You speak German (mostly)

Plus photographs of Portugal and Spain, an AI-generated fantasy dance, and reader-contributed echo words. Video of the week: Dolphin stampede!

PICTURE & WORDS

Click on the cover image to see my new book, best viewed on a larger screen.

A PRE-PANDEMIC trip to four cities in Portugal and two in Spain yielded a trove of images that I’ve recently rediscovered, refined, and newly released in a free online book, Iberia. Using a small Sony camera and wide angle lens, I had enormous fun with the region’s angled vistas and rich colors, such as the orange-roofed casas that steeply line the Douro River in Porto. That autumn, the Portuguese were celebrating the beginning of the school year at universities in Coimbra and Lisbon with festive parades through the streets. Entering freshman were decked in brightly colored outfits and silly hats, while the senior class members, like the young women below, donned sober academic black robes yet conveyed the same infectiously joyous spirit.

This is the third book of photographs I’ve recently made available free online in the form of a slideshow. A fourth is in the works. There’s also link for a free download of my multimedia Yosemite book. A friend has urged me to write about my thoughts behind this decision, and perhaps I will at a later date. For now, suffice it to say that art and commerce are at best an uneasy mix (witness the $120,000 duct-taped banana). It’s more important to me that the pictures are seen. Of course, as always, I heartily welcome your comments. In the material world, I also have a half-off holiday sale on books, prints, and cards that I’ll continue to offer for a few more days.

University students, Coimbra, Portugal

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ON LANGUAGE

Illustration by Minna Sundberg

Why we (mostly) don’t speak Celtic or French

By Barbara Ramsey

“ENGLISH IS CLASSIFIED as a Germanic language? What about all the words from French and Latin?” Kerry was genuinely astonished.

I’m obsessed with language origins and had learned that English is considered a Germanic language, along with Dutch, German, and Flemish. I was surprised that my well-educated husband didn’t share this understanding. Unlike me, he had studied German in college. And I know that English has tons of French words. I suddenly wanted to review my linguistic beliefs.

A quick internet dive uncovered some amazing facts. Approximately sixty percent of all English words are derived from French and Latin, while only about twenty-five percent have Germanic roots. But get this: according to the billion-word database maintained by Oxford University Press, ninety-eight of the one-hundred most commonly used words in English have Germanic origins. The two that don’t? “People” and “cause”.

Many of the earliest recorded languages of Great Britain are Celtic, similar to those of contemporary Cornish, Welsh, and Breton speakers. But in 40 AD, England was invaded by the Romans, who spoke Latin. Unlike Celtic, Latin is a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, introduced by a herding people from the Eurasian steppes (see my article, “Two knights and a lady: an origin story”).

Latin did take hold all over much of Europe, ultimately morphing into French, Spanish, Italian and the rest of the Roman-inflected—hence “Romance”—languages. But although the Romans occupied Great Britain for four hundred years, there’s almost no linguistic trace of Roman Latin in English. How could that be?

More invasions.

Starting in the fifth century, less than two generations after the Romans left Britain, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians arrived from mainland Europe. These Germanic peoples slowly but surely altered the linguistic landscape. Most of England began to speak a very different tongue, now called Old English. It reigned supreme until 1066 AD.

How did the language of the Anglo-Saxon invaders supplant those of the Romans and Celts? Did they simply move in, kill as many of the natives as possible, and replace them? Gee, sure sounds like a familiar scenario. And while it was a plausible theory for a long time, recent genetic evidence shows that’s not what happened.

Those Britons in the far west that kept speaking Celtic until the 19th century were genetically almost identical to those on the rest of the island who hadn’t spoken Celtic for more than a thousand years. It’s now hypothesized that the conquering Germanic speakers simply found good farmland, married into the local population, and settled down. Since they functioned in many places as overlords, learning their language probably became extremely useful to those natives who wanted political or economic power.

Though the Celtic language got sidelined, it probably remained the mother tongue for most people for many generations, while the Anglo-Saxon tongues merged and change in subtle ways. The vocabulary remained essentially Germanic but the sentence structure became slightly more Celtic.*

The biggest gift the Celts gave us, in my opinion, was the elimination of Latin and Germanic cases. A case is a grammatical category that indicates the function of nouns and pronouns. Cases are why Latin and German nouns are a huge headache for adult language learners. The Celts apparently weren’t gonna play that game. Their kids learned the new language but jettisoned the clunky bits.

The Normans, those French-speaking descendants of Vikings, invaded England in 1066 AD. Like the Germanic tribes before them, they were strong enough to rule over the Brits but not numerous enough to push them out. The Normans established a ruling aristocracy at lightning speed and French became the language of the bosses—but not of the people. The English commoners adopted only those parts that suited them. “Pig” is German. “Pork” is French. Need I say more?

So our Latin-inflected words come via the French, not the Romans. We rejected the French method for constructing sentences, retaining what is essentially a Germanic syntax with Celtic influences. And after nearly 300 years of being the official language of England, the English legal system jettisoned French in 1362. English was back and the words of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Bob Dylan were yet to come.

If German is our cake, French is the icing. In certain disciplines, there’s a lot of icing. Ninety percent of our technological and scientific words come from French or Latin. But if you’re shooting the breeze with your friends du sprichst Deutsch.

*For a detailed look at what bits of Celtic remain, John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is excellent.

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AI ART

davidszauder

A post shared by @davidszauder

HUNGARIAN ARTIST David Szauder created this mind-blowing short in conjunction with the Paris-based Gotan Project, which blends “tango and electronica”. Most artists and photographers I know are—to put it mildly—unfriendly to AI-generated art because it is seen as made by a machine rather than a human being. To add insult to injury, it’s a machine trained on human creations. For photographers, it blurs the already debated veracity of photographic images. And AI may further depress the market for the handmade, at least in the short term. But it is also a set of tools that, like a camera or a computer, has the potential to open up imaginative possibilities. Click on the image above and see for yourself. (For Szauder’s views on creating art with AI, see this interview in Hype&Hyper.)

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POSTSCRIPT: ECHO WORDS

THANKS TO EVERYONE who commented on last week’s piece on echo words. Readers wrote in with many amusing specimens including knick-knack, boola-boola, silly-billy, ding-dongs, and fancy pants. Our friend Lisa Gilley signed hers, “Silly Gilley”. My favorite was culled from the memoirs of Dame Judi Dench, wherein she reportedly called a bawdy interlude a “rumpy-pumpy”.

Dame Judi may be a bit much to share with the kids in your life. But check out a children’s book recommended by my friend Pat Herkal, Double Trouble in Walla Walla. In this story, written by Andrew Clemens and illustrated by Salvatore Murdocca, a small child named Lulu starts talking in echo words, which accidentally infects those around her. Her problem begins with an ordinary event: “It was really really a humdrum day. I was practicing ballet in my tutu, when my little brother Bobo asked me to play on the teeter-totter. We see-sawed until Bobo slipped off and got a boo-boo and started to boo-hoo.” Then things get all topsy-turvy, as you can imagine. –BR

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VIDEO OF THE WEEK

JUST ANOTHER dolphin stampede. Except this one, off California’s Dana Point earlier this year, involved several thousand of them. These coordinated, high-speed take-offs can be a response to a predator such as an orca or shark. Whale-watching boats, like the one on which this video was recorded, can spook them. But it’s also possible that they just heard about a hot new fish place.