Languages In the World (36 page)
Read Languages In the World Online
Authors: Julie Tetel Andresen,Phillip M. Carter
In Chapter 7, we mentioned in passing that places like the Caucasus and Papua New Guinea are called residual zones, and these are places where languages accumulate and survive. This term is the creation of linguist Johanna Nichols (1992) in
Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time
, where she also analyzes the language dynamics of spread zones, which are places where languages spread out and succeed one another. These two types of zones are not the only relevant ones for comparative work, but they are two important and common types of linguistic areas. They are both subcontinental in size, but their size is not what defines them. Other criteria, such as relative linguistic diversity, center/periphery, and internal stability, are the critical factors. Nichols's work is a great contribution to linguists' understanding of the languages of the world, and we summarize it here.
A
residual zone
tends to be a relatively small, sometimes even enclosed area where a higher number of languages from diverse lineages (families, stock, phyla) are spoken than in the areas surrounding it. The residual zones around the world, in addition to the Caucasus and Papua New Guinea, include: eastern Africa, northern Australia, the Pamir-Himalayan region, the Pacific coast of northern Asia (from Japan to the Behring Strait), the Pacific coast of North America, probably the southeastern United States, and presumably parts of South America. Clearly, some of these residual zones are historic; the Pacific coast of North America was once home to many Native American stocks and families, but no more.
We must also mention the Balkans. When we first brought up this language area in Chapter 3, we offered examples of structural convergences particular to the languages spoken there only in terms of examples from Romanian. Here, we return to the topic of clitics and note that the use of a proclitic to intensify meaning is found throughout the Balkans. In contemporary colloquial Bulgarian, for instance, the intensifying proclitic takes the form of
po-
and combines with nouns:
| po Äuvik |
| âmore of a man' |
and verbs:
| po ubiÄeÅ¡ |
| âmore you like (you like more)' |
(Klagstad 1963:182).
Another type of clitic is found in pronoun agreement in gender and number of the type âI saw-her Mary.' These agreement pronouns usually occur with an accusative or dative object that is definite. Here is an example from Macedonian, a South Slavic language:
| mu go | davam | moliv-ot | na | momÄe-to |
| him-it | I give | pencil-the | to | boy-the |
| (definite masculine) | (definite neuter) | |||
| âI give the pencil to the boy' |
The utterance begins with the clitics
mu
âthird singular, neuter dative' (which refers to the boy) and
go
âthird singular, masculine, accusative' (which refers to the pencil). These clitics set up the grammatical structure of the entire sentence, which is given particular content (boy, pencil) as the utterance unfolds. We mentioned in passing in Chapter 3 that there are limited ways humans have found to keep track of grammatical relations in a rapidly fading signal. Setting up definite objects and their relationship to one another at the beginning is one way to track slightly complex utterances.
The important point here is that clitic pronoun agreement is standard in both spoken and written Macedonian, but it is found typically only colloquially, to varying degrees, in Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian. It is excluded in formal contexts in these other languages because the older prestige languages did not have it, and it is therefore considered colloquial. For instance, in the translations of the Bible, Modern Greek and Bulgarian versions do not use pronoun reduplication, while Albanian and Romanian require it in some contexts (Friedman 2006:213). The usual explanation for the rise of these clitics is that the populations that spoke these languages were illiterate for so long. However, the explanation may actually lie in the fact that the rise of clitics is an effect of residual zone dynamics where many and diverse languages are spoken by multilingual populations.
In the Balkans, there is quite a lot of linguistic diversity and structural complexity in an area a little smaller than Texas. It is pertinent to note that Istanbul sits on its southeastern border. This important and attractive city drew many different people over the centuries to pillage and plunder or to ply a trade. These attempts sometimes left residual languages on the edges, namely the Balkans. The Balkans furthermore exemplify other features of the many residual zones, which can be found dotted all over the world:
- Many of the languages have been there for a long time.
- The populations speaking the languages do not expand; the homeland remains the homeland.
