In Memoriam, or: Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good Languages?

I haven't been slacking off, but I've been working on a rather large, and potentially deterring, article about phonetics, which is taking a lot longer than I had anticipated. At any rate, I felt I had to post something what with the nice weather here and all that, so, naturally, to hold you over, we're going to talk about language death.

We all know languages go extinct and we can often even name some extinct languages (Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English and many more). Some of these we hold in the greatest esteem, such as Latin, about which we speak with admiration, often from a place of not really knowing much Latin ourselves.
Frequently, some concerned language enthusiast will speak of the decline of his or her language and will cite examples of how it's all going to the dogs and how every thing used to be better. We, of course, now know that language change is essentially a good thing, as it allows a language to adapt to the needs of its time and its speakers. And you get used to the new norms quite quickly.
In some countries outside the English-speaking world there is often great concern that English will supplant their native language. France, for instance, strictly regulates how much English is broadcast on the public airwaves. These concerns, I'm afraid, are unfounded. It is very unlikely that English will supplant any language where it is not spoken or used at all levels. Only if English is the majority language in a nation, is used by the administration as the primary language of communication, by the people in daily life and by the media outlets as their preferred language, do the other language kids in the playground have to start worrying (don't worry, we'll talk about the British Isles later on).
However, the fact remains that languages die out. We have evidence that it's happened in the past and that it's happening in the present. But why?

First off, we need to make a distinction between language death and a language dying out because of normal language changes (like sound change, morphological change). In the case of the former, it is the end of the line and that particular branch of the language dies out completely. A good historical example of that form the Anatolian languages, of which Hittite is the main representative. At one point, several thousands of years ago, this language group just disappears from history leaving little to no traces in the other languages in that particular area.
If a language goes extinct because it undergoes normal changes, then we can't really speak of language death, since it essentially continues in a new, adapted form. For example:

Old English > Middle English > Early Modern English > Modern English

Or:

Classical Latin > Vulgar Latin > French; Spanish (castellano); Catalan; Portuguese; Italian; Romanian; and a bunch of others.

These parent languages haven't really died out, but rather evolved or morphed into something new.

That's all well and good, but why do languages go extinct and disappear then? Well, we can identify several distinct factors, although it's often a combination of these factors and different factors start playing a part at different stages. They are:

• gradual language death
• bottom-to-top language death (language change begins at a low level, such as the home life)
• top-to-bottom language death (language change begins at the highest level, such as the administration and, more recently, mass media)
• radical language death
• linguicide

Most often what will happen, is that a large number of speakers of a particular language will become bilingual and gradually shift allegiance to the new language, forcing them to abandon their original, or heritage, language. By far the largest contributor to people voluntarily giving up their native language in favor of another are economic considerations. Also, the heritage language can be seen as inferior by the speakers themselves. Russian, for instance, has an overwhelming cultural and economic influence on the many hundreds of languages spoken in the Russian Federation. If you want to succeed in Russian society, you need to be fluent in Russian. This has caused some languages to fall into decline and even to die out. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing or that this makes the Russians evil, but this is the way it has been going up until this point in Russia. For the sake of fairness, I need to also state that since the Russian Revolution, Russia has become more aware of its minority languages and many of them have had varying degrees of success in language revitalization projects. Also, Soviet linguists often made very useful and complete language analyses. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, has largely contributed to the further decline of many of these minority languages. Time will tell what their future will be.

Recently extinct languages

We live in a remarkable age, in that we are obsessively documenting everything about everything and usually call that by the name of science or knowledge. As a result, a language dying out, for whatever reason, usually no longer is a silent event, but rather the end of a stage of massive effort to preserve this moribund language for future generations to study. A good example of that is the Ubykh language.

Oh, come on! Now you're just making up languages!

Not at all! The Ubykh language is a now extinct Northwestern Caucasian language that originally was spoken in modern-day Russia on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. In the 1860s, its speakers migrated en masse to Turkey. At this point, we need to introduce the hero of this language, for without him, the language would have just faded into oblivion. His name was Tevfik Esenç.

While Mr. Esenç worked in Istanbul, he encountered French linguist Georges Dumézil and his associate Georges Charachidzé. He had an excellent memory, was a purist and related to Dumézil, his associate and the other linguists who came to see him not just the language, but also the mythology, culture and customs of the Ubykh people. He was the last speaker of Ubykh and died in 1992 at the age of 88. On his request, his tombstone read:

"This is the grave of Tevfik Esenç. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh."

Here's a tissue.

Most languages don't have the benefit of having a Tevfik Esenç-like figure to champion them during their last threnodies. The Kamassian language, a Samoyedic language spoken to the east of the Ural mountains in Russia, died out with its last speaker, Klavdiya Plotnikova in 1989. Yugh, a Yeniseian language of central Siberia, only had two or three non-fluent speakers left by the early 1990s, which, in linguistic terms, means the language is pretty much extinct. Klallam, a Straits Salishian language spoken on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada is in the bizarre limbo of languages where there are more linguists who speak it than native speakers (natives 4 - linguists 5). The North Straits Salish language, divided into six dialects despite its only 20 speakers, may very well die out sooner rather than later. And there are many, many more examples.

Some countries and continents highlighted

I love maps and languages and that is why I absolutely love the UNESCO Atlas of the World's languages in danger. I've taken some maps to demonstrate exactly what kind of situation most minority languages are in. A small legend to the maps: black means the language is extinct, red is critically endangered, orange is severely endangered, yellow is definitely endangered and white is vulnerable. Let's start with the US.

