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- From: markrose@enteract.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
- Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.answers,news.answers
- Subject: sci.lang FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
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- Date: 21 Jun 2002 17:12:05 GMT
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-
- Archive-name: sci-lang-faq
- Version: 2.29
- Last-modified: 3 Mar 2002
- Last-posted: 20 Jun 2002
-
- Except where noted, written by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu)
- Maintained by Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com)
-
- The Web version of this FAQ can be found at:
- http://www.zompist.com/langfaq.html
- (The most up-to-date FAQ will always be the Web version.)
-
- Changes this month: Added a question on etymology.
-
- NOTE: This FAQ file doesn't cover everything! 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.
-
- DISTRIBUTION: This file may be freely distributed electronically, or
- as handouts in linguistics classes. Please retain the author
- attributions and addresses, and this paragraph. Before using it
- in print, please contact the authors.
- ===============================================================================
- 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 (or other electronic resources)?
- 18. How do I subscribe to the LINGUIST list?
- 19. How can I represent phonetic symbols in ASCII?
- 20. Is English a creole?
- 21. How do you look up a word in a Chinese or Japanese dictionary?
- 22. What about Nostratic and Proto-World?
- 23. What are phonemes and why's it so hard to lose a foreign accent?
- 24. How likely are chance resemblances between languages?
- 25. How are tone languages sung?
- 26. Why are there so many words for Germany?
- 27. Why do both English and French have plurals in -s?
- 28. How did genders and cases develop in IE?
- 29. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
- 30. Languages keep simplifying-- how did they ever become complex?
- 31. Where did (some word or phrase) come from?
- ===============================================================================
- 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>.
- Discussion of or in Greek or Latin is available in sci.classics.
- The sci.lang.translation newsgroup focusses on translation and issues of
- concern to translators and interpreters.
- The comp.ai.nat-lang newsgroup focusses on natural language processing
- by computers.
-
- 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 languages, non-verbal communication,
- animal communication, and other topics besides spoken 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.
- Some good surveys of linguistics:
- An Introduction to Language - Fromkin and Rodman (1974)
- The Social Art - Ronald Macaulay (1995)
- The Language Web - Jean Aitchison
- Language: The Basics - R.L. Trask (1996)
- AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGUAGE, by Fromkin and Rodman (1974), is one of the
- best intro linguistics survey texts. There are many others.
- THE WORLD'S MAJOR LANGUAGES, edited by Bernard Comrie (1987) contains
- meaty descriptions of fifty languages.
- AN INTRODUCTION TO THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD by Anatole Lyovin (1997)
- surveys everything and has good sketches of some languages Comrie skips.
- 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?
-
- Attached to a word, either of 2 things.
- An unattested, reconstructed word (such as Indo-European *ekwos);
- or an ungrammatical sentence (such as *Himself saw me).
-
- (In a generative rule, such as AP -> Adj (AP)*, it indicates that
- an element may be repeated zero or more times.)
- ===============================================================================
- 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-C is BANTU (Swahili, Zulu, Xhosa, etc.)
-
- URALIC
- 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
- TUNGUSIC: Manchu, Juchen, Evenki, Even, Oroch, and other languages of NE Asia
-
- Some linguists group these three 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). The authoritative (but expensive) reference
- is Daniels and Bright's THE WORLD'S WRITING SYSTEMS (1996), which
- discusses every known script.
- ===============================================================================
- 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/ /tSinkwe/ /sinko/
-
- 'I run' /kurro/ /kur/ /korro/ /korro/
- 'story' /kontu/ /ko~t@/ /(rak)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.
-
- If you want more, Theodora Bynon's HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (1977) is
- very good, and not long; R.L. Trask's HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS (1996)
- is very readable and covers more recent studies.
- Anthony Fox's LINGUISTIC RECONSTRUCTION: AN INTRODUCTION
- TO THEORY AND METHOD (1995) concentrates on the reconstruction process
- itself, and assumes some knowledge of linguistics. On Indo-European,
- try Beekes, COMPARATIVE INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS: AN INTRODUCTION (1995).
- ===============================================================================
- 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.
-
- The main evidence consists of:
- - The fact that babies learn to talk remarkably well from what seems
- to be inadequate exposure to language; it is claimed
- 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),
- Newmeyer, GRAMMATICAL THEORY: ITS LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES (1983), and
- Pinker, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT (1994).
-
- This theory is by no means accepted by all linguists, though many
- would agree that some core part of language is innate.
-
- (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 1995 book on Minimalism
- contains significant departures from earlier work in GB.
-
- (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. They
- are highly divided, however, on the nature and function of those mechanisms!
- ===============================================================================
- 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.
-
- At this point we usually quote Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect
- with an army and a navy."
-
- 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?
- [--M.C. + M.R.]
- Before the 1900s many people believed that so-called "primitive
- peoples" would have primitive languages, and that Latin and Greek--
- or their own languages-- were inherently superior to other tongues.
