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Do new spelling systems change the number of extant languages? Commenting under the answer of Den Hollander.
- Q
- When was the last new language created?
https://www.quora.com/When-was-the-last-new-language-created/answer/Den-Hollander-2
- Answer requested by
- Nathan Defa
- Den Hollander
- August 27
- Works in Linguistics & Machine learning
- Languages (except a few artifical languages which are not really living languages) are not “created” they evolve progressively from existing languages…..
American english comes from modern British english istself coming from Elisabethan english which in turn came from middle english whih was derived from old english which came from old north-west germanic which came from proto-germanic - which came from……..ad (almost) infinitum.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Aug 27
- You are forgetting a thing. Middle English coming, without creation, from Old English is partly true as to the spoken language, but totally untrue as to the written language. Ormmulum and Chaucer tried two new spelling systems for English other than Anglo-Saxon alias Old English, and Chaucer’s is the one that basically survives. So, English was in fact created by the contemporaries of Geoffrey Chaucer.
- Den Hollander
- Original Author
- Aug 27
- We’ll have to agree to disagree then - For me designing a spelling/writing system is not creating a language, just giving it tools for written expression. The korean language was spoken well before chinese characters started to be used to write it, a later migration using the syllabic “hangul” system did not alter the phonology, grammar, syntax or lexicon of the language…. so to me does not count as “creating a language” - You could say the same about turkish dropping the arabic alphabet for a latin based one, for the numerous spelling reforms - and of course for the (usually latin) writing systems designed for a myriad of languages which initially did not have a written form.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Aug 27
- You are missing that SHIFTING spelling system from one to other is changing the available references.
Once spelling changed from Latin to Old French spelling for the spoken language in France, the genitive was no longer available as an optional “high style” form.
Once spelling changed from Anglo-Saxon chronicle to Chaucer, no one had to guess what case it would be in the case declining language.
In the latter case there was a gap between, but there is a continuity over time in any language that has its writing available, and there are therefore different continuities over time when the writing is changed.
“ You could say the same about turkish dropping the arabic alphabet for a latin based one,”
Surely modern Turkish has many fewer loans from Arabic even as options available?
Precisely as post 1970 Greek has no use for being extra posh with a dative form.
- Matthew McVeagh
- Oct 14
- “Once spelling changed from Latin to Old French spelling for the spoken language in France, the genitive was no longer available as an optional “high style” form.”
But the use of the genitive itself had already been long lost in the late Roman empire.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Oct 18
- It had been lost from everyday speach, not as a high style form.
A bit like in French passé simple is used in books, but not in everyday speech.
- Matthew McVeagh
- Oct 25
- What you are referring to as a ‘high style form’ is Late Latin/Mediaeval Latin, not a vernacular. The spoken language in France at the time of first ‘accurate’ spelling (800s) was already very much French, or at least langue d’oil. Vulgar Latin inscriptions in Pompeii (hence pre-79 CE) already had de + ablative in place of the genitive.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Just now
- As you already mention, pre-79 AD you have people speaking “da mi libru de servu” and writing “da mihi librum servi” (we can assume for context that it was a Greek slave who arrived with books from the slave market).
As to the spoken language in 800 it would have been “da mei livre serf” and it would still be written “da mihi librum servi”.
“What you are referring to as a ‘high style form’ is Late Latin/Mediaeval Latin, not a vernacular.”
That’s like saying “thou hast” is not “a” vernacular. It is certainly not the vernacular form anymore. It is in fact Elisabethan English (at latest) but still available to speakers who have learned to read Shakespear and who pronounce him as if he had written after Great Vowel Shift and lots of other things. Is Elisabethan English “a vernacular”?
This is the exact point I am making about graphemes of Latin and phonemes of “French” (if you will call Strassburg Oaths that) before Alcuin’s arrival to Tours.
If you disagree, what is your argument? Where do you find a non-vernacular pronunciation of Latin in Tours (before Alcuin) or a non-Latin spelling of the vernacular?
- Matthew McVeagh
- 13h ago
- Actually, during the empire Classical Latin writers also spoke it, whether or not they also spoke Vulgar. In other words the difference between Classical and Vulgar was not just between spelling system and pronunciation, but between two quite different lects, only one of which had a regular written form.
After the empire the basilect continued but ever more fractured geographically, still without any written form, and became separate languages. The acrolect continued, as ‘Latin’, influenced a little by some of the same changes as Vulgar had absorbed, but more going off on its own direction due to factors like its largely ecclesiastical use, etc. No-one was brought up learning Latin as their mother tongue; all mother tongues - vernaculars - were local ‘Romance’ varieties and clergy then learned Latin as a second and dead language.
I’m not convinced anyone would have said “da mei livre serf” in France in 800 - did they still use dare, rather than the reflex of donare? At any rate if they had written “da mihi librum servi” they would not have seen that as spelling what they said in Langue D’oil.
