of hers for their vulgar tongue ... Some of her writers would make this world believe that she was the language spoken in paradise." The search for "the language of paradise" was on among all the linguists of Europe. Those who wrote in Latin called it the lingua prima ,
9216-593: Was using "Indo-European commerce" to mean the trade of commodities between India and Europe. All the evidence Young cites for the ancestral group are the most similar words: mother, father, etc. Adelung's additional classes were the Tataric (which would later be known as the disputed family Altaic ), the African and the American, which depend on geography and a presumed descent from Eden. Young does not share Adelung's enthusiasm for
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