تويت
<font color="#0000ff"><strong>What about those Eskimo words for snow? (and other myths about language) "The Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow." This story is constantly being repeated, with various numbers given, despite the fact that it has no basis at all. No one who repeats this pseudo-factoid can list the hundreds of words for you, or even cite a work that does. They just heard it somewhere. <br />The anthropologist Laura Martin has traced the development of this myth (including the steady growth in the number of words claimed). Geoffrey Pullum summarizes her report in THE GREAT ESKIMO VOCABULARY HOAX (1991). How many words are there really? Well, the Yup'ik language in particular has about two dozen roots describing snow or things related to snow. This is not particularly significant; English can amass about the same total: snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, flurry, avalanche, powder, hardpack, snowball, snowman, and other derivatives. The Yup'ik total could be greatly expanded by other derived words, since the Inuit languages can form hundreds of words from a single root. <br />But this is true of all words in the language (and indeed of all agglutinative languages), not just the words for snow. "There's a town in Appalachia that speaks pure Elizabethan English." There isn't. All languages, everywhere, are constantly changing. Some areas speak more conservative dialects, but we know of no case where people speak exactly as their ancestors spoke centuries ago. Of course, ancient languages are sometimes revived; biblical Hebrew has been revived (with some modifications) in modern Israel; and there's a village in India in which Sanskrit is being taught as an everyday language. But these are conscious revivals of languages which have otherwise died out in everyday use, not survivals of living languages. <br />"Chinese characters directly represent ideas, not spoken words." Westerners have been taken by this notion for centuries, ever since missionaries started describing the Chinese writing system. However, it's quite false. Chinese characters represent specific Chinese words. (To be precise, almost all characters represent a particular syllable with a particular meaning; about 10% however represent one syllable of a particular two-syllable word.) The vast majority of characters consist of a phonetic giving the approximate pronunciation of the word, plus a signific giving a clue to its meaning (thus distinguishing different syllables having different meanings). As an added difficulty, many of the phonetics are no longer helpful, because of sound changes since the characters were devised, over 2000 years ago. However, it is estimated that 60% of the phonetics still give useful information about the character's pronunciation. To be sure, Japanese (among other languages) uses Chinese characters too, and it is a very different language from Chinese. However, we must look at exactly how the Japanese use the Chinese characters. Generally they borrowed both the characters and the words represented; it's rather as if when we borrowed words like psychology from Greek, we wrote them in the Greek alphabet. Native Japanese words are also written using the Chinese characters for the closest Chinese words: if the Japanese word overlaps several Chinese words, different characters must be written in different contexts, according to the meanings in Chinese. A good demythologizing of common notions about Chinese writing is found in THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: FACT AND FANTASY, by John DeFrancis (1984). <br />"German lost out to English as the US's official language by 1 vote." This entertaining story is also told of Greek, Latin, and even Hebrew. There was never any such vote. Dennis Baron, in THE ENGLISH ONLY QUESTION (1990), thinks the legend may have originated with a 1795 vote concerning a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as English. At one point a motion to table discussion (rather than referring the matter back to committee) was defeated 41-40. The proposal was eventually defeated. <br />"Sign language isn't really a language." "ASL is a gestural version of English." Sign languages are true languages, with vocabularies of thousands of words, and grammars as complex and sophisticated as those of any other language, though with fascinating differences from speech. If you think they are merely pantomime, try watching a mathematics lecture, a poetry reading, or a religious service conducted in Sign, and see how much you understand. ASL (American Sign Language) is not an invented system like Esperanto; it developed gradually and naturally among the Deaf. It has no particular relation to English; the best demonstration of this is that it is quite different from British Sign. Curiously enough, it is most closely related to French Sign Language, due to the influence of Laurent Clerc, who came from Paris in 1817 to be the first teacher of the Deaf in the US. ASL is not to be confused with Signed English, which is a word-for-word signed equivalent of English. Deaf people tend to find it tiring, because its grammar, like that of spoken languages, is linear, while that of ASL is primarily spatial. <br />_____________________ د/بشير الشاوش</strong></font>
