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Subject: sci.lang FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
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Archive-name: sci-lang-faq
Version: 2.6
Last-modified: 25 Mar 1994

Except where noted, written by Michael Covington ([e-mail])
Maintained by Mark Rosenfelder ([e-mail])


      changes this month:
          added a section on common myths about language
          added more information on acquiring electronic fonts


NOTE: This FAQ file is fairly short.  Many good books and many important ideas
      are left unmentioned.  All readers should be aware that linguistics
      is a young science and that linguists rarely agree 100% on anything.

PHONETIC SYMBOLS IN ASCII: To represent phonetic symbols, see
      Evan Kirshenbaum's ASCII/IPA system, which is explained in
      separate postings.

===============================================================================
CONTENTS

 1. What is sci.lang for?
 2. What is linguistics?
 3. Does linguistics tell people how to speak or write properly?
 4. What are some good books about linguistics?
 5. How did language originate?
 6. What is known about prehistoric language?
 7. What do those asterisks mean?
 8. How are present-day languages related?
 9. Why do Hebrew and Yiddish [etc.] look alike if they aren't related?
10. How do linguists decide that languages are related?
11. What is Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar all about?
12. What is a dialect?  (Relation between dialects and languages.)
13. Are all languages equally complex, or are some more primitive than others?
14. What about artificial languages, such as Esperanto?
15. What are some stories and novels that involve linguistics?
16. What about those Eskimo words for snow? (and other myths about language)
17. Where can I get an electronic IPA font (also Cyrillic, etc.)?
===============================================================================
1. What is sci.lang for?

Discussion of the scientific or historical study of human language(s).
Note the "sci." prefix.  The main concern here is with _facts_ and
theories accounting for them.

For advice on English usage, see alt.usage.english or misc.writing.
For casual chatter about other languages see soc.culture.<whatever>.

Like all "sci." newsgroups, sci.lang is not meant to substitute for
a dictionary or even a college library.  If the answer to your question
can be looked up easily, then do so rather than using the net.
If you don't have a library, then ask away, but explain your situation.
===============================================================================
2. What is linguistics?

  The scientific study of human language, including:
     Phonetics (physical nature of speech)
     Phonology (use of sounds in language)
     Morphology (word formation)
     Syntax (sentence structure)
     Semantics (meaning of words & how they combine into sentences)
     Pragmatics (effect of situation on language use)

  Or, carving it up another way:
     Theoretical linguistics (pure and simple: how languages work)
     Historical linguistics (how languages got to be the way they are)
     Sociolinguistics (language and the structure of society)
     Psycholinguistics (how language is implemented in the brain)
     Applied linguistics (teaching, translation, etc.)
     Computational linguistics (computer processing of human language)

  Some linguists also study sign language, non-verbal communication,
  animal communication, and other topics peripheral to ordinary language.
===============================================================================
3. Does linguistics tell people how to speak or write properly?

No.  Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
Linguistics can often supply facts which help people arrive at a
recommendation or value judgement, but the recommendation or value
judgement is not part of linguistic science itself.
===============================================================================
4. What are some good books about linguistics?

(These are cited by title and author only. Full ordering information
can be obtained from BOOKS IN PRINT, available at most bookstores and
at even the smallest public libraries.)

  CAMBRIDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LANGUAGE, by David Crystal (1987) is a good place
     to start if you are new to this field.
  LANGUAGE, by Edward Sapir (1921), is a readable survey of linguistics
     that is still worthwhile despite its age.
  AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE, by Fromkin and Rodman (1974), is one of the
     best intro linguistics survey texts. (Read it!) There are many others.
  CAMBRIDGE TEXTBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS (a series) consists of good,
     modestly priced introductions to all the areas of linguistics.
  Any encyclopedia will give you basic information about widely studied
     languages, alphabets, etc.
===============================================================================
5. How did language originate?

Nobody knows.  Very little evidence is available.
See however D. Bickerton, LANGUAGE AND SPECIES (1990).
===============================================================================
6. What is known about prehistoric language?