- Over time, there is a net increase in the diversity of the lineages of the languages spoken there; for this reason, residual zones are also sometimes called
refugia
: languages take refuge there; however, they are not pushed into the zone but drawn into it. - Language isolates are likely to be found in these areas.
- There is no lingua franca for the entire area; local bilingualism or multilingualism is the means of interethnic communication.
- The zones, although they are made up of languages from very different lineages, nevertheless share a standard linguistic profile of structural diversity.
This last feature of a residual zone is, perhaps, the most remarkable of all. Let us mention here one structural feature, namely clitics. These grammatical elements are sometimes called
semifree
or, even,
detached
. When they first appear in a language, they are felt as optional or as only appropriate in one speaking register, as noted above in the difference between the presence and absence of the pronoun clitics in colloquial versus formal speech in certain Balkan languages. What is interesting is that, if these clitics do attach to anything, they attach to the verbs, as in Romanian
am vazut-
o
pe Maria
âI have seen-
her
(by) Mary' that is, âI saw Mary.'
Marking of gender, number, and case on the verb, namely the head, of the sentence, instead of on the object, namely Mary, is a definite shift away from the usual Indo-European preference for marking on dependent constituents. In the Balkans, this clitic pattern is not native to any language in the zone. It could be attributed to accident or to anything else, but Nichols's educated guess is that: “The clitic pronouns are the spontaneous response to language contact, and the rise of such clitics in an otherwise dependent-marking language is to be expected in residual zones and at the peripheries of spread zones” (1992:272). Close proximity of diverse languages in a relatively small area is, thus, one of the many conditions languages catch up to. Such a condition produces the linguistic effect of speakers feeling the need to mark grammatical relations on the verb, which often comes upfront in an utterance.
A
spread zone
, by way of contrast, is a potentially larger area than a residual zone, but, more importantly, it is geographically spacious. It is also an area characterized by low genetic diversity, that is, low genetic density, which is measured by the ratio of genetic stocks to million square miles of area. To make a comparison, the residual zone of the Caucasus has six stocks and a genetic density of 16.1, while the spread zone of Europe has six stocks and a genetic density of 1.6 (Nichols 1992:233). Spread zones in the world include: the Ancient Near East, sub-Saharan Africa, the Europe in the days of the Roman Empire, the Eurasian steppe, central and northern Australia, the Great Plains of North America, Mesoamerica, and the entire Arctic region. The zones may be open, such as the Great Plains and Siberia, where people can enter from all directions, or they may be closed, when isolated by ecological barriers, for instance, the water surrounding Australia.
Spread zones have the following characteristics:
- Usually only one language family and possibly only one language dominate the area.
- The amount of time that it dominates is limited before another language comes along, spreads, and replaces the previously dominant language.
- Languages in these areas do not stay in their original locations for long periods.
- The dominant language is dominant in terms of cultural and economic prestige and functions as a lingua franca for the entire area.
- Because of this prestige, the dominant language has effects on the languages it comes in contact with.
- The profile of the dominant language spoken in the spread zone is unique to that spread zone; there is no convergence of linguistic features, such as the cliticization that seems to crop up continually in residual zones.
Like residual zones, some of the spread zones have a historic character. The Great Plains of North America, for instance, were once a spread zone just as, to their west, the Pacific coast was once a residual zone. The plains were originally covered by only a few language stocks, mainly Algonquin and Siouan. However, they lack a significant characteristic found in other spread zones. On the plains, there were no cities on the peripheries, such as there are along the southern edges of the Eurasian steppe. The lack of cities in North America could be the reason why there was
relatively
little bi- and multilingualism on the plains, because there were no settled locations where tribes/nations could meet up for trade and talk, and no centers where linguistic innovations could arise and from which the features could spread. Certainly, on the east coast, the Iroquois had what would be recognized today as towns, but they were far from the spread zone. Only Teotihuacán and Chichen Itzá, both in present-day Mexico, and then Machu Picchu in present-day Peru could be considered urban centers in pre-Columbian times.