Alaska

Hawaii

The US east of the Mississippi river

The US west of the Mississippi river

Oh, those barbaric Americans! I'm sure Canada is doing better.

Canada's indigenous languages

It is, but not by much. - Mexico then? They had the Aztecs and the Mayas. Surely the descendants of their languages must be faring better.

Mexico

Based on this, I wouldn't say that the bulk of Mexico's indigenous languages are flourishing. Brazil then.

Brazil

Do I even want to ask about China?

Minority languages in China

Concerning EU member states, they mainly already either eradicated their indigenous languages, or the surviving languages are currently protected by the minority languages charter of the EU. Still, France, for example, will not allow languages like Breton or Occitan to be used in the administration at a local level and is still clinging to the concept of cultural superiority of French. France is not unique in this, mind you.

A while back, I saw an episode of David Mitchell's soapbox. David Mitchell is a man whom I tremendously admire and enjoy watching in pretty much everything he does. However, when he spoke of the Gaelic language (meaning Scottish Gaelic), he said this:

"I find I have mixed feelings about [saving the Gaelic language]. Certainly, if it were in my power, I'd rather see any language survive rather than die. But I'm uneasy about spending too much money or time on a language which is now not far above the level of a private code."

A fantastic way of underplaying the importance of the Gaelic language as a source of cultural identity for the Scottish people. We all like to feel connected to the region we're from and the ethnic group we belong to and one of the main ways of achieving that is by speaking the language of your ancestors. Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaeilge used to form a single dialect continuum and, as such, the Scottish ancestral language predates the Anglo-Saxons' presence in Britain by at least a few centuries. To dismiss their language and to designate it as a private code, shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the psychological effects of linguistic displacement.

"If I were a parent and I spoke Gaelic, then I would certainly bring my child up as bilingual, because that's basically like giving them a free language. But I think it would be quite hard to justify Gaelic as a priority language to teach my child or learn myself from scratch. After all language is fundamentally a tool of communication and if you've learned Gaelic, you have enabled yourself to speak with only 60,000 people, all of whom also speak English."

Yes, and Czech was a language of only five million speakers compared to the many dozens of millions of speakers of German. Lithuanian was a language of only three million, compared to the roughly 200 million speakers of Russian. Yet these languages felt it was justifiable to foster their own language and promote it, rather than simply adopting the language of the country that had invaded them and forced a foreign tongue on them. Also, it's a little bit of a contradiction to first extol the virtues of bilingualism (remember, it's a free language!) and then later use the communication-is-easier-if-we-do-it-in-my-language-since-you-already-speak-it argument to get out of learning Gaelic.

"Isn't it a pity, though, when an ancient language dies? Yes, it is, that's exactly what it is: a pity. Not the end of the world. The extinction of an animal in the modern world is almost never because of natural selection. It's because of the actions of man. The extinction of a language, however, still is natural selection. If it dies out, it's because humans no longer needed to communicate. As long as they do, they will. After all, it's not as though the language will disappear when no longer spoken. It will still be available for anyone to learn and, indeed, to communicate if they so wish. Just as people still learn Latin or Old English."

Social darwinism at work. If Gaelic dies out, it's because of natural selection and not because of the hundreds of years of suppression and the fact that speaking it was outlawed. It's not that, to this day, Scottish Gaelic has not been given the same degree of official recognition as Welsh has, or that it took until 2005 for the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act to provide it with rudimentary language rights. No, not at all. This is natural selection. No humans needed.

Fortunately, there is such a thing as a language revival movement, although, as we will see in the next section, that doesn't always go quite as smoothly as initially conceived.

We need to talk about Irish

Any attempt at talking about the fate of Irish automatically suffers from a good dose of Oh-look-at-the-English-being-the-assholes-of-history-again Disease. In part, it's because England did in fact discourage the use of Irish, often in less-than-nice ways. And in part, it's because language, politics and nationalistic sentiment are often intricately woven into a nice mesh of selective memory. We'll take it from the beginning.

Every thing was fine in Ireland until the mid 12th century: they had a rich, well-developed and refined language and a literature that, after Ancient Greek and Latin, was the oldest in Europe. Clear skies ahead, you'd say.

And then, starting in 1169, the Normans came and briefly brought Ireland under control of the Plantagenet Kings of England. However, from the 13th century onward, the Norman invasion of the rest of Ireland first faltered, then waned. The Normans gradually assimilated into Irish culture and the only part of Ireland that remained under the English crown was an area that became known as The Pale (Irish: an Pháil).

Ireland in 1450

Phew, that was close! But Irish survived and even most of the English settlers in The Pale became predominantly Irish-speaking by the 1500s. And then things take a rather grim turn for Ireland. The declaration of the Kingdom of Ireland by Henry VIII (he of the six wives) and the subsequent Tudor conquest of Ireland, which was largely completed by the turn of the 17th century, had led to all of Ireland coming under English law. Still, Irish was not really in danger yet, even though English was considered a prestigious language and bilingualism increased among the gentry and the middle classes. Elizabeth I actively encouraged the use of Irish in The Pale, seeing it as the ideal vehicle to promote the Reformed faith. A primer was even drawn up for her by Sir Christopher Nugent, 6th (or 14th) Baron Delvin. It is thought that even as late as 1800, Irish was still the majority language in the Kingdom of Ireland, now part of the United Kingdom. Yeah, and then the English started acting a little bit like dicks.