Quite a lot, if by "prehistoric" you'll settle for maybe 2000 years
before the development of writing.  (Language is many thousands of years
older than that.)

Languages of the past can be recovered by comparative reconstruction
from their descendants.  The comparative method relies mainly on
pronunciation, which changes very slowly and in highly systematic
ways.  If you apply it to French, Spanish, and Italian, you
reconstruct late colloquial Latin with a high degree of accuracy;
this and similar tests show us that the method works.

Also, if you use the comparative method on unrelated languages,
you get nothing. So comparative reconstruction is a test of whether
languages are related (to a discernible degree).

The ancient languages Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and several others form
a group known as "Indo-European."  Comparative reconstruction from
them gives a language called Proto-Indo-European which was spoken
around 2500 B.C.  Many Indo-European words can be reconstructed with
considerable confidence (e.g., *ekwos 'horse').  The grammar was
similar to Homeric Greek or Vedic Sanskrit.  Similar reconstructions are
available for some other language families, though none has been as
thoroughly reconstructed as Indo-European.
===============================================================================
7. What do those asterisks mean?

Either of 2 things.
An unattested, reconstructed word (such as Indo-European *ekwos);
or an ungrammatical sentence (such as *Himself saw me).
===============================================================================
8. How are present-day languages related?
                                                           [--Scott DeLancey]

This is an INCOMPLETE list of some of the world's language families.  More
detailed classifications can be found in Voegelin and Voegelin, CLASSIFICATION
AND INDEX OF THE WORLD'S LANGUAGES (1977), and M. Ruhlen, A GUIDE TO THE
WORLD'S LANGUAGES (1987).  (Note: Ruhlen's classification recognizes a
number of higher-order groups which most linguists regard as speculative).

A language family is a group of languages that have been proven to have
descended from a common ancestral language.  Branches of families likewise
represent groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor.  For
example, English, Dutch, and German have a common ancestor which we label
Proto-West-Germanic, and thus belong to the West Germanic branch of Germanic.
Icelandic and Norwegian are descended from Proto-North Germanic, a separate
branch of Germanic.  All the Germanic languages have a common ancestor,
Proto-Germanic; farther back, this ancestor was descended from Proto-Indo-
European, as were the ancestors of the Italic, Slavic, and other branches.

Not all languages are known to be related to each other.  It is possible that
they are related but the evidence of relationship has been lost; it's also
possible they arose separately.  It is likely that some of the families
listed here will eventually turn out to be related to one another.

While low-level close relationships are easy to demonstrate, higher-order
classification proposals must rely on more problematic evidence and tend to
be controversial.  Recently linguists such as Joseph Greenberg and Vitalij
Shevoroshkin have attracted attention both in linguistic circles and in the
popular press with claims of larger genetic units, such as Nostratic
(comprising Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian, and Afroasiatic) or
Amerind (to include all the languages of the New World except Na-Dene and
Eskimo-Aleut).  Most linguists regard these hypotheses as having a grossly
insufficient empirical foundation, and argue that comparisons at that depth
are not possible using available methods of historical linguistics.

This list isn't intended to be exhaustive, even for families like Germanic
and Italic.  Nor is it the last word on what's a "language"; see question 12.

  Note: English is not descended from Latin.
        English is a Germanic language with a lot of Latin vocabulary,
        borrowed from French in the Middle Ages.

