History of Lingusitics
Read the History of Linguistics. Prepare a one page summary of one of the key linguistic figures and apply it to your own language.
Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language and has been of scholarly interest throughout recorded history. Contemporary linguistics is the result of a continuous European intellectual tradition[1] originating in ancient Greece that was later influenced by the ancient Indian tradition of linguistics due to the study of Sanskrit grammar by European linguists from the 18th century. China has also independently produced native schools of linguistic thought.
At various stages in history, linguistics as a discipline has been in close contact with such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology and philology. In some cultures linguistic analysis has been applied in the service of religion, particularly for the determination of the religiously preferred spoken and written forms of sacred texts in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic. Contemporary Western linguistics is close to philosophy and cognitive science.
Linguistics in antiquity
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India
Linguistics was pursued in ancient India for many centuries. The Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC), who is often considered the founder of linguistics, contains a particularly detailed description of Sanskrit morphology, phonology and roots, evincing a high level of linguistic insight and analysis. In particular, he is most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī. His sophisticated grammar of Sanskrit continues to be in use to this day. The Indian grammatical tradition is believed to have been active for many centuries before Pāṇini, and anticipates by millennia certain developments in the West, such as the phoneme and the generation of word forms by the successive application of morphological rules for example. (Outside of India, the phoneme seems to have been discovered and forgotten several times through history.)
The South Indian linguist Tolkāppiyar (c. 3rd century BC) wrote the Tolkāppiyam, the grammar of Tamil, which is also still in use today. Bhartrihari (c. 450–510) was another important author on Indic linguistic theory. He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages: conceptualization by the speaker; performance of speaking; and comprehension by the interpreter. The work of Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics.
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Greece
While ancient Indian scholars pursued grammar, ancient Greek philosophers were debating the nature and origins of language. A subject of concern was whether language was man-made or supernatural in origin. The possibilities that the meaning of language is agreed to by consensus versus having a predetermined fixed value was also considered. An example for the Greek debates about language is available in Plato's Cratylus. It was not until relatively late that the Greeks developed a set of grammatical rules for their language. It was upon this foundation that Roman philosophers built the grammar rules for Latin.
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Medieval linguistics
Medieval Europe accepted the Greek and Latin without change until the start of the Italian Renaissance. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day. From this base the grammars and vocabularies of the various languages of Europe were then explored.
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Modern linguistics
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Historical linguistics
In the eighteenth century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous primative languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human language. His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological evolution. Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered correct today. The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.
Working from a biblical perspective some scholars believed that all human languages were descended from the language of Adam and Eve, a language called the Adamic language. Many of these scholars believed that the Hebrew language was, in fact, the same as the Adamic language.
In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed that human language was a rule-governed system, anticipating a theme that was to become central in the formal work on syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century, of this observation he said that it allowed language to make infinite use of finite means (Über den Dualis 1827).
About 1880, scholars in the United States began to record the hundreds of native languages once found in North America. The concern with describing languages spread throughout the world, and thousands of languages around the world have now been analyzed to varying degrees. As this work was developing in the early twentieth century, mainly in America, linguists were confronted with languages whose structures differed greatly from those of known European languages.
Scholars decided they needed a theory of linguistic structure and methods of analysis.
From such concerns came the field of structural linguistics. Pioneers in it include the anthropologists Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.
When historical-comparative linguistics first met unfamiliar languages, the linguist's first job was to thoroughly describe the language.
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Descriptive linguistics
In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced most strongly by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss student of Indo-European and general linguistics whose lectures on general linguistics, published posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic analysis from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely adopted in other fields under the broad term "Structuralism."
During the second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his students and colleagues developed teaching materials for a variety of languages whose knowledge was needed for the war effort.
This work led to an increasing prominence of the field of linguistics, which became a recognized discipline in most American universities only after the war.
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Generative linguistics
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Other specialties
From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
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See also
History of communication
Mario Pei (1965). Invitation to Linguistics. Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-06584-1.
W. P. Lehmann, editor (1967). A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34840-4.
Frederick J. Newmeyer (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America.
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Line notes
^ James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, The Origin and Progress of Man and Language (6 volumes, 1773-1792)
posted by TRB | 1:59 PM
14 Comments:
I’m not entirely sure if this is what the assignment is looