Okay, last time, I said that we were headed off to San Antonio to see one of our favorite comics, Ismo.
I also said last time that one of the reasons we like him is that among his topics (he has several. He also works blue, as they say, very well) is language, and we’re language nerds pure and simple. Martha was a professor of education with a background in English literature. And I, of course, am a writer and have been an editor. So, we’re into stuff like that.
I don’t know why Ismo seems to share our tastes. It may be a case of simple shared interests. You wouldn’t think it to look at him (and he works hard to look like just some guy you might meet on the street), but he has a background in physics and philosophy.
But I’m guessing that it is actually personal experience that drives him. He is, after all, a Finn, and English is not his first language. That means he had to learn it somewhere along the way, and there’s not a lot of correspondence between our bewildering tongue and his own.
About the photos: Three today. First, a shot of the River Walk (which I’ve mentioned before) on a rainy, misty day. Second, this is a garden structure in a hotel we stayed at in the King William District, which is one of the city’s more appealing neighborhoods. Tradition says it was named after Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, by one of the area’s many German immigrants.
And, finally, Martha at lunch in San Antonio during our 2019 trip there.
Let’s talk about Finnish. It is not what they call a “language isolate” --i.e., a language which isn’t like anything spoken anywhere else.(1) But it is “isolated” in the sense that it is unrelated to anything spoken by its larger neighbors, like Sweden, Norway, and Russia.
Most of Europe, and big chunks of Western and Southern Asia, speak Indo-European languages, which people think had their origin somewhere in what is now southern Russia, specifically in the Pontic–Caspian steppe region.(2) The traditional theory, which was unchallenged when I was in graduate school the first time, was that people in that region first domesticated the horse, and they used that brilliant innovation to spread across an enormous section of the world, from Ireland to parts of Western China.(3)
However, there are competing hypotheses. For instance, in the late 1980s, a theorist named Colin Renfrew suggested that the Indo-Europeans actually came out of what is now Turkey, that is, Anatolia. Renfrew suggested that the first Indo-Europeans were, in fact, farmers, and the brilliant innovation that allowed them to spread was not horses but agriculture. When I was in graduate school the *second* time, the Anatolian theory was all the rage and the idea that Proto-Indo-Europeans were horsemen/women embarrassingly militaristic, probably racist, and at the very least quasi-imperialistic.
Now...a few decades later...I gather that genetic studies have so tilted the balance back to the Pontic that even Renfrew himself has abandoned or greatly modified his original thesis.(4)
Whatever, Finnish has nothing to do with any of that. Finnish is a “Uralic” language, unrelated to Indo-European. The Uralic languages include (among others) Finnish, Sami, Samoyedic, and Hungarian (no kidding).(5) Again, when I was in graduate school the first time, some people threw Turkish into the mix as well. Though, I guess, that idea has been abandoned.(6)
And, of course, there’s lots of arguments about where the Uralic languages (including Finnish) came from. I gather that the original thesis is that the Uralic languages came from someplace in, as the name would suggest, the Ural mountains between what is today Russia and Siberia. Now, though, I gather that the general opinion is that the Uralic peoples got their start someplace further east, in Siberia itself.(7)
One really wild possibility. When I was in graduate school the second time, one of my professors was an advocate of an idea that I’d never heard of, and which is probably kind of crazy, but which is appealing all the same. We know that the Uralic people were in Siberia, including the ancestors of the Finns. But where did they come from before that? Well, it seems that native Siberians are the direct descendants of people who came out of Africa, crossed into Asia via India, traveled up the Pacific coast, and finally came to rest in what is now Northeastern Siberia.(8) There, they split into two groups, one of which went across the Bering Strait and became the ancestors of the Native American people. The other went east, and settled in what is now Siberia.
Okay, so, my professor took this theory to its logical conclusion. The Finns, he said, as heirs to this ancient Siberian population, were connected to both the Navajo and Japanese. There may be absolutely nothing to my professor’s thesis. But, you gotta admit, it is one very cool idea.(9)
But, anyway, the reason I’m going through all of this is that Ismo is Finnish...which means he had to learn English...which, being an Indo-European language (specifically, of the Germanic persuasion) had almost zero correspondence with his native tongue.