INDO-EUROPEAN
    GERMANIC
      North Germanic:  Icelandic, Norwegian / Swedish / Danish
      East Germanic:  Gothic (extinct)
      West Germanic:  English, Dutch, German, Yiddish
    ITALIC
      Osco-Umbrian:  Oscan, Umbrian (extinct languages of Italy)
      Latin and its modern descendants (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
         Catalan, Rumanian, French, etc.)
    CELTIC
      P-Celtic:  Welsh, Breton, Cornish
      Q-Celtic:  Irish, Scots Gaelic, Manx
      Some extinct European languages were also Celtic, notably those of Gaul
    HELLENIC:  Greek (ancient and modern)
    SLAVIC:  Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, etc.
         (not Rumanian or Albanian)
    BALTIC:  Lithuanian and Latvian
    INDO-IRANIAN
      Indic:  Sanskrit and its modern descendants (Hindi-Urdu,
         Gypsy (Romany), Bengali, etc.)
      Iranian: Persian (ancient and modern), Pashto (Afghanistan), others
    ALBANIAN:  Albanian
    ARMENIAN:  Armenian
    TOKHARIAN (an extinct language of NW China)
    HITTITE (extinct language of Turkey)

AFRO-ASIATIC
    SEMITIC:  Arabic, Hebrew (not Yiddish; see above), Aramaic, Amharic
      and other languages of Ethiopia
    CHADIC:  languages of northern Africa, e.g. Hausa
    CUSHITIC:  Somali, other languages of eastern Africa
    EGYPTIAN:  Ancient Egyptian
    BERBER:  languages of North Africa

NIGER-KORDOFANIAN:  includes most of the languages of sub-Saharan
    Africa.  Most of the languages are in the NIGER-CONGO branch; the
    most widely known subgroup of N-G is BANTU (Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, etc.)

URALIC (=FINNO-UGRIAN)
    Finnish, Estonian, Saami (Lapp), Hungarian, and several
    languages of central Russia

MONGOL:  Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmuck, etc.
TURKIC:  Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and other languages of Central Asia

    Some linguists group the Mongol and Turkic families together as ALTAIC.
    Rather more controversially, some add Korean and Japanese to this group.

    It has been claimed that URALIC and ALTAIC are related (as URAL-ALTAIC),
    but this idea is not widely accepted.

DRAVIDIAN:  languages of southern India, including Tamil, Telugu, etc.

SINO-TIBETAN
    SINITIC:  Chinese (several "dialects", or arguably distinct languages:
      Mandarin, Wu (Shanghai), Min (Hokkien [Fujian], Taiwanese),
      Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, Gan, Xiang
    TIBETO-BURMAN: Tibetan, Burmese, various languages of Burma,
      China, India, and Nepal

AUSTROASIATIC
    MON-KHMER:  Vietnamese, Khmer (Cambodian), and various minority
      and tribal languages of Southeast Asia
    MUNDA:  tribal languages of eastern India

AUSTRONESIAN
    Malay-Indonesian, other languages of Indonesia (Javanese, etc.)
    Philippine languages: Tagalog, Ilocano, Bontoc, etc.
    Aboriginal languages of Taiwan (Tsou, etc.)
    Polynesian languages: Hawaiian, Maori, Samoan, Tahitian, etc.
    Micronesian:  Chamorro (spoken in Guam), Yap, Truk, etc.
    Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar)
  Most of these languages fall in a branch called MALAYO-POLYNESIAN

JAPANESE:  A number of linguists argue that Japanese is ALTAIC; others,
    that it is most closely related to AUSTRONESIAN, or that it represents
    a mixture of AUSTRONESIAN and ALTAIC elements.

TAI-KADAI:  Thai, Lao, and other languages of southern China and
    northern Burma.  Possibly related to AUSTRONESIAN.
    An outdated hypothesis that TAI is part of SINO-TIBETAN is still
    often found in reference works and introductory texts.

AUSTRALIA:  the Aboriginal languages of Australia are conservatively
    classified into 26 families, the largest being PAMA-NYUNGAN, consisting
    of about 200 languages originally spoken over 80-90% of Australia.