The 19th century started out as rather disastrous (this is, in fact, the understatement of the day) for the Irish language and Ireland in general. In 1831, a system of primary education called the National Schools was introduced, in which Irish was prohibited until 1871. The National Schools run by the Roman Catholic Church discouraged the use of Irish until as late as 1890. The motivation behind this was that economic opportunity for the Irish could mostly be found in the United States and England, both bastions of the English language.

There was another little event that contributed heavily to the decline of Irish, namely The Great Famine (Irish:  An Gorta Mór), otherwise known as the Irish Potato Famine, which rampaged through Ireland from 1845-1852. Many of the most hard-hit areas were those inhabited by the poor, who formed the majority of Irish speakers. During the famine, approximately one million people died and another one million emigrated, mostly to the United States. Those who emigrated, often abandoned using Irish as a medium for communication, ironically in favor of English. In Ireland itself, many parents discouraged use of Irish in their children, since it was now seen as backward and a hindrance to social advancement. Remember, this is the same language with that long and proud literary tradition and the oh-so-refined and developed vernacular. All in all, not a great century for Ireland and the Irish language.

But Ireland became independent in 1921, surely that must have solved the problem?

You'd think so, wouldn't you? First of all, Ireland after independence became the Irish Free State, which was an entity that functioned autonomously from Britain, but was still a part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. A Civil War broke out and it wasn't until 1949 that Ireland became fully independent (as the Republic of Ireland). However, the newly formed Irish Free State retained English as the language of the administration, forcing many, even in areas where up to 80% of people spoke Irish natively, to have to switch to English. The areas where a majority of people spoke Irish were designated as Gaeltachtaí (singular: Gaeltacht, literally 'Gael (Irish) land'). The opposite of this, meaning counties where English is the primary medium, is, confusingly, called Galltacht.

The Irish government refused to implement the recommendations of the Gaeltacht Commission of 1926, which included the restoration of Irish as the language of the administration in these areas. (That whirring sound in the background is the dwindling number of speakers of Irish.) It is a case of supreme irony that the Irish language, which was elevated to the status of a national symbol for independence and absolute Irishness, was nearly brought to extinction by the government, which early on already declared its desire to restore Irish to its former glory. It went as follows.

The state was the largest job provider in the country by far and, naturally, all employees of the state had to have a qualification in Irish in order to work for the state. But the required level wasn't very high and most employees seldom used Irish. In the Gaeltachtaí, employees involved in local government often hardly spoke any Irish at all, so if you wanted to get anything done, you had to speak English. The following quote from a 1986 Bord na Gaeilge report is telling:

"...the administrative agencies of the state have been among the strongest forces for anglicisation in Gaeltacht areas."

But arguably the biggest mistake was made in the domain of education. Quite naively, the Irish government thought that if it simply forced the children of the nation to be educated through the medium of Irish, then the language would be back on top within a generation, maybe two. Cue reality.

In 1928, Irish was made a compulsory subject for the Junior Certificate and in 1934 for the Leaving Certificate. However, from the mid-1940s onward the policy of teaching all subjects to English-speaking children through the medium of Irish was abandoned. Furthermore, due to the way Irish was taught, generations of Irishmen and women grew up either thoroughly despising Irish, or at the very least not learning it to a point of moderate fluency. The state placed all the responsibility for the survival of Irish in the hands of the education system, the go-to guy for dirty jobs to this day in most Western societies that parents and the rest of society don't want to undertake or get involved with, and the education system was not fully equipped to handle this Herculean task.

So that's it then. Irish is doomed for extinction and language revival efforts are pointless.

Not necessarily on both counts. In recent years, due to a more realistic and practical approach, there have been moderate success stories. Apart from the Irish language television channel TG4, which broadcasts in Irish, and the radio station Raidió na Gaeltachta, the most remarkable positive force in the Irish language revival movement comes from, yes, education.

The history of the phenomenon of the Gaelscoileanna (singular: Gaelscoil 'Gael school') reads like a novel in which the plucky underdog (played in the movie by the Irish language) suddenly finds himself supported by his community and is given a fighting chance against the nefarious overlord he has to combat (played for the sake of symmetry by the English language). It's a little bit more nuanced than that, but the Gaelscoil is the product of a community and not a state effort. They offer full-language immersion at the primary and increasingly secondary level and are known to produce competent Irish-language speakers. These are private, but affordable, schools and they have the added benefit of outperforming English-language schools in terms of how many students advance to the tertiary education level (22%, compared to 7% of English-medium schools). A study examining the socioeconomic benefits of this type of multilingualism showed other favorable results for competent speakers of Irish as well as English, such as higher average wage.

Also, we shouldn't be too hard on the Irish government for fumbling a bit along the way. In many ways, the Irish language revival project is a massive social experiment. It was the first time that a nation committed itself to reviving a severely endangered language. And it appears that the Irish government has learned from the mistakes in the past and is now more realistic when it comes to handling the Irish language problem. But yes, since independence the number of first-language speakers of Irish has gone down, while the number of second-language speakers has increased.

The reason why language revival efforts aren't pointless can best be illustrated by the example of Hebrew, though. Hebrew had pretty much died out as a language and only remained as the liturgical vernacular for the Jewish people. After the state of Israel was founded, Hebrew was revived and flourishes today. Though many of the people who moved to Israel brought their own language (Yiddish, Russian, etc.) and this in turn has shaped the modern Hebrew language into what it is today, the language flourishes, albeit not in the (and I hate this word) pure form that Ancient Hebrew was.

