Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 July 6

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 6

I'm looking for sentences containing double successive words, e.g. "Give her her book", "He said that that was clear", "I told you you were wrong", "The dog's owner told it it would be punished", "The doll got broken so please try to put its back back".

Let's exclude the following common cases:

1. Two sentences pretending a single sentence, e.g. "Hi there, there is no rain today", and likewise.
2. Double words intended to emphasize an idea, as in the song: "a big big house and a big big car", and the like.
3. Double words one of which is in quotations marks, e.g. "I'm not referring to long words but rather to 'to' and other short words", "When 'When' comes in the beginning it mustn't follow any word", and likewise.
4. Double words one of which is a verb, e.g. "Can a bow bow down?", "Can a row row a boat?", and the like.
5. Double words one of which is an auxiliary verb, e.g. "What it really is is not interesting me", "What it really was was not interesting me", "Whether he does does not matter", "His will will never be realized", "He had had been there", "This can can get broken", "May May be the month he's talking about?", and likewise.
6. Double words each of which is a preposition, e.g. "He is the person I was looking at at the beginning", "I'm waiting for the person you're waiting for for the same reason", and the like.

So far, I've only found five rare cases satisfying my condition:

• Sentences of the type: "Give her her book" ( Or generally: "[transitive verb] her her [noun]" ).
• Sentences of the type: "He said that that was clear" ( or generally: "[pronoun] [say/says/said and its synonyms] that that [predicate]" ).
• Sentences of the type: "I told you you were wrong" ( or generally: "[pronoun] [tell/tells/told and its synonyms] you you [predicate]" ).
• Sentences of the type: "The dog's owner told it it would be punished" ( or generally: "[subject] [tell/tells/told and its synonyms] it it [predicate]" ).
• Sentences of the type: "The doll got broken so please try to put its back back" ( or generally: "put [article/demonstrator] back back" ).

I will appreciate any additional example. Thank you. HOOTmag (talk) 07:50, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• It was in doing that that he made his big mistake. [demonstrative that + relative that]
• There was one person he used to speak with with whom he could never agree. [identical prepositions in different clauses]

Not very elegant examples, but these cases do come up occasionally in edited prose. Deor (talk) 08:12, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, thanks to your first important example, I've just added it to my original question. Your second example is correct as well, but it's only an example of the more general case of double preposition, which I've just excluded in sec. #6 above.HOOTmag (talk) 08:22, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

"He brought up the issue again, but I was no mood to for it. We had had this discussion many times before".--Shirt58 (talk) 09:28, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

No, it's an auxiliary verb, so it has already been excluded (see above sec. #5). HOOTmag (talk) 09:36, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

In your first two examples for number 5, the is and was are not auxiliary verbs. Deor (talk) 09:54, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I suspect they are, but they certainly are - if I add "me" after "interesting". HOOTmag (talk) 10:09, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Oh, bloody Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo hell. Yeah, I missed that. Is there any way a sound can immediately be played when you type in a wrong answer here, like the "forfeit" on QI? If "is" is "is" in "it's", is "is" in "isn't" "is", or isn't it "is" is? etc, etc. --Shirt58 (talk) 10:18, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Your "buffalo" example violates sec. #4. Your "is" example violates both sec. #3 and sec. #4 (or #5). HOOTmag (talk) 10:27, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Buffalo (proper nown) buffalo (noun) would seem to qualify, since both are nouns. Presumably other place names which are also non-proper nouns would also work. MChesterMC (talk) 08:33, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

"It's not its breed that troubles me, it's its cold nose".

• Now, this obviously shouldn't qualify, since apostrophes count. But increasingly common practice suggests it's just a matter of personal preference whether one spells the possessive pronoun its the traditional way (without an apostrophe), or the new way (with one). If one accepts that such a choice is valid (I don't, for the record) and then chooses the new option, we have "... it's it's cold nose". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:55, 6 July 2014 (UTC)
  • The cold doesn't bother me anyway. 86.129.13.205 (talk) 17:17, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

If it's "it is" or "it has", it's "it's", but if it's not, i'ts "its". — Grammar rule

Of course, it doesn't qualify either, per quotes. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:23, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Some suggestions:

• "I gave the kid kid to eat." (i.e. "meat of a young goat")
• "Is this mine mine?"
• "After the second second, he already knew he'd lost the game"
• "She gave him the third third of the money"

And then there's the category of words that can be adjectives as well as nouns (e.g. "a kind kind of person", "the final final", "a fair fair", "a gay gay", "an orange orange" etc.) - Lindert (talk) 14:41, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

• There's another use of "second second". If you read the small-print section of movie credits you will often see the job title second second assistant director. This is simply the ordinal use of "second" repeated, i.e. there are two "second assistant directors" and this is the second-ranking of them. Although the linked article attempts to give the job a different meaning from "third assistant director" (and indeed a few movies credit people under both job titles), usually only one of the two job titles appears and I strongly suspect that the term originated as an attempt to keep "third" in "third assistant director" from being pronounced like "turd".
• Another variation on "that that" is where the second "that" is not a pronoun but an adjective. "He said that that man did it."
• Another variation on "each one is a preposition" is where the first word is a particle in a phrasal verb. "He set it up up in the attic."

--50.100.189.160 (talk) 19:10, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

"He who loves loves you with your dirt." - Ugandan proverb (search online). This doesn't quite violate #4 as both words, rather than just one of them, are verbs. --Theurgist (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

If you're making a batch of something that solidifies; "The set set quickly" - X201 (talk) 08:52, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Then there's the famous furniture treatment made in Warsaw: Polish Polish. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:20, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

In China, china has a long history. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:40, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

In Russia, history has a long china. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:23, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

There's what used to be a fairly well-known punctuation example given to primary school children in the UK: James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. Eric Corbett 22:50, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

And the publican who employed a sub-standard signwriter, and was left complaining that "there's not enough space between the Coach and and and and and Horses.' Stephen 03:08, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger...oops, I forgot Carlsberg WP doesn't do internet memes. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:23, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

WSJ (July 5-6): Too Many Eggs In Your Boss's Basket

Boss's - is it correct? How do you pronounce this? Should it not be Boss' with pronunciation: [boss is] or something like this? Thanks --AboutFace 22 (talk) 14:15, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

"Boss's" is correct that context; it's pronounced the same as "bosses". —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:46, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

The short and long spellings are both correct (i.e. widely accepted), although style guides may recommend a specific choice. The short and long pronunciations (like "boss" or "bosses") are also both correct. Different people use different combinations. If your boss wants you to use a specific form, best to go with that. Sadly, the article English possessive does not address this topic at all. --50.100.189.160 (talk) 19:19, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Our information on the subject is at Apostrophe#Singular nouns ending with an “s” or “z” sound and MOS:POSS. Tevildo (talk) 22:35, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Verbs with limited objects

Certain English verbs seem to only accept a very limited class of direct objects. For instance, "wreak" [1] most commonly comes with "havok". We can "wreak vengeance on Joe", but we cannot "wreak happiness on Joe", nor van we "wreak Joe." Similarly, "doff" often goes with hats [2]. I can also "doff my coat", but I cannot doff a dog or a cup or myself (in the sense of the first definition). The questions: Is there a word for this kind of limited-object verb? Any interesting studies about them? Any candidates for "verb that accepts smallest class of direct objects"? I suppose many verbs' objects are restricted to either concrete or abstract nouns (I cannot "punch happiness"), but I'm interested in the more limited examples. Thanks for any insights, SemanticMantis (talk) 16:55, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

It's more a case that a verb has become obsolete except in idioms. Another is "hale", surviving only with "hearty". Jimfbleak - talk to me? 19:16, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I would call them collocations. --ColinFine (talk) 20:59, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

FYI... The terms "wreak", "wrack" and "wreck" all seem to come from the same place.[3] The terms "doff" and "don" are short for "do off" and "do on".[4] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:05, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

A book on popular linguistics

I am trying to find a book. I used to own it and read but later it's been lost. The book was written by what I dare say a famous European linguist who lived in the 19th century. He was Scandinavian but I do not recall his last name. I also cannot recall the book's title. His name sounded pretty much like Erickson but was almost twice as long. I am sure it is on Amazon but I cannot locate it.

He wrote this popular book at the end of his life apparently. It was all about linguistics. Among other things he discussed how languages originated. He gave a few examples when language sprang out from nowhere. This is one of the stories. Somewhere in northern Europe, perhaps in Belgium in one family identical twin were born. Somehow the family neglected them and they grew up on their own. They had a very little input from outside world and when the story became known they spoke their own language. I think the grammar was pretty much of their mother's tongue which is significant.

He gave other examples. He said that when Europeans came to California they found hundreds of small tribes speaking their own languages. There was a linguistic pandemonium. On the other hand Eskimo up north speak a single language across vast expanse of the tundra. There is one language for thousands of miles. He explained it this way. In California the climate is mild and historically something like this probably happened. A small family separated from a tribe and went on a hunting trip. The little kids stayed behind at a camp while the adults hunted big game. During the hunt the adults are killed and the kids are left to their own devices. Somehow they survive, get by and grow up. In the meantime they spontaneously develop a new language if they started out young, perhaps around 2 years of slightly older. This language deviates significantly in vocabulary from what their parents spoke but the grammar might be similar. Grammar is innate. Chomsky formulated this obvious truth and made an academic career out of it but it apparently was known well before him. In the north behind the Polar Circle if parents are killed during a hunt the children under similar circumstances have no chance to survive and no new language develops.

Even when I still had this book I tried to discuss his assertions in some online forums. The participants’ reaction stunned me. Everyone was saying: "It is an old book!" Indeed it was written I believe at the end of the 19th century but the book I actually had was reprinted most likely by Dover in 1945 or so. The observations like this of course are timeless but it appears linguistics grows on its skin as some would say but I thought the latest statement is more applicable to medicine not linguistics. Does anybody know what I am talking about? Thanks. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 17:08, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Otto Jespersen? Maybe his book Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922) (although I don't know if its contents match your description). Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:15, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

I feel you are correct. Many thanks. I've already ordered the book on Amazon with "one click." --AboutFace 22 (talk) 18:09, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

No need buying until you do like olde good paper books. By the way, his no less interesting The Philosophy of Grammar was one of my first books about linguistics.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 22:59, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

JFYI, the idea that "grammar is innate" is far from an "obvious truth". Most empirical linguists reject Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" because of insufficient evidence. As phrased here:

Theoretically, Darwin makes a number of important observations. First, he recognizes the crucial distinction between the language faculty (the biological capacity which enables humans to acquire language) and particular languages (like Latin or English). The former capacity, which Darwin refers to as "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art" (p 56), is shared by all members of the human species. Darwin neatly bypasses the unproductive nature/nurture debate that has consumed so much scholarly energy by observing that language "is not a true instinct, as every language has to be learnt. It differs, however, from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children" (p 55). As ethologist Peter Marler has put it, language is not an instinct, but an "instinct to learn" whose expression entails that both biological and environmental preconditions be fulfilled. It is this "instinct to learn" for which an biological, evolutionary explanation must be sought: a thoroughly modern perspective.

See also Zompist.com for an accessible introduction to the problem.

Moreover, it is highly doubtful that new languages (especially spoken languages) arise as spontaneously as described, and such an occurrence has never been documented securely. Twin languages do not arise completely independently, in total isolation from the surrounding languages (nor do pidgins, by the way, and it is extremely implausible that the Nicaraguan Sign Language should form an exception). The "poverty of the stimulus" is a standard Chomskyan talking point that nobody has ever been able to support with solid evidence. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:36, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Chomsky has never had anything interesting or worthwhile to say on the subjects of evolution or genetics. Nevertheless, it has become quite clear during the past several decades that general undifferentiated learning mechanisms (association, conditioning, reinforcement etc.) cannot account for childhood language learning, and that in fact children make highly specific and restrictive implicit assumptions about what it is that they are learning. You can call these "universal grammar" or reject the term as you please, but there is definitely something other than general leaning going on... AnonMoos (talk) 07:15, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I think the OP is misunderstanding universal grammar. UG says that the ability to learn grammar is hardwired into the brain, not that specific grammars are hardwired. UG does not mean that a Chinese child (for example) can easily learn Chinese because his genes code for Chinese grammar. If the child is completely isolated from society, and she somehow begins speaking, there's no reason to suspect that her grammar would be more similar to Chinese than to English, or Nahuatl. It's easy to demonstrate that specific grammars are not hardcoded: Chinese people born and raised in the US speak perfect English, and the same applies to every other ethnic group. --Bowlhover (talk) 20:26, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Wow! The subject, it turns out, touches some nerves. Well. I am not a linguist, I am a psychiatrist. What Jespersen presented looked very reasonable to me. I don't think he stated it this way but the message was loud a clear that there is a predisposition in the brain to think about the world in a certain grammatical way. The example of a Chinese child being brought up in an English speaking country is incorrect, aside from being primitive. Many of us have innate ability to learn another language if started early and become bilingual. What does this example with the Chinese child say? It says that had he been brought up in bilingual environment (Chinese and English) he would have had easier, much easier, way to learn Chinese than an English child in similar environment. Of course it is only a statement. It is hard to stage an experiment like this and even if we did it must have been done on a grand scale to compare statistics and exclude confounding variables.

I personally interviewed an individual who could not phrase his thoughts in the past tense. It was bizarre and shocking. I knew for a fact that he was talking about something that happened in the past but all his sentences were in present tense. Only later I heard about discovering similar cases in Canada. More than that some people have no way to express their thoughts in the future tense. They do not understand it. I believe Arabic does not have future tense. They allegedly use adverbs for that. What does it mean? It means that when the proto-Arabic first originated it did not have future tense in their grammar. And in essence they did not need it. I believe it is in John's that he asked Jesus when the end of the world would come. Jesus lightheartedly defined it briskly: "Before you die." What does it mean? it means the Jesus and perhaps a good portion of the Jews at that time had no idea about the future. For them the future did not extend beyond a couple of days.

I don't think there is such a thing as a universal grammar. Grammars have been born and died with new historical mutations in Broka and Wernicke parts of the brain. Some of them survived, other died. Each mutation dictated its own grammar, pronunciation, prosody and inflexion. A single proto-language is of course, a nonsense. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 22:58, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

No need to go this far. English and, if I recall correctly, Proto-Germanic has/had no "formal" future tense.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 23:08, 6 July 2014 (UTC)

Can you point to a source for the Canadian cases? I think this is fascinating, and I want to read more about it.

Many languages don't have a past or future tense. Chinese is one example: there is no past tense, and speakers depend on context to tell past from present. I guarantee that Chinese people know what the past is, and are perfectly able to make a past/present distinction when necessary. I highly doubt that Jesus didn't have a concept of "future", considering that the Hebrew Bible claims to prophesize events hundreds of years in the future.

As for my example with the child, my point is that language-specific grammars are learned rather than inherited. There is nothing in a Chinese person's genes that would make her better or faster at speaking Chinese than English, or any other language. If you locked her in a cage for her entire life (which happened to Genie (feral child), except she wasn't lucky enough to get a cage), she likely wouldn't speak any language and would lose the ability to learn a language in her adult years, just like Genie. If she somehow did start speaking spontaneously, there's no reason to assume that her speech would resemble Chinese and not Kwadi. --Bowlhover (talk) 08:27, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

While I agree that Jesus and his contemporaries almost certainly had a well-formed concept of the future, it isn't true that the Hebrew Bible predicts events hundreds of years in the future. There is absolutely nowhere in the text where it literally says such a thing. Such readings started being applied to the text later, by readers who may have had a significant Greek influence. AlexTiefling (talk) 09:05, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

I'm a few days late to your discussion, but I hope this is helpful: My L1 is not Arabic but Standard German. We don't usually mark the future grammatically. Yet we do understand the concept of future just fine. Even as a child when I didn't know any other language, I had no trouble distinguishing between present and future events, despite not distinguishing between those in grammar.

Some linguistic phenomena (progressive tense in English, aspect in Russian) may take some time to get used to for people who are not used to them from previous languages. They are simply not used to having to think about those concepts whenever they want to write or say something. That does not mean that the concepts themselves are alien to those people; only their intrusion into one's established linguistic habits is.

Not sure how relevant this is, but I was surprised, even incredulous, when I first read something along the lines of Mandarin lacking a past tense, because I was used to having a past tense in my L1. It did not occur to me that the case of Mandarin is not all that different from my own L1's lack of a future tense (I guess there is one, but I hardly ever use it to mark the future), a lack that may be equally shocking to people who only know languages with a compulsory present–future distinction. Other shockers for me were Russian's lack of "is/are/am" and Korean's lack of "you". 82.83.108.127 (talk) 22:08, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Given the third paragraph that the OP posted I would take the whole book with a grain of salt. In Inuit languages it points out that they could be considered a "system of closely interrelated dialects" or "a group of languages". However, the ability to understand a dialect/language drops with distance. So a native speaker in Ulukhaktok will have no difficulty speaking to someone from Kugluktuk (same dialect with minor differences), little difficulty in speaking with someone from Sachs Harbour, great difficulty in speaking with someone from Gjoa Haven and would probably be unable to understand someone from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut.

If you look at Inuit culture#Family life and Native American cultures in the United States#Gender roles you can see that both peoples had similar gender roles. The males were the primary hunters although the women were expected to have a knowledge of hunting as well. This would mean the chances of the children being left alone were slim. A major hunt in either type of culture would have be males only. CBWeather, Talk, Seal meat for supper? 01:18, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

• Jesperson's stories aren't totally useless, but they are pretty much of the "just so" type nowadays. When I was a babe, Mario Pei was the popularizer of linguistics, although I can really only recommend his work on the romance languages to layman. Anthony Burgess's (A Clockwork Orange) A Mouthful of Air remains the best rigorous popular work for laymen of which I am aware, a penny plus shipping at Amazon. Fromkin and Rodman would be the next step up from Burgess, it is the standard college 201 introductory text for majors. Don't bother paying for a recent edition, one from the 80's will do. μηδείς (talk) 02:44, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Pinker's The Language Instinct is a very readable introduction, aimed at non-specialists, to a resolutely Chomskyan view of language. Other views are available. --ColinFine (talk) 15:20, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Answering to Bowlhover, No, I don't have a source/quote. I heard that on National Public Radio morning news broadcast many years ago while driving to work. However, over the years I have been coming across some bits and pieces of such information from various sources I cannot recall. Keep it in mind I am not a linguist. I wish I could recall where I read that in Africa there are tribes who speak only in the present tense, no past, no future. As far as Chinese is concerned, and that may be true for some other languages, the lack of past tense seems to indicate that when the language first sprang up and the languages are always spring up from nowhere when appropriate mutations appear in the population, the Chinese did not have past tense. It is possible that the gene for past tense appeared in the population later on and no grammar developed or perhaps their "past tense genes" are somewhat different from corresponding genes in Northern Europeans who perhaps historically began without past tense genes but acquired them hundreds or thousands years later.

I just want to say that in my opinion language is a behavior, pretty much as handwriting or the manner we walk is a behavior and every behavior is mediated by the genes. --AboutFace 22 (talk) 16:01, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi, AboutFace 22. I'm afraid your conclusion is not warranted. That Chinese doesn't have a past tense (in some formulations of what "past tense" means) is a fact about the mechanisms that the language uses. It tells you almost nothing about the mental models of its speakers, still less about their genetics. A comparable analogy would be to claim that because meso-Americans didn't have the wheel, they couldn't travel, and were lacking a gene for travel. --ColinFine (talk) 17:24, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

AboutFace 22 -- unfortunately that sounds like a shallow or severely outdated version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Languages differ enormously in their "obligatory categories" (i.e. what is expressed in inflections, so that one must generally choose between using the singular form or the plural form of an English noun, etc.), but all human languages have ways of expressing that events took place in the past... AnonMoos (talk) 17:31, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