Elizabethan English *was* a vernacular. People can understand “thou hast” as an archaism. However Shakespeare texts have to be considerably updated to modern spelling and orthography compared to their First Folio versions, or else they are largely incomprehensible to modern readers. Even then copies of the plays used in education have to be annotated to explain countless words and phrases. And we almost never apply pre-GVS pronunciation, and when that is done people find it utterly alien.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Just now
- The acrolect did not divorce phonetically from the basilect, except marginally, where the basilect did not exist.
English Latin after Anglo-Saxon invasion and mission by St. Augustine was acrolect only - that’s where Alcuin’s pronunciation was coming from.
“However Shakespeare texts have to be considerably updated to modern spelling and orthography compared to their First Folio versions, or else they are largely incomprehensible to modern readers.”
I don’t think they would be more so than US American and British are to each other.
Besides, my point was, the Great English Vowel shift was not reflected in spelling, but is reflected in our prounciation of Elisabethan English.
The basic upshot is, just before 800 AD, the pronunciation of the acrolect was as fragmented, or nearly, as the basilect, except in England, Germany, Byzantium, where the basilect did not exist.
This chaos in pronouncing the acrolect is both explanation for very odd spellings in Gregory of Tours and for the need of importing Alcuin to Tours.
Finally, basilect and acrolect are not (or nearly not ever) two distinct lects and the only ones existing, but two poles of a spectrum of mainly sociolects. This whole spectrum existed up to the language divorce I explained, and vanished when this language divorce happened.
“I’m not convinced anyone would have said “da mei livre serf” in France in 800 - did they still use dare, rather than the reflex of donare?“
Anyone who read that sentence in an old book from when dare was used, would have pronounced it like that.
I am probably projecting backward a pronunciation even more divorced from the Latin one from later centuries. But I am at least saying “mei” and not “moi” in the context.
“At any rate if they had written “da mihi librum servi” they would not have seen that as spelling what they said in Langue D’oil.”
They would. First adumbration of a consciousness of a distinction as between two languages was 813 decision of Council of Tours. In it, the basilect - what is going to become a separate langue d’oïl - is given a separate treatment from NEW pronunciation of acrolect, and it is called “lingua romana rustica” = Roman basilect, if you like. Before that you don’t have a distinction between the two.
It was a bit like today’s pronunciation of Church Slavonic, it is pronounced differently according to whether the Orthodox priest is Bulgarian (pronouncing tverty znak), Ukrainean (pronouncing o as i) and so on.
- Matthew McVeagh
- Nov 11
- Maybe pronunciation of Latin *was* influenced locally by pronunciation of Romance - certainly this happened by the High Middle Ages when the Italianate pronunciation became fashionable. But the very fact (if that is what it is) that someone had to be brought from a non-Romance speaking area to teach better Latin pronunciation shows they had a sense that Latin was supposed to be international, interlingual/-dialectal, and not the same as the local speech.
Besides dare/donare, they would not have said simply “serf” but “de serf”, and actually probably “de il serf” or “del serf”. “Livre” might well have been “lo livre”. So many new endings and words cannot be put down to spelling differences with the Classical Latin inheritance. If people were saying “de serf” and writing “servi” they were *converting* one language form into another, not just spelling in an old-fashioned way. The same would actually be true if Romans wrote the ‘ungrammatical’ Pompeii Vulgar inscriptions in Classical Latin.
By contrast the French passé simple may not be used in everyday speech, but it can be pronounced and spoken in recitations, and if people use the passé composé or imperfect in speech it is not spelt with the passé simple. And in contemporary Greek Katharévousa still exists if anyone wants to use it, including the dative, but it’s a different language form from Dhimoticí, which by government decree became imposed in state communications and education.
I’m not aware of a continuum of uses connecting Latin and vernacular Romance. Anyone learning Latin learnt it from the church; the ecclesiastical use was the definitive one, others would be by extension (histories, chronicles, state business, biographies). The whole point of the Council of Tours 813 decision was that the congregations couldn’t understand Latin; they only had the vernacular. Those who had Latin as well had had to learn it by instruction, and their mother tongue was also a vernacular (Romance or Germanic).
The 813 decision does not mark the beginning of awareness that there was a difference between Latin and French, but the point at which something had to be done about it. The awareness would have begun much earlier; these things always take time to develop into more serious problems before the authorities get round to making a change. The very fact that Latin had prestige, and that local Romance vernaculars had not been written before and there was no precedent for putting them into the sacred medium of writing, or for how to spell them, would have been previous barriers for some time.
In particular, none of what you’ve argued amounts to the ‘creation’ of a new language, which was what the question originally was. And this is equally true of post-Chaucer English. And I’m afraid Jacobean spelling conventions and idiom now out of date render Shakespearean English much more different from contemporary British and American English than either is from the other.
- Hans-Georg Lundahl
- Just now
- “But the very fact (if that is what it is) that someone had to be brought from a non-Romance speaking area to teach better Latin pronunciation shows they had a sense that Latin was supposed to be international, interlingual/-dialectal, and not the same as the local speech.”