Perhaps that is the future for Irish, too. It seems unlikely that English will disappear entirely from Ireland, so realistically a fully or predominantly bilingual nation should be the ideal. Irish itself in turn will continue to be shaped and molded by English, which will introduce further language change. And even if Irish does eventually cease to exist, perhaps the Irish state would do well to embrace and foster Hiberno-English, the variety of English characteristic of Ireland, since it contains many grammatical and lexical elements of Irish. But perhaps that's not exactly what they had hoped for.

Dúirt mé.

Woorden die (nagenoeg) geheel uit het Nederlands zijn verdwenen en dringend terug moeten komen, een bloemlezing

Ik heb ooit in een aanval van boekenkoopwoede, waarschijnlijk bij De Slegte, het Verdwijnwoordenboek van Ton den Boon en Julius ten Berge gekocht. Dit is geen vuistendik, academisch naslagwerk, maar een boekje van zo'n 125 pagina's waarin per letter een paar pagina's aan woorden met hun betekenissen staan die niet of nauwelijks meer gebruikt worden in het Nederlands. Het gaat dan om woorden die tot 150 jaar geleden, maar vaak ook nog veel recenter, gangbaar waren in het Nederlands en nu om een veelvoud aan verschillende redenen niet meer in zwang zijn. Deze worden afgewisseld met een pagina of twee aan culturele achtergronden die de maatschappelijke situatie van vroeger uitleggen, bijvoorbeeld hoe vroeger schoongemaakt en gewassen werd met alle daarbij behorende en nu verdwenen woorden.
Hieronder staat een aantal van de leukste, treffendste en soms ook nuttigste die ik heb weten te vinden met soms een voorbeeldzin. Let op: er wordt vaak gebruik gemaakt van oude spellings- en grammaticaregels en die heb ik in de lemma's en definities behouden.

a
afhoeren (zich) ww. (ik hoerde mij af, heb mij afgehoerd) zich door overmaat van wellust in het verderf storten
afzitten (zich) ww. (ik zat af, heb/ben afgezeten) moede worden van zitten
- Ik heb de hele dag niks gedaan en nu ben ik afgezeten.

b
baardhen v. vrouw met eenen baard
bibaceren ww (ik bibaceerde, heb gebibaceerd) onder allerlei boert veel drinken

d
droppelpis v. pijnlijke waterloozing

f
fniezen ww. (ik fniesde, heb gefniesd) onwillekeurig en hoorbaar proesten door den neus en de keel
- Toen hij over zijn vakantie naar Rome zei dat hij nog nooit eerder in Spanje was geweest, moest de hele klas fniezen.

g
gebild bn. dik van billen
- De zangeres Jennifer Lopez heeft bijgedragen aan de toenemende mate waarin gebilde vrouwen worden gezien als voldoenend aan het schoonheidsideaal.
geeuwhonger m. zenuwtoeval ten gevolge van het langdurig ontberen van voedsel
(Misschien is het een leuk idee om hiervan de verwensing "Krijg de geeuwhonger!" te vormen, indien dat nog niet bestaat.)

h
hekelteef o. boos wijf; xantippe
hotje o. (-s) oogenblikje

i
invidieus bn. afgunstig

k
kakocratie v. (-ën) slechte regering
kevis v. bijwijf
- Na een langdurige periode van seksuele spanning, bedroog hij uiteindelijk zijn vrouw en maakte hij van zijn secretaresse zijn kevis.
konkel v. (-s) vaatdoek, vod; (fig.) lui, vadsig vrouwspersoon
kwalijkvaren o. het ongelukkig zijn

l
leemtig bn. gemeen, laag; leemtig schuim het gemeene volk
letterbaas m. geleerd man
- Met zijn uitmuntende dissertatie bewees hij absoluut een letterbaas te zijn.
(Er is, mijns inziens, niets op tegen om hiervan de vrouwelijke vorm letterbazin af te leiden.)
leugenlegende v. (-n) verzonnen verhaal
lichthater m. die de duisternis boven het licht verkiest; (fig.) domper, vijand van verlichting en beschaving
- In het politieke klimaat van de 21e eeuw tieren de lichthaters welig.
ligtomdeintje o. ontuchtig vrouwspersoon
(Mag van mij - niet van het woordenboek - ook voor mannen gebruikt worden)
lodderlijk bijw. wellustig, geil
lolster v. (fig.) slecht zanger, slechte zangeres

m
manslag m. (geen mv.) moord
marktvlek o. groot dorp
- Sinds hij in Amsterdam is gaan wonen vindt hij de rest van Nederland één marktvlek.
Moffrika (scheldnaam) Duitsland

n
nazinnen diep nadenken
nippelen ww. (ik nippelde, heb genippeld) iem. uit geile drift gedurig betasten
- Nu moet je ophouden met mij te nippelen, anders sla ik je voor je smoel!

o
ochlocratie v. regering van het gepeupel

s
sleurwerk o. werk van de gewoonte, van de sleur (zonder genie of nieuwe vinding)
sneuken, sneukeren ww. (ik sneukte/sneukerde, heb gesneukt/gesneukerd) in stilte genieten
spijkertjeswee o. het verdriet dat fietsers, automobilisten enz. hebben door het lek worden hunner luchtbanden door spijkertjes op den weg

v
veelmannerij v. (geen mv.) onnatuurlijk verkeer der mannen

w
woordenvitter m. die de woorden in al hunne volkomene zuiverheid overeenkomstig de taalen spelregelen wil geschreven en gesproken hebben, purist

