Eh, languages aren’t static things. They always grow and change. Though it will never stop driving me crazy that “addicting” is interchangeable with “addictive” now. Get off my lawn, American English!
PSA: Everyone responding to this thread would probably immensely enjoy reading the goddamn hilarious book Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way by Bill Bryson
This is a really wide open question. There are theories, but no one has any truly strong evidence. Steven Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist and linguist, and wrote an excellent book on the subject. It goes into several of the more common theories, and then lays out his own theory. Much of the book may be fairly dry if you don't have a real interest in language itself (how language works, as opposed to how it evolved), but I found it very worthwhile and fascinating.
I read a great book called Words on the Move that explains this and many other things, and it's made it a lot easier for me to chill out about the way other people use language.
Here is the book I read that finally made me resign myself to the evolution of 'literally': Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
Edited to add: And a related article I was trying to find the link to!
Great episode!
If anybody is interested in the history of cryptography and how it works, I suggest checking out "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography" (Amazon link).
Although I haven't finished the book yet, I've found it very interesting so far. A good chunk of the book talks about cryptography in WWI and WWII, which I found pretty interesting. The Zimmerman telegram mentioned in this video is included in the book I believe.
> I think it still holds up as an examination of what it means to be a person.
Agreed. Should have mentioned this too. I think I got mine for free from amazon:
TIL, and am reminded of W. C. Minor
(cut off his penis as a kind of self-punishment for sex addiction, with a side of paranoid scizophrenia)
You really can't find any solid evidence? The issue is essentially considered settled these days. Check out The Horse, The Wheel, and Language for starters.
>I was offering examples for my reasoning.
You weren't offering examples of reasoning, you were offering examples of assumptions, and given randomly at that. Even if either of those examples were actually based on the flimsy hypotheses you had given, what would that say about the origins of stories about fire breathing dragons?
>Offer sources about your position. Anyone can talk out the backside.
Sure. The Horse, The Wheel, and Language is an extremely highly regarded text that summarizes the past few decades of archaeological studies about the origins of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It's commonly cited in discussions about settling their origins and providing significant evidence for the Steppe Theory (the theory that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were the archaeological culture known as the Yamnaya). As the title implies, there's also a significant discussion about horse evolution.
I actually read a really interesting book about this guy, another guy, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's called 'The Professor and the Madman': amazon link
A quick Google search tells me it's also called 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne', and that there is now a movie based off it.
The Oxford Guide to Etymology has very brief glossary.
If you read it on a Kindle or in a Kindle app, you can select any word to check for a definition in Kindle's dictionary. The combination would provide definitions for most all of the etymology terms used in the book. It's more or less an introduction to etymology - not aimed at advanced students.
If you haven't read it, The Professor and the Madman is about this. It's a really good (and relatively quick) read.
This one:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IBZ405W/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
It's the same guy. I can't speak to the app, but the book is extremely good. I actually funded the app on kickstarter, but by the time it came out, I had already done the process from the book.
Some of his ideas that I was able to put into practice:
1) Learn sounds FIRST...too many people don't learn pronunciation and then can't fix it later. Book has a lot of concrete advice about how to go about it. (Probably contained in the app.)
2) First learn a list of around 600 concrete words, learn them by making flashcards with pictures. (He'll give you the list.) Use google images to search the words IN L2.
3) Then learn a frequency list. (Most frequent 4000 words or so)
4) When choosing immersion, go for TV series that you have seen before in L1...you already know the characters and what is going on and can concentrate on the language.
There's a bunch of other hacks...how to memorize gender and such. All very good and practical.
In the field of etymology:
Words that share a common ancestor are cognates.
Words that are not cognates, but which are identical in both pronunciation and written form (spelling) are homonyms.
Words that are not cognates, but are identical in written form are homographs. All homonyms are necessarily homographs, but homographs are not always homonyms.
Words that are not cognates, but which are pronounced identically are homophones. All homonyms are necessarily homophones, but homophones are not always homonyms.
Words that are cognates, but which have evolved to have more than one meaning are described as polysemous.
Occasionally homonyms can undergo lexical merger or partial lexical merger. In this case, at least one of the words will have been polysemous - usually both words are polysemous. If one of the meanings of each word are somewhat similar, those similar but distinct meanings can sometimes evolve to a new meaning that is somehow a middle ground between the two. This process is generally subtle and ambiguous and I've done a poor job of explaining it here. For a more detailed explanation by a bonafide expert see Chapter 3 Section 5 of The Oxford Guide to Etymology.
>tiny amount of absurdly dedicated people.
Reminds me of the story of the first OED. One man contributed an insane amount of work on hundreds of entries, it turns out from an insane asylum: https://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary-ebook/dp/B000FCKM7E
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
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I dont know why you would have read it in 3rd grade (also it came out in 2015...), but sounds like Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue
Here you are:
Hope that helps. I cannot think of one book that has all of this, but that just means we have more books to enjoy reading! Cheers.
As many have mentioned, the Rosetta Stone is a wonderful story about the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, the deciphering of Linear B is probably a greater accomplishment. Both of these are beautifully outlined in The Code Book by Simon Singh; well worth reading if you want to know in detail how it was achieved.
Deciphering Linear B involved all kinds of techniques to prise meaning out of the symbols, including statistical analysis, (forensic) linguistics, archeology and sociology. The story is quite involved and too long to describe here, but it's a really wonderful and engrossing story.
There's actually a convergence of data points on archeological finds that match cognates in many IE languages, which places the point of origin in the eurasian steppe. So there isn't actually a conflict here, but a synergy of different information painting a stronger picture. You can read Anthony 2010 which is a pretty approachable read on the subject which lays out its reasoning from a multiple-disciplinary perspective.
That there is agreement and not conflict here is pretty typical in general because historical linguistic techniques tend be very good. There have been many finds from historical linguistics that were ahead of other disciplines, such as linguists proving migration patterns based on language data before the discovery of DNA and the subsequent era of genetic testing. For example, linguists were the first to know that the inhabitants of Madagascar came from Indonesia, because they could deduce they spoke a Austronesian language with no obvious substrate. This was later confirmed with DNA testing.