-
- In fact, however, there is no correlation between type or complexity of
- culture and any measure of language complexity. Peoples of very simple
- material culture, such as the Australian Aborigines, are often found to
- speak very complex languages.
-
- Obviously, the size of the vocabulary and the variety and sophistication of
- literary forms will depend on the culture. The _grammar_ of all languages,
- however, tends to be about equally complex-- although the complexity may
- be found in different places. Latin, for instance, has a much richer
- system of inflections than English, but a less complicated syntax.
-
- As David Crystal puts it, "All languages meet the social and psychological
- needs of their speakers, are equally deserving of scientific study, and can
- provide us with valuable information about human nature and society."
-
- There are only two case of really simple languages:
-
- * _Pidgins_, which result when speakers of different languages come to live
- and work together. Vocabulary is drawn from one or both languages, and a
- very forgiving grammar devised. Grammars of pidgins from around the world
- have interesting similarities (e.g. they are likely to use repetition to
- express plurals).
-
- A pidgin becomes a _creole_ when children acquire it as a native language;
- as it evolves to meet the needs of a primary language, its vocabulary and
- grammar become much richer. If a pidgin is used over a long period (for
- example, Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea), it may similarly develop into a
- more complex language known as an _extended pidgin_.
-
- * _Language death_, what happens when a language falls out of use-- an
- alarmingly widespread phenomenon, which has been studied in detail by
- linguists. The process typically takes several generations, and involves
- an increasingly simplified grammar and impoverished lexicon.
- ===============================================================================
- 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 (1958); Detlev Blanke, INTERNATIONALE
- PLANSPRACHEN (in German). For websites, see the web version of the FAQ.
-
- There is a newsgroup, soc.culture.esperanto, dedicated to Esperanto. Also
- see alt.language.artificial, dedicated to artificial languages in general.
-
- The ConLang mailing list is devoted to the discussion of constructed and
- artificial languages for general communication; its FAQ is on the web at
- http://personalweb.sierra.net/~spynx/FAQ/index.html. To subscribe,
- e-mail a message to listserv@brownvm.brown.edu consisting of the single
- line: subscribe conlang
-
- The AuxLang list is devoted to discussions of the merits and
- practicality of particular international auxiliary languages. To
- subscribe, send mail to listserv@brownvm.brown.edu consisting of the
- single line: subscribe auxlang
- ===============================================================================
- 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 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, Orbis Tertius" in FICCIONES - Jorge Luis Borges (1956)
- 40000 IN GEHENNA - C.J. Cherryh (1983)
- BABEL-17 - Samuel R. Delany (1966)
- FLIGHT OF THE DRAGONFLY - Robert L. Forward (1984)
- THE HAUNTED STARS - Edmond Hamilton
- HELLSPARK - Janet Kagan (1988)
- INHERIT THE STARS - James P. Hogan
- "Not So Certain" - David I. Masson
- "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)
- WELTGEIST SUPERSTAR - P.M. (1980)
-
- futuristic varieties of English
-
- "Barrier" - Anthony Boucher
- A CLOCKWORK ORANGE - Anthony Burgess (1962)
- HELLFLOWER - eluki bes shahar (1991)
- THE INHERITORS - William Golding (1955)
- THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS - Robert Heinlein (1966)
- RIDDLEY WALKER - Russel Hoban (1980)
- 1984 - George Orwell (1948)
-
- other invented languages
-
- NATIVE TONGUE - Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)
- THE GAMEPLAYERS OF ZAN - M A Foster
- "Gulf" in ASSIGNMENT IN ETERNITY - Robert A. Heinlein (1949)
- ALWAYS COMING HOME - Usrula K. Le Guin
- PALE FIRE - Vladimir Nabokov
- THE KLINGON DICTIONARY - Marc Okrand (1985)
- THE VOID-CAPTAIN'S TALE - Norman Spinrad
- THE LORD OF THE RINGS - J R R Tolkien (1954-55)
- THE MEMORANDUM - Vaclav Havel (1966)
- THE LANGUAGES OF PAO - Jack Vance (1957)
-
- linguist heroes
-
- RATES OF EXCHANGE - Malcolm Bradbury
- DOUBLE NEGATIVE - David Carkeet
- THE FULL CATASTROPHE - David Carkeet
- PYGMALION - George Bernard Shaw (1912)
- THE POISON ORACLE - Peter Dickinson (1974)
- OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET - C.S. Lewis (1943)
- HANDS ON - Andrew Rosenheim (1992)
- LEAR'S DAUGHTERS - M. Bradley Kellogg w/ William Rossow (1986)
- THE SPARROW, CHILDREN OF GOD - Mary Doria Russell (1996, 98)
-
- animal language
-
- WATERSHIP DOWN - Richard Adams (1972)
- TARZAN OF THE APES - Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
- CONGO - Michael Crichton (1980)
-
- use of linguistic theory
-
- SNOW CRASH - Neal Stephenson (1992)
- GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - Jonathan Swift (1726)
- THE EMBEDDING - Ian Watson (1973)
- Ozark trilogy - Suzette Haden Elgin
- YONDER COMES THE OTHER END OF TIME - Suzette Haden Elgin
-
- other
-
- THE TROIKA INCIDENT - James Cooke Brown (1969) [Loglan]
- ETXEMENDI - Florence Delay [Chomsky ref]
- TRITON - Samuel Delany [reflections on meaning]
- SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD - Diane Duane
- TONGUES OF THE MOON - Philip Jose Farmer
- DUNE - Frank Herbert (1965)
- THE DISPOSSESSED - Ursula LeGuin (1974)
- LOVE ME TOMORROW - Robert Rimmer (1976) [Loglan]
- ===============================================================================
- 16. What about those Eskimo words for snow? (and other myths about language)
- [--markrose]
-
- For more myths and what's really going on, see LANGUAGE MYTHS (1999),
- edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (no linguistics knowledge needed).
