Sprachbund

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with the sociolinguistic term Sprechbund, or with Sprachraum, an area defined by a language.

A sprachbund (

genetically unrelated
, or only distantly related, but the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness.

A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Without knowledge of the history of a regional group of similar languages, it may be difficult to determine whether sharing indicates a language family or a sprachbund.[1]

History

In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship (rodstvo) and those arising from convergence due to language contact (srodstvo).[2][3]

Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз (yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article.[4] In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax, morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary.[5][3]

Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson,[6][7] have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy.[8][9][10]

A rigorous set of principles for what evidence is valid for establishing a linguistic area has been presented by Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark.[11]

Examples

The Balkans

Main article:
Balkan Sprachbund

The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to Jernej Kopitar's description in 1830 of Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of "nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie",[12] which has been rendered by Victor Friedman as "one grammar with the [sic] three lexicons".[13][14]

The

Serbo-Croatian), Greek, Balkan Turkish, and Romani
.

All but one of these are

Turkic language. Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive, future tense
formation, and others.

The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as the other Romance languages in relation to Romanian, and the other Slavic languages such as Polish in relation to Bulgaro-Macedonian.[9][14]

Mainland Southeast Asia

Languages of the

Mon–Khmer families.[15]

Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. A well-known example is the similar

tone split where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until André-Georges Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of the Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin.[15]

Similarly, the unrelated Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Many languages in the region are of the

derivational morphology
. Shared syntactic features include
topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families.[15]

Indian subcontinent

In a classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area",

subject–object–verb word order, discourse markers, and the quotative.[16]

Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families:

Tibeto-Burman. This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become a major field of research in language contact and convergence.[9][17][18]

Northeast Asia

Some linguists, such as

Samuel Martin and Sergei Starostin, are sometimes included as part of the purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including Roy Andrew Miller, John C. Street and Karl Heinrich Menges
.
agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion.[19]

The

Tibetan plateau spanning the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu, is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest Mandarin Chinese, Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages.[citation needed
]

Western Europe

Main article: Standard Average European

Standard Average European (SAE) is a concept introduced in 1939 by

language group
.

Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period. The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members.

Alexander Gode, who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua, characterized it as "Standard Average European".[21] The Romance, Germanic, and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of the language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund.

The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact in the time of the Migration Period[22] and later, continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.[citation needed] Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of the SAE features.[23]

Others

See also

Look up sprachbund in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

  1. ISBN 0-444-863117
    .
  2. ^ de Courtenay, Jan Baudouin (1904), "Jazykoznanie" [Linguistics], in Brokhaus, F.A.; Efron, I.A. (eds.), Enciklopedičeskij slovarʹ, vol. 31.
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-90-272-3100-0
    .
  4. ^ Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1923), "Vavilonskaja bašnja i smešenie jazykov" [The tower of Babel and the confusion of languages], Evrazijskij Vremennik, 3: 107–124.
  5. ^ Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. (1930), "Proposition 16. Über den Sprachbund", Actes du premier congrès international des linguistes à la Haye, du 10–15 avril 1928, Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, pp. 17–18.
  6. ^ Jakobson, Roman (1931), "Über die phonologischen Sprachbünde", Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague, 4: 234–240; reprinted in R. Jakobson: Selected writings, vol. 1: Phonological Studies. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971, pp. 137–148.
  7. ^ Jakobson, Roman (1938), "Sur la théorie des affinités phonologiques entre les langues", Actes du quatrième congrès international de linguistes tenu à Copenhague du 27 aout au 1er septembre, 1936, New York: Kraus Reprints, pp. 351–365.
  8. ^
    doi:10.1016/S0024-3841(98)00037-0
    .
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-90-420-1322-3
    .
  10. ^ Campbell, Lyle (2002), "Areal Linguistics: a Closer Scrutiny", 5th NWCL International Conference: Linguistic Areas, Convergence, and Language Change, archived from the original on 2012-03-13, retrieved 2010-09-25.
  11. ^ Campbell, Lyle, Terrence Kaufman, and Thomas C. Smith-Stark. "Meso-America as a linguistic area." Language (1986): 530-570.
  12. ^ Jernej K. Kopitar, “Albanische, walachische und bulgarische Sprache”, Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur 46 (1830): 59–106.
  13. ^ Friedman, Victor A. (1997), "One Grammar, Three Lexicons: Ideological Overtones and Underpinnings in the Balkan Sprachbund", Papers from the 33rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (PDF), Chicago Linguistic Society.
  14. ^ a b Friedman, Victor A. (2000), "After 170 years of Balkan Linguistics: Whither the Millennium?" (PDF), Mediterranean Language Review, 12: 1–15.
  15. ^
    hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0013-167B-C
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  16. JSTOR 410649
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  17. ISBN 978-0-8047-1047-3
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  18. ISBN 978-0-7486-0719-8
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  19. ISBN 978-0-7007-1133-8
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  20. ^ "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language", published in (1941), Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir Edited by Leslie Spier, A. Irving Hallowell, Stanley S. Newman. Menasha, Wisconsin: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund. pp 75–93.
    Reprinted in (1956), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamins Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press. pp. 134–159.
    Quotation is Whorf (1941:77–78) and (1956:138).

    The work began to assume the character of a comparison between Hopi and western European languages. It also became evident that even the grammar of Hopi bore a relation to Hopi culture, and the grammar of European tongues to our own "Western" or "European" culture. And it appeared that the interrelation brought in those large subsummations of experience by language, such as our own terms "time," "space," "substance," and "matter." Since, with respect to the traits compared, there is little difference between English, French, German, or other European languages with the 'possible' (but doubtful) exception of Balto-Slavic and non-Indo-European, I have lumped these languages into one group called SAE, or "Standard Average European."

    (quotation pp. 77–78) and as Whorf, B. L.
  21. ^ Alexander Gode, Ph.D. "Manifesto de Interlingua" (PDF) (in Interlingua). Retrieved February 10, 2013.
  22. ^ "Language Typology and Language Universals" accessed 2015-10-13
  23. ^ Haspelmath, Martin, 1998. How young is Standard Average European? Language Sciences.
  24. ISBN 978-0-19-953222-3
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  25. ^ Ferguson, Charles (1970), "The Ethiopian Language Area", The Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 8 (2): 67–80.
  26. ISBN 978-0-19-436102-6
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  27. S2CID 7883334
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  28. JSTOR 415477
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  29. ISBN 978-90-272-3100-0
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  30. ^ Schapper, Antoinette. "Wallacea, a linguistic area." Archipel. Études interdisciplinaires sur le monde insulindien 90 (2015): 99-151. Open Edition
  31. ISBN 978-3-86309-286-3
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