A large number of language families are found in North and South America.
There are numerous proposals which group these into larger units, some of
which will probably be demonstrated in time.  To date no New World language
has been proven to be related to any Old World family.  The larger North
American families include:

ESKIMO-ALEUT:  two Eskimo languages and Aleut.
ATHAPASKAN:  most of the languages of Alaska and northwestern Canada,
    also includes Navajo and Apache.  Eyak (in Alaska) is related to
    Athapaskan; some linguists put these together with Tlingit and Haida
    in a NA-DENE family.
ALGONQUIAN:  most of Canada and the Northeastern U.S., includes
    Cree, Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Blackfoot
IROQUOIAN:  the languages of NY state (Mohawk, Onondaga, etc.) and Cherokee
SIOUAN:  includes Dakota/Lakhota and other languages of the Plains
    and Southeast U.S.
MUSKOGEAN: Choctaw, Alabama, Creek, Mikasuki (Seminole) and other
    languages of the southeast U.S.
UTO-AZTECAN:  a large family in Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.,
    includes Nahuatl (Aztec), Hopi, Comanche, Paiute, etc.
SALISH:  languages of Washington and British Columbia
HOKAN:  languages of California and Mexico; a controversial grouping
PENUTIAN:  languages of California and Oregon; also controversial

Work on documentation and classification of South American languages still
has a long way to go.  Generally recognized families include:

ARAWAKAN, TUCANOAN, TUPI-GUARANI (including Guarani, a national language
of Paraguay), CARIBAN, ANDEAN (including Quechua and Aymara)

LANGUAGE ISOLATES:  A number of languages around the world have never been
successfully shown to be related to any others-- in at least some cases
because any related languages have long been extinct.  The most famous
isolate is Basque, spoken in northern Spain and southern France; it is
apparently a survival from before the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.
===============================================================================
9. Why do  Hebrew and Yiddish
           Japanese and Chinese
           Persian and Arabic
   look so much alike if they aren't related?

Distinguish LANGUAGE from WRITING SYSTEM.
In each of these cases one language has adopted part or all of the
writing system of an unrelated language.

(To a Chinese, English and Finnish look alike, because they're written
in the same alphabet.  Yet they are not historically related.)

An excellent introduction to writing systems is Geoffrey Sampson's
WRITING SYSTEMS (1985).
===============================================================================
10. How do linguists decide that languages are related?           [--markrose]

When linguists say that languages are related, they're not just remarking
on their surface similarity; they're making a technical statement or claim
about their history-- namely, that they can be regularly derived from a
common parent language.

Proto-languages are reconstructed using the comparative method.  The
first stage is to inspect and compare large amounts of vocabulary from the
languages in question.  Where possible we compare entire _paradigms_ (sets
of related forms, such as the those of the present active indicative in
Latin), rather than individual words.

The inspection should yield a set of regular sound correspondences between
the languages.  By regular, we mean that the same correspondences are
consistently observed in identical phonetic environments.  Finally, _sound
changes_ are formulated: language-specific rules which specify how the
original common form changed in order to produce those observed in each
descendent language.

Applying the comparative method to the Romance languages, we might find

  'I sense'  Sard /sento/  French /sa~/   Italian /sento/   Spanish /sjEnto/
  'sleep'         /sonnu/         /som/           /sonno/           /suEn^o/

  'hundred'       /kentu/         /sa~/           /tSento/          /sjEnto/
  'five'          /kimbe/         /sE~k/          /tSinko/          /sinko/

  'I run'         /kurro/         /kur/           /korro/           /korro/
  'story'         /kontu/         /ko~t@/         /konto/           /kuEnto/

and hundreds of similar examples.  We see some correspondences--

  (1)        Sard /s/      French /s/     Italian /s/       Spanish /s/
  (2)             /k/             /s/             /tS/              /s/
  (3)             /k/             /k/             /k/               /k/

but they seem to conflict: does Sard /k/ correspond to Spanish /s/ or /k/?
Does French /s/ correspond to Italian /s/ or /tS/?

In fact we will find that the correspondences are regular, once we observe
that (2) is seen before a front vowel (i or e), while (3) is seen in other
environments.  Alternations within paradigms, such as It. /diko/ 'I say'
vs. /ditSe/ 'says', will help us make and confirm such generalizations.

