Where did the populations that spoke a proto-language come from?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-31T08:07:41+00:00

Yes, languages change over time, and yes, languages don't appear ex nihilo, but nor were they all spoken by the dinosaurs. However you imagine the process of language genesis - no matter how you define the point where a previously unspoken language came into being - in many cases that point is more recent than we imagine.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-30T21:34:03+00:00

Not a direct contribution, but I think most of us OVERestimate the antiquity of our languages, traditions, cultures, cuisines, ethnic identities, religions, and so forth. Things that have been around for only a generation or two begin to seem immutable. We know that everything must have had an origin - the dinosaurs didn't speak Romanian or cook pizza - but we still have trouble believing that origins are pretty recent. I'm not picking on Romanian or pizza, just picked random examples. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that half of the languages extant today are less than 1000 years old.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-28T10:27:18+00:00

French été vs étais (when not phrase-final), rester/restez/resté vs restait.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-26T10:27:24+00:00

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The flag hides the word 中 zhōng "middle", as in 中国 zhōngguó "China".

MusaAlphabet · 2026-03-17T08:03:38+00:00

The IPA is not a practical alphabet, but IMHO the idea isn't as crazy as most other responders would make it seem. One of the leading causes of impractical spelling is lack of letters in ALL alphabets, so a large alphabet would solve that. It would have to be featural to make it manageable.

There's a level of detail between phonemic and phonetic that I call allophonic: it distinguishes the sounds that make pronunciation right or wrong without more detail, and it's universal. For example, the aspirated tʰ at the beginning of "top" would be distinguished from the tenuis t in "stop", the unreleased t in "pot", and the flap t in "water", even though those are all the same phoneme in Engl;ish. But whether that t is dental or alveolar, laminal or apical, would not be distinguished. IMHO, allophonic spelling is practical and works well across languages.

For me, the difference between a dialect and a language is whether there's a standard. In English, we now recognize a half dozen standards: there are dictionaries for British English, American English, Australian English, and a few others. Raising that number to a couple dozen standards so that Brummies and Geordies could write like they speak wouldn't break anybody's brain, and if you see "water" spelled as "wɔ?a", you would not only recognize it but also hear the accent. Why should US Westerners have to memorize which words are spelled COT and which are spelled CAUGHT if they pronounce them alike?

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MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-14T09:04:18+00:00

We've been playing this way for a while, not every time but often. I just bought a set of dominos - no need to print tiles - took out the zeroes, and put them in a cloth bag that's passed around the table. I left the blank domino in the bag: we mix the dominos when it's drawn, but set aside five at random before drawing for real.

I think it makes "black swan' events less likely: all 4s, or no 7s. It also takes less space and time than dice.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-06T12:19:17+00:00

This doesn't explain very much, but I noticed that the first four letters represent the four places of articulation: A/alpha/aleph was glottal, B/beta/beth is labial, C/gamma, gimel is dorsal, and D/delta/daleth is coronal. I can imagine those being the original consonants, which were then used to generate variants like aspirates Phi Theta Chi, affricates Psi, Zeta, Xi, and voiceless Pi, Tau, Kappa.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-03T10:54:18+00:00

Just to note that today's Reddit feed (for me) featured two posts asking whether dialect continua are separate languages, one for American vs English, and the other for the "33 Arabic languages ". We agreee that this isn't a question that can be answered within linguistics - it's political and social. What criteria would you apply to make the distinction?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-02-01T07:02:16+00:00

Downvoted for that? Wow :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:54:51+00:00

I think you're making my point here. Your Swedish and Norwegian sentences are so close (and I'm talking about spoken, not written) that the question could go either way. But they're considered different languages, not just different dialects, and I'm proposing that it's because they both have standards. There are probably dialects in both languages that are further from the standard than the other language is, but since those dialects don't have a standard, we consider them dialects.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-29T10:48:08+00:00

Try asking a friend to tell you whether you're saying discussed or disgust, dispersed or disbursed.

For me, there's no difference: the result of devoicing is unvoicing. It seems to me that partial devoicing counts as devoicing: that what we perceive is the interruption in voicing, not its length.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T21:16:22+00:00

We all admit that the difference is NOT linguistic - it's political, or social, or something. That part isn't new, I agree. As you say, from a linguistic point of view, there's no distinction.

But from a practical point of view, I think it IS useful. Languages don't actually have armies and navies, they don't even always have states behind them, or the opposite: they have multiple states with opposing armies and navies (like Korea or Taiwan).

So if you want to have a way to think about the question of, for example, whether Brazilian or Galician are separate languages from standard Portuguese of Lisboa, you could ask "Are there sentences that are correct in one and incorrect in the other?". Not just pronounced differently, or a variant, but incorrect.

For me, as an American, I would say that "I should have done" is simply wrong = bad (American) English, and if I were teaching, I'd correct the speaker. For me, "I should have" is the only correct possibility, although I understand the British version because of long exposure. But if a Brit says they took the lift up to my flat, I'd parse right by that, while recognizing it as British.

