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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.Its lowly position almost certainly helped English to become a simpler, less inflected language. As Baugh and Cable note: “By making English the language mainly of uneducated people, the Norman conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward unchecked.”
213- alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate. It seems not to matter greatly whether governments suppress them brutally or support them lavishly. Despite all the encouragement and subsidization given to Gaelic in Ireland, it is spoken by twice as many people in Scotland, where there has been negligible government assistance. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic is one of the few minority languages in the world to be growing.
213 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.
216 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to roundabout expressions such as “I think not” and “This is so.”
213 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
As late as the thirteenth century, Dante was still regarding his own Florentine tongue as Latin. And indeed it is still possible to construct long passages of modern Italian that are identical to ancient Latin.
213 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
If we must fix a date for when Latin stopped being Latin and instead became these other languages, the year 813 is a convenient milestone. It was then that Charlemagne ordered that sermons throughout his realm be delivered in the “lingua romana rustica” and not the customary “lingua latina.”
214 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has changed the least—so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian can understand simple phrases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian has preserved many more of the inflectional complexities of the original Indo-European language than others of the family.
214 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.Читать далее
The descended languages of Indo-European almost always show some kind of kinship in their names for primary family relationships, such as mother and father; for parts of the body, such as eye, foot, heart, and ear; for common animals, such as goat and ox; and for natural elements, such as snow, thunder, and fire. We can deduce something about how these people lived from these cognates. They had a common word for snow and cold, so the climate obviously was not tropical, and yet they appear to have had no common word for sea. Those tribes that reached the sea each came up with words of their own, so presumably they began their migration from a point well inland. Among the other words held in common are oak, beech, birch, willow, bear, wolf, deer, rabbit, sheep, goat, pig, and dog. They had no common word for horse or window. By studying the known range of certain flora and fauna, linguists have placed their original homeland in various places: the Russian steppes, Scandinavia, central Europe, the Danube valley, Asia Minor—indeed, almost everywhere.
212 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.Читать далее
Where vocabulary is concerned, children are very reliant on their mothers (or whoever else has the role of primary caregiver). If she says a word, then the child generally listens and tries to repeat it. But where grammar is concerned, children go their own way. According to one study [by Kenneth Wexler and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine, cited by The Economist, April 28, 1984], two-thirds of utterances made by mothers to their infants are either imperatives or questions, and only one-third are statements, yet the utterances of children are overwhelmingly statements. Clearly they don’t require the same repetitive teaching because they are already a step ahead where syntax is concerned.
212 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed? Why do we say colonel as if it had an r in it? Why do we spell four with a u and forty without?
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