We may interpret these now-regular correspondences as indicating that an
initial /s/ in the proto-language has been retained in all four languages,
and likewise initial /k/ in Sard; but that /k/ changed to /s/ or /tS/ in
the other languages in the environment of a front vowel.

Actually, this process is iterative.  For instance, at first glance we
might think that German _haben_ and Latin _habere_ 'have' are obvious
cognates.  However, after noting the regular correspondence of German h to
Latin c, we are forced to change our minds, and look to _capere_ 'seize'
as a better cognate for _haben_.

Thus, similarity of words is only a clue, and perhaps a misleading one.
Linguists conclude languages are related, and thus derive from a common
ancestor, only if they find *regular* sound correspondences between them.

To complicate things, derivations may be obscured by irregular changes,
such as dissimilation, borrowing, or analogical change.  For instance,
the normal development of Middle English _kyn_ is 'kine', but this word
has been largely replaced by 'cows', formed from 'cow' (ME _cou_) on the
analogy of word-pairs like stone : stones.  Analogy often serves to reduce
irregularities in a language (here, an unusual plural).

_Borrowing_ refers to taking words from other languages, as English has
taken 'search' and 'garage' from French, 'paternal' from Latin, 'anger' from
Old Norse, and 'tomato' from Nahuatl.  How do we know that English doesn't
derive from French or Nahuatl?  The latter case is easy to eliminate:
regular sound correspondences can't be set up between English and Nahuatl.

But English has borrowed so heavily from French that regular correspondences
do occur.  Here, however, we find that the French borrowings are thickest in
government, legal, and military domains; while the basic vocabulary (which
languages borrow less frequently) is more akin to German.  Paradigmatic
correspondences like sing/sang/sung vs. singen/sang/gesungen also help show
that the Germanic words are inherited, the French ones borrowed.
===============================================================================
11. What is Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar all about?

Several things; it really comprises several layers of theory:

(1) The hypothesis that much of the structure of human language is
inborn ("built-in") in the human brain, so that a baby learning to
talk only has to learn the vocabulary and the structural "parameters"
of his native language -- he doesn't have to learn how language works
from scratch.

This is well supported and widely believed; main evidence consists of:
  - The fact that babies learn to talk remarkably well from what seems
     to be inadequate exposure to language; it can be shown in detail
     that babies acquire some rules of grammar that they could never
     have "learned" from what is available to them, if the structure of
     language were not partly built-in.
  - The fact that the structure of language on different levels
     (vocabulary, ability to connect words, etc.) can be lost by injury
     to specific areas of the brain.
  - The fact that there are unexpected structural similarities between
     all known languages.
For detailed exposition see Cook, CHOMSKY'S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (1988), and
Newmeyer, GRAMMATICAL THEORY: ITS LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES.

(2) The hypothesis that to adequately describe the grammar of a human
language, you have to give each sentence at least two different structures,
called "deep structure" and "surface structure", together with rules
called "transformations" that relate them.

This is hotly debated.  Some theories of grammar use two levels and
some don't.  Chomsky's original monograph, SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES (1957),
is still well worth reading; this is what it deals with.

(3) Chomsky's name is associated with specific flavors of transformational
grammar.  The model elaborated over the last few years is called GB
(government and binding) theory; however, Chomsky's 1992 paper on Minimalism
contains significant departures from earlier work in GB.

Bill Turkel ([e-mail]) runs a mailing list on Minimalism; e-mail
him for more information.

(4) Some people think Chomsky is the source of the idea that grammar ought
to be viewed with mathematical precision.  (Thus there are occasional
vehement anti-Chomsky polemics such as THE NEW GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL, which
are really polemics against grammar per se.)

Although Chomsky contributed some valuable techniques, grammarians have
_always_ believed that grammar was a precise, mechanical thing.
===============================================================================
12. What is a dialect?
                                                              [--M.C. + M.R.]
A dialect is any variety of a language spoken by a specific community of
people. Most languages have many dialects.