Which means, in turn, that it must have been dang hard to do. Which also, I’m guessing, goes a fair distance towards explaining why he finds so much to comment upon (and laugh about) in English’s rather bizarre structure and functioning.
And you can’t blame him. Because English is...weird. No way around it. It is a mess. A wonderful mess. But a mess. With a little bit of this, and a lotta bit of that...German, Danish, French, Indian, West African... it is thus a great and glorious Gumbo of words...a linguistic Bouillabaisse...
Which is what makes it so very difficult.
Yet, also, so delightful.
More to come.
About the photos:
Three today. First, a shot of the River Walk (which I’ve mentioned before) on a rainy, misty day. Second, this is a garden structure in a hotel we stayed at in the King William District, which is one of the city’s more appealing neighborhoods. Tradition says it was named after Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, by one of the area’s many German immigrants.
And, finally, Martha at lunch in San Antonio during our 2019 trip there.
Footnotes:
1. True language isolates appear to be unrelated to any other existing tongue. They include, for example, ancient Sumerian (now extinct) and modern Basque. I’m told that scholars believe that Basque is the last surviving pre-Indo-European language of Europe. Who knows? Maybe when Cro-Magnon Man chatted about the weather with his Neanderthal neighbors, they used some kind of pre-pre-Basque.
2. For Indo-European origins, see Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_homeland . For the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic%E2%80%93Caspian_steppe
3. Ireland’s Celtic name, Éire, appears to be related to Aryan, a common term for “the people” among Proto-Indo-Europeans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ire
Meanwhile, the furtherest East that the Indo-Europeans got seems to be the Tarim Basin, which is now in Xinjiang, China. This was the Tocharian people who were great travelers and traders and moved into the area perhaps as early 3000 BC. Alas, they didn’t actually call themselves “Tocharians.” That was a name applied to them by much later historians. I deeply regret this, because “Tucker” and “Tocharian” sort of sound alike and I’d love to pretend that I am secretly descended from Tocharian royalty. Hey. You have your fantasies. I have mine.
Anyway, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians
5. For the Uralic languages, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
6. At one time, it was thought that the Finnic-Uralic languages were part of a much larger language family, the Ural-Altaic languages, which included Turkic and, perhaps, East Asian languages as well. However, this idea has been abandoned in recent years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages
The idea is that, presumably, the peoples who spoke Proto-Uralic languages adopted the horse and spread very much like the Indo-Europeans before them. Certainly this was the case with the Hungarians, whose horsemen became the terror of Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_invasions_of_Europe
8. Early modern humans came out of Eastern Africa at least 70,000 years ago. Apparently, they moved along the coast of the Red Sea and into India, and when from there down into what is now Australia and along the Pacific coast of Asia. In fact, in the Bay of Bengal, you can find the North Sentinel Island, on which live the Sentinelese, one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes. Almost nothing is known of them, and they like it that way. Back in 2018, a far too enthusiastic missionary tried to land on the island to convert the heathen. The Sentinelese responded with a few well placed arrows and sent the missionary on to his reward.
Anyway, the Sentinelese seem to be directly descended from that very, very early wave of humans coming out of African and in the larger world. If you want to see what those pioneers looked like, look at the Sentinelese. For more on them, see their wikipedia entry, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese. For their origins in the original migration out of Africa, see this interesting article, “The most isolated tribe in the world?,” https://www.survivalinternational.org/about/mostisolated
Meanwhile, modern humans seem to have moved into Europe a bit after that, about 45,000 years ago, via the Balkans. In Europe, they met up with our close kin, the Neanderthals, who vanished not long after. The question has always been whether this transition was peaceful or otherwise. The fact that so many of us have Neanderthal genes makes me suspect that we made less war and more love.
9. I’m told that there have long been efforts to link Japanese and Finnish, particularly back in the days when academics were trying to shoehorn everything they could find into Ural-Altaic. In fact, it seems that the two languages sound a lot of alike. Alas, modern opinion is that’s accident. Japanese remains in its own language family, Japonic, which seems to have emerged in what is now central Korea before immigrating to Japan.
***
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