Unit 3: Chapter 6 Vocab

Question 1

backward reconstruction

Answer 1

The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of constants “backward” toward the original language

Question 2

Conquest Theory

Answer 2

One major theory of how ProtoIndoEuropean diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of ProtoIndoEuropean spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of IndoEuropean tongues

Question 3

Creole Language

Answer 3

a language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the mother tongue

Question 4

Deep reconstruction

Answer 4

technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to recreate the language that proceeded the extinct language

Question 5

Dialect chains

Answer 5

a set of contagious dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related

Question 6

dialects

Answer 6

local or regional characteristics of a language. While accent refers to the pronunciation differences of a standard language, a dialect, in addition to pronunciation variation, has distinctive grammar and vocabulary

Question 7

Dispersal hypothesis

Answer 7

hypothesis which hold that the IndoEuropean languages were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the RussianUkrainian plains and on into the Balkans

Question 8

Extinct Language

Answer 8

Language without any native speakers

Question 9

Germanic Languages

Answer 9

Languages (English, german, danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south

Question 10

Global Languages

Answer 10

the Language used most commonly around the world; defined on the basis of either number of speakers of the language, or prevalence of use in commerce and trade

Question 11

Isogloss

Answer 11

a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs

Question 12

Language

Answer 12

a set of sounds, combination oof sounds, and symbols that are used for communication

Question 13

Language Convergence

Answer 13

the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence

Question 14

language divergence

Answer 14

the opposite of language convergence; a process suggested by German linguist August Schleicher whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of the language into discrete new languages

Question 15

Language families

Answer 15

A group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin

Question 16

lingua franca

Answer 16

a term deriving from “Frankish language” and applying to a tongue spoken in ancient Mediterranean ports that consisted of a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and even someArabic. today it refers to a “common language,” a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce

Question 17

monolingual states

Answer 17

countries in which only one language is spoken

Question 18

multilingual states

Answer 18

countries in which more than one language is spoken

Question 19

mutual intelligibility

Answer 19

the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking

Question 20

Nostratic

Answer 20

Language believed to be the ancestral language not only of ProtoIndoEuropean, but also of the Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the UrialicAltaic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravidian languages of India, and the Afroasiatic language family

Question 21

Official language

Answer 21

in multilingual countries the language selected, often by the educated ad politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government

Question 22

pidgin language

Answer 22

when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary

Question 23

place

Answer 23

fourth theme of geo; uniqueness of a location

Question 24

ProtoIndoEuropean

Answer 24

linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral IndoEuropean language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Austrailia

Question 25

Romance Languages

Answer 25

Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed

Question 26

Slavic Languages

Answer 26

Languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, SerboCroation, and Bulgarian) that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine close to 2,000 years ago

Question 27

Sound shift

Answer 27

slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin

Question 28

standard language

Answer 28

the variant of a language that a country’s political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life

Question 29

subfamilies

Answer 29

Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent

Question 30

toponyms

Answer 30

place name