Chapter 6: Language Flashcards
What is a lingua franca?
A common language used among speakers of different languages for the purpose of trade and commerce.
What is the Nostratic language?
It is believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-Europeam, but also of the Kartvelian languages, Uralic-Altaic, Dravidian, and Afro-Asiatic languages.
What is the term for local or regional characteristics of a language (pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary, cadence, and pace of speech)?
Dialect
What is the name for a place name?
Toponym
What are sound shifts?
Slight changes in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin
What is a language?
A systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, gestures, marks, or articulate vocal sounds
What is the name for a variant of a language that a country’s political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in the government, schools, media, and other areas?
Standard language
What is an isogloss?
A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs
What are language families? Give 2 examples.
Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin. Indo-European and Dravidian.
What are language subfamilies? Give 2 examples.
Group of languages with more definite commonality (Romance or Germanic). These are often divided into individual language groups which consist of individual languages.
How many language families are there in the world today?
Twenty
What is the major language of the Indo-European language family?
English
What is the major language of the Sino-Tibetan language family?
Chinese
What is the major language of the Japanese-Korean language family?
Japanese/Korean
What is the major language of the Afro-Asiatic language family?
Arabic
What is the major language of the Dravidian language family?
Telegu
What is the major language of the Niger-Congo language family?
Hausa
What is the name of the way of charting the diversification of languages over time?
Backward reconstruction
Jones observed that Sanskrit was closely related to what language?
Ancient Greek and Latin
What did Jakob Grimm discover?
He observed that related languages have similar consonants which soften over time.
What is language divergence?
Differentiation over time and space; languages branch into dialects, become isolated, then new languages develop.
What is language convergence?
When long-isolated languages made contact; linked to human mobility (relocation diffusion); complicates the rules of reconstruction.
What is language replacement?
Modification or supplanting of a language by stronger cultures (acculturation)
What is the Conquest Theory?
The hearth of the Proto-Indo-European language was modern-day Ukraine; people used horses, wheel, and trade, spread language westward toward Europe.
What is the Agriculture Theory?
The hearth of Proto-Indo-European language was Anatolia (Turkey); Ukraine relied on nomadic pastoralism, not farming; more words for mountains and other high-relief landforms; leading hearth for agriculture was Mesopotamia.
What is the Renfrew Model?
Proposed that three source areas of agriculture each gave rise to a great language family.