-
- "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).
-
- "German lost out to English as the US's official language by 1 vote."
-
- This entertaining story is also told of Greek, Latin, and even Hebrew.
-
- There was never any such vote. Dennis Baron, in THE ENGLISH ONLY QUESTION
- (1990), thinks the legend may have originated with a 1795 vote concerning
- a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as English. At one
- point a motion to table discussion (rather than referring the matter back
- to committee) was defeated 41-40. The proposal was eventually defeated.
-
- "Sign language isn't really a language."
- "ASL is a gestural version of English."
-
- Sign languages are true languages, with vocabularies of thousands of words,
- and grammars as complex and sophisticated as those of any other language,
- though with fascinating differences from speech. If you think they are
- merely pantomime, try watching a mathematics lecture, a poetry reading, or
- a religious service conducted in Sign, and see how much you understand.
-
- ASL (American Sign Language) is not an invented system like Esperanto; it
- developed gradually and naturally among the Deaf. It has no particular
- relation to English; the best demonstration of this is that it is quite
- different from British Sign. Curiously enough, it is most closely related
- to French Sign Language, due to the influence of Laurent Clerc, who came
- from Paris in 1817 to be the first teacher of the Deaf in the US.
-
- ASL is not to be confused with Signed English, which is a word-for-word
- signed equivalent of English. Deaf people tend to find it tiring, because
- its grammar, like that of spoken languages, is linear, while that of ASL is
- primarily spatial.
-
- For more on Sign and the Deaf community, see Oliver Sacks' SEEING VOICES
- (1989), or Harlan Lane, WHEN THE MIND HEARS (1984) and THE MASK OF
- BENEVOLENCE.
- ===============================================================================
- 17. Where can I get an electronic IPA font (or other electronic resources)?
- [--markrose]
- [Adapted from information posted to sci.lang by Sean Redmond,
- Evan Antworth, Chris Brockett, Roy Cochrun, J"org Knappen,
- Harlan Messinger, Alex Rudnicky, Enrico Scalas, Mark Kantrowitz.
-
- If you know of other publicly 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.winsite.com
- directory: pub/pc/win3/fonts/truetype
-
- 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: 214-709-2495, -2440
- fax: 214-709-3387.
- e-mail: Margaret.Swauger@sil.org
-
- * University College London also sells these fonts on disk ($32). See:
-
- http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/fonts.htm
-
- * Some IPA fonts for TeX can be found in the CTAN archives
-
- ftp.dante.de
- ctan.tug.org (finger ctan@ftp.dante.de for mirrors)
- ftp.tex.ac.uk
-
- in the directories
-
- tex-archive/fonts/wsuipa
- tex-archive/fonts/tsipa
- tex-archive/fonts/tipa <-- the most recent
-
- * The Carnegie-Mellon 100,000-word English dictionary can be retrieved
- as follows.
-
- host: ftp.cs.cmu.edu [128.2.206.173]
- directory: project/fgdata/dict
-
- Retrieve the following files:
-
- README
- cmudict.0.2.Z (compressed)
- cmulex.0.1.Z (compressed)
- phoneset.0.1
-
- * WEBSITES related to linguistics or languages are listed in the web
- version of the FAQ: http://www.zompist.com/lang17.html#Websites
-
- * sci.lang (since October 1994) is archived at
-
- ftp.cs.cmu.edu
- /user/ai/pubs/news/sci.lang
-
- * Kenneth Hyde maintains OUT In Linguistics, a mailing list for
- lesbian/gay/bi folk interested in linguistics. (Both qualifiers--
- "lgb(-friendly)" and "linguistics"-- are important, please.) For
- information, e-mail kenny@udel.edu (Kenneth Hyde). To subscribe, send a
- message with an empty subject and "subscribe outil-list" as the body
- of the message to majordomo@udel.edu.
- ===============================================================================
- 18. How do I subscribe to the LINGUIST list?