Centers are defined not geographically but rather by the magnitude of cultural influence. London is hardly at the geographic center of Great Britain, but it has functioned historically as the linguistic center from which innovations spread. The extent of any particular linguistic spread defines the periphery.
Nichols has devoted much research to the linguistic profile of the Eurasian steppe spread zone. This 5000-mile grassland in the center of the landmass is a closed spread zone whose east/west boundary is the Altai Mountains, which place China and Mongolia on the eastern part of the steppe and Russia and Kazakhstan on the western steppe. It is furthermore bounded on the north by Siberian forests and on the south by the Central Asian Desert, mountains, and the Gobi Desert. It begins all the way in Manchuria in northeast Asia and continues westward to the Black Sea and Moldova as well as the northern parts of Romania. It finds a tail end in Hungary. The steppe is also a relatively closed economic zone, in that steppe nomadic herding (sheep, goats, yaks) is complementary to farming-based societies found at the periphery. Although the two economic systems were dependent on one another for most of recorded history, the cities on the periphery were dominated politically by the steppe society (Nichols
2011:180). The domestication of the horse on the steppe about 3000 years ago may have given the nomads their political superiority. There is evidence that the Great Wall of China was begun 2000 years ago by Chinese farmers to keep out Mongolian horsemen from the north who needed grain.
What has happened on the steppe since the breakup of the Indo-European languages, roughly 4000 years ago, has determined the current linguistic picture for this major part of the world.
We begin by noting that the first steppe spread is believed to be Proto-Uralic, but it is difficult to prove definitively. The first identifiable language stock to spread over the steppe was Indo-European, and it likely spread from the western steppe. It also likely covered the steppe around the time of the Indo-European breakup about 4000 years ago. Thereafter, the succession of languages illustrates Nichols's point that the time-depths of steppe language families are shallow. The first to spread was the Iranian daughter branch of Indo-European, and Persian began to dominate in the first millennium BCE and lasted there until the early centuries CE. Replacing it came Turkic, which as a family is now about 2000 years old, and by the end of the twelfth century the steppe was Turkic speaking. Replacing the Turkic family came Mongolian whose spread was halted by medieval plagues such as the Black Death in 1348. Notice now that one of the languages in the diversity-dense Caucasus is Ossetic, an Iranian language that was drawn into this residual zone on the periphery of the steppe when Turkic began to spread. Another language found there is Karachay-Balkar, a Turkic language that ended up there when the Mongolian spread began.
When Genghis Khan united the Mongolic tribes, the dominant languages on the steppes at the time were Turkic languages, and over time more and more Turkic-speaking men were drawn into the heavily westward- (but also northward-, eastward-, and southward-) moving Mongol army. Eventually the Turkic languages found their western-most edge in eastern Europe helped along by the Ottomans; and pockets of Turkish varieties exist still today in the residual zone of the Balkans. Another language in the Balkans shows the history of the western march of Turkic, namely Bulgarian, which is a Turkic ethnonym and a Slavic language. According to Nichols (2011:183), for the societies on the TurkicâMongolic steppe, language did not seem to be an important component of identity. Clans, and then tribes, were the important markers. Because of this sociolinguistic situation, when Proto-Hungarians joined the military, coming down from the Finno-Ugric homeland in the Uralic mountains or western Siberian forests north of the steppe, they retained their ethnic and linguistic identity for four centuries in the westward spread of TurkicâMongolic dominance. The Proto-Hungarians came to settle on the westernmost periphery of the spread zone, namely the northern shores of the Black Sea, having survived long-range migration linguistically intact but with plenty of borrowings.
In 869, the Magyars/Hungarians were called from the Black Sea by a Germanic king who wanted their help in fighting the Slavs. Thus, the Magyars arrived in what is now known as the Hungarian steppe and absorbed whoever was already there, namely some
Germanic, Slavic, and Turkic tribes. For the next century, they generally harassed the Italians, the Germans, and the French until they were defeated and settled down; their language did not expand until the Austro-Hungarian Empire many centuries later.
4
Thus was Hungarian stranded from its Uralic sisters â Finnish, Estonian, Saami â far to the north and east, and was drawn into the residual zone of the Balkans.
