(Skrev nedanstående på engelska, då jag tänkte posta det på ett par engelska listor också. Det finns en del som kan roa dem... --AE)
During last weekend's "The Longest Book Table in the World" Day, a part of the Stockholm Cultural Festival - and I can't say if it *really* was the longest "book table" arrangement world-wide, but there were according to papers 700 booksellers and 4 km of tables - I found a very interesting book: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Languages, by David Crystal (from 1987). This 472 page, generously illustrated, big format book is one of the best and most stimulating books I've seen on the subject of languages. It covers just about everything: origins of languages, etymology, grammar, stylistics (even poetry and fiction theory is briefly covered), social function of languages, the biology of speech, spelling, language families, language history, languages around the world, semantics, history of dictionaries, symbols and alphabets (incl sign language for the deaf), how the brain treats language, language education, creole and pidgin languages, artificial languages, etc etc - I haven't mentioned all. Eg, there's even a section dealing with puns and "word games". It is a magnificent book and if you'll find it - grab it. You'll enjoy it, if you're interested in the subject of languages. The only (perhaps) negative thing to note is that the book has English as a baseline for many comments and discussions, but that's perhaps understandable since the publisher and author are British. (I have no real problems with that, though.) But after giving this short account, I'll just give you some odd facts or claims or things of curiosity interest from the book, in no particular order (and probably not representative for the entire scope of the Cambirdge Encyclopedia of Language). Here we go:
* Japanese has a special variation of the language for women. It's of course not totally different, but there are some subtle grammatical features, some vocabulary etc, that women tend to use, but men don't.
* As late as in 1970, according to a survey, there were 626 000 people in the USA that claimed to have Swedish as a "mother language", the eighth language in the survey (Spanish as No 2 had at that time 7,8 million claiming it to be their mother language; the ten in top were English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Polish, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Slovak). Swedish has most certainly shrunken since then - Spanish has probably grown very much.
* Pangrams is what you call phrases having each letter of the alphabet of a language as few times as possible. The well-known "The Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is not the best English pangram. There's a phrase invented in 1984, "Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck" (all words to be found in a large dictionary, the book claims) with all English letters only once. Here's my moment to brag a bit: I have myself invented a Swedish pangram with all Swedish 29 letters only once (a morning paper issued such a challenge a few years back, and my pangram was also published there). Here it goes: "Yxskaftbud, ge vår wczonmö iqhjälp" (approx "Axe-shaft messenger, give our wc-zone maid iq help").
* There's been a debate about if Francis Bacon was the "real" author of the plays by Shakespeare. The linguist T C Mendenhall made a statistical comparison and found that Shakespeare had more four-letter words than three-letter words "whereas the reverse were the case for Bacon." So it seems highly unlikely that Bacon was Shakespeare. However, one sceptic remarked "if Bacon could not have written the plays, the question still remains, who did?". (Maybe Shakespeare did?)
* One Kingsley Zipf found a number of interesting statistical laws for languages. Here's one (out of several intriguing statistical laws): Take a text. Count all instances of a word (frequency, f). Assign a rank number to each word in such a list (r, eg the most frequent number has r = 1). f x r will be nearly the same for all words! And that goes for virtually all languages, not only English.
* Ancient Greek had no spaces between words in written text. That convention was invented by the Romans. (ItmusthavebeendifficulttoreadancientGreektext.)
* Finnish has fifteen cases, that is: a lot of things that in other languages are described by a preposition is in Finnish described by a suffix added to the word (ie instead of saying "from America" you say "Americafrom", to give a perhaps crude explanation). I should add, that Finnish doesn't lack prepositions as we know them, but they are rarer.
* A way to describe languages is to see what the prefered order is between Subject, Verb and Object (SVO). English, French, Swedish, etc prefer SVO and Japanese, Tibetan, Korean etc SOV - that's 75% of the world's languages. 10-15% prefer VSO (eg Welsh). There are also some VOS languages. Until recently no OVS languages were known, but some have been found in the Amazons (Amazon Indian languages) - Jedi Master Yoda in Star Wars speaks OSV! ("Sick I've become!").
* There were no words for "grey" or "brown" in ancient Latin. Modern Romance languages have borrowed these words from Germanic. Russian has two words for two kinds of blue. There are languages on New Guinea which only have words for black (dark) and white (bright). Welsh divides the colour spectrum somewhat differently from English.
