Anthropology Midterm Part 3 Flashcards
There are two ways to study language:
synchronically and diachronically
synchronically
at one moment in time. A grammar book or dictionary of a language is a
synchronic snapshot of a language, for example
diachronically
as it changes through time. This is what we will mostly be looking at this
semester.
It is important to note that roughly a third of all language are endangered or virtually extinct, often with
less than 1,000 speakers remaining. Why are many extinct?
- the loss of speakers to other languages
- Only elderly speakers with no children being raised in their use
- The languages are no longer used for normal speech, perhaps for religious use only
- They are used for ethnic identity only
language family
a group of languages with a common ancestral language.
proto-language
The ancestral language, “proto” meaning the first or earliest form of.
mutually unintelligible
meaning speakers of one language cannot understand speakers of the other language. When this occurs, they are generally considered to be distinct languages. It takes about 1,000 years for split languages to become mutually unintelligible.
linguists often disagree on which languages are distinct and which are dialects
true
mutually intelligible
speakers of one can easily understand speakers of the other.
Languages, he argues, are just “dialects with army and a navy,”
they simply have the power to assert themselves as a distinct language.
Language families
used to show the linguistic connection between languages. All members of a linguistic family are seen to have evolved from a single proto-language.
how many language families are in the world?
141 different language families in the world.
Six of them are considered to be major language families and account for 63% of all languages
Afro-Asiatic (376 languages)
Austronesian (1,256 languages)
Indo-European (446 languages)
Niger-Congo (1,539 languages)
Sino-Tibetan (455 languages)
Trans-New Guinea (482 languages)
a language family is like a tree
we attempt to trace back the major splits, just as we would when looking at the evolution of a family of species.
English is part of the ________ family tree.
Indo-European
what is the largest and most geographically widespread of the language families.
The Indo-European language family
There are six subfamilies in Indo-European:
- Indo-Iranic (including Hindi, Urdu, Persian, etc.)
- Hellenic (of which only Greek continues to exist)
- Celtic (including Irish, Welsh, and Scottish)
- Italic (including the Romance languages of Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and
Romanian) - Balto-Savic (including Russian, Polish, Croatia, etc.)
- Germanic (including German, Dutch, English, etc.)
Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
The primary theory is that the earliest speakers of PIE lived in southern and southeastern Turkey just south of the Black Sea, known then as Anatolia, about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago. The language then diffused west and north into Europe, then both east and west, and then South as farming peoples migrated into these areas. As people dispersed, they lost contact with one another, so over time their languages diverged from one another leading to the emergence of distinct languages.
how are language families determined?
through the comparative method which looks at the historical changes of languages as they change through time
Languages are constantly undergoing change, but ______.
sound changes have a regularity to them and can be traced back.
The patterns of sound changes in Proto Indo-European included:
In Proto Indo-European, /bh/, /dh/ and /*gh/ were all voiced aspirates.
In Latin, they all became fricatives (/f/ and /h/).
In Greek, they all became voiceless, but still aspirated (/ph/, /th/ and /kh/).
In English (and all Germanic branches), they lost their aspiration (/b/, /d/ and /g/).
World languages
languages that are used well beyond their place of origin. languages with numbers of speakers above 100 million, or 1.5% of the world’s population
The spread of languages is due to…
the political, economic, and religious conquest and colonization. These processes led to the growth of the imperial languages – the language of the colonizers – and the decrease or disappearance of the languages of the colonized.