Spreading languages replace nearly every language they encounter that does not make it into a residual zone. In the case of the spread of MongolicâTurkic, Indo-European languages such as Scythian (Iranian) and Gothic (East Germanic)
5
were eliminated, along with Hunnish, which was likely Turkic, as well as eastern branches of Slavic/Russian spoken in places such as present-day Ukraine.
Nichols (2011:188) observes that the languages of inner Eurasia and especially eastern inner Eurasia share well-known structural features characteristic of the Ural-Altaic type:
- simple syllable structure;
- vowel harmony (see Language Profile: Mongolian, Chapter 11);
- front rounded vowels;
- no genders;
- simple prosodic structures (no tones, fixed stress);
- agglutinative morphology;
- primarily suffixing morphology;
- case systems;
- accusative alignment; and
- personal pronouns with [m] in the first person and a [t]-like consonant in the second.
Speakers of Indo-European languages are familiar with characteristics (vii)â(x), and (x) can be easily illustrated by English
me
and
mine
in the first person and
thou
/
thee
/
thine
in the obsolete second person. The languages of Eurasia furthermore share very regular verbal word formation in which the most basic form in the word family is intransitive, and semantic causatives are overtly derived from the corresponding noncausatives with transitizing morphology of the type: âfrighten' is âfear' + transitiving suffix. The languages are also notably noncomplex, regular, and transparent.
6
Among the spreading steppe languages, these properties increase over time and with more easterly origin, and come to an end with Mongolian. Many of these properties are shared by languages like Tungusic and Korean at the eastern steppe periphery, thus the argument of assigning Korean to the Altaic stock.
Nichols states that residual zones the world over converge on a linguistic profile, while the languages of the spread zones are unique to each spread zone. Thus, how the languages of the Eurasian spread zone come to share this set of structural properties must be explained, and the explanation is this: there was a lack of fresh typological input into the closed Eurasian spread zone. The last spread phases on the steppe were Bulgar Turkic, Common Turkic, Mongolian, and Mongolian plus Turkic. Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Turkic were structurally very similar to begin with, and with no new languages entering the steppe, the same so-called typological package spread each time. Furthermore, the similarity of the two protolanguages for Turkic and Mongolic
must owe something to contact, as they had been spoken in the same area for centuries before their spreads and had probably interacted closely throughout that time. This is a very different situation from the case of the Balkans where typologically very different languages not formerly in contact begin, over time, to produce clitics.
The discussion of the languages of the Eurasian landmass ends with the spread of the Slavs. By the fifth and certainly the sixth century CE, the Slavs occupied an area of central-eastern Europe, in the vicinity of the western Danube plain. From this relatively compact homeland, they came to occupy vast stretches of eastern Europe over the next 400 years. In the seventh and eighth centuries, they expanded to the north and east toward the Volga River, to the west toward the Alps, and to the south toward the Balkans, where they encountered people speaking a language inherited from the Romans. In this easternmost Romance territory,
invasion
is perhaps not the correct word to describe the process whereby Slavonic dispossessed Romance. It was more of a continuous infiltration. The Avars, who were kindred with the Turks, pushed a certain number of Slavs south of the Danube and into present-day Bulgaria.
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Slavic languages are phonetically distinctive for the array of palatalized consonants they all have, and these developed after Proto-Slavic became Common Slavonic after it broke away from PIE. Common Slavonic also tended to be conservative in terms of inflectional morphology, that is, it retained much of what was in PIE: three numbers (singular, dual, plural), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and seven cases (nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative). Common Slavonic had neither definite nor indefinite articles, and the modern languages today also do not. Bulgarian and Macedonian are exceptions in having articles, and their presence in these languages can be explained by areal contact in the Balkans. Similarly, the relative absence of the extensive case system of Common Slavonic in Bulgarian and Macedonian receives the same explanation.
