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Post by Jaga on Nov 22, 2008 22:43:28 GMT -7
yesterday I had a talk about indoeuropean languages in my toastmaster club.
I was very surprised since nobody really knew almost anything about it! I thought that people in America know what indo-european languages are, how they are divided etc etc.
Maybe I just knew so much about it because my father was a history professor and he knew several foreign languages. Maybe it is just that Poles know more about languages because they have to.
My question to you:
what non indo-european languages are there in Europe? Can you list them?
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Post by kaima on Nov 22, 2008 22:57:44 GMT -7
My question to you:
what non indo-european languages are there in Europe? Can you list them? I can think of four and speculate on the Lapps of Scandinavia as a fifth, but that is the end of my guesses. Now to draw Karl and others into it, I would add the question: is IndoGermanic the same as IndoEuropean? Some people in Germany use the words interchangeably, but I don't see how Slavic languages can be considered IndoGermanic (under what I know of the IndoEuropean organization of languages). Kai |
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Post by pieter on Nov 23, 2008 6:45:11 GMT -7
All European countries have an indo-European background. Except, Hungarian which is a Uralic language, Finnish and Estonian which are a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and the language isolate Basque language! So you could say that there is a far connection between Hungarian on the one side and Finnish and Estonian on the other side where the Basque language stands on its own. The differances between these Northen-, central European and Eastern-European languages can be seen as the differances between Western-, Eastern- and Southern slav languages.
Hungarian
Hungarian (magyar) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. It is spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian minorities in seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar.
Hungarian has long been of great interest to linguists as one of the small number of modern European languages that do not belong to the Indo-European language family. Due to the Uralic heritage, Hungarian often sounds completely foreign to speakers of Indo-European languages. It is sometimes considered to be one of the most difficult languages for speakers of English to learn well.
There are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.5–10 million live in modern-day Hungary. A further two million speakers live outside present-day Hungary, but in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon. Of these, the largest group lives in Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians (see Hungarian minority in Romania). Hungarian-speaking people are also to be found in Slovakia, Serbia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world. As with many European languages, there are a few hundred thousand speakers of Hungarian in the United States as well.
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Post by Jaga on Nov 23, 2008 16:18:26 GMT -7
Guys,
you are almost perfect. One extra language - Turkish, since Turks live in Europe at least partly.
Now, what is an origin of gipsy/Roma language?
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Post by kaima on Nov 23, 2008 16:47:51 GMT -7
Well, I missed the Turks completely. I do wonder if the Lapps have a non-IndoEuropean language.
Now the Gypsies .... I will bite on this one and say an Indian language? The sub-continent with 150+ languages?
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Post by pieter on Nov 23, 2008 17:46:18 GMT -7
Jaga,
Yes, how could I forget my Turkish compatriots. I forget sometimes that Turkey lies half
in Europe and half in Asia minor (the Middle east). Millions of Turks live in Europe and
speak Turkish there next to Dutch, German and other languages.
The Romani language is an Indo-Aryan language, and therefor it is difficult for me to
describe if it is an Indo-European language too. The language is linked to languages that
are spoken in India and Pakistan, Western Hindi, Bhili, Gujarati, Khandeshi, Rajasthani.
So I think it is not an Indo-European language, but an asian language closely linked
to Northern-India. From the other side it exists fro such a long time in Europe that
it must have gotten influences from the Slavs, Hungarians, Rumanians, and other
Europeans whith whom they were neighbours for almost a thousand years (or]
hundreds of years).
Pieter
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Post by pieter on Nov 23, 2008 17:48:32 GMT -7
Romani language
Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy (native name: romani ćhib) is the language of the Romani people.
The Indo-Aryan Romani language should not be confused with either Romanian (spoken by Romanians), or Romansh (spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland), both of which are Romance languages.
Classification and status
Analysis of the Romani language has shown that it is closely related to those spoken in central and northern India. This linguistic relationship is believed to indicate the Roma's and Sinti's geographical origin. Loanwords in Romani make it possible to trace the pattern of their migration westwards. They came originally from the Indian subcontinent or what is now northern India and parts of Pakistan. The Romani language is usually included in the Central Indo-Aryan languages (together with Western Hindi, Bhili, Gujarati, Khandeshi, Rajasthani etc.). It is still debated whether the origin of the name Sinti is the same as that of the toponym for the Sindh region of southeastern Pakistan and far western India (Rajasthan and Gujarat), around the lower Indus River or is a European loanword in Romani, recognizable as such in its morphological integration into the language (plural Sinte, feminine singular Sintica). It was primarily through comparative linguistic studies of the Romani language with various north Indian dialects and languages that the origins of the Roma people were traced back to India.
Romani, Panjabi, and Pothwari share some words and similar grammatical systems. A 2003 study published in Nature suggests Romani is also related to Sinhalese,[2] spoken in Sri Lanka.
In terms of its grammatical structures, Romani is conservative in maintaining almost intact the Middle Indo-Aryan present-tense person concord markers, and in maintaining consonantal endings for nominal case – both features that have been eroded in most other modern languages of Central India. It shares an innovative pattern of past-tense person concord with the languages of the Northwest, such as Kashmiri and Shina. This is believed to be further proof that Romani originated in the Central region, then migrated to the Northwest. Characteristic for Romani is the fusion of postpositions of the second Layer (or case marking clitics) to the nominal stem, and the emergence of external tense morphology that attaches to the person suffix. All of these features are shared between Romani and Domari, which has prompted much discussion about the relationships between these two languages.
The Romani language is sometimes considered a group of dialects or a collection of related languages that comprise all the members of a single genetic subgroup.
While the language is nowhere official, there are attempts currently aimed at the creation of a standard language out of all variants (such as those from Romania, the USA, Sweden). Also, different variants of the language are now in the process of being codified in those countries with high Roma populations (for example, Slovakia).
