Decouple the actions

Posted Aug 21, 2024 10:46 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Decouple the actions by viro
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

Fair enough - it's clear from what I wrote that I didn't actually know. Which is why I was deliberately - and clearly - vague.

And actually - from what you say - I suspect the language of Rabbie Burns may be *further* from BBC English than Catalan from Spanish (I was under the impression that Catalan might have been a pre-existing language swallowed up into Spain. Bit like Welsh and English). Rabbie spoke Scots (aka "the language of the Angles"), while BBC is English (aka "the language of the Saxons").

And where does Basque fit into all this?

Cheers,
Wol

Decouple the actions

Posted Aug 21, 2024 15:24 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Rabbie spoke Scots (aka "the language of the Angles"), while BBC is English (aka "the language of the Saxons").

Robert Burns is actually not a great example of Scots because in many cases he would tone down his Scots to be rather more like English (he had an audience to consider, after all). The Scots language, as distinct from other varieties of English in Britain, became its own thing only by the 15th century, when “Angles vs. Saxons” hadn't been an issue for close to a millennium or so.

And where does Basque fit into all this?

Basque is really an outlier because it is the only surviving language in Europe that is not somehow related to some other language. The general thinking is that early Basque developed before Indo-European languages (such as Celtic or Romance languages) reached the area. Basque has now assimilated various words from its neighbours but the grammar is still considerably different from Indo-European languages.

Decouple the actions

Posted Aug 21, 2024 16:38 UTC (Wed) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Catalan is a language being swallowed up - it's just that it is closely related to the language that swallows it. So's Scot to English (and divergence times are similar - 15th century or so). Basque is a very different beast - it's not I-E at all, but more to the point, the grammar is different enough to make things interesting. It's not about the common ancestry - we *know* that there had been many deep reworks in that among the I-E, to the point that reconstructing the grammar of their common ancestor is pretty much hopeless; Basque grammar has features outside of the observed range for attested I-E languages. No idea how much headache does that cause for automatic translation, though...