Geoffrey Sampson: from Proto-Indu-European to English spelling
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Geoffrey Sampson
Department of Informatics
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, EnglandHello! Summarizing myself in a dozen words, I am:
- an Englishman
- born in 1944
- a professional academic
- a politically-active British subject
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Here are some of the books I have written or co-edited.
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- complete lists of my publications
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- The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate (2005)
- Corpus Linguistics: Readings in a Widening Discipline (2004)
- e.biz — The Anatomy of Electronic Business (2003)
- Brissac and its Mediaeval Seigneurs (2002)
- Empirical Linguistics (2001)
- Evolutionary Language Understanding (1996)
- English for the Computer (1995)
- The Computational Analysis of English (1987)
- Writing Systems (1985)
- An End To Allegiance (1984)
- Schools of Linguistics (1980)
A few things I picked up from Sampson’s "Say something in Proto-Indy-European"
Nevertheless, PIE is sufficiently old that it may possibly have had properties that would make it seem not just “different” but somewhat “primitive”, if we could encounter it as an actual spoken language today. Nobody would expect PIE to have had words for “television” or “banana” — obviously. But, more interestingly, Mallory and Adams point out for instance that the PIE word for “nine” seems to derive from the word for “new”; they suggest that “nine” may originally have been called “the new number”, implying that having a name for such a big number ranked for PIE speakers as a whizzy technological breakthrough. (In English, the pronunciation of these two words has developed rather differently, but notice that in German neun and neu are closer, and in French neuf has both meanings.)
For a long time, it has been suspected that PIE may have been structurally simple, relative to present-day languages, in ways that go deeper than lack of particular vocabulary items. More than a hundred years ago, Eduard Hermann argued that PIE may have had no complex sentences: all utterances would have been strings of simple clauses, with no clause subordination. Instead of saying things like “When he saw the stone he wanted, he shouted out”, PIE speakers might have said things more like “He saw a stone. He wanted that stone. Then he shouted out.”
In the closing decades of the 20th century, this and similar ideas were widely rejected, not so much because of factual evidence but for ideological reasons. Many linguists wanted to think of all human languages as equal. They disliked the suggestion that languages could be ranked as more or less evolved.
However, a careful, scholarly book by Guy Deutscher (Syntactic Change in Akkadian, Oxford University Press, 2000) has now shown that this principle of linguistic equality is not really tenable. The most ancient languages which were recorded in writing had very limited systems of grammatical subordination; some languages spoken by simpler, tribal societies today demonstrably are less evolved than modern European languages in this respect. So it does seem quite possible that Hermann’s suggestion about PIE may have been correct.
And here is a little imagined story, in both English and PIE
S.K. Sen picked a simple passage in which the Old Indic vocabulary is known to correspond to PIE roots rather than later neologisms, and took a consensus view from the experts on what the passage would look like if the Old Indic structures and sounds were rolled back two or three further millennia to their PIE antecedents. Here is the passage in English translation:
Once there was a king. He was childless. The king wanted a son.
He asked his priest: “May a son be born to me!”
The priest said to the king: “Pray to the god Varuna”.
The king approached the god Varuna to pray now to the god.
“Hear me, father Varuna!”
The god Varuna came down from heaven.
“What do you want?” “I want a son.”
“Let this be so”, said the bright god Varuna.
The king’s lady bore a son.
… But first, here is the passage about the childless king, as it might have been uttered by a PIE speaker — by one of our linguistic ancestors, some six millennia ago:
To réecs éhest. So nputlos éhest. So réecs súhnum éwelt.
Só tóso cceutérm prcscet: “Súhnus moi jnhyotaam!”
So cceutéer tom réejm éweuqet: “Ihgeswo deiwóm Wérunom”.
So réecs deiwóm Werunom húpo-sesore nu deiwóm ihgeto.
“Cluttí moi, phter Werune!”
Deiwós Wérunos kmta diwós égweht.
“Qíd welsi?” “Wélmi súhnum.”
“Tód héstu”, wéuqet loukós deiwos Werunos.
Reejós pótnih súhnum gegonhe.
(For four of these words, some of the scholars consulted included an extra sound, because of — for instance — different ideas about which verbal inflexion would have been used in a particular context. I certainly am not qualified to adjudicate such issues, so I have arbitrarily chosen the shortest alternative in each case.)
It turns out that Sampson has other interesting projects going on.
G.R. Sampson, “The structure of children’s writing: moving from spoken to adult written norms”, in S. Granger and S. Petch-Tyson, eds., Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Research, Rodopi, pp. 177-93, 2003, and online.
The structure of childrenís writing: moving from spoken to adult written norms[1]
Geoffrey Sampson
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex
1 Introduction
Most children arrive at school speaking English fluently. If all goes well they complete compulsory schooling, a decade or so later, as skilled users of the written language. Written and spoken structural norms differ in a number of ways (see e.g. Miller & Weinert 1998). The compilation of structurally annotated electronic corpora of spoken and written English is starting to open up new possibilities of studying the trajectory taken in moving from one stage to the other.
Our recent CHRISTINE and current LUCY projects have been compiling annotated corpora of everyday conversational English, and of various genres of written English, including published writing of many kinds and childrenís writing, all annotated according to the same very detailed scheme of structural annotation (defined in Sampson 1995).[2] This paper represents a first attempt to extract findings shedding light on the process of writing-skills acquisition from the partly complete CHRISTINE and LUCY corpora.
… The "child writing" is taken from material published by a research project sponsored by the Nuffield Foundation in the 1960s. Researchers visited a number of schools in London, Kent, Sussex, and Yorkshire collecting various kinds of data on pupilsí use of oral and written language. (The schools included state primary and grammar schools, one secondary modern, and one then-novel comprehensive school; their locations appear to have been suburban and semi-rural rather than either "inner-city" or fully rural.) For the exercise relevant here, the researchers invited children aged from nine to twelve in 1964-5 to write essays on a choice of open-ended topics (e.g. "My hobby", "Our last holiday") which were transcribed into typescript and published as Handscombe (1967a, 1967b). The present study uses 67 of these, comprising roughly equal quantities of wording from ages 9, 10, 11, and 12 and from the two sexes.
Specifically, the "LUCY Corpus contains some further extensions to allow consistent structural annotation of the written English of unskilled writers, such as children. The LUCY Corpus represents written English in modern Britain, ranging from published prose to the less-skilled writing of young adults, and spontaneous writing by nine-to-twelve-year-old children." [source]