To give examples of the Slavic case system from Polish, when
pies
âdog' is the subject, it is in the nominative case, but to show ownership, it becomes
psa
(genitive), and to mark location it becomes
psie
(locative). Polish also marks nouns morphologically with the instrumental case to indicate âby means of.' English speakers tend to do this with prepositions. Rather than saying âI'm writing with a new pen,' Polish speakers say:
| PiszÄ | nowy m | dÅugopis em |
| I write | new | pen |
| âI write with a new pen' |
The case endings
-m
on ânew' and âpen' agree and indicate âby means of.'
The Slavic languages are also distinctive for their use of verbal
aspect
âcharacter/perception/view of the action' rather than
tense
âtime when.' A tense system marks the time of an event with respect to another and sorts itself into categories such as
past
,
present
, and
future
. The aspectual systems of the Slavic languages pair one verb used for completed actions, known as the
perfective
, with a separate verb used for an incomplete action, known as the
imperfective
. Thus, in Polish, there are two verbs for the English âto buy':
kupiÄ
the perfective and
kupowaÄ
the imperfective. When conjugated, the separate verbs make the aspectual distinctions. The perfective
kupiÅem
means âI bought,' while the imperfective
kupowaÅem
means âI was buying.' So all
Polish verbal actions occur in pairs, which sometimes are formed through affixation, for example,
pisaÄ/napisaÄ
âto write,' or are suppletive, for example,
braÄ/wziÄ
Ä
âto bring.' The tense/aspect system of Polish can give a sense of time that is unfamiliar to English speakers. The present tense of the imperfective
kupujÄ
may mean âI buy' or âI am buying,' while the present tense of the perfective
kupiÄ
results in what we might call the future, since logically a completed action cannot take place in the present moment. Here the notion of tense familiar to English speakers takes a backseat to the prominence of the aspectual distinction in Polish.
Slavic specialist Alan Timberlake maps out much of the story of the Slavic homeland by means of hydronyms (names of rivers) found in and around what is known as the Ukrainian Mesopotamia, whose rivers drain southward into the Black Sea.
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To the north, the Pripyat River, whose
etymology
is contested between being of Baltic origin and of Slavic origin, marks a zone north of which Baltic hydronyms are found and south of which Slavic hydronyms are found. So, the uncertain etymology of the Pripyat makes a kind of sense. Far to the east, the Volga, which empties into the Caspian Sea, is a Slavic hydronym meaning âwetness, moisture' and seems to be a loan translation of the Scythian/Iranian name. On the western edge of the Ukrainian Mesopotamia, near the Dnieper River, there is a cluster of Slavic hydronyms, and it was from these population centers that the Slavs began to spread in the fifth century CE, which they did along rivers.
The Slavs went in a northerly direction, following the Dnieper and replacing Baltic populations and, further north, Finnic populations. They moved west along the Vistula into present-day southern Poland and then farther west into Bohemia by means of the Oder and Elbe Rivers. However, they did not absorb the local populations who withdrew as the invaders neared. As for their southern trajectory, there were the Dniester and Prut along the foothills of the Carpathians and then the northern shores of the Danube. Later they would be pushed into Bulgaria, as noted above. The key point is that the Slavic names for the major rivers â Dnieper, Dniester, Danube â are most likely Iranian, thereby suggesting the movement of Slavs into territories previously inhabited by Iranian people (Timberlake 2013:336â337).
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The arrival of the Slavs in the historic residual zone of the Caucasus has had a distinct and recently upsetting effect. Given the eventual rise of the Tsarist Empire followed by a dominant Soviet Union, Russian is now a lingua franca in the Caucasus, although historically speaking, residual zones do not have lingua francas. The large empires of the last several hundred years have altered the way residual zones have operated linguistically in the past 10,000 years. The same can be said about historic spread zones. Just as the Great Plains is no longer a spread zone today, neither is the Eurasian steppe. We will see in Chapter 9 just how dramatically Russian has affected the residual zone of the Caucauses, in specific relationship to Chechen and Georgian, both Caucasian languages, as well as to Ossetic, an Indo-European language also found in this residual zone. In short, the effect has been one of creating violence.