* There seem to be or have been words which haven't existed outside disctionaries. Two examples from English are "commemorable" and "liquescency" (well, they *are* now in print in the Cambridge language book!). But the prize for non-words in dictionaries goes to "Dord" used in a 1930's dictionary, which came from a card in the compiler's files saying "D or d" as "abbreviation for the word density"; obviously an administrative pointer but "Dord" entered the dictionary meaning "density".
* The name "London" comes from "Londinos", meaning "the bold one". But here's the prize winner: Manhattan means "the place of great drunkenness" (according to this book).
* Acccording to a rumour, the QWERTYUIOP of the top row of a keyboard, was placed there so that salesmen of the early typewriters could easily and fast find the letters for "typewriter" for demonstration purposes.
* English spelling is complicated (for a number of historical reasons, which I won't go into). You've heard of "fish" being spelled "ghoti", but that's nothing compared to (according to G Dewey in 1971) spelling "taken" as "phtheighchound" ("as in PHTHisic, wEIGH, sCHool, glamOUr, haNDsome").
* There have been several spelling reforms suggested for English. Here's an example from the Gettysburg address according to the "World English Spelling" scheme: "Forskor and seven yeerz agoe our faathers braut forthh on this kontinent a nue naeshon, konseevd in liberti, and dedikaeted to the propozishon that aul men ar kreeaeted eekwal."
* There are several theories on how language came to be. We have the bow-wow theory, the pooh-pooh theory, the ding-dong theory, the yo-he-yo theory and the la-la theory. I won't go into what the theories mean (you can probably google it), but it shows that linguists have a very high-level and abstract scientific language...
* On Malta, they speak a variation of Arabic (English is also official language; Italian is widely understood) which is the only Arabic dialect written with Latin letters (an example is given in the book).
* There are a huge number of "pidgin" and "creole" languages, usually a simplified major world language mergin a bit with a local language - the book gives 100 examples, which I won't go into. But note for instance "Russenorsk", a blend of Norwegian and Russian for the fishermen and traders along the northern polar sea coast, or several ports where Indian languages and Portugese have merged on the Indian coast and Sri Lanka (as well as the Canton Chinese-Portugese creole in Macau).
* The slogan "Come alive with Pepsi" was once translated in ads in Taiwan to "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave".
* One of the strangest artificial languages was "Solresol", based on the music notes do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. "Over 9000 five-note combinations were used for the names of animals, vegetables and minerals. Semantic opposites were often exproessed by reversing the order of syllables, eg MISOL 'good" vs SOLMI 'evil'. The unique feature of this language is that it could be played, whistled or sung, as well as spoken! It became very popular in the mid-19th Century and won several prizes. ... it must have sounded extremely monotonous."
* It is a myth that German once was one vote from becoming the official language for the USA. All that happened was that a group of Virgina Germans wanted to have certain laws isued in German as well as in English, and it was this proposal that was defeated with one vote.
* The first grammarian is often considered to be an anonymous writer adding four treatises on grammar to the Icelander Snorri Sturlasson's Prose Edda, from the mid 12th century. One of the texts for instance deals with how to use and improve upon the Latin alphabet to write Old Norse.
* This book notes - as if it would be strange! - that Swedish has no word for grandfather or grandmother. Instead we have four words for this, for the parents on the father's side and on the mother's side (farfar, farmor, morfar, mormor). But it misses that the same goes for uncle and aunt, where we also have four words instead of just two (farbror, faster, morbror, moster - ie father's brother, father's sister, mother's brother, mother's sister). This system is of course superior, since it gives more detailed information about relationships. However, our sister-languages Norwegian and Danish don't use this system; they have the equivalents of "grandfather" (bestefar), "grandmother" (bestemor), "uncle" (onkel) and "aunt" (tante).
But that was just some trivia from this very interesting and stimulating book. You will definitely know more about languages and how they work after digging into the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Or, it should really be "encyclopaedia" but as the book notes, the American spelling of the word (once invented by this Webster guy) has now totally corrupted even the British. Let's be grateful we didn't get "World English Spelling", forskor and seven yeerz agoe...
--Ahrvid -- ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxxx/ahrvid@xxxxxxxxxxx/tel 073-68622[53+mercersdag] Pangram för 29 sv bokstäver: Yxskaftbud, ge vår wczonmö iqhjälp! Novelltävling, info http://www.skriva.bravewriting.com - gå med! ----- SKRIVA - sf, fantasy och skräck * Äldsta svenska skrivarlistangrundad 1997 * Info http://www.skriva.bravewriting.com eller skriva- request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx för listkommandon (ex subject: subscribe).