Uiteraard heb ik heel veel weggelaten om meerdere redenen: het begrip of voorwerp waarnaar het woord verwees is niet meer gebruikelijk (wie gebruikt er naast hobbyisten nog zegelwas? En de atomistiek is inmiddels een verlaten wetenschappelijk begrip); het woord kan echt niet meer (van zambo 'kind eens negers en eener indiaanse vrouw' kun je denken: sterf maar uit); of het woord voelt (te) Frans aan en dan hebben wij tegenwoordig al gauw de associatie met 'bekakt' taalgebruik.
Over dat laatste, ik geef even een greep uit de woorden onder de d: decoloreren, defigureren, deguiseren, derideren, desappointeren, devasteren, difficulteit, difformiteit en divorceren. Overigens bestaan al deze woorden ook in het Engels en is het heel goed denkbaar dat deze woorden uiteindelijk, met een al dan niet (licht) andere betekenis, terugkeren in het Nederlands. Maar je moet erg voorzichtig zijn met dat soort voorspellingen.

Dixi.

Over artsen en artiesten

Ik had eerlijk gezegd nog nooit zo heel erg nagedacht over het Nederlandse woord arts. Goed, ik wist dat het woord in het Duits bestond als Arzt en ging er dan altijd maar vanuit dat we het, net als zoveel woorden, van onze oosterburen hadden overgenomen. Dat bleek ten dele waar te zijn.

De website van de etymologiebank is een handige plaats om op te zoeken waar een woord vandaan komt, wanneer het voor het eerst in het Nederlands verschenen is, hoe de betekenis door de eeuwen heen veranderd is (indien van toepassing, natuurlijk) en zelfs of het woord in het Afrikaans bestaat met alle bovenstaande informatie voor die taal. Dit is het verhaal van het woord arts.

Volgens de etymologiebank verschijnt het woord in de betekenis 'dokter' voor het eerst in het 10e-eeuwse, Oud-Nederlandse (!) manuscript genaamd de Wachtendonkse Psalmen. Het heeft dan de vorm ercetere. Even ter verduidelijking: Oud-Nederlands is de taal van het overbekende regeltje Hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu, uuat unbidan uue nu. Nu heb ik drie redelijk hoofdpijn bezorgende uren de integrale tekst van de Wachtendonkse Psalmen doorgespit en dit woord noch in deze vorm aangetroffen, noch in een andere, creatief gespelde vorm. Maar goed, we nemen dit voor het gemak maar even voor waar aan. Een oud woord dus.
Daarnaast komt het ook nog voor in de alleraardigste verbinding arzatwurze 'geneeskrachtig kruid', waarin het woord wortel te herkennen valt, vgl. de huidige Duitse woorden Wurzel 'wortel' en Würze 'kruiderij, specerij' en Wurz 'plant, kruid, wortel'.

Het Middelnederlands is beter gedocumenteerd en dus vinden we dit woord dan ook vaker terug met, karakteristiek voor het Middelnederlands, verscheidene spellingsvormen, zoals ersetre, arseter, arsetere, ersetere en later: arsete. De verkorting arsetere > arsete kan een gevolg zijn van contaminatie met het Middelnederlandse woord artist, beklemtoond op de eerste lettergreep (zoals nog steeds in het Engels het geval is). Aldus de etymologiebank.

Wacht. Ho. Stop. Het woord artist heeft het woord voor arts beïnvloed? En hoe mag ik me dat dan voorstellen? We maken even een uitstapje naar het woord artiest en zijn geschiedenis.

Niet verbazingwekkend komt dit woord van het middeleeuws Latijnse woord artista. Ietwat verbazingwekkender is wellicht dat de betekenis in der tijd die van 'beoefenaar der vrije kunsten (de zogeheten artes liberales)' was. In het Middelnederlands is de vorm artiste - met een korte i - overgeleverd. Onder de artes liberales vielen onder andere de beroepen retoricus en, jawel!, medicus.
De betekenis en de vorm die wij nu kennen (artiest met een lange ie) is waarschijnlijk het gevolg van een  latere herontlening uit het Frans omstreeks het midden van de 17e eeuw, waarna de oude betekenis vervangen wordt en voornamelijk betrekking gaat hebben op schilders, beeldhouwers en graveurs.

Met andere woorden, het is enigszins logisch dat er een contaminatie plaatsvond tussen arts en artist, gezien het feit dat de twee woorden een veel nauwer betekenisverband hadden dan wij nu, enkele eeuwen later, zouden denken.
Voor we naar de oorsprong van het woord arts springen (het uiteindelijke doel van dit stukje) moet nog even vermeld worden dat het woord al in het Oud-Hoogduits vanaf de 9e eeuw bekend is als Arzāt. In sommige gevallen zouden de Nederlandse equivalenten het gevolg kunnen zijn van directe ontlening aan het Duits.

De onthulling

Uiteindelijk gaan alle vormen, ook de Duitse, terug op middeleeuws Latijn arciater uit Laat Latijn archiater, of archiatrus, wat dan zelf weer (surprise, surprise!) ontleend is aan het Griekse woord arkhiātrós. Dit is samengesteld uit de onderdelen arkhi- 'opper, aarts-' (het voorvoegsel aarts- is zelf ook afgeleid van het Griekse arkhi- en heeft niets te maken met het woord aarde, vandaar de t) en het woord iātrós 'dokter'. De oorspronkelijke betekenis was dus die van 'opperdokter'.

