Week 9 Flashcards
When did spoken language occur and when did written language occur?
“Some type of spoken language must have developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago)” (Yule).
What do many cultures believe about languages?
In many cultures, language is believed to emerged from a divine source. The same is true for writing. This is probably because it’s also difficult to trace writing back to its historical origin.
Children acquire their native language without much strain and without explicit instruction. Is that the same for learning a written language?
This isn’t the case for written language. Learning how to read and write is an difficult process that takes many years, and not all people succeed, due to insufficient teaching (leading to illiteracy) or to learning disorders (such as dyslexia).
What are two facts about languages and their writing systems?
Many languages lack a writing system. And many languages that do have a writing system have borrowed it from another language
What is the main function of writing?
That it enlarges the range of communication.
Not all ways of representing information visually qualify as writing. Give examples.
- Tally sticks
- Inuksuk
- Pictograms
- Cuneiform
Pictograms
Pictograms are iconic signs; they look like what they are meant to represent. Iconic signs are therefore language-independent; they can be understood with the same conventional meaning by speakers of different languages are spoken. (Frequent in airports).
How does the etymology of the various words for ‘write’ testify to the physical origin of writing?
Old English wrītan ‘to scratch, to carve’
Greek gráfein‘to carve’ (cf. biography, digraph, telegraph)
Latin scrībere (whence Italian scrivere, Spanish escribir, French écrire, German schreiben
Dutch schrijven, English scribe, inscription, etc.; < PIE (s)kreybh‘to scratch, to tear’)
Semitic shf‘to write, to hollow
A writing system consists of…
A set of graphical marks that represent a level in the linguistic structure. In other words, there is a link between writing symbols and linguistic units.
What are the different writing systems and their linguistic units?
Logographic (meaning-based) have words and morphemes as linguistic units.
Phonographic (sound-based) have syllables and phonemes as linguistic units.
The choice of writing system can be due to internal or external factors:
Internal: the structure of a language may favour a particular type of writing system.
External: the writing system may be adopted from a culturally dominant language.
What does it mean when languages are predominantly isolating (or analytic)?
It means that they don’t have many word-formation processes and generally lack inflection, so that there’s a close to 1-to-1 correspondence between words and morphemes.
Examples of such languages are Chinese and Vietnamese.
Other languages are predominantly agglutinating. What does this mean?
These languages have a wide range of affixes, and there’s a close to 1-to-1 correspondence between affixes and grammatical functions.
Examples of such languages are Swahili and Turkish.
Languages that lack inflection. Word = morpheme. A symbol. This can mean eat, eating.
Isolating (analytic) languages (Chinese, Vietnamese).
Word = several morphemes. One morpheme indicates one meaning.
Languages that have a wide range of affixes and there’s a close 1-to-1 correspondence between affixes and grammatical functions.
Agglutinating languages (Swahili, Turkish).
Inflectional (or synthetic) languages
There’s often no 1-to-1 correspondence between affixes and grammatical functions. An inflectional affix may signal more than one grammatical function at the same time, and inflection may also involve changes to the root itself.
Examples of such languages are Latin and Old English.
Languages with root-and-pattern morphology
Languages with root-and-pattern morphology have roots that consist of consonants only; different grammatical functions are signalled by vowels, which are inserted in different positions in the root. This type of word-formation is a characteristic property of Semitic language.
Like Egyptian Arabic.
What is one of the earliest writing systems?
Cuneiform, which was invented by the Sumerians around 5000 years ago.
Early cuneiform texts are mostly administrative documents, suggesting that writing came into existence in response to an economic necessity.
The original symbols were pictograms, but these symbols soon lost their iconocity.
The expressive power of pictographic writing is very limited. How does the data from Sumerian show that the power was increased?
- By metaphorical or metonymic extension of word meanings (‘sun’ > ‘heat’).
- By combining pictograms (‘mouth’ + ‘bread’ → ‘eat’).
- By exploiting phonetic similarities between words.
Rebus principle
The strategy of exploiting phonetic similarities between words.
Determinatives
Markers that showed the semantic category of a form.
Chat acronyms
2DAY = today
The Chinese language
The traditional Chinese writing system is also logographic. The oldest Chinese characters were derived from pictograms and represented morphemes.
Other characters derive from ideograms, from compounds of basic characters and from the rebus principle.
However, in present-day Chinese the most numerous class of characters combines semantic and phonetic information. The semantic component consists of a classifier, whose function is similar to that of determinatives.
Slide 17.
Han’gul
Korean used the Chinese writing system, but this wasn’t suitable. This led to the development of an independent writing system, called Han’gul.
It’s an alphabetic system; the signs are based on phonemes.
Shallow orthography
Some languages with alphabets have direct spelling-sound correspondences, with a (close to) 1-to-1 relationship between graphemes and phonemes. This makes the spelling of words very consistent (Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Finnish).
Deep orthography
In other languages, the relation between spelling and sound is less direct, so that learners must learn arbitrary or unusual spellings of irregular words. Examples include French, English, Dutch and German.
Paradigm uniformity
Dutch slab ‘bib’ vs. slabben ‘bibs’
hoed ‘hat’ vs. hoeden ‘hats’ (but huis‘ house’ vs. huizen ‘houses’)
Loanword identification
English phoneme, physical, phantom (compare Dutch foneem, fysiek, fantoom).