Everyone speaks a dialect.  In fact everyone speaks an _idiolect_, i.e.,
a personal language.  (Your English language is not quite the same as
my English language, though they are probably very, very close.)

A group of people with very similar idiolects are considered to be
speaking the same dialect.  Some dialects, such as Standard American
English, are taught in schools and used widely around the world.
Others are very localized.

Localized or uneducated dialects are _not_ merely failed attempts to speak
the standard language.  William Labov and others have demonstrated, for
example, that the speech of inner-city blacks has its own intricate
grammar, quite different in some ways from that of Standard English.

It should be emphasized that linguists do not consider some dialects
superior to others-- though speakers of the language may do so;
and linguists do study people's attitudes toward language, since
these have a strong effect on the development of language.

Linguists call varieties of language "dialects" if the speakers can
understand each other and "languages" if they can't.  For example,
Irish English and Southern American English are dialects of English,
but English and German are different languages (though related).

This criterion is not always as easy to apply as it sounds.
Intelligibility may vary with familiarity and interest, or may depend
on the subject.  A more serious problem is the _dialect continuum_: a
chain of dialects such that any two adjoining dialects are mutually
intelligible, but the dialects at the ends are not.  Speakers of
Belgian Dutch, for instance, can't understand Swiss German, but
between them there lies a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects.

Sometimes the use of the terms "language" or "dialect" is politically
motivated.  Norwegian and Danish (being mutually intelligible) are
dialects of the same language, but are considered separate languages
because of their political independence.  By contrast, Mandarin and
Cantonese, which are mutually unintelligible, are often referred to
as "dialects" of Chinese, due to the political and cultural unity of
China, and because they share a common _written_ language.

Because of such problems, some linguists reject the mutual
intelligibility criterion; but they do not propose to return to
arguments on political and cultural grounds.  Instead, they prefer
not to speak of dialects and languages at all, but only of different
varieties, with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.
===============================================================================
13. Are all languages equally complex, or are some more primitive than others?

Obviously, the size of vocabulary and the variety and sophistication of
literary forms will depend on the culture.

But the _grammar_ of all languages is about equally complex.  Even people with
a very "primitive" material culture, such as the Australian Aborigines, speak
complex languages.

Different languages put their complexity in different places.  English has
complex, intricate sentence structure, but simple morphology (each word has
only a few forms).  Finnish has freer syntax but much more complex morphology.

The only really simple languages are _pidgins_ and _creoles_, which result
when speakers of different languages are suddenly forced to live and work
together. They quickly arrive at a very simple language with vocabulary from
both languages, and a simple grammar of a specific kind (e.g., they are
likely to use repetition to express plurals).  Such a language is called
a _pidgin_ initially, then becomes a _creole_ when babies are born who
acquire it as a native language.
===============================================================================
14. What about artificial languages, such as Esperanto?          [--markrose]

Hundreds of constructed languages have been devised in the last few centuries.
Early proposals, such as those of Lodwick (1647), Wilkins, or Leibniz, were
attempts to devise an ideal language based on philosophical classification
of concepts, and used wholly invented words.  Most were too complex to learn,
but one, Jean Francois Sudre's Solresol, achieved some popularity in the last
century; its entire vocabulary was built from the names of the notes of
the musical scale, and could be sung as well as spoken.

Later the focus shifted to languages based on existing languages, with a
polyglot (usually European) vocabulary and a simplified grammar, whose purpose
was to facilitate international communication.  Johann Schleyer's Volapu"k
(1880) was the first to achieve success; its name is based on English
("world-speech"), and reflects Schleyer's notions of phonetic simplicity.

It was soon eclipsed by Ludwig Zamenhof's Esperanto (1887), whose grammar
was simpler and its vocabulary more recognizable.  Esperanto has remained
the most successful and best-known artificial language, with a million or
more speakers and a voluminous literature; children of Esperantists have
even learned it as a native language.

