Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 November 18

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November 18

Tintin's (Traditional) Fonts

From where I can download those traditional Tintin fonts, please ? 124.253.253.208 (talk) 17:59, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Just type 'tintin font' and you'll find several options. --B8-tome (talk) 19:13, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Decrypting newly found languages

After a first contact with humans whose language does not resemble ours, like new world folks, or isolated African tribes, how can it be established what words mean what concept? We could draw an animal or point to a tree, but what about more abstract concepts like "hope', "liberty", "fair"? -- 20:47, 18 November 2017 B8-tome

The word "decryption" usually refers to trying to understand fixed written texts. Trying to learn a spoken language is quite different. Presumably discussing abstract matters would require greater language fluency than learning the names of physical objects in the vicinity... AnonMoos (talk) 03:52, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

I can't answer the question but we have Uncontacted peoples and First contact (anthropology). And this makes brief reference to language as concerns "uncontacted tribes". Bus stop (talk) 04:27, 19 November 2017 (UTC) Bus stop (talk) 04:21, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

This may be OR, but logically it is probably the case that as context and familiarity with the language increases, the ability to infer the meaning/presence of such abstract notions may become easier. Purely as a thought experiment, if there's some Aesop-like story about two animals and one of them is cheating or something along those lines, one may be able to deduce from this context the words for "fair" or "unfair," etc. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.15.48.37 (talk) 05:54, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Luckily for European explorers, European languages such as English, French, and Spanish are easy to learn. In the Americas, the usual process was that a Native American linguist would learn to speak the explorers' language (as the Aztecs and Incas did by learning Spanish), and then the Native American linguists would tell us the meanings of their words (for example, La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as interpreter for the Spanish Conquistadores). Soon after, Catholic (usually) missionaries would arrive to convert the natives and would begin learning the native language. Once they learned the native languages, they would create word lists, vocabularies. These lists eventually became very important as the native languages began to die out. Sometimes the orthography that the priests used was not sufficient, as in the case of An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language by the Franciscan Fathers. Many of the words in the dictionary cannot be understood by modern speakers of Navajo, because the orthography was too blurry. Nevertheless, it's an important work and still useful. —Stephen (talk) 08:31, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

"European languages such as English, French, and Spanish are easy to learn" for whom? Those european languages have many constructionslike the analytic perfect tense andarbitrary gender which are rare in the Americas (if they exist at all), while European languages lack ergativity, clusivity, alienable vs inalienable possessives, or the obviative or fourth person where "different pronouns are used in the expression his dog killed his cat depending one we are speaking of one owner or two different owners. Phonological systems can be wildly different. Ease of a task depends on both the origin and the destination. μηδείς (talk) 01:33, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Easy to learn for most people who don't speak English. We're talking about spoken language, not written. The perfect tense does not present much of a problem for speakers of most Native American languages, who find it a highly simplified form of a common verbal aspect. While speakers of analytical languages find agglutinative languages impossibly difficult, the speakers of agglutinative/synthetic languages find no barrier in the simplicity of analytical languages. The missing obviative just makes European languages all the more simple. I know a good many Native Americans who did not learn English until, at a later age, it became necessary, and they all agree that it is very easy. Gender in Spanish and French does not pose much of a problem, since most American languages have similar noun classes. As most North American languages are much, much more complex and difficult than English, Spanish, and French, the early learners found them surprisingly simple and easy to learn. In the U.S., we get an enormous number of foreigners who need to learn English, and they say that, although some of the sounds are difficult at first, it's an easy language to learn. The only people who say that English is a difficult language are native English-speakers (I'm not sure why they think this... maybe the spelling). —Stephen (talk) 07:15, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Same question asked at 58:20, not really answered. Шурбур (talk) 09:29, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

The result of a fairly recent thread here (which I can't find now) was that the languages of uncontacted tribes rarely stand in isolation, so it is generally possible to find another local language which has some mutual intelligibility as a starting point. Alansplodge (talk) 19:34, 19 November 2017 (UTC)

Sorry to be blunt, but did the poster a few paragraphs above really say, "Luckily for European explorers, European languages such as English, French, and Spanish are easy to learn"? --216.15.48.37 (talk) 03:29, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I said that. In the heyday of geographic exploration, it was a boon that the explorers' language was easy to learn, as is the case with many European languages such as English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Norwegian, and others. For the Native Americans whose first contacts were from Russians, thought by many Europeans to be difficult, the Americans found Russian logical and easy to learn. If the explorers of America had been speakers of a Khoisan language or a Caucasian language, for example, they would have had to develop and rely on a simplified pidgin or creole. —Stephen (talk) 07:27, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

I can just imagine the horror with which a Tlingit speaker would have met a Burusho or the confusion a Yeniseian language speaker would have caused the Athabaskan language speakers.