Vanishing Languages

The Carolingian Empire was based on an alliance between the emperor, who was a temporal ruler supported by a military retinue, and the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, who granted spiritual sanction to the imperial mission. Charlemagne and his son Louis I ( 814-40) established centralized authority, appointed imperial counts as administrators, and developed a hierarchical feudal structure headed by the emperor. Reliant on personal leadership rather than the Roman concept of legalistic government, Charlemagne's empire lasted less than a century.

A period of warfare followed the death of Louis. The Treaty of Verdun (843) restored peace and divided the empire among three sons, geographically and politically delineating the approximate future territories of Germany, France, and the area between them, known as the Middle Kingdom . The eastern Carolingian kings ruled the East Frankish Kingdom, what is now Germany and Austria; the western Carolingian kings ruled the West Frankish Kingdom, what became France. The imperial title, however, came to depend increasingly on rule over the Middle Kingdom. By this time, in addition to a geographical and political delineation, a cultural and linguistic split had occurred. The eastern Frankish tribes still spoke Germanic languages; the language of the western Frankish tribes, under the influence of Gallo-Latin, had developed into Old French. Because of these linguistic differences, the Treaty of Verdun had to be written in two languages.
source: own summary from various history books.

Hexe, no, we will never kill our 'Umlaut'! It is just too funny to make English speaking people say things like 'Schnäuzchen' (which of course also has the 'ch' sound...).

Nor I, Urs. Isn't there a theory that language began with onomatopoeias? I need to look that up.

This paper is a brief phonetic investigation of the nature of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is the imitation of natural noises by speech sounds. To understand this phenomenon, we must realize that there is a problem here which is by no means trivial. There is an infinite number of noises in nature, but only twenty-something letters in an alphabet that convey in any language a closed system of about fifty (up to a maximum of 100) speech sounds. I have devoted a book length study to the expressiveness of language (What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? -- The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception), but have only fleetingly touched upon onomatopoeia. In this paper I will recapitulate from that book the issue of acoustic coding, and then will toy around with two specific cases: why does the cuckoo say "kuku" in some languages, and why the clock prefers to say "tick-tock" rather than, say, tip-top. Only fleetingly I will touch upon the question why the speech sounds [s] and [S] (S represents the initial consonant of shoe; s the initial consonant of sue) serve generally as onomatopoeia for noise (in my book I have explored the expressiveness of these sounds at much greater length). By way of doing all this, I will discuss a higher-order issue as well: How are effects translated from reality to some semiotic system, or from one semiotic system to another.