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+LING 112 > Chapter 6 > Flashcards

Chapter 6 Flashcards

1
Q

Sanskrit (where from, what time, etymology)

A

Ancient Indian language, 1500 BCE, sum (complete) + krt (created), “completed, refined, perfected

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2
Q

Sir William Jones

A

English judge, wrote paper on Sanskrit

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3
Q

Rasmus Rask

A

Danish linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Lithuanian and Armenian

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4
Q

Franz Bopp

A

German linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages

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5
Q

Cognates

A

words in related languages which developed from the same ancestral root. Sound changes can be deduced from them.

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6
Q

Indo-European

A

group of modern (and dead) languages

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7
Q

Proto-Indo-European (what is it, when did it exist)

A

extinct maternal proto-language, 3000 years

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8
Q

language family

A

All languages descending from one common ancestral language, and are thus related to each other

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9
Q

Comparative linguistic reconstruction

A

a comparison of cognates across sister languages in order to reconstruct the ancestral language forms.

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10
Q

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction

A

Plausibility and Majority rule

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11
Q

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Plausibility

A

Most likely phonetic/phonological process

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12
Q

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Majority rule

A

if there is no probability preferences for phonetic rules, follow the majority of the daughter language forms.

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13
Q

PLAUSIBILITY EXAMPLES

A

a sound is more likely to be deleted rather than to be inserted;
before front vowels, a sound is likely to be palatalized;
between vowels, a voiceless consonant is likely to be voiced;
in word-final position, a voiced segment is likely to be devoiced;
assimilations are very common, etc

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14
Q

Internal reconstructions

A

reconstructions of earlier forms within one language

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15
Q

How many languages are there in the world?

A

5000-7000, one language dies every two weeks

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16
Q

Problems with determining the number of languages in the world are:

A

Language death,
Difficulties of differentiating between dialects vs languages
Some new languages discovered

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17
Q

Examples of dead languages

A

Ainu (Japan), Manx (Isle of Man)

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18
Q

Examples of dying languages

A

Canadian Doukhobor Russian

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19
Q

Australian aboriginal languages (number of surviving languages)

A

263

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20
Q

Examples of endangered languages

A

Michif (1000 Canada), Inari Saami (400 Finland), Comanche (200 USA), Ingrian (100 Russia), Salish (56 Canada), Eyak (1 Alaska)

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21
Q

Spanish

A

Castilian vs Catalan (different languages or dialects?)

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22
Q

Koro

A

2008, a National Geographic expedition, Arunachal Pradesh region of India, About 100 speakers left (young people have switched to Hindi)

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23
Q

Light Warlpiri

A

created by children in the town of Lajamanu (in northern Australia), a mixture of the local aboriginal language Warlpiri with English and Kriol

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24
Q

types of language classification

A

genetic, typological, areal

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25
Q

typological language classification

A

compare and group languages according to similarities in their structures

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26
Q

language universals

A

features believed to be found in all/most languages (e.g., all languages have lexical categories of words (parts of speech)

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27
Q

Vowels universals (6)

A
  1. A tendency towards symmetry (use of front/back, open/close)
  2. counter-tendency: dissymmetry
    (front unrounded vowels /i,e/ and back rounded /u, o/ are common, but not the opposite;
  3. /a/-like vowels are common, so are /i/,/u/
  4. Low vowels /a/ tend to be unrounded
  5. If a language has contrastive nasal vowels, it also has oral
  6. If a language has contrastive long vowels, it also has short
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28
Q

Consonants universals

A
  1. A weaker tendency towards symmetry (front and back of the tongue)
  2. All languages have stops
  3. The most common stop is k (p, b, g, t)
  4. The most common fricative is /s/
  5. Most languages have at least 1 nasal (m)
  6. Most languages have at least one liquid
  7. If a language has voiced obstruents> has voiceless
  8. Sonorants are typically voiced
  9. If there are voiceless sonorants, there are voiced
  10. If there are fricatives, there are stops
  11. If there are affricates, there are fricatives and stops
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29
Q

Abkhaz

A

2 vowels, 76 consonants.
Is a north west caucasian language
Autonomous villa(?) in Georgia(?)
Speakers in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, America
Wide range of allophones in different consonantal environments
Differentiate something (???)
Influenced by Russian lexically

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30
Q

Prosodic ways of marking words and word boundaries

A

stress, tone, pitch accent

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31
Q

Types of stress languages

A

Fixed and free stress

32
Q

Fixed stress

A

Latin, Hebrew (penultimate, antepenultimate),
Amicus optima vitae possessio.

