the same rough word for “rose”. In French, it is “rose”, a direct cognate with languages such as English and German. An example of it being prevalent in a Slavic language is the word růže in Czech. While this word might seem unfamiliar and far from the sound of ‘rose’, it is pronounced quite simply, “ROO-zhe”. It is clear that this has the same root word as ‘rose’. So where does this elusive root word come from? It is widely thought that this originates from the Proto-Indo-Europe- an word *wr º d h os , translating to “sweet briar”. This might look completely separate from ‘rose’, but you can pronounce it by saying a ‘wr’, as in write, then say a ‘d’ but have your tongue in the position when you say an ‘r’ and simply finish with ‘-os’. With a bit of imagination, you can clearly see the similarity. An interesting example of language being influenced by trade is the word for ‘tea’. Throughout the world, there are two major word roots for the word ‘tea’. The story about how they came around is fascinating and an excellent example of the inter- connection between linguistics and geography. The English word for tea comes from the Yue dialect of Chinese, which is spoken in the provinces around Guangdong. This is one of the areas in China where the British Empire had the most influence, so their languages mixed. France also traded here, leading to the French word, thé. Hindi however uses the word chai which is derived from Mandarin cha , because Mandarin speakers were geographically near India. All in all, language is worth far more than its surface value. It is a fascinating blend of geography history and so much more. It is an easy field to understand the basics but you can spend your whole life working on it. Linguistics is truly a study for everyone. ◎
bly processing this in an Indo-European language right now. There is also the Turkic language family which includes languages such as Turkish, spo- ken on the sunny shores of the Aegean to Yakuts, spoken in the furthest reaches of the Russian Far East. One of the interesting quirks of the Turkish language is that it is agglutinative, meaning that you can construct words by adding theoretically infinite amounts of suffixes to any word stem. An example of this is muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriv- eremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine . The word stem is muvaffakiyet , meaning “success”. The translation of this incredibly long word is “as though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones”. This word has no real meaning, but it was invented to perfectly demonstrate this fascinating linguistic feature. Another language group is the Afro-Asiatic. This contains languages such as Hebrew, Arabic and Berber languages across the Maghrib. Another member, somewhat surprisingly, is Maltese. It is the only Afro-Asiatic script written in the Latin alphabet. One of the things that make these languages so hard to learn is that unlike Chinese or Punjabi, there is not a set romanisation for Arabic
The words we speak
or Amharic, the two most widely spoken Afro- Asiatic languages. This means that spelling will differ from source to source, and you have no way of truly knowing how certain words are
Language is worth far more than its surface value; it is a fascinating blend of geography history and so much more
L anguage is perhaps the most important part of civilisation, allowing humans to communicate ideas, learn and trade. It is no wonder then, that the study of languages – linguistics – has appealed to humans since words existed. We have been obsessed about the origin of languages since Biblical times. The Tower of Babel perfectly shows that even long ago, humans understood the importance of this feature of every- day life. During a French lesson, you may be wondering why there are so many languages. Originally, in the Old World, at various points throughout time, there could have been only 15 major languages. It is a common belief that
all languages came from one, but this is easily disproved simply by the fact that you’d be hard- pressed to find a cognate between Hebrew (an Afro-Asiatic language of the Semitic branch, which is spoken in an area now known as Israel) and Nenets (a Uralic language of the Samoyedic branch, with about 38,000 speakers; it is spoken in the extreme north of Russia, in particular the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug). So, what are the main language groups? The four ones which have the highest number of speakers are the Indo-European, has languages stretching from Hindi to Russian. You are proba-
by Geraint Jenkins, Year 9
pronounced if they are written in Latin script. The final major language group is the Sino-Tibetan family. Some notable members of this group include Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Tibetan and Burmese. It has one of the largest amount of native speakers, second only to the Indo-European group. Most of these speakers come from the Sinitic branch, which has around 1.3 billion native speakers. An interesting example that proves the existence of a greater language family throughout Europe is the word “rose”. Different language sub-groups such as Romance, Slavic and Germanic all share
39
THE ALLEYNIAN 713
OPINION, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES
40
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker