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Via Language Log, I discovered this big news item: Solid evidence for a relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages.

If you’re a language geek like me, this is really exciting news. First off, it’s not very often that new large language families are established. The high-level language groupings that linguists know of are pretty stable, and attempts to establish new relationships between families are usually done by crackpots using dubious methods to reach absurd conclusions, like asserting that all languages are descended from ancient Sumerian. (Or that guy who claims that the Romance languages all descend from Modern English.)

The other interesting thing is both the distances involved: the Yeneseic languages are spoken in central Siberia, while the Na-Dene languages are spoken across North America, from Alaska in the west to Greenland in the east (oops, that was confusion with a different language family) and Mexico in the south. This makes the Dene-Yeniseic language group one of the most dispersed in the world, with impressively ambitious speakers:

The distance from the Yeniseian range to that the most distant Athabaskan languages is the greatest overland distance covered by any known language spread not using wheeled transport or sails. Archaeologist Prof. Ben Potter of UAF reviewed the postglacial prehistory of Beringia and speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times.

From the Linguist List

There are papers and more information on the pages linked; I’m just beginning to go through the material myself.

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My wife is Romanian, and we speak Romanian at home as our normal language of conversation. So today I was looking up some information about historical Romanian orthography (possibly the subject of another post), and I was surprised to discover the existence of not one, but four Romanian languages:

Map of Romanian Language Distributions

I was previously dimly aware of the existence of Aromanian (shown in red above), but what most fascinated me were the Istro-Romanians. They’re two tiny dots of yellow over there in Croatia. They are the smallest ethnic group in Europe, numbering less than 1000 speakers, spread among a handful of villages and hamlets. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a website. The website is, in fact, very good, with a reasonable pronunciation guide and a variety of resources.

(No one, however, seems to be able to tell me what the phonetic value of {å} is. Based on circumstantial evidence, I’m guessing that it’s [ɒ], the low rounded back vowel.)

Fascinating stuff, here. The language is clearly close to Romanian: I can just barely make it out, though it’s quite a stretch in some places. I especially like this poem:

Ur populu
pureţ-ăl în veruge
respuliaţ-ăl
zecepiţ-li gura
şi înca-i liber.

Laieţe-li lucru
paseporetu
scåndu iuva mărânca
påtu iuva dorme,
înca ăi bogåt.

Ur populu,
vise siromah şi servu
când ăli furu limba
cara vut-a în dota dila ţåţi
şi pl’erzut-ăi za vaica.

The last stanza, as best I can guess (seeing as I don’t actually speak this language) is translated:

A people,
Dreams (siromah?) and serves (Serbs?)
When they steal their language
Which they had as a gift from their fathers
And have lost forever

I’m sure that my readership contains plenty of people who actually speak Istro-Romanian and would be happy to correct me.

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Vylar Kaftan wrote an interesting post about stories that are three sentences off. I was going to leave her a nice comment, but the server she’s hosted on ate one comment, and didn’t seem to work when I tried to post another. So instead I’m writing this post, and maybe the pingback will work. (After meeting her husband Shannon and recognizing him as a fellow Linux geek with a tiny laptop that was teh k00l, I suspect that her site is hosted on a server in their garage. Shannon: get some more CPU and/or bandwidth on that baby.)

Do you ever write a story, and have it ALMOST working–but it’s three sentences off?

Approximately three sentences, of course. Might be a few more or less. Might be sentences you need to add, delete, change, or some combination of the above. But those tiny changes make all the difference.

Yes. This happens to me all the time. However, I am lazier, or perhaps more impatient than Vy. If I get to that point and I can’t see what the fix is, I’m sorely tempted to say “What the hell”, slap it in an envelope, and send it on its way. This is a terrible idea. What I really should do is set it aside for a few days and come back to it later. That usually gives me the perspective to see what’s wrong, or (more likely) gives me the perspective to see dozens of other things that are wrong.

Although I successfully evaded that problem with my two most recent subs, as both Lights and Confession of Adrianna Belle had problems in their endings that I did eventually fix. I think I’m perfectly happy with each of them at present.

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Sent out Lights again. Sort of: I e-subbed it, then immediately got a note back saying that I had formatted something wrong. It’ll take me a bit to fix it for reasons too boring to explain, but it’ll be really re-subbed tomorrow.

Agent Kristin had an informative post about author websites. In particular, she said this:

What you might not want to include is a whole play-by-play of your current editor, agent, or publisher search. This could backfire. I have seen sites where an author has clearly outlined all the rejections (sometimes the letters are posted there verbatim!). It would make me think twice about asking for the full (although the one time I encountered it, I did end up requesting the full as opinions can vary widely) but think of the psychology impact of that. If lots of people are saying NO, maybe I’ll think twice about saying YES.

Um, oops. I’ve been doing more or less this, counting the number of rejections and then advertising them here on the blog. And I take her point that this might give a bad impression. So I’m changing tacks, slightly. I’ll still talk about the Quest For Publication, but I’m not going to give the names of the places I’m submitting to, at least not until someone buys it. Then you’d better believe that I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.

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  1. Over 2000 people have now climbed J.S. Bangs, with roughly ten percent dying on the way down.
  2. People used to believe that dressing their male children as J.S. Bangs would protect them from evil spirits.
  3. Baby swans are called J.S. Bangs.
  4. Forty percent of the world’s almonds and twenty percent of the world’s peanuts are used in the manufacture of J.S. Bangs.
  5. J.S. Bangs, from the movie of the same name, had green blood.
  6. The international dialling code for J.S. Bangs is 672.
  7. Peanuts and J.S. Bangs are beans!
  8. If you chew gum while peeling J.S. Bangs then it will stop you from crying.
  9. In Japan it is considered rude to talk with J.S. Bangs in your mouth!
  10. New Zealand was the first place to allow J.S. Bangs to vote.

Find out more facts about yourself at here.