Polish (penultimate),
Penultimate syllable = before the last (2nd from the end)

33
Q

Free stress

A

Russian, English

oknO, Oknami, Okon; Import, impOrt

34
Q

Tonal languges

A

pitch movement in the syllable is used for lexical distinctions ex: chinese, burmese, latvian, norwegian

35
Q

Pitch accent languages

A

Words have lexical distinctions depending on the patterns of alternating H (high) and L (low) pitched syllables ex: Japanese, Ancient Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Korean

36
Q

Isolating (analytic languages)

A

1 word = 1 root morpheme. No affixes. Categories of tense, number, person, etc. are expressed by separate words.
Examples: Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese

37
Q

Polysynthetic

A

1 word  1 sentence. Many roots and affixes expressing genders, numbers, object characteristics, etc.
Examples: Cree, other North American aboriginal languages

38
Q

Agglutinating languages

A

1 word = root+ affixes,
where 1 affix represents 1 constant grammar category
Examples: Turkish, Finnish, Estonian, Nahuatl, Quechua, Japanese

39
Q

Fusional (inflectional) languages

A

1 word = root(s) + affixes + flexions,
where 1 affix represents a particular kind of grammatical or semantic meaning, and the flexion (inflectional affix, ending) reflects a few grammatical categories (e.g., gender, number, person or tense, etc.)
Examples: Latin, Russian, German, French

40
Q

Genetic classification

A

Classification based on language origins, whereby related languages are grouped into “families”

41
Q

When and where did Indo-European language family come from? How is it the largest language family and how is it not?

A

Proto-Indo-European ~ 4000-10000 BCE
The largest on earth by the number of speakers (close to 2 billion) and the 4th largest family by the number of languages it incorporates.

42
Q

Major Currently Existing branches of the Indo-European family

A

Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Slavic

43
Q

Examples of languages in germanic branches

A

west: english, frisian, german, hutterisch, yiddish, afrikaans, dutch, saxon
east: gothic, vandalic, burgundian
north –> west scandinavian: faroese, icelandic
east scandinavian: danish, jutish, swedish

44
Q

Slavic branches and examples

A

West: czech, slovak, polish

south: bulgarian, macedonian, serbo-croation, clovene
east: russia, ukranian, byelorussian

45
Q

Indo-Iranian branches and examples

A

Indic: hindi-urdu, bengali, marathi, romany
Iranian: persian (farsi), kurdish

46
Q

Uralic and altic (origin)

A

ural and altai mountains

47
Q

uralic languages fetures

A

Agglutinating, no gender, some have vowel harmony; high numbers of noun cases

48
Q

altaic family branches and examples

A 
turkic: turkish, turkmen, azerbaijani, tartar, etc
Mongolic: mongolian, buryat
Tungusic: evenski, nanai, manchu
japonic?: japanese, ryukyan
korean?: korea
49
Q

dravidian language family (where, features, examples)

A

Area : Southern India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal. Language examples: Tamil, Malayalam
Features: SOV, agglutinating, non-tonal, initial stress

50
Q

Tai-Kadai family (where, features, examples)

A

Language examples: Thai, Laotian, Shan. Area: Burma and Thailand. Characteristics: Tonal.

51
Q

Sino-Tibetan

A

the 2nd largest family by speakers numbers) 300 languages of China, Tibet

52
Q

Austronesian (where, examples, homeland)

A

Languages spoken on Madagascar, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, Java. Examples: Hawaiian, Malay, Tagalog
Homeland – Taiwan? (2% aboriginal population) Canoes.

53
Q

INDO-PACIFIC family (where, how old, features)

A

mostly Papua New Guinea, where 850 languages are spoken; the most linguistically diverse country of the world
More ancient than Austronesian (6-40 thousand yrs migration)
Tone, Nouns have cases, but not numbers

54
Q

language branches in africa

A

nilo-saharan, niger-congo, khoisan

55
Q

Eskimo-Aleut language family

A 
Aleut  (only Aleut, spoken on Aleut islands)
Eskimo branch (Inuit and Yupik subbranches)
56
Q

Devanagari script

A

used initially for Sanskrit, later for Hindi & other Ianguages of India

57
Q

1899 Monier-Williams

A

Sanskrit-English dictionary

58
Q

Accuracy of reconstruction in Latin

A

Latin> Romance languages = 1000 years
Latin had noun cases, none of the Romance languages do. We would have reconstructed Latin as a language with no noun cases, if we had no records of written Latin.

