Author: Peter Wessendorf

Okay, so I was thinking– we really did gloss over just about everything when we ran through linguistics this week. So here’s a brief glossary of particularly important terms:

Allomorphs: Two phonetically similar and semantically identical morphemes that never appear in the same context.
Allophones: Two sounds that are phonetically similar and never appear in the same context.
Cognate: Two words in related languages that are recognizably similar in both sound and in meaning.
Content words: Words that have specific, definable meanings; basically any word in a sentence that’s not a function word is a content word.
Function words: Words that only exist to serve the grammar of the language; they are often difficult to specifically define and short in length. Examples in English include “and”, “but”, “the”, etc.
Morpheme: The smallest linguistic unit that still has meaning.
Phoneme: A sound that is used by a language to distinguish between words.

That’s everything I can explain for now. Comment if you want more info, want additional terms defined/explained, whatever.

I’m not sure if this actually makes sense, but it’s a thought that’s been kind of bouncing around in my head. Ashley’s presentation on symbiosis got me thinking about the relationship between language and writing.

First off, most writing systems originated as pictographic at one time or another: that is, they started out as rather rough drawings of whatever it was the symbol was to represent. This means that originally, the symbol had more to do with the idea behind the word than the word itself. Since they were not related to the sound of the word in their correspondent language, the symbols could not reflect affixes or other morphology, and therefore any interpretation would have been based entirely on connecting words and word order. This means that reading pictograms would have originally been much more of an art than the pretty straightforward “sound it out” method that we get away with today.

But the really important bit is that reading the pictograms aloud would have not made any sense because of the lack of morphology and proper formations. At best, it would have sounded stilted and forced.

What this means, in short, is that orthography would have had little to do with the language to which it was linked, simply because it was in no way phonetic. If written and spoken language were originally separate and then became merged, it looks a bit – not a lot, mind, but a bit – like a form of symbiosis.

Over time, the common thread of meaning between symbol and sound becomes overwhelming, and the writing takes on features of the spoken language; in the case of the Phoenician alphabet, a phonetic resemblance was required in order to make the symbols match the syntax. In the case of Chinese, none of the languages have much on the way of morphology, so it was enough to stick to more-or-less pictographic representations.

Eventually, the reverse also happens: people mispronounce words based on their spelling and that becomes a largely attested phenomenon in a particular dialect of the language as a whole.

The last point I wanted to make, going back on the “symbiosis” note, was that having a system of writing dramatically improves the chances a language has of a) remaining unchanged, since there’s a constant record to which debates may be referred, and b) spreading, since a language that has a writing system, being more solidified, will tend to resist change more than a language without one.

One thing we brought up in historical linguistics was something of an alternative to tree diagrams. Trees are really nice for representing linear branchings and genetic relatedness, but have a hard time describing what exactly is similar between two languages; as such, some people in linguistics have proposed what’s called the “wave model” of linguistics. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia Article.

For those of you who don’t want to read it, I’ll summarize it here. Basically, you put down the names of the languages on paper and then draw lines around certain subsets of them. Each enclosed area represents a single innovation that sets those languages apart from the rest that you’re studying. The primary advantage to it is that it’s based in featural commonalities, so it’s really easy to see what exactly particular languages share. Disadvantages include the fact that they’re painstakingly difficult to draw and to read, and sometimes the person making them screws up and you get lines bleeding into each other… they can be a real mess.

That said, since they allow you to look at certain changes, if you took things like, say, Early Latin, Classical Latin, Late Latin, a couple dialects of Old French, a couple of Middle French, and a couple of Modern French, those lines are going to tell you what sort of changes happened when and how, simply by mapping the linguistic changes onto the fairly well-known historical record of the area and cultures.

Also, wave models can make it very easy to distinguish which features are “genetically” conditioned (that is, those that the language retained from it’s ancestor language) and those that are “areally” conditioned (those that the language assimilated from other nearby languages). All you really have to do is look at the features shared between most of the languages in its area and those that shared between most everything else in its family.

Of course, life’s rarely that simple, since languages move with the cultures that speak them and so often times it’s no easy task to determine why the language has the areal features it does. But I think the idea’s kind of a cool one.

Also, and this is just a side note, we should have a tag for culture.