Its relative success hasn't prevented the appearance of new proposals, such
as Ido, Interlingua, Occidental, and Novial.  There have also been attempts
to simplify Latin (Latino Sine Flexione, 1903) and English (Basic English,
1930) for international use.  The recent Loglan and Lojban, based on
predicate logic, may represent a revival of a priori language construction.

See also Andrew Large, THE ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE MOVEMENT (1985); Mario Pei,
ONE LANGUAGE FOR THE WORLD; Detlev Blanke, INTERNATIONALE
PLANSPRACHEN (in German).

There is a newsgroup, soc.culture.esperanto, dedicated to Esperanto.
The FAQ for this group contains pointers to mailing lists for other
constructed languages.
===============================================================================
15. What are some stories and novels that involve linguistics?    [--markrose]

The following list is by no means exhaustive.  It's based on James Myers'
list of books, which was compiled the the last time the subject came up on
sci.lang.  Additions and corrections are welcome; please suggest the
approximate category and give the publication date, if possible.

ALIENS AND LINGUISTS: Language Study and Science Fiction, by Walter Meyers
(1980) contains a general discussion and lists more works.

alien languages

    "Tlon, Uqbar, Tertius Orbis" in FICCIONES - Jorge Luis Borges (1956)
    BABEL-17 - Samuel R. Delany (1966)
    FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY - Robert L. Forward
    THE HAUNTED STARS - Edmond Hamilton
    INHERIT THE STARS - James P. Hogan
    "Omnilingual", in FEDERATION - H. Beam Piper
    CONTACT - Carl Sagan (1985)
    PSYCHAOS - E. P. Thompson
    "A Martian Odyssey" in SF HALL OF FAME - Stanley Weinbaum (1934)
    "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" in SF HALL OF FAME - Roger Zelazny (1963)

futuristic varieties of English

    A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - Anthony Burgess (1963?)
    HELLFLOWER - eluki bes shahar
    THE INHERITORS - William Golding
    THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS - Robert Heinlein (1966)
    RIDDLEY WALKER - Russel Hoban
    1984 - George Orwell (1948)

other invented languages

    NATIVE TONGUE - Suzette Haden Elgin
    "Gulf" in ASSIGNMENT IN ETERNITY - Robert A. Heinlein (1949)
    DUNE - Frank Herbert (1965?)
    THE VOID-CAPTAIN'S TALE - Norman Spinrad
    THE LORD OF THE RINGS - J R R Tolkien (1965)
    THE MEMORANDUM - Vaclav Havel (1966)
    THE LANGUAGES OF PAO - Jack Vance (1957)

linguist heroes

    DOUBLE NEGATIVE - David Carkeet
    THE FULL CATASTROPHE - David Carkeet
    PYGMALION - George Bernard Shaw (1912)
    THE POISON ORACLE - Peter Dickinson (1974)
    HANDS ON - Andrew Rosenheim (1992)

animal language

    WATERSHIP DOWN - Richard Adams
    TARZAN OF THE APES - Edgar Rice Burroughs
    CONGO - Michael Crichton

use of linguistic theory

    SNOW CRASH - Neal Stephenson (1992)
    GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - Jonathan Swift (1726)
    THE EMBEDDING - Ian Watson (1973)

other

    THE TROIKA INCIDENT - James Cooke Brown
    ETXEMENDI - Florence Delay
    SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD - Diane Duane
    TONGUES OF THE MOON - Philip Jose Farmer
    THE DISPOSSESSED - Ursula LeGuin (1974)
===============================================================================
16. What about those Eskimo words for snow? (and other myths about language)
                                                               [--markrose]

   "The Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow."

This story is constantly being repeated, with various numbers given,
despite the fact that it has no basis at all.  No one who repeats this
pseudo-factoid can list the hundreds of words for you, or even cite a
work that does.  They just heard it somewhere.

The anthropologist Laura Martin has traced the development of this myth
(including the steady growth in the number of words claimed).  Geoffrey
Pullum summarizes her report in THE GREAT ESKIMO VOCABULARY HOAX (1991).