-
- The LINGUIST list is a mailing list dedicated to linguistics; it's more
- technical than sci.lang. The easiest way to read and post to it is on
- its website at http://linguistlist.org; you can also use the website
- to have postings e-mailed to you.
- ===============================================================================
- 19. How can I represent phonetic symbols in ASCII?
-
- The following table is a summary of Evan Kirshenbaum's IPA/ASCII schema,
- which a number of posters have been using in sci.lang and alt.usage.english.
- For more information, see the Web page at
- http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/
-
- This summary is presented for convenience only, and is not intended to
- forestall discussion of alternative systems.
-
- blb-- -lbd-- --dnt-- --alv-- -rfx- -pla-- --pal--- --vel-- -----uvl-----
-
- nas m M n[ n n. n^ N n"
- stp p b t[ d[ t d t. d. c J k g q G
- frc F V f v T D s z s. z. S Z C C<vcd> x Q X g"
- apr r<lbd> r[ r r. j j<vel> g"
- lat l[ l l. l^ L
- trl b<trl> r<trl> r"
- flp * *.
- ejc p` t[` t` c` k'
- clk p! t! c! c! k!
- imp b` d` d` J` g` q` G`
-
-
- ---- lbv ---- --phr-- ---glt---
-
- nas n<lbv> alv lat frc: s<lat> z<lat>
- stp t<lbv> d<lbv> ? lat flp: *<lat>
- frc w<vls> w H H<vcd> h<?> lat clk: l!
- apr w h
-
-
- ----- unr ----- unr ----- rnd -----
- fnt cnt bck cnt fnt cnt bck
- rzd
- hgh i i" u- y u" u
- smh I I. U
- umd e @<umd> o- R<umd> Y o
- mid @ R @.
- lmd E V" V W O" O
- low & a A &. a. A.
-
-
- Diacritics:
- Vowels: Consonants: + = ad hoc diacritic
- ~ nasalized velarized [ dental
- : long ! click
- - unrounded syllabic <H> pharyngealized
- . rounded retroflex <h> aspirated
- ` ejective/implosive <o> unexploded or voiceless
- ^ palatal <r> rhotacized
- ; palatalized <w> labialized
- " centered uvular <?> murmured
-
- Other symbols:
- $ % ad hoc segment
- [] phonetic transcription
- // phonemic transcription
- # syllable or word boundary
- space word/segment separator
- ' , primary and secondary stress
- 0-9 tones
- ===============================================================================
- 20. Is English a creole?
- [--markrose]
- The change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English (loss of gender and of
- case inflection, phonological change, acquisition of a huge stock of French
- and Latin vocabulary) is certainly dramatic, and has led some sci.lang
- posters, and even some linguists (e.g. Domingue, Bailey & Maroldt,
- Milroy) to the provocative suggestion that English suffered pidginization
- or creolization at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) or the Norse
- invasions (from 865), or both.
-
- This hypothesis, as Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman have
- shown in LANGUAGE CONTACT, CREOLIZATION, AND GENETIC LINGUISTICS (1988),
- rests on an incomplete understanding of creolization and a shaky grasp on
- the history of English. There is a wide range of language contact
- situations, from casual contact to deep structural interference; English is
- by no means the most striking of these cases. It looks like a creole only
- if one ignores this range of phenomena and labels any case of moderate
- interference as creolization.
-
- For many of the changes in question, the chronology does not work out.
- For instance, the reduction of unstressed vowels to /@/, largely responsible
- for the loss of Old English nominal declensions, had taken place *before*
- the Conquest, and affected all of England, including areas never settled
- by the Norse. And English did absorb an immense amount of French and
- Latin vocabulary, but most of this occurred well *after* the Conquest--
- past 1450, two centuries after the nobility ceased to be French-speaking.
-
- Other points to note: 1) most of the simplifications and foreign borrowings
- seen in English occurred as well in other Germanic languages, notably
- Dutch, Low German, and the Scandinavian languages; 2) a particularly
- striking borrowing from Norse, the pronoun 'they', was probably adopted
- to avoid what otherwise would have been a merge of 'he/him' with 'they/them';
- 3) the total number of French-speaking invaders was not more than
- 50,000, compared to an English-speaking population of over 1.5 million--
- nowhere near the proportions that would threaten the normal inheritance
- of English.
- ===============================================================================
- 21. How do you look up a word in a Chinese or Japanese dictionary?
- [--markrose]
-
- The vast majority of Chinese characters can be divided into two parts, the
- radical and the phonetic. Each part is another, simpler character. The
- _radical_ gives an idea of the meaning-- rather a vague idea, since
- traditionally there were only 214 different radicals. The _phonetic_
- identifies the sound, with a bit more precision: generally, all the
- characters that share a phonetic rhymed 2000 years ago in Archaic Chinese.