“the longer in the past the proto-language split up, the more linguistic changes will have accumulated and the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct with full success”

59
Q

Why do languages die?

A

The threat to minority languages around the world comes from the changing economic and political landscape, globalization, imperialism, and urbanization as well as from majority languages

60
Q

Top 10 Languages by N of L1 speakers

A
  1. Mandarin Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Hindi
  5. Arabic
  6. Portuguese
  7. Bengali
  8. Russian
  9. Japanese
  10. Javanese
61
Q

most common vowels

A

i - 87.1%
a – 86.9%
u – 81.8%

62
Q

most common consonants

A 
m - 94.2%
k - 89.4%
j - 83.8%
p - 83.2%
w - 73.6%
b - 63.6%
h - 61.9%
g - 56.1%
N - 52.6%
? - 47.9%
n - 44.8%
63
Q

types of syllables

A

CV - Japanese, Hawaiian
V(C)
CV(C) Hebrew, Arabic, German

64
Q

universal syllable tendencies

A

CV syllable
If there is a CCV syllable, there is CV
If there is a (C)VCC syllable, there is (C)VC and (C)V

65
Q

mixed type languages

A

Exhibit elements of 2 other types
English – synthetic fusional + isolating
Plural: cat-cats, bright – brighter

66
Q

East Germanic Branch: Gothic, Vandalic,Burgundian

A

Gothic – spoken by Goths. Oldest attested Germanic language due to 4th century Bible copy. Bishop Ulfilas (or Wulfila, d 383) designed an alphabet based on Greek. Historic home: Baltic sea coast (Poland). Invaded Roman Empire in the 3rd-4th centuries AD, settled in Iberian peninsular (West Goths) and Italy (East Goths), their kingdoms finally defeated in 8thc.

67
Q

Hutterisch

A

Hutterites in Central Canada and Northern and Northwestern USA
Protestant Reformation in Europe in the early 16th century; Jakob Hutter (died in 1536). Of about 40,000 speakers of Hutterisch, 29,200 are in Canada.
West Germanic subgroup of Germanic languages
50% intelligible to Standard German speakers

68
Q

Plautdietsch

A

West Germanic language and “the tongue of the Netherlandic-Prussian-Russian Mennonites” (Epp, 1987). Origin: the Netherlands during the Protestant Reformation. Menno Simmons, the 16th century Protestant leader. 50% comprehensible to German speakers
Mennonites initially used a Low German dialect in their everyday life and Dutch as the language of worship and written communication. In the 1550s, they immigrated to the delta of the Vistula River (the area that later became West Prussia), and thus the language experienced some influence from Prussian Low German.

69
Q

italic branch

A

romance – from latin “romanice”

70
Q

Catalan

A

The regional language of Catalonia (around Barcelona). 40-50% of the Catalan people are still retaining the language as their mother tongue. The survival is attributed to “above all the fidelity of the majority of the inhabitants” of Barcelona and the neighbouring areas (Harris & Vincent, 2001, p. 13). Catalan is 60-70% intelligible to the speakers of Spanish (Lindsay, 2009)

71
Q

uralic family

A 
finno-ugric -- ugric (hungarian, khanty, mtansi), finnic (finnish, estonian, karelian, veps, ingrian)
Mari -- mari
mordvin -- erzya, moksha
permian -- udmurt, komi
saami -- saami
samoyed -- nenets, enets, selkup
72
Q

cacausian language gamily

A

south – georgian, laz, svan
north west – kabardian, adyghe
northeast – chechen, lezghian, avar

73
Q

caucasian family characteristics

A

Usually inflectional,
Complex verbal systems,
High cons/vowel index.

74
Q

AUSTRALIAN

A

perhaps the same family, perhaps not
Before invasion – 250 languages, now – 60; 20 spoken on the daily basis
11% of aboriginal population can speak their languages

75
Q

Afro-asiatic family

A

(375 languages, 300 million speakers)
Sometimes called “Hamito-Semitic” (French tradition) but let’s not use that term because it’s not PC
Homeland of proto-language – Ethiopia? Sahara? Red Sea coast?
includes Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian

76
Q

Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages

A

a two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound,
VSOs,
a complicated consonant system, includes glottalized, pharyngealized and other secondary articulations;
a templatic morphology (infixes, prefixes and suffixes).

+LING 112 (7 decks)

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