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د/ بشير محمد الشاوش -
_MD_RE: بعض الخرافات حول اللغة
أريد القيام بتعديل، هل هذا غير متوفر ؟
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د/بشير الشاوشد/ بشير محمد الشاوش -
بعض الخرافات حول اللغة
<p><font face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#660000" size="5"><strong>لقد أخبرني الدكتور بشير بأن الموضوع مصدره مكان ما من الموقع التالي</strong></font></p><p><a href="http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/langFAQ.htm#12" target="_blank"><font face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#660000" size="3"><strong>http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~jmatthew/langFAQ.htm#12</strong></font></a><br /><br /><font face="Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#660000" size="5"><strong>وبسبب أن هناك الظاهر مدة زمنية محددة لا أعرف مقدارها تسمح للمتداخل بتعديل أي شيء فيها وبعد ذلك تمنعه، فلم يستطع الدكتور تعديل أي شيء وأشتكى أعلاه ولا من مجيب<br /><br />ما رأي الدكتور عبدالرحمن بما ورد عن اللغات في أعلاه؟<br /><br />ما رأي عريفة المنتدى الصيني بما يتعلق باللغة الصينية على الأقل إن لم تزد عليها والتي وردت أعلاه؟<br /><img alt=" " src="http://www.wataonline.net/site/uploads/smil3dbd4e5e7563a.gif" /></strong></font></p>تعليق
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_MD_RE: بعض الخرافات حول اللغة
<p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">أخي الدكتور بشير،<p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">التعديل ممكن، ولا أدري ما الذي يحول دون ذلك. ولقد جربت ذلك وغيرت لون المداخلة إلا أن التنسيق تغير بعض الشيء لأن النص منقول. ويحبذ عند نقل نص من مكان آخر استعمال خيار </span></strong><strong><span dir="ltr" style="font-size: 16pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-sa">KIOVI EDITOR</span></strong><span dir="rtl"></span><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma"><span dir="rtl"></span> الذي يحتفظ بتنسيق النص المنقول كما هو. وعلى كل حال سأعود يوم السبت القادم إلى بلجيكا إن شاء الله وسأتصل بالمهندس لمناقشة هذا الأمر بالإضافة إلى الصفحة الرئيسية وذلك لإتمام تطوير الموقع إن شاء الله. <p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">بالنسبة إلى الخرافات اللغوية فهي كثيرة بالطبع ولعل أقدمها تلك التي كان الغربيون في العصور الوسطى يؤمنون بها ويروجون لها ومفادها أن العبرية هي أم كل اللغات وأن اللغات السامية المعروفة آنذاك (العربية والآرامية والحبشية) هي اللغات الأكثر شبهاً باللغة الأم! ولهذا الاعتقاد أصول كتابية ربما انتقلت إلى العرب مع الإسرائيليات إلا أن العرب كانوا في وقت من الأوقات يعتقدون أن السريانية كانت لغة آدم وهذا كله من قبيل الخرافات. <p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">أجل، تلعب البيئة دورا مهما في تطور اللغة، من ثمة الاعتقاد بأنه يجب أن يكون للأسكيمو مئات الكلمات الدالة على الثلج والجليد. وليس الأمر كذلك بالنسبة للأسكيمو فيما يبدو من المقال أعلاه.<p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">وفي الحقيقة لا أعرف بين اللغات السامية والأوربية لغة كثرت فيها ظاهرة تعدد المرادفات المتعلقة بأحوال معيشية معينة تأخذ حيزا مركزيا في تفكير المتحدثين بها مثل العربية التي تحتوي على مئات المرادفات للجمل والسيف والخمرة والداهية والأسد والأفعى، لأن هذه المسميات مهمة للعرب في بيئتهم القديمة مثل أهمية الثلج للأسكيمو. فأي شيء أخطر على البدوي النائم في بيت الشعر من الأفعى؟! وأي شيء أغلى عنده من الخمرة التي تستورد من الشام والعراق والتي يكلفه اقتناؤها والتَّمَوُّن بها نصف ميزانيته السنوية؟! أما الجمل والسيف فلا حياة له بدونهما في الصحراء. ولا أدري لم أكثروا من مرادفات الداهية التي يقال عنها إنها تتجاوز الألف! <p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">الخرافات اللغوية الشائعة كثيرة، ومعظمها يعود إلى عصور كان التواصل فيها بين الناس شبه منعدم.<p></p></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" dir="rtl" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; direction: rtl; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify"><strong><span lang="AR-MA" style="font-size: 20pt; font-family: "traditional arabic"; mso-bidi-language: ar-ma">وتحية طيبة.</span></strong></p>تعليق
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<p><font size="4">يوجد في الرابط أدناه أمثلة عن غزارة لغتنا الجميلة:</font></p><p><a href="http://www.wataonline.net/site/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?viewmode=flat&type=&topic_id =300&forum=8"><font size="4">ttp://www.wataonline.net/site/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?<br /><br />viewmode=flat&type=&topic_id=300&foru m=8</font></a><br /><br /><br /></p>صابر أوبيري
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