-
- (It's impossible to give examples in ASCII; see the Web page for more:
- http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html)
-
- Characters are arranged in most Chinese dictionaries by radical. To find
- an unknown character, then, you identify the radical, and look up its
- section in the dictionary. The radicals are arranged in order of increasing
- complexity. Each radical's section is ordered by the number of strokes in
- the character. Several characters may have the same number of strokes;
- these must simply be scanned till the right one is found.
-
- Sometimes it isn't easy to identify the radical-- it's in an odd position
- (e.g. on the bottom or the right rather than the top or left side); or it's
- drawn in an abbreviated form; or it's not clear which of several similar
- radicals the character is listed under. It's also important to know the
- proper method for counting strokes.
-
- If a character isn't composed of a radical + phonetic, it's usually treated
- as one, graphically, for the purposes of dictionary lookup. For instance,
- the character for hao3 'good' is composed of the characters for 'woman' and
- 'child'-- a _semantic_ compound. It's simply listed under the 'woman'
- radical, although zi3 'child' is not its phonetic.
-
- The People's Republic simplified a number of characters and radicals, and
- this changed the number of radicals-- there's 224 in my dictionary, for
- instance. The Japanese have made their own separate simplification.
- ===============================================================================
- 22. What about Nostratic and Proto-World?
- [--markrose]
- In recent years some some linguists have attempted to reconstruct languages
- far older than Indo-European.
-
- *Nostratic*, said to underlie the Indo-European, Kartvelian (South Caucasion),
- Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut
- families, was first proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903. More recently
- the greater part of work on Nostratic is due to Soviet linguists led by
- Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Aaron Dolgopolsky, and Vitaly Shevoroshkin.
-
- The methodology is the traditional comparative method, and over 600 roots
- have been proposed. Most linguists remain skeptical, believing that chance
- processes will have obscured any relationship at this level beyond
- reconstruction, or question the accuracy of the derivations (a charge which
- makes Nostraticists bristle). Others simply suspend judgment, especially
- since much of the supporting material for Nostratic is available only in
- Russian.
-
- A good overview on Nostratic is Kaiser and Shevoroshkin, "Nostratic", in
- the _Annual Review of Anthropology_, 17:309. Illich-Svitych's original
- Russian article (from _Etymologia_, 1965) has been translated in
- Shevoroshkin, ed., RECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGES AND CULTURES (1989).
-
- Joseph Greenberg has proposed a grouping which covers much the same language
- areas (omitting Afro-Asiastic and Dravidian, but adding Ainu and Gilyak),
- called *Eurasiatic*. Greenberg's method of _mass comparison_ (which he has
- also used to group together almost all Native American languages into one
- superfamily, Amerind) basically consists of assembling huge lists of
- common words and doing eyeball comparisons.
-
- This methodology has been severely criticized by many historical linguists.
- If 'mass comparison' were applied to the Indo-European languages, it would
- be bedevilled by false positives (caused by borrowing or chance) and by
- specious phonetic or semantic similarites. Greenberg's methods seem to
- linguists to abandon the very methodological severity which has put
- Indo-European linguistics on a scientific footing, and distinguished it from
- the work of cranks. Relax the rules enough, and you can derive any language
- from any other.
-
- Greenberg replies that the patterns he has found are compelling enough to
- justify his methods, and that he is merely following in the footsteps of
- the originators of the comparative method: linguists had to decide that the
- Indo-European languages were related before attempting reconstructions.
-
- The ultimate areal comparison would be *Proto-World*, the hypothetical
- ancestor of all human languages. Greenberg has mentioned Proto-World, but
- since he is not much interested in reconstruction, his proposal is not much
- more than a statement of the monogenetic theory (a single origin for all
- languages). Most linguists are skeptical that anything could be
- reconstructed at this hypothetical time depth.
-
- Greenberg's work on Amerind can be found in LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAS (1987);
- on Eurasiatic, in the forthcoming INDO-EUROPEAN AND ITS CLOSEST RELATIVES:
- THE EURASIATIC LANGUAGE FAMILY. Introductions to the Nostratic and
- Proto-World controversies were published in both _The Atlantic_ and
- _Scientific American_ in April 1991. The essays in Lamb and Mitchell, eds.,
- SPRUNG FROM SOME COMMON SOURCE (1991), are also relevant.
-
- Loren Petrich maintains an annotated bibliography on Indo-European,
- Nostratic, and Proto-World. I am also indebted to Peter Michalove for
- citations used in this entry.
- ===============================================================================
- 23. What are phonemes and why's it so hard to lose a foreign accent?
- [--markrose]
- The sounds (*phones*) humans can make are infinite; there's (almost always)
- a continuum of phones in between any two phones.
-
- In any one language, however, phones are grouped into 20 to 60 or so discrete
- groups of sounds called *phonemes*. The range of variation for each phoneme
- is discounted by speakers and hearers of the language, who perceive the
- entire range as "the same sound."