Dus het woord arts begon in het Grieks, reisde vervolgens af naar het Laat Latijn en bleef daar tot de Middeleeuwen, maakte vervolgens een uitstapje naar zowel het Nederlands als het Duits, beïnvloedde vanuit het Duits de Nederlandse vorm, de Nederlandse vorm werd ook misschien nog eens zijdelings beïnvloed door het volslagen andere, maar qua betekenis gerelateerde woord artist, totdat het bij ons komt in zijn huidige vorm. Een hele reis, me dunkt.

Dixi.

Indo-Europeans, their language and why they influence you to this day

The story of the Indo-European language family is that of a plucky little tribe of nomadic or semi-nomadic people who inhabited the southern part of modern-day Ukraine around 2500 BC. Their language was never written down, forcing resourceful historical linguists several millennia later to reconstruct it based on clues and correspondences found in the individual language groups. These linguists prefer to work with the oldest material available and the general motto is: 'the older, the better'.

You may have noticed before that there are quite a few correspondences between English, German and Dutch, as in the following examples:

English	Dutch	German
father	vader	Vater
live	leven	leben
hundred	honderd	hundert

This is not surprising, as these languages are all classified as belonging to the West-Germanic branch of the Germanic language group. But what if we compare the word father, for example, with some other languages? We'll take some old languages and compare them to the word father.

Sanskrit pitā, Greek patēr, Latin pater, Gothic fadar

Gothic is the oldest attested Germanic language. Between vowels, a single d was probably pronounced as the th in Modern English father. Already, we can see an interesting correspondence, namely that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *p corresponds to an f in Germanic. The sound that is the result of a regular sound change from an older language is called its reflex. So, Germanic f is the reflex of PIE *p (the asterisk * means it is a reconstructed form and therefore not found in any written source). Linguists use the following shorthand:

PIE *p > Germ. f (or rather Proto-Germ. *f)

This process is called sound change. Its principles and finer points are something I'm going to leave for another day.

Now some less transparent forms:

Old Irish athir, Armenian hayr (which comes from a reconstructed earlier form *haþir; þ = th as in thin)

In Armenian PIE *p became h at the beginning of a word and w after vowels. The beginning of a word is often called by the German name Anlaut or anlaut. In shorthand:

PIE *p	Arm.	h / #_
		w / V_

(the slash / means 'under the condition'; # is used to indicate the word boundary, if # is at the beginning, it means the beginning of a word, if it stands at the end, it means the end of a word; V is a shorthand meaning 'any vowel'; and the underscore _ means the position in the word the sound is in. So this shorthand can be read as: Proto-Indo-European *p has the reflex h in Armenian under the condition that *p was in anlaut and it has the reflex w under the condition that it stood after any vowel. This cumbersome and  long sentence explains why historical linguists prefer to work with shorthand notations.)

Old Irish lost the PIE *p completely. So:

PIE *p > OIr ø
(ø means zero, or the disappearance of a sound)

Naturally, the word for father is not the only word that has been reconstructed for PIE, but I used this example to demonstrate that there are regular correspondences that, reason suggests, must have come from the same ancestral language.

A word of caution to this tale: correspondences between words in different languages does not automatically imply kinship. There can be other factors at work, such as borrowing (think of all the words from French and Latin in English that have been borrowed). That is why historical linguists choose the oldest available data for their reconstruction, since the external influences on sounds and lexicon will be minimal and therefore closer to the proto-language they are trying to reconstruct.

The players in the Indo-European language theater

The following is a list of the groups in the Indo-European language family with some of the more important languages used for reconstruction in parentheses. It is by no means exhaustive, but it will give you a rough idea of the scope of languages we are talking about.

• Indic (mainly Sanskrit, the Rigveda are especially important)
• Iranian (Avestan)
• Baltic (Lithuanian, Old Prussian, Latvian to a certain extent)
• Slavic (Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croat)
• Anatolian (Hittite, this group is extinct)
• Tocharian (two varieties, indicated with A and B; both are extinct)
• Greek (Homeric, Classical, Mycenaean)
• Italic (Latin)
• Celtic (Old Irish)
• Germanic (Gothic, Old High German, Old Norse, Old English)
• Armenian

There are others, but these are either too poorly attested (mainly names of people or places) or have reached us in written form at a much later date after having undergone many innovations, most notably Albanian.
Bless the Internet, because some brave soul has made an exhaustive overview of all the Indo-European languages (living or dead).

We'll return to Proto-Indo-European, some of the principles behind language reconstruction and sound laws (including many examples of reflexes) at a later time. Until then, I leave you with a map that shows how the Indo-European languages have spread out across the world, largely due to colonialism by the English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch. But also the spread of Russian through the medium of the Russian Empire first and later the Soviet Union has contributed to the fact that Indo-European languages are now spoken in most of world, either as a native language, or as a recognized official language.

Dixi.