There is no evidence to support the theory that specific grammars are genetically encoded and plenty of evidence to refute it. For just a few examples out of hundreds of possibilities, we know that many Italians are genetic descendants of Etruscans who spoke a language with a grammar radically different from that of Latin or Italian. Hungarians are largely the genetic descendants of peoples who previously spoke a Slavic language, and before that, Celtic or Pannonian languages, yet Hungarian grammar is radically different from those of the languages spoken by most Hungarians' ancestors. And, speaking of Chinese, many or most of the ancestors of the present-day population of Northeast China spoke the Manchu language or other Tungusic languages, whose grammar is radically different from that of the Mandarin Chinese dialect now spoken by the overwhelming majority in Northeast China. Because language shift has occurred so frequently among historic populations, there is no reason to think that it occurred less often in prehistoric times. So, which grammar would be genetically encoded in the inhabitants of Northeast China: the Mandarin grammar that has been in use for 5-6 generations, the Manchu grammar that was in use for a few centuries before that, or the grammars of lost prehistoric languages spoken by those people's ancestors? Language continuity is more the exception than the rule for populations with more than 2,000 years of recorded history. Even in populations with some linguistic continuity, such as the Greeks or the remaining speakers of Irish, grammatical rules and structures have undergone quite substantial change. This makes it impossible to maintain that specific grammars are genetically encoded. Marco polo (talk) 17:45, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

You wrote that "many or most of the ancestors of the present-day population of Northeast China spoke the Manchu language or other Tungusic languages". Given the numbers at Chuang_Guandong#Historical_background, that probably only applies to a small fraction of the average Northeasterner's ancestry, as new immigrants of the Chuang Guandong would have far outnumbered all previous inhabitants, both those who still used Tungusic and those – including many if not most Manchurian Manchus by that time – who were monolingual in Mandarin. 82.83.92.51 (talk) 22:51, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

I must have the Jespersen's book tomorrow and will refresh my recollections. This discussion is too heavy for me. I even had to read hastily on Hungarian language. Of course none of the Hungarians ever spoke Slavic. They are members of Ugro-Finnish group and that's it.

You guys confuse genetic wiring of the grammar with plasticity of the nervous system. Of course, anyone can find countless examples as to how a person born into one ethnicity being brought up in another language milieu will completely adapt the fruits of it and blend into the new medium. Our nervous system can do it provided people are gifted enough, shall I say endowed with enough IQ? Still if their children at a very young age brought back into the original ethnicity where the original language is preserved they will have a much easier time to master it than people who are not genetically related to this population. I will try to come up with some examples in a day or two if I find them. Thanks, --AboutFace 22 (talk) 01:01, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

• It seems unfortunate you have no desire in educated opinion here. Ignore me and the sources I've given, but Colins, Maroco's and Anon's statements are established science. As for Hungarians not having spoken Slavic, thanks for the laugh on a personal basis. μηδείς (talk) 03:39, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
  • From the other hand, Hungarians indeed never spoke Slavic as if they spoke Slavic then they were Slavs. ;) Hungarians are those who speak Hungarian, if they spoke Slavic they were not Hungarians, obvsly.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 04:33, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
    • I didn't mean to imply that all Hungarians spoke slavic or that Hungarian was a slavic language, but I'm a Slav with plenty of Hungarians in my ancestry and neighborhood where I grew up. μηδείς (talk) 16:37, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
      • Yes, I understand. In such cases better say that a great bulk of the ancestors of modern Hungarians spoke Slavic hence were linguistically still Slavs and not yet Hungarians. If they did not, then modern Hungarians were sharply different anthropologically from surrounding population (and looked like original Uraloid Magyars) but this difference is absent. So modern Hungarians have not inherited their language "genetically" but rather socially as here was already said.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:54, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

I never said that Hungarians spoke Slavic, I said that the ancestors of today's Hungarians spoke Slavic languages. A person's genetic inheritance is quite distinct from his or her cultural inheritance or identity. Rapid cultural change can and does occur without corresponding genetic change. As AnonMoos correctly stated, language, one aspect of culture, changes much more readily and rapidly from one generation to the next than the genome. Marco polo (talk) 14:14, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

AboutFace 22 -- All available evidence that I've ever seen is that human babies are primed and highly motivated to learn a language, but not any particular language. Certainly languages change much faster than genes do. If all of the details of human language were directly encoded in the genes (rather than the ability to learn a language), then there would be a much smaller vocabulary than seen in actual languages, and an inability to adjust language to fit changing circumstances (new inventions, or moving to a geographic area with different plants and animals) except through slow genetic mutation... AnonMoos (talk) 07:32, 8 July 2014 (UTC)