-
- The English phoneme /p/ has two phonetic realizations or *allophones*:
- aspirated [ph] beginning a word and non-aspirated [p] elsewhere. But
- since the two types of /p/ never distinguish one word from another, speakers
- of English generally don't even notice the difference. (Linguists
- write phonemic transcriptions between /slashes/, and phonetic transcriptions
- in [brackets].)
-
- If we can find two words with different meaning but only one difference in
- sound between them-- a *minimal pair*-- then we've found distinct phonemes;
- e.g. /p/ and /b/ in English 'pit' and 'bit'. If two sounds never occur in
- the same phonetic environment (e.g. English [p] and [ph])-- if they're in
- *complementary distribution*-- then they're probably allophones of a single
- phoneme. (I say 'probably' because English [h] and [ng] are also in
- complementary distribution, but linguists balk at assigning them to one
- phoneme.)
-
- Other languages do not divide up the phonetic space in the same way. For
- instance, /p/ and /ph/ are separate phonemes in Mandarin Chinese (as in
- /pa1/ 'eight' and /pha1/ 'flower'). And the vowels of 'late' and 'let',
- phonemes in English, are allophones of a single phoneme /e/ in Spanish.
-
- We're trained from childhood to make the phonetic distinctions our language
- uses to keep its phonemes apart, and to ignore those it doesn't.
- Learning to make different distinctions in a foreign language is quite
- difficult-- usually harder than making new sounds our native language lacks
- entirely. We'll continue to have an accent in the new language so long as
- we hear its sounds through our native language's phonemic filter.
- ===============================================================================
- 24. How likely are chance resemblances between languages?
- [--markrose]
- It depends-- to an astonishing degree-- on the amount of phonetic and
- semantic leeway you allow for a match. But in general the answer is
- "Quite likely."
-
- For the sort of comparisons that are often posted to sci.lang, where
- perhaps just two consonants match, or nearly match, and the semantic
- matchups are quirky, one can expect literally hundreds of random matches.
-
- For a detailed discussion, see the web version of the FAQ.
- ===============================================================================
- 25. How are tone languages sung?
- [--markrose]
- It varies. Tones are basically ignored in Mandarin Chinese songs,
- for instance. (Does this make them hard to understand? Often, yes.)
- However, Cantonese songs are generally written in such a way as to
- preserve the relative pitch of successive syllables. E.g. a low tone
- following a high tone will be on a lower note.
-
- For more, see: http://deall.ohio-state.edu/chan.9/articles/bls13.htm
- ===============================================================================
- 26. Why are there so many words for Germany?
- [--markrose]
- Basically, because there were Germans before there was a Germany. Each of
- the Germans' neighbors came up with their own name for them, long before
- there was a German state that people might want to refer to uniformly.
-
- _German_ is a relatively recent borrowing from Latin _Germanus_, whose origins
- are uncertain. It's been referred to Latin _germanus_ 'brotherly', Germanic
- _*geromann-_ 'spear-man', Old Irish _gair_ 'neighbour', etc.
-
- _Deutsch_ comes from Proto-Germanic _*theudisko-z_ 'of the people', from
- _*theuda_ 'people, nation'; originally it was used to distinguish the speech
- of the people from Latin, the language of scholarship. The English word
- 'Dutch' is a derivative, and used to be used for any northern Germanic
- people, later narrowed down to those closest to England; the older usage is
- preserved in 'Pennsylvania Dutch'.
-
- The word *theuda survived into Middle English as _thede_, but was supplanted
- by Romance borrowings such as 'people' and 'nation'. Non-Germanic cognates
- include Oscan touto, Irish tu:ath, and Lithuanian tauta, all meaning 'people'.
-
- Italian _tedesco_ is another derivative of *theudisko-z.
-
- _Teutonic_ derives from a name of an ancient tribe in Jutland, the Teutones;
- if these were a German tribe their name is presumably another derivative of
- *theuda.
-
- French _allemand_ (and Spanish _alema'n_, etc., as well as older English
- _Almain_) derive from a particular tribe of Germans, the Alemanni ('all men').
-
- Finnish _saksa_ derives from the name of another tribe, the Saxons.
-
- Russian _nemets_ is related to _nemoj_ 'dumb, mute'; to the ancient Slavs, not
- speaking in an understandable language was as good as not speaking at all.
- Hungarian _nemet_ is borrowed from Slavic.
-
- Latvian _Va:cija_ may derive from a word meaning 'west'.
- ===============================================================================
- 27. Why do both English and French have plurals in -s?
- -Miguel Carrasquer Vidal (adapted by markrose)]
-
- Despite what one might think, these are independent developments.
-
- The English s-plural comes from the PIE o-stem nominative plural ending *-o:s,
- *-o:s, apparently extended in Germanic to *-o:s-es by addition of the PIE plural
- suffix *-es (*-o:s itself comes from *-o-es). This *-o:ses became Proto-Germanic
- *-o:ziz or *-o:siz, depending on the accent, which gave the attested forms--
- Gothic -o:s, Old English -as, Old Saxon -os, and Old Norse -ar (with the change
- to words that were not a-stems, a tendency which has since become nearly
- universal.