Taalverhaspelingen waar ik stiekem toch om moet lachen en een voorstel tot ander gebruik van enkele

Je kent het wel. Iemand zegt of schrijft iets en gebruikt een woord dat vaak wel op het juiste woord lijkt, maar toch verkeerd is. Soms leidt dat tot hilariteit. Ewoud Sanders geeft in zijn boek Aarsrivalen, scheldkarbonades en terminale baden een aantal geweldige voorbeelden, zoals een Rotterdamse vrouw die op het consultatiebureau trots zegt dat ze de genitaliën van haar kinderen op haar arm heeft laten tatoeëren (ze bedoelde initialen), of de president-commissaris van een bouwstoffenhandel die bij de aandeelhoudersvergadering opende met de woorden: "Ik kan met genoegen vaststellen dat het scrotum aanwezig is en dat derhalve rechtsgeldige besluiten kunnen worden genomen." Hij bedoelde quorum. Of dat hopen we dan maar.
Ewoud Sanders is overigens een prima bron van taalweetjes en de nodige verzamelingen van dingen die hij woordinfecties noemt, een term waarvan hij toegeeft dat hij hem niet zelf heeft bedacht. Het is wel een treffende term waarvan ik hoop dat die zich wijderverbreidt. Op zijn website kun je een groot aantal van zijn boeken gratis downloaden voor eigen gebruik. Hulde aan Ewoud Sanders voor dit initiatief.
Vaker zullen mensen die het beter weten - want er zijn altijd mensen die het beter weten - echter een geërgerde houding aannemen over zo veel ingebeelde domheid. Niet doen. Is nergens voor nodig. Afgezien van het feit dat we allemaal fouten maken in ons taalgebruik, zijn de regeltjes niet heilig. Ik kies daarom hier voor een andere houding, namelijk dat we deze taalverhaspelingen een andere betekenis gaan geven en die in de nieuwe zin gaan gebruiken. Een aantal voorbeelden:

1) kwakkeloos - klakkeloos

Het juiste woord is klakkeloos in een zin als:

"Hij nam de antwoorden van zijn buurman tijdens het proefwerk klakkeloos over."

Hier betekent het iets als 'zonder bedenken, zonder overweging, onnadenkend'.

Maar kwakkeloos is een te leuk woord om zomaar te verbannen naar het rijk van Grove Voudten en Misdaden Jegens de Nederlandsche Tael. Mijn voorstel voor de nieuwe definitie en een aantal voorbeeldzinnen.

kwakkeloos (bn.), (gezegd over een man) niet in staat kinderen te verwekken.
- Omdat Laurens kwakkeloos is, hebben hij en Rita besloten de weg van de adoptie te bewandelen.
- Sinds zijn vasectomie gaat Herbert kwakkeloos maar gelukkiger door het leven.

2) heetgeblakerd - heetgebakerd

Blakeren betekent 'de oppervlakte branden' of 'door straling verwarmen'. Als de zon blakert, betekent dat dat de zon fel schijnt en na een brand kunnen de muren van een huis geblakerd zijn.

Heetgebakerd betekent iets als 'driftig, opvliegend' en komt van het woord baker 'vroedvrouw', waarbij de achterliggende gedachte was dat de manier van bakeren invloed had op iemands karakter.

Tijd voor een nieuwe definitie.
heetgeblakerd (bn.), in hoge, vaak onnatuurlijk ogende mate bruin geworden door de zon.
- Anja kwam zo heetgeblakerd terug uit Spanje dat het leek alsof ze twee weken in het tosti-ijzer had gelegen.

Het merendeel van de verhaspelingen die ik heb gevonden zijn ofwel heel flauw, of produceren een woord dat al bestaat en een andere betekenis heeft, maar ik stel hierbij de mogelijkheid open voor verdere suggesties.

Ego dixi.