Exactly. Some élite persons GOT this sense sometime late in 700’s. And Alcuin came to the rescue.
You cannot prove this sense existed any full 50 years before, and you cannot prove an educated Roman in Tours in 750 would have taken the uneducated pronunciation as “local” rather than “uneducated”.
There was an incident when a foreigner coming to Gaul wondered whether the baptismal formula had included “et Filii” (correct) or “et filiae” (heretical). His complaints (and similar ones) about Latin in Gaul were behind Alcuin’s arrival.
When voyages were on the whole rather rare (missi dominici of Charlemagne made them more often occurring these precise decades), one cannot state with certainty that the distinction between “local” and “international” was in any way, shape or form present to minds.
As to Italian pronunciation of Medieval Latin, it was probably brought by Alcuin and ignored in Gaul where they preferred a somewhat more French pronunciation - ts for tch in CE, CI, CAE, COE. “Sire” as opposed to “shire” for the spelling “scire”.
// Besides dare/donare, they would not have said simply “serf” but “de serf”, and actually probably “de il serf” or “del serf”. //
Those details would arguably, if already present, have seemed very vulgar to the élite. Old French had a two case system. Singular, sers, serf, plural serf, sers. Especially the oblique as sufficient for genitive is attested in Latin like that of Gregory and Fredegar of Tours.
// If people were saying “de serf” and writing “servi” they were *converting* one language form into another, not just spelling in an old-fashioned way. //
Educated speech would have omitted “de”. It would have been extreme posh to use “servi” when “servo” or “servum” would do. And it did, for Gregory.
// By contrast the French passé simple may not be used in everyday speech, but it can be pronounced and spoken in recitations, and if people use the passé composé or imperfect in speech it is not spelt with the passé simple //
Witness : j’ai attendu deux heures
Police report (written French) : le témoin attendit deux heures.
As you mention recitation, serf and servo, sers and servos would have been alternative pronunciations, like “heures” acquires an extra syllable in French recitation.
// Anyone learning Latin learnt it from the church; the ecclesiastical use was the definitive one, others would be by extension (histories, chronicles, state business, biographies). //
Anyone learning written Latin. And no, not really, the Roman aristocracy was not all that vanished in favour of Franks, and the Franks arriving in 400’s were not all that unable to pick up Latin.
// The whole point of the Council of Tours 813 decision was that the congregations couldn’t understand Latin; they only had the vernacular. //
After the clergy of Tours had from 800 taken language lessons in correct Latin from Alcuin.
Before those thirteen years, it was, remember, the foreign priest who had trouble with Latin in Gaul.
// Those who had Latin as well had had to learn it by instruction, and their mother tongue was also a vernacular (Romance or Germanic). //
Those who had the NEW, Alcuin style, Latin as well, usually had learned it by letting Alcuin correct their pronunciation of Latin.
Imagine a German telling you : nein, Ka eN I Ge Ha Te ist nicht NEID, es ist KNICHT.
It would take you time to learn Chaucerian pronunciation, but when you had finished, you’d still consider it a pronunciation of English. But your cockney neighbour could only understand your old pronunciation, even if his wasn’t identic.
Once the council of Tours decided “lingua romana rustica”, you would however try to adapt your English to Cockney or Glaswegian (see you are a Scotsman) or whatever, so he could understand you even better.
// And I’m afraid Jacobean spelling conventions and idiom now out of date render Shakespearean English much more different from contemporary British and American English than either is from the other. //
And yet, as spelling conventions, much closer, than actually pronouncing as Shakespear did.
// The awareness would have begun much earlier; these things always take time to develop into more serious problems before the authorities get round to making a change. //
Except, through lack of foreign priests visiting every year, and of those doing so complaining, it would have gone unnoticed for centuries. A question on the validity of a baptism would have been a very urgent alarm bell, leading to a very prompt reaction.
Example of St. Gregory of Tours:
Principio Dominus caelum terramque in christo suo, qui est omnium principium, id est in Filio suo, furmavit, qui post creata mundi totius elementa, glebam adsumens fragilis limi, hominem ad suam imaginem similitudinemque plasmavit et insufflavit in faciem eius spiraculum vitae, et factus est in animam viventem.
And:
Cognitum autem satellitem, mulier concipit peperitque duos filios. Sed dum Deus unius sacrificium dignanter suscipit, alius invidia inflammante tumiscit, et in fraterni sanguinis effusionem novus parecida consurgens, fratrem opprimit, vincit, interimit.
https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Historiarum_Francorum_libri_X/Liber_I
Furmavit. Factus in animam viventem. Tumiscit. Parecida. Three unambiguous examples of non-Classical phonetics, probably short u coincides with long o, and even with short o in closed or unaccented syllables, as well as short i with long e, and even with short e in closed or unaccented syllables.
Since we have "peperitque" I suppose "concipit", "suscipit", "opprimit", "interimit" are for "concepit", "suscepit", "oppremit", "interemit", while "vincit" either points the other way or is faulty in another way for "vicit"./HGL