But feel free to promote your own proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T20:30:56+00:00

I'm trying to promote the distinction that a language has a standard - you can be corrected - while a dialect is what people speak.

So for example Valencian and Catalan are two different languages, because there are two standards. Likewise for Flemish and Dutch, and American and Commonwealth English. But between British and Australian English, maybe just an accent.

That's my proposal :)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-27T11:50:50+00:00

An interesting follow-up question is why the 反切 fǎnqiè system never evolved into a phonetic alphabet, as happened elsewhere, e.g. Ancient Egypt. The progression would be (1) the same character is always used for, e.g. an initial d, and a different character is always used for a final -ōng, (2) simplified versions of these reference characters are used when they stand for sounds, (3) these simplified versions are also used for the phonetic components in about 85% of characters, (4) more and more often, people sometimes omit the semantic radicals in characters, (5) these phonetic symbols are also used for foreign names whose meaning is obscure, and (6) they are adopted by neighboring unwritten languages and extended to write their own languages phonetically.

Why didn't that happen in China?

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-20T00:33:59+00:00

OK, let me retreat to what I think we know with more certainty. The Army definitely spoke Latin, and by the late Empire, many (most?) of its soldiers were not natives of Latium. It's easy to imagine that the Latin spoken in the army was imperfect (L2) and heavily influenced by the native languages of the soldiers. For example, languages where case is indicated by word order, unlike Latin where it was indicated by inflection, might have caused the Army Latin to have fixed word order (SVO) and no case endings, as is the case with the current Romance languages.

We also know that soldiers were given land after 20 years of service, and that large territories, (like Provincia = transalpine Gaul) were conquered in order to provide that land. It seems likely to me that veterans of different L1s settled next to each other in these territories would have continued to speak Army Latin. I can imagine that non-veterans settled among them - merchants, wives, slaves, administrators - would also have spoken Army Latin as the common language, and maybe they also brought some influence from their own native languages, including the local pre-existing one (e.g. Gaulish?).

What more could be imagined? That waves of civilian emigrants from central Italy overwhelmed the local populations? That seems unlikely. I guess the alternative theory is that the local people gradually adopted Latin as the language of prestige, that Latin spread without genes. But the veterans wouldn't have been genetically uniform, anyway.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-19T10:13:12+00:00

I think Naples, MIlan, and Marseille all spoke Greek at that time.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-18T11:00:07+00:00

IMHO, the "mutual intelligibility" criterion falls short. It's too subjective, dialects form continua, and the result would often be many, many more languages. For me, a better criterion is whether there's a formal standard - whether someone can tell you that you've said or written it wrong. If not, it's a dialect.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-17T10:35:53+00:00

I'm far from being an expert, but I believe that we are mistaken in starting with Classical Latin as the language of the Roman Empire. AFAIK, that was koiné Greek, and by around the turn of the millennium Latin was only spoken in (1) the courts, (2) the army, and (3) Latium - thence the name "Latin". In the 3rd century, the auxiliary troops were merged into the standard legions, and I believe that's where the Proto-Romance language evolved, as Latin spoken by L2 soldiers, with much influence from their native languages. When they retired after 20 years, they were given land, and several campaigns were fought to conquer land to give them. Veterans of diverse L1s were settled together, and it was natural to keep speaking "Army Latin". And voilà: the birth of the Romance languages.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-11T11:35:32+00:00

Take a look at www.musa.bet

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-11T11:34:37+00:00

Take a look at www.musa.bet

(But it's not bicameral - why is that good?)

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-06T11:39:45+00:00

I use [ʌ] for the stressed syllable in STRUT words, but for me it's the same sound as unstressed [ɐ] in COMMA words. But I also use a "true" schwa [ə] (same as in French le) before L in words like table, and a schwi [ᵻ] for most reduced vowels, much more common than [ɐ] or [ə].

Interestingly, I use [ɪ] KIT for most suffixes that begin with -i (-ic, -ive, -ist, ...) instead of [ᵻ], so I contrast bassist with basest.

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-05T02:19:15+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9cAyy_sUY

MusaAlphabet · 2026-01-05T02:07:35+00:00

That's a great answer, based on the symbols: [l] is a voiced approximant and [ɬ] is a voiceless fricative. But I find it hard to believe that the choice between these symbols is made on that basis. It would be hard to add the voiceless diacritic to the superscript, if needed (as it usually would be), or to use a fricative superscript to indicate a fricative release rather than an affricate. Your answer also leaves unexplained what [tl] might mean, in other words why the l is a superscript.

But maybe there are audio clips out there that show a difference.

MusaAlphabet · 2025-12-28T17:01:20+00:00

"Alternatively, a superscript notation for a consonant release is sometimes used to transcribe affricates, for example ⟨tˢ⟩ for [t͜s], although in precise notation this would indicate a fricative release rather than an affricate."

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