-
- The n-plural of German is generalized from the PIE n-stems (*-on-es --> -en).
- It was still present in Old English n-stems, and survives today in a few words
- like 'oxen'.
-
- The Romance s-plurals (-as, -os, -es) are derived from the accusative (PIE
- *-a:ns, *-ons, *-ens). Old French still had separate nominative and oblique
- (accusative/ablative) forms, but in the end, grammatical cases were dropped
- completely, and usually only the oblique forms were retained.
-
- In Italian and Romanian, final -s was phonetically lost, and the plurals are
- based on the nominative. The Latin nominative plural, at least in the o- and
- a:-stems, was based on PIE *-i, of pronominal origin, not *-es as in most other
- IE languages.
- ===============================================================================
- 28. How did genders and cases develop in IE?
- [--Mikael Thompson]
- Early stages of proto-Indo-European (PIE) didn't have feminine gender. This
- is attested in Hittite, the oldest recorded IE language; it had only
- masculine and neuter genders, divided basically between animate and
- inanimate objects. For most noun classes the PIE endings can be reconstructed
- as follows:
- Animate Inanimate
- Subject *-s *-0
- Object *-m *-0
- For animate nouns, *-s indicated the source of action, *-m the thing acted
- upon; the zero ending indicates no syntactic role. The basic idea is that
- only living things can act upon other things, so only animate nouns could
- take the *-s.
-
- Such a system is characteristic of active/stative languages. Other
- features of PIE fit in with this observation; for instance, in PIE objects
- like fire and water which are inanimate but move seemingly of their own
- will have two separate names. In many languages with an active-stative
- distinction there are such pairs of words. As this distinction was lost in
- IE, different branches retained just one of the words: e.g. English water,
- Greek hydor, Hittite watar form one group (from PIE *wed-), while Latin
- aqua is from PIE *akwa:-.
-
- The animate nouns are the historical source for the masculine gender, and
- the inanimate nouns for the neuter. This is why in all the classic IE
- languages the neuter nominative and accusative have identical forms, and
- the only basic difference between masculine and neuter nouns is in the
- accusative.
-
- Earlier historical linguists cheerfully reconstructed eight cases for PIE,
- on the model of Sanskrit; but the IE languages with many cases are now
- considered to be innovative, not conservative. The other cases developed
- from postpositions or derivational suffixes. Luwian, a sister language of
- Hittite, for instance, has no genitive, but has an adjective-forming
- suffix -assi, as in harmah-assi-s 'of the head'. (This is an adjective,
- not a genitive, because it can be declined.) Genitives in other languages
- often seem to be developments of cognates to this suffix.
-
- PIE didn't bother much with specifying plurals, but when it did, it added
- an *-s or other endings. The neuter plural in all IE languages is not
- descended from this, however-- active/stative languages typically don't
- mark plurals for inanimate nouns-- but is instead a collective noun,
- treated grammatically as a singular. This collective noun ended in *-a in
- the nominative and accusative, and eventually it developed into the
- feminine, which in all the old IE languages has the same form in the
- nominative singular as does the neuter plural nominative- accusative. It
- is also why the Greek neuter plural took a singular verb.
-
- The reason it is called the feminine, of course, is that nouns indicating
- females fell in this gender most of the time. This is puzzling, and
- probably we must accept it as a fact whose explanation can't be recovered
- from the depths of time.
- ===============================================================================
- 29. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
- [--markrose]
- According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines the
- categories and much of the content of thought. "We dissect nature along
- lines laid down by our native languages... We cannot talk at all except by
- subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the
- [speech community] decrees," said Whorf, in LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND REALITY
- (1956). "The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large
- extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group," said
- Sapir.
-
- Both were students of Amerindian languages, and were drawn to this
- conclusion by analysis of the grammatical categories and semantic
- distinctions found in these languages, fascinatingly different from those
- found in European ones. (Neither linguist used the term 'Sapir-Whorf
- hypothesis', however; Whorf referred to the 'linguistic relativity
- principle'. Moreover, the principle was almost entirely elaborated by
- Whorf alone.)
-
- The idea enjoyed a certain vogue in the mid-20th century, not only among linguists but
- among anthropologists, psychologists, and science fiction writers.
-
- However, the strong form of the hypothesis is not now widely believed. The
- conceptual systems of one language, after all, can be explained and
- understood by speakers of another. And grammatical categories do not
- really explain cultural systems very well. Indo-European languages make
- gender a grammatical category, and their speakers may be sexist-- but
- speakers of Turkish or Chinese, languages without grammatical gender, are
- not notably less sexist.
