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.
3 replies on “Linguistics Overview”
We should probably put up some sampler of various grammatical things people do (like evidentiality markers, aspect, etc), just for kicks. Eventually…
I was just thinking, linguistic evolution doesn’t have a gene-like replicator does it? Or would phonemes and morphemes count as unit-replicators?
Personally I think language has been left out of the memetics debate, though there is indeed so much overlap I wonder why linguistic evolution doesn’t get brought up.
Long story short- linguistics does have such a unit. Croft (2000) refers to it as a lingueme. The problem with linguemes is that, like most memes, they’re notoriously hard to define.
The examples that come to mind are things like idioms, specific meanings of words, syntactic constructions, and sound sequences. These tend to blur together a bit, though.