Introduction - Introductie - Předmluva

I intend to post things in Dutch (my native language) as well as English (my preferred language) about language, languages, linguistics and related topics. The topics will be quite varied, ranging from, for example, the etymology (origin) of words and the path they have taken to their current use to grammatical constructions, from phonetics and the International Phonetic Alphabet to linguistic development throughout the ages and whatever else I deem interesting. Also, there might be an excursion sometimes during which I rant and vent my frustrations about other real-world topics. These represent my relatively poorly informed opinion on matters outside my specialist subject and should not be seen as authoritative, or, for that matter, taken too seriously.
We all have a different relationship with our language and a person's attitude towards it, I feel, can be placed somewhere of the spectrum of casual indifference ("as long as they understand what I mean, spelling, grammar, punctuation, word use and phrasing don't really matter") to a hypersensitive notion of equating mastery of the language to intelligence and the ability to think ("if you don't know the ins and outs of the language perfectly, you are obviously retarded and not fit to function in civilized society"). Neither extreme is desirable.
Those who have adopted the former attitude will find that they frequently will be subject to ridicule and scorn and it will be harder for them to be taken seriously when presenting something in writing. If they use words "wrong" or mispronounce them (very easily done in English in particular), it can lead to fairly embarrassing situations. I cannot say this with certainty, but I suspect that this attitude has to do with a certain amount of pragmatic thought that characterizes our age as well as a shift in what we deem important. For whatever reasons, society equates usefulness of knowledge with the capacity to use that knowledge to generate money. For example, the bulk of the exact sciences are seen as useful, because they frequently lead to billion-dollar inventions and well-paid jobs. The humanities and, to a certain extent, the social sciences, seldom if ever lead to such a financial boost and are therefore dismissed as not worth pursuing or even as something akin to a hobby. This might be a new phenomenon, but I have not done an extensive study to see how people viewed the humanities in the past and if there ever actually was such a thing as a broad level of admiration of the arts, or if it was merely seen as something that people pursued who were well-off in society.
Those who lean towards the latter option should be aware that no one uses any language, whether it be their own or not, perfectly and that language changes. This appears to be a timeless problem, because ever since people have begun writing about their language - and they have been doing so for quite a few centuries - and its use, there have been complaints about the younger generations as well as people perceived as intellectually inferior. These linguistic innovations tend to be seen as an abomination, as a degeneration and corruption of the language, which will carry us all to the precipice of the abyss and plummet us into a thousand years of despair, during which time we will be so intellectually backward that we simply have no choice but to return to cave paintings and hoarse grunting of monosyllabic imperatives. This, demonstrably, is nonsense.
These people would do well to remember that they do not communicate on a daily basis in the Old English of Beowulf, the Middle English of Chaucer and Spenser or, for that matter, the Elizabethan English made world-famous by William Shakespeare. (Obviously, this also goes for Dutch, French and all the other languages spoken by people around the world with significant numbers of people who whine about a decline in standards.) Language changes over time and languages strive for a midway point in the dynamic equilibrium between expressive capacity on one hand and a simplicity that facilitates its use on the other. Language did not come into being to satisfy the aesthetic whims of the intellectual elite, but rather as a tool that facilitated cooperation for the tribal monkeys known as humans. Furthermore, the sounds of a language change over time, which often has consequences for the grammar and therefore the structure of a language. There is a continuous influx of new words and new terms, as well as words that are banished to the realm of the obsolete. This can happen because the objects and concepts they describe are no longer commonplace, or simply because they are replaced by different words. In that sense, words are a little bit like living beings, in that they come into being, experience a level of success during which they thrive and eventually die out. The success of a word depends on what it describes. Words like father, cow, nose, tooth, foot, brother, daughter, eight, work, snow and acre are incredibly old and have been reconstructed for Proto Indo-European (the parent language for a lot of the languages ranging from Iceland to India). More on Proto Indo-European, abbreviated as PIE, in due time.
For a large part, our attitude towards language is determined by the position our scholars have taken on the matter. Up until about the mid-twentieth century this attitude was largely dominated by a prescriptive one, which means that the rules for the language had been drawn up, based largely on the norms of literature and high culture, and subsequently taught to those fortunate enough to receive an education as correct and proper. Literature, however, had different norms and standards than colloquial varieties of a language, which means that there was a gap between the lucky few who were educated and the overwhelming majority of people who used the language on a daily basis as it actually existed at this time. These varieties interacted with each other to a certain extent, but for the most part those who spoke the language in its colloquial variety, or any variety that deviated from the norm, were seen as intellectually unsound and their language as base.
Socioeconomic positions and education were not the only driving factor behind promoting the standard language in a form perceived as more pure. Cultural influence, mostly centered around capitals of nations, also was a driving factor behind the elevation of the language of high culture as something superior, since these regions usually started playing a leading role in the production of more literature. In France, this role was fulfilled by Paris, in England by London, in The Netherlands by the dialects of Flanders and Brabant, after that those of Holland (the Dutch pronunciation of the standard language is largely based on the old dialect of Haarlem, a little bit west of Amsterdam) and later by the city of Amsterdam, in the Czech Republic (first as Bohemia, then as Czechoslovakia and since the Velvet Revolution as the independent Czech Republic) this has been Prague. As a result, dialects, a term that is notoriously difficult to define and which is largely based on political grounds, were also seen as inferior, an attitude that pervades in most countries to the present day.
This does not mean, of course, that the standard or standardized language and those who promote it, are inherently evil devil spawn hellbent on the destruction of anything that is different. Standardized languages have had a hard time from their inception, since they were based on the vernacular of a relatively small region in a country. They had to be promoted and fight for their existence. They also have merit, since they allow us to communicate with speakers of our language throughout a country or even, in the case of English, French, Spanish, etc, with speakers across several countries.
There is much more to be said on the dynamics of the standard language between regional variations, other languages (for instance, in former colonies) and linguae franca, in which one language influences completely different languages outside its immediate sphere of influence, but that would mean that this introduction would turn into a little bit of an extensive scholarly publication. Suffice it to say that these fears and complaints about decline in language use are based on the wrong idea, namely that one stage of the language is intrinsically superior to another, often more contemporary, form. Those who adopt a fully prescriptive view of language use are fighting a losing battle: full preservation of a language without wanting to change anything leads to its demise. New words, forms, figures of speech, and so on, only enrich the language and adjust it to the needs of the time.
That's all well and good, but does that mean we shouldn't care if people don't know how to properly write the word definitely, or place apostrophes wrong, or use completely different tenses than the ones they're supposed to use? No. Just because the prescriptive extreme does not offer a useful approach, does not mean we should move to the other extreme and just let everybody write things however they want to, phrase things in a manner that is often unintelligible and not care about the standard language. The answer, I feel, lies somewhere in the middle: you should care about how you spell, phrase and structure things, because it will determine how well you can get your point across. Just make sure that in the process you don't fetishize use of the language in question that corresponds to all the intricate rules and start dehumanizing those who make mistakes by belittling them and labeling them as stupid. After all, if you said something you thought was correct and somebody corrected you and called you a moron, would you seize that opportunity to learn, or would you start one of those delightfully tedious internet fights that ultimately form a tremendous waste of time and energy and are extremely unproductive. Correct, if you must, but don't belittle. Accept that change is inherent to life and therefore language. Don't fear knowledge, but seek to gain it instead. Stray beyond what you know and expose yourself to different views. Knowing something and understanding something does not mean you have to agree with it. Be wary of what is posted on the Internet, since the majority of it is not edited, filtered or managed and often written with an agenda. Read like a filter, not a sponge. And care, care a great deal about a lot of different things. Useful tenets to life, I would imagine.