-
- Whorf's analysis of what he called "Standard Average European" languages
- is also questionable. E.g. he claims that "the three-tense system of SAE
- verbs colors all our thinking about time." Only English doesn't have three
- tenses; it has two, past and present; future events are expressed by the
- present ("I see him tomorrow"), or by a modal expression, merely one of a
- large class of such synthetic expressions. And for that matter, English
- distinguishes more like six than three times ("I had gone, I went, I just
- arrived, I'm going, I'm about to go, I'll go").
-
- To prove his point, Whorf collected stories of confusions brought about by
- language. For instance, a man threw a spent match into what looked like a
- pool of water; only there was decomposing waste in the water, and escaping
- gas was ignited by the spark-- boom! But it's not clear that any
- *linguistic* act is involved here. The man could think the pool looked
- like water without thinking of the word 'water'; and he could fail to
- notice the flammable vapors without doing any thinking at all.
-
- A weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-- that language influences
- without determining our categories of thought-- still seems reasonable,
- and is even backed up by some psychological experiments-- e.g. Kay &
- Kempton's finding that, in distinguishing color triads, a pair
- distinguished by color names can seem more distinct than a pair with the
- 'same' name which are actually more divergent optically (American
- Anthropologist, March 1984).
-
- It should be emphasized that, in their willingness to consider the idea
- that non-Western people have languages and worldviews that match the
- European's in precision and elegance, Sapir and Whorf were far ahead of
- their time.
-
- For a spirited and very readable defense of Whorf, see Suzette Haden
- Elgin's THE LANGUAGE IMPERATIVE (2000).
- ===============================================================================
- 30. Languages keep simplifying-- how did they ever become complex?
- [--markrose]
- This question starts with an observation: the classical Indo-European
- languages, such as Latin, Greek, Old English, and Sanskrit, were highly
- inflected, while their modern descendants are not. For instance, French
- nouns have entirely lost the Latin case system, and French verbs have lost
- entire classes of forms, such as the passive voice.
-
- It's natural to ask: how did the classical languages get so complex in the
- first place? Why are there inflecting languages at all? Why don't they
- all become isolating, like Chinese?
-
- The answer is that there are also complicating tendencies in language.
- Habitual idioms can become particles, which can become inflections--
- a process called grammaticalization.
-
- For instance, the future and conditional tenses in Romance languages don't
- derive from classical Latin, but the infinitive plus forms of 'to have'.
- French has rather complicated verb clusters (je ne le lui ai pas donne)
- which are perhaps best analyzed as single verbs showing both subject and
- object agreement.
-
- Another example is the plethora of cases in Finnish, many of which derive
- from postpositions. Roger Lass has pointed out a cycle in Germanic
- languages where perfectives are developed, merge with the imperfect,
- and are developed anew.
-
- Chinese is not immune from this phenomenon-- Mandarin already has verbal
- particles like perfective le, or nominal particles like the possessive
- /adjectivizing de. The diminutive -r even merges with the preceding
- syllable; e.g. dian3 + -r --> diar3 'a bit'.
- ===============================================================================
- 31. Where did (some word or phrase) come from?
- [--markrose]
- If you get a snarky response to such questions on sci.lang, it's because
- some people think you ought to look in a dictionary first. The American
- Heritage Dictionary traces words back (where possible) to Proto-Indo-European;
- and the massive Oxford English Dictionary, available at most libraries,
- contains not only etymologies but illustrative citations through the centuries.
-
- When it comes to word and phrase origins, most people's standard of proof
- seems to be "Doesn't violate the laws of physics!" But a plausible story is
- not a proof. The three most important types of evidence in etymology are
- citations, citations, citations. If you have some amusing theory that "the
- whole nine yards" derives from haberdashery, or baseball, or mortuaries,
- you'd better have appropriate examples from those fields in the right
- historical period.
-
- Anyway, here are brief notes on a few terms that have been asked about
- more than once on sci.lang. (Also see the alt.usage.english FAQ.)
-
- OK
-
- There's half a dozen explanations for this, but only one correct one,
- demonstrated with hundreds of citations by Allen Walker Read in 1964:
- OK stands for oll korrect, and dates to a fad for humorous mis-abbreviations
- which started in Boston newspapers in 1838. It spread nationwide when
- supporters of Martin Van Buren organized the "OK Club" during the 1840
- presidential campaign (giving the term a double meaning, since Van Buren's
- nickname was Old Kinderhook).
-
- Usted
-
- Some people have wondered if the Spanish formal second person pronoun Usted
- came from the Arabic honorific 'usta:dh. It doesn't; it's a well-attested
- abbreviation of vuestra merced 'your mercy'. There are transitional forms
- such as vuasted, vuesarced, voarced, as well as parallel constructions like
- usia from vuestra sen~oria, ucencia from vuestra excelencia. Compare also
- Portuguese vossa merce^ --> vosmece^ --> voce^, as well as Catalan voste
- and Gallego vostede. Finally, note that the abbreviation Usted doesn't appear
- until 130 years after the Moors had been kicked out of Spain.
-
-