How many words are there really?  Well, the Yup'ik language in particular
has about two dozen roots describing snow or things related to snow.  This
is not particularly significant; English can amass about the same total:
snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, flurry, avalanche, powder, hardpack,
snowball, snowman, and other derivatives.

The Yup'ik total could be greatly expanded by other derived words, since
the Inuit languages can form hundreds of words from a single root.  But
this is true of all words in the language (and indeed of all agglutinative
languages), not just the words for snow.

   "There's a town in Appalachia that speaks pure Elizabethan English."

There isn't.  All languages, everywhere, are constantly changing.  Some
areas speak more conservative dialects, but we know of no case where
people speak exactly as their ancestors spoke centuries ago.

Of course, ancient languages are sometimes revived; biblical Hebrew has
been revived (with some modifications) in modern Israel; and there's a
village in India in which Sanskrit is being taught as an everyday
language.  But these are conscious revivals of languages which have
otherwise died out in everyday use, not survivals of living languages.

   "Chinese characters directly represent ideas, not spoken words."

Westerners have been taken by this notion for centuries, ever since
missionaries started describing the Chinese writing system.  However, it's
quite false.  Chinese characters represent specific Chinese words.

(To be precise, almost all characters represent a particular syllable with
a particular meaning; about 10% however represent one syllable of a
particular two-syllable word.)

The vast majority of characters consist of a _phonetic_ giving the
approximate pronunciation of the word, plus a _signific_ giving a clue to
its meaning (thus distinguishing different syllables having different
meanings).  As an added difficulty, many of the phonetics are no longer
helpful, because of sound changes since the characters were devised, over
2000 years ago.  However, it is estimated that 60% of the phonetics still
give useful information about the character's pronunciation.

To be sure, Japanese (among other languages) uses Chinese characters too,
and it is a very different language from Chinese.  However, we must look
at exactly how the Japanese use the Chinese characters.  Generally they
borrowed both the characters and the words represented; it's rather as if
when we borrowed words like _psychology_ from Greek, we wrote them in the
Greek alphabet.  Native Japanese words are also written using the Chinese
characters for the closest Chinese words: if the Japanese word overlaps
several Chinese words, different characters must be written in different
contexts, according to the meanings in Chinese.

A good demythologizing of common notions about Chinese writing is found in
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: FACT AND FANTASY, by John DeFrancis (1984).
===============================================================================
17. Where can I get an electronic IPA font (also Cyrillic etc.)?
                                                                  [--markrose]
     [Adapted from information posted to sci.lang by Sean Redmond
     and Evan Antworth.  If you know of other publically available (and+
     legal) fonts or other linguistic resources, please e-mail me or post
     to sci.lang, so they can be listed here.]

* A number of Postscript Type 1 and TrueType fonts (including IPA, Greek,
  Cyrillic, Armenian, etc.) are available by ftp from

     host       ftp.cica.indiana.edu
     directory: ftp/pub/pc/win3/fonts

  List (ls) the directory to see what's available.  The files are zipped;
  a version of unzip is usually available on whatever host you use
  to ftp with.

  Note: TrueType files can be used under Windows or on the Macintosh.
  I'm not sure if the unzipped files can be inserted directly into the
  Mac's Fonts folder; I ran them through Fontographer first.

* The SIL IPA fonts (also in PostScript Type 1 and TrueType versions)
  are also available by ftp from

     host:      linguistics.archive.umich.edu [141.211.32.2]
     directory:
        Windows version: /msdos/windows/fonts/truetype/sil-ipa12.exe
        Mac version:     /mac/system.extensions/font/type1/silipa1.2.cpt.hqx

* They are also available on diskette for $5.00 plus postage: $2.00 in U.S.
  or $5.00 outside U.S. Order from:

     SIL Printing Arts Department
     7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road
     Dallas TX  75236   USA

     tel:    [phone], -2440
     fax:    [phone].
     e-mail: [e-mail]