@GratefulDisciple No way for me to guess the purple one, even knowing the category. I can only recognize a single one in the list. Funny that one of the yellow group has no (well known?) name in French. I was surprised to discover that meaning in English.
@Cerberus I thought French came from the version of Latin spoken and developed in what's currently the country of France when it was ruled by the Franks before the Carolingian took over in 800 AD?
Unless we count Old English as part of English. Maybe I should. Then I stand corrected.
@jlliagre To the French people, did they consider the language started with Old French or with the earlier Gaulish language, (seeing the Wikipedia article).
@Cerberus Hmm... I'm at a loss to understand your question. My premise was that an older language would have more vocabulary than a newer language. So I'm surprised English has more words for that category than French.
@Cerberus That's what I meant in the context of the discussion about that Connection category. Latin and Greek were not in view, only English and French.
@Cerberus In saying "French is even older than English" I suggested that both languages were very old. Then combined with my premise that older language should have more vocabulary for human experience, and with my 2nd premise that French is older than English, I said "even older".
But on hindsight, I could have said "French is older than English" rendering the word "even" unnecessary, and probably may confuse the reader. So an explanation why I used "even" probably has its root in my language neural net that I'm not fully aware of 😊.
Or I may have in mind an instinctual comparison with my mother language (Indonesian) which, though its predecessor Malay has been around since at least the Srivijaya Kingdom, also around 800 AD, my perception is that both French and English were older than Malay, which may not be factually correct.
Englishmen try to tell the world that their language has more words, just because they can't imagine another language having as many, and they haven't see that many words in other languages (which they obviously won't know super well).
@GratefulDisciple And how do you define the age of a word?
Does it need to have modern spelling?
The exact same meaning?
If the word was borrowed do you count the age of the word in its original language?
@Cerberus I would say "no" to modern spelling, and "partly" to exact same meaning. If there is a substantial enough connotation, I would count the age of that predecessor word.
BTW, I think I have given short shrift of the age of the Malay language, Old Malay is said to start from the 3rd century when it started to be penetrated by Sanskrit, but Proto-Malayic was spoken from at least 1000 BCE, though I want to see statistics of how many current Malay words have substantial connotations similar to those Proto-Malayic language.
@Cerberus Of course. The first order of business would be to establish the criteria. Then maybe use the aid of AI doing the grunt work to assign age for each word in use today. I may oversimplify this task ignorantly, not being a linguist, but I would be interested in seeing the result of that research.
@Cerberus Well, I'm sure it wouldn't be intelligible, but we're talking of history of each word independent of each other.
So for Malay we have to realistically start with Old Malay (3rd century at the oldest). Just for an age exercise to see continuity of present language to Old Malay, I'm trying to see how many words I recognize in this 683AD [Kedukan Bukit Inscription](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedukan_Bukit_inscription#Transliteration).
@jlliagre In that Kedukan Bukit Inscription, the word "dua" (two) was preserved with the same spelling (after accounting for the one-to-one Pallava script to Roman letter mapping).
@GratefulDisciple I think 'age' doesn't really apply to language coherently. Sometimes you can say for a particular word when it entered the language (usually only in written languages) and where it came from (if it was borrowed from another language or is a repurposing/sound change from an existing word).
Sure, -Old French- was a source of a lot of vocab added to Old English so that people in the British isles got the label Middle English for what they spoke.
For one language that has been labeled (a somewhat consistent set of language properties (phonology/grammar/vocab)) is somewhat arbitrary (more an historical artifact than linguistic fact).
All languages are the same age... they're spoken right now. None of them are ever 'born'.
@Mitch Yes, repurposing based on sound doesn't seem like a proper ancestor of a word. BTW, my family just saw the movie Big Fat Greek Wedding where one of the main characters is fond of doing false etymology of ANY word his children pose to him because he believes that ALL words in usage today have their origin in Greek, so he devised (on the spot) the Greek etymology of "kimono", which is hilarious.
@GratefulDisciple Just plain old computer work might get you closer to answers here. AI is nothing special (LLMs aren't very reliable on doin a large IT task like compiling all the dates/etymologies of all words and then sorting).
@Mitch Yes, I agree that considered as a whole, it doesn't mean much to make an argument which language is older when both influenced each other for such long period (such as English, French, and German).
@Mitch That seems right, a simple algorithm combing through massive data will do the job, maybe even better since there will be no hallucination.
@GratefulDisciple Oh totally. But that's kind of the case for most (Western) European languages... they all got a huge influx of 'fancy' words for science and medicine in the late Middle Ages/Renaissance from Latin/Greek. Does that sound right @Cerberus?
@GratefulDisciple Exactly ('hallucination' is just a cartoonish word for 'error').
@Mitch Which is another reason why history increasingly fascinates me, as how migration of people (whether through war, economy, adventure, climate change, etc) drives the evolution of not only language, but customs, ideas, religions, art, utilitarian implements, etc.
@GratefulDisciple Or cultural hegemony (said without irony) like English is doing to many languages of the world.
@GratefulDisciple I don't think people are using the word 'hallucination' as a euphemism. People use it to describe what an LLM is doing when it doesn't seem to follow reality as if it were a human, as though it had an alternate reality (like what happens in a hallucination). But there's no human there and no alternate reality. and a difference between actual reality and some alternate is generally called an 'error'.
@Mitch That's right. Coming from SE Asia, I actually welcome what English and the rise of economic importance of ESL to that region, since those additional vocabs enrich the mental life and scholarly precision of a SE Asian culture self-introspection (when I read "native"-authored journal articles in Indonesian, for example).
@Mitch Yes, hallucination as "alternate reality" is certainly more accurate on both the origin and the explanation of the "error". While euphemism is to avoid cultural embarassment or taboos.
@GratefulDisciple Well, that's one thing I'm trying to redirect... hallucination is not at all accurate a description... and it's also not a euphemism because people don't even think of it as an error.
But yes 'hallucination' does feel like it is euphemizing, if you are aware of what's really going on.
@Mitch I see. Alas, the people "in the know" of a particular field are not the ones who need ChatGPT answers in the first place, or at best (like myself) sometimes use it as a low-level research assistant to generate a lead.
@GratefulDisciple Sure, they have their uses. They're good for things like that, first pass summaries, quick facts. But everything should be checked and double checked if you care about correctness.
I've done some minimal programs with them, and they help me out so that I don't have to spend hours in man pages trying to figure out the correct parameters.
@Mitch I always do fact checks and I have encountered several hallucinations. I have yet to use it to help me program though.
BTW, as a concrete examples of what I said earlier, I value Clifford Geertz's anthropological studies of Java (although it's dated now) and Paul Stange a Univ of Wisconsin ethnologist writing a book about a Javanese religion in Indonesian, even resulting in his conversion to that religion (Kejawen).
Great chatting with you. Gotta do some work now. Have a good weekend.
@Cerberus Yeah German tends to translate and make one single big germanic word. Did Dutch do that or did they tend to just borrow straight? French tend towards the Greek (because Latin would be too transparent?). I'm pretty sure Spanish and Italian did the same kind of borrowing at the same time period (when books became available).
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…