Chapter 6 Flashcards
Sanskrit (where from, what time, etymology)
Ancient Indian language, 1500 BCE, sum (complete) + krt (created), “completed, refined, perfected
Sir William Jones
English judge, wrote paper on Sanskrit
Rasmus Rask
Danish linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Lithuanian and Armenian
Franz Bopp
German linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages
Cognates
words in related languages which developed from the same ancestral root. Sound changes can be deduced from them.
Indo-European
group of modern (and dead) languages
Proto-Indo-European (what is it, when did it exist)
extinct maternal proto-language, 3000 years
language family
All languages descending from one common ancestral language, and are thus related to each other
Comparative linguistic reconstruction
a comparison of cognates across sister languages in order to reconstruct the ancestral language forms.
Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction
Plausibility and Majority rule
Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Plausibility
Most likely phonetic/phonological process
Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Majority rule
if there is no probability preferences for phonetic rules, follow the majority of the daughter language forms.
PLAUSIBILITY EXAMPLES
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
Internal reconstructions
reconstructions of earlier forms within one language
How many languages are there in the world?
5000-7000, one language dies every two weeks
Problems with determining the number of languages in the world are:
Language death,
Difficulties of differentiating between dialects vs languages
Some new languages discovered
Examples of dead languages
Ainu (Japan), Manx (Isle of Man)
Examples of dying languages
Canadian Doukhobor Russian
Australian aboriginal languages (number of surviving languages)
263
Examples of endangered languages
Michif (1000 Canada), Inari Saami (400 Finland), Comanche (200 USA), Ingrian (100 Russia), Salish (56 Canada), Eyak (1 Alaska)
Spanish
Castilian vs Catalan (different languages or dialects?)
Koro
2008, a National Geographic expedition, Arunachal Pradesh region of India, About 100 speakers left (young people have switched to Hindi)
Light Warlpiri
created by children in the town of Lajamanu (in northern Australia), a mixture of the local aboriginal language Warlpiri with English and Kriol
types of language classification
genetic, typological, areal
typological language classification
compare and group languages according to similarities in their structures
language universals
features believed to be found in all/most languages (e.g., all languages have lexical categories of words (parts of speech)
Vowels universals (6)
- A tendency towards symmetry (use of front/back, open/close)
- counter-tendency: dissymmetry
(front unrounded vowels /i,e/ and back rounded /u, o/ are common, but not the opposite; - /a/-like vowels are common, so are /i/,/u/
- Low vowels /a/ tend to be unrounded
- If a language has contrastive nasal vowels, it also has oral
- If a language has contrastive long vowels, it also has short
Consonants universals
- A weaker tendency towards symmetry (front and back of the tongue)
- All languages have stops
- The most common stop is k (p, b, g, t)
- The most common fricative is /s/
- Most languages have at least 1 nasal (m)
- Most languages have at least one liquid
- If a language has voiced obstruents> has voiceless
- Sonorants are typically voiced
- If there are voiceless sonorants, there are voiced
- If there are fricatives, there are stops
- If there are affricates, there are fricatives and stops
Abkhaz
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
Prosodic ways of marking words and word boundaries
stress, tone, pitch accent
Types of stress languages
Fixed and free stress
Fixed stress
Latin, Hebrew (penultimate, antepenultimate),
Amicus optima vitae possessio.
Polish (penultimate),
Penultimate syllable = before the last (2nd from the end)
Free stress
Russian, English
oknO, Oknami, Okon; Import, impOrt
Tonal languges
pitch movement in the syllable is used for lexical distinctions ex: chinese, burmese, latvian, norwegian
Pitch accent languages
Words have lexical distinctions depending on the patterns of alternating H (high) and L (low) pitched syllables ex: Japanese, Ancient Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Korean
Isolating (analytic languages)
1 word = 1 root morpheme. No affixes. Categories of tense, number, person, etc. are expressed by separate words.
Examples: Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese
Polysynthetic
1 word 1 sentence. Many roots and affixes expressing genders, numbers, object characteristics, etc.
Examples: Cree, other North American aboriginal languages
Agglutinating languages
1 word = root+ affixes,
where 1 affix represents 1 constant grammar category
Examples: Turkish, Finnish, Estonian, Nahuatl, Quechua, Japanese
Fusional (inflectional) languages
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
Genetic classification
Classification based on language origins, whereby related languages are grouped into “families”
When and where did Indo-European language family come from? How is it the largest language family and how is it not?
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.
Major Currently Existing branches of the Indo-European family
Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Slavic
Examples of languages in germanic branches
west: english, frisian, german, hutterisch, yiddish, afrikaans, dutch, saxon
east: gothic, vandalic, burgundian
north –> west scandinavian: faroese, icelandic
east scandinavian: danish, jutish, swedish
Slavic branches and examples
West: czech, slovak, polish
south: bulgarian, macedonian, serbo-croation, clovene
east: russia, ukranian, byelorussian
Indo-Iranian branches and examples
Indic: hindi-urdu, bengali, marathi, romany
Iranian: persian (farsi), kurdish
Uralic and altic (origin)
ural and altai mountains
uralic languages fetures
Agglutinating, no gender, some have vowel harmony; high numbers of noun cases
altaic family branches and examples
turkic: turkish, turkmen, azerbaijani, tartar, etc Mongolic: mongolian, buryat Tungusic: evenski, nanai, manchu japonic?: japanese, ryukyan korean?: korea
dravidian language family (where, features, examples)
Area : Southern India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal. Language examples: Tamil, Malayalam
Features: SOV, agglutinating, non-tonal, initial stress
Tai-Kadai family (where, features, examples)
Language examples: Thai, Laotian, Shan. Area: Burma and Thailand. Characteristics: Tonal.
Sino-Tibetan
the 2nd largest family by speakers numbers) 300 languages of China, Tibet
Austronesian (where, examples, homeland)
Languages spoken on Madagascar, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, Java. Examples: Hawaiian, Malay, Tagalog
Homeland – Taiwan? (2% aboriginal population) Canoes.
INDO-PACIFIC family (where, how old, features)
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
language branches in africa
nilo-saharan, niger-congo, khoisan
Eskimo-Aleut language family
Aleut (only Aleut, spoken on Aleut islands) Eskimo branch (Inuit and Yupik subbranches)
Devanagari script
used initially for Sanskrit, later for Hindi & other Ianguages of India
1899 Monier-Williams
Sanskrit-English dictionary
Accuracy of reconstruction in Latin
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”
Why do languages die?
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
Top 10 Languages by N of L1 speakers
- Mandarin Chinese
- Spanish
- English
- Hindi
- Arabic
- Portuguese
- Bengali
- Russian
- Japanese
- Javanese
most common vowels
i - 87.1%
a – 86.9%
u – 81.8%
most common consonants
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%
types of syllables
CV - Japanese, Hawaiian
V(C)
CV(C) Hebrew, Arabic, German
universal syllable tendencies
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
mixed type languages
Exhibit elements of 2 other types
English – synthetic fusional + isolating
Plural: cat-cats, bright – brighter
East Germanic Branch: Gothic, Vandalic,Burgundian
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.
Hutterisch
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
Plautdietsch
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.
italic branch
romance – from latin “romanice”
Catalan
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)
uralic family
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
cacausian language gamily
south – georgian, laz, svan
north west – kabardian, adyghe
northeast – chechen, lezghian, avar
caucasian family characteristics
Usually inflectional,
Complex verbal systems,
High cons/vowel index.
AUSTRALIAN
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
Afro-asiatic family
(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
Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages
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).