History
There are no sure historical documents about the early phases of the Romani language. The language is not directly cited in the epic Shahnameh by the eleventh century Persian poet Firdausi, who wrote about the 10,000 or 12,000 Desi musicians who were given in the fifth century A.D. by King Shankal of Kanauj (in Sindh) to Bahram Gur the King of Persia. Nevertheless, many have suggested that these people are the ancestors of the Roma.
However, research carried out already in the nineteenth century by Pott (1845) and Miklosich (1882-1888) showed this to be unlikely. The Romani language proves to be a New Indo-Aryan language (NIA), not a Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), as it would have to be to fit Firdausi's scheme. The principal argument favouring a migration during or after the transition period to NIA is the loss of the old system of nominal case, and its reduction to just a two-way case system, nominative vs. oblique. A secondary argument concerns the system of gender differentiation. Romani has only two genders (masculine and feminine). Middle Indo-Aryan languages (named MIA) generally had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), and some modern Indo-Aryan languages retain this old system even today. It is argued that loss of the neuter gender did not occur until the transition to NIA. Most of the neuter nouns became masculine while a few feminine, like the neuter अग्नि (agni) in the Prakrit became the feminine आग (āg) in Hindi and jag in Romani. The parallels in grammatical gender evolution between Romani and other NIA languages have been cited as evidence that the forerunner of Romani remained in the Indian Subcontinent until a later period, perhaps even as late as the tenth century.
There are no historical proofs to clarify who the ancestors of the Roma were or what motivated them to emigrate from the Indian subcontinent, but there are various theories. The influence of the Greek language (and to a lesser extent of the Iranian languages, like Persian, Kurdish and of the Armenian language), points to a prolonged stay in Anatolia after the departure from South Asia.
The Mongol invasion of Europe beginning in the first half of the thirteenth century triggered another westward migration. The Roma arrived in Europe and afterwards spread to the other continents. The great distances between the scattered Roma groups led to the development of local community distinctions. The differing local influences have greatly affected the modern language, splitting it into a number of different (originally exclusively regional) dialects.
Today Romani is spoken by small groups in 42 European countries. A project at Manchester University in England is transcribing Romani dialects, many of which are on the brink of extinction, for the first time.
Sinti
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sinti or Sinta (Singular masc.=Sinto; sing. fem.=Sintisa) is the name of a population in Europe. They are often called "Gypsies" in English. The Sinti are an ethnic subgroup of the Roma people. Traditionally nomadic, today only a small percentage of the group remains unsettled. In earlier times, they frequently lived on the outskirts of communities, generally in squalor.
The Sinti speak a dialect of the Romany language called "Romanes, Sintenghero Tschib(en)", which has a primarily Romany vocabulary but some grammatical differences, and exhibits strong German influence.
French-speaking Sinti are called "manouche".
Etymology
The origin of the name "Sinti/Sinte" is uncertain. The term is similar to the Sindh region of southwest Pakistan, and to inhabitants' name, the Sindhis. Additionally, linguistic and cultural evidence indicates this region was the likely geographic origin of the Roma.
History
The Sinti arrived in Germany and Austria in the Middle Ages, eventually splitting into two groups: Eftavagarja ("the Seven Caravans") and Estraxarja ("from Austria"). These two groups then expanded, the Eftavagarja into France, where they are called "Manouches", and the Estraxarja into Italy and Eastern Europe, mainly what are now Croatia, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, eventually adopting various regional names.
In Italy they are present mainly in Piedmont region.
[edit]Other theories
Another theory holds that the Roma differ from the Sinti in that the former converted to Islam in the Seljuq Empire, thus acquiring citizenship and escaping slavery. The Sinti, on the other hand, allegedly refused to convert to Islam and thus remained in slavery. [2]
Notable Sinti
The Sinti have produced some number of renowned musicians, such as jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and Biréli Lagrène. The Sinto Häns'che Weiss produced a record in Germany in the 1970s in which he sang about the Poraimos (Roma Holocaust) in his own language. Many younger Germans first learned about this part of Holocaust history as a result of this recording. Titi Winterstein and several members of Reinhardt's clan still play traditional and modern "Gypsy jazz" all over Europe. The jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul was also of Sinte (sintenghero) descent.
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Post by karl on Nov 23, 2008 18:20:43 GMT -7
My question to you:
what non indo-european languages are there in Europe? Can you list them? I can think of four and speculate on the Lapps of Scandinavia as a fifth, but that is the end of my guesses. Now to draw Karl and others into it, I would add the question: is IndoGermanic the same as IndoEuropean? Some people in Germany use the words interchangeably, but I don't see how Slavic languages can be considered IndoGermanic (under what I know of the IndoEuropean organization of languages). Kai Some how, I have totally missed this subject {presentation} For the topics are so swift! I have always considered that of my early studies as of our language as being: Indo-European Germanic with many dialects. For as a people, it is not for us to make simple, for we must make complicate, it is just our way of conducting the business of life. In-as-much as we must argue amongst our selves of the most trivial matters. But of Slavic being that of Indo-European, it is my opinion it is not. Now then, this is from memory, for I am not a linguist, very far from it... I have thought of Slavic as of low sorbian Baltic. This would include the Czech/Slovak-Polish/Ukrainian and surrounding other countries. Perhaps I am wrong, if so, it would be enlightening to face correction from those knowing much better. Karl |
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Post by karl on Nov 23, 2008 18:31:01 GMT -7
Pieter
Gollies, you have made such a contribution that is simply out-standing, to say the least!
That what you have brought forward of the origin of the Roma is that exactly what we had learnt. That they were originally out of Northern India and spoke Romany {with a wide spread of dialects}.
Karl
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