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Language Families
Page 8 of 9
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Good afternoon,
My name is Timothy Dodd and I go to school at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, USA. I have a question about your list of the 30 most spoken languages.
Does your list only includes the number of primary speakers? If so, are there any lists that include the number of people that speak a particular language including those that speak it as a second language? Also, do you have lists that include populations that live outside of a particular region? (For example, many ethnic Chinese live outside of China's borders in other parts of Southeast Asia, but they still speak Mandarin). I was just curious after looking at your [web] page.
KryssTal Reply: Thank you for your kind comments. A good source of the type of information you require is The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Languages.
These web sites might help:
http://washington.uwc.edu/courses/geo110/geo110.htm
http://merkury.saic.com/tonguetied/language.html
In para 1 of the Sino-Tibetian Family section of your Language Families, you state that the Thai word MA can mean not, burn, wood, no or mother. For the first four of these, I believe you mean MAI. MA, depending on tone, can be dog, horse, or to come.
Neither is a good transliteration of the word for mother. This is so, MAI?
KryssTal Reply: Thank you - my memory isn't what it used to be.
Hi,
1- Which family does Egyptian fit into?
KryssTal Reply: In Egypt, Arabic is spoken. Ancient Egyptian was probably a Semitic language.
2- Can you recommend a site posting language Family Trees?
KryssTal Reply: My Language Families page has some families
3- Do you also know if any Trees exist indicating approximately when (year, centuries, eras) the different languages branched off?
KryssTal Reply: Try [this site]:
Interesting website! Just a few corrections:
KryssTal Reply: Thank you for your comments (or should I say "shukran")
On the page about the Afro-Asiatic branch: Aramaic is not extinct. It is still spoken in two christian villages in Syria plus several villages in Iraq (also Christian). I personally had an Iraqi friend whose mother tongue was Aramaic.
KryssTal Reply: You are correct - I need to change it to "almost extinct". I visited one of the Aramaic villages in Syria in 1986.
On the main page: All plurals in Arabic are *not* irregular. In fact most are regular ending in 'in / un' for masculine nouns and 'at' for feminine nouns.
KryssTal Reply: I meant the changes to the vowels not the endings. I will recheck my research though.
On the main page: You list Japanese as an Altaic language. It isn't.
KryssTal Reply: I had it listed as "Independent" until I received a paper from a US University which had some recent research proving the link between Japanese and the other Altaic languages. I think there is still much debate about this.
Hello!
My native language is Romanian and I was surprised to find moldovian both under the romance branch and under the slavic branch. The relationship between romanian and moldovian is similar to that between serbian and croatian, namelly they are the same language but due to political reasons they are considered different.
Some linguists (e.g. Taglianini) believe moldovian is a dialect of romanian. Romanian and moldovian share the same morphology and syntax and now use the same (latin) alphabet. There are very small differences in pronunciation and there are probably more slavic lexical items in moldovian than in romanian.
When the province of Moldova was attached to the former USSR politically motivated soviet linguists tried to make the argument that romanian and moldovian are different languages as romanian and italian are different languages. Taglianini in his "Le lingue neo-latine" has a good discussion about this.
Hope this helps.
KryssTal Reply: Thank you for your help.
Dear Kryss:
You will probably find the Web site of the Summer Institute of Linguistics fascinating. See specifically a listing of all the world's languages and dialects.
It is incorrect to state that Hausa is the only member of the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic. This branch contains nearly two hundred languages.
Dear Mr. Katsiavrides,
Your Language Families site is interesting and useful. Thank you for taking the time and effort to inform us laymen.
In Thailand an ancient language called "khom" or "kom" is still un use for religious and magical purposes. I believe it is a dead language in the sense that there is no population speaking it, but it is still used in mantras, inscriptions and magical protective symbols.
Some people say it is related to the Cambodian and Mon languages. Others say it is derived from Pali. Have you heard of this language? Where would I find information on its origin and history?
Thank you for any ideas you may have on this.
KryssTal Reply: Sawat Dii (Good day)
Thank you (kop koon khrap) for your kind comments. You may find the information you require on the site below:
Do a search on KOM.
Khap khoon krap: thanks for your help. This led me to a lot of interesting information. Finally, I suppose the "Khom" still used here for ritualistic purposes is an old form of Khmer (alt Khome) rather than the sino-tibetan Kom listed as an Indian language. The alphabet used is similar to Thai. Maybe it was even the script from which the Thai alphabet was modified.
Thanks
Hi,
Just browsing for info. on a paper I'm doing about Aramaic. You list Aramaic, Syriac, and Assyrian as extinct languages. It seems to me that there are many living dialects of Aramaic (the Ethnologue lists over 10) and that modern Aramaic dialects are often used synonomously with the name Syriac. Although Biblical Syriac may be "dead" I don't think that makes Syriac "extinct" anymore than English moving on from Old and Middle English extinguished the language of English.
Here is a good web page about modern Aramaic
Here is another web page about Aramaic history
Here's the Ethnologue ref
I appreciate your pages. Thanks
KryssTal Reply: Thanks for the info. I did visit a couple of villages in Syria where Aramaic was supposed to be spoken. I'll check the sites you recommend out and make any relevant changes.
on [your] site you list the most spoken 20 languages. There are more than 100 million Turkish speaking people in the near east. So what about an update?
KryssTal Reply: Thank you for your comments.
I think you are counting languages like Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh and other languages of Central Asia along with Turkish. If all of these languages are included then there are over 100 million "Turkish" speakers.
I will check the current figures to see if Turkish is now in the "Top 20".
Teshekur Ederim (thank you).
Hello!
Thanks for the nice page!
I was surfing to see what's linguistic classification/relationship of/between Finnish and Turkish, since I am a Turk living in Finland, so Yahoo brought your page up to me. In Turkey, about our language, we learn the way 'uralic-altaic' examined together, here in Finland, they do not learn any of that sort, most of them thinks Turkish is a sort of Arabic, or something. Of course, that sounds ridicoulus to me, while I cannot pronounce Arabic 'kh's, and all those sounds coming from deep throat, and when learning Finnish, everything in grammar seems familiar, and pronouncation is extremely easy for me..
Anyway, to come to the point, your example in Turkish,
those last to of them are not 'OUR house' or 'to OUR house'.. it says 'YOUR house' in this way. If you like to say *OUR* you have to write EVLERIMIZ(E).
I don't think this is any major, but anyway..
All the best
KryssTal Reply: Tesekur ederim (thank you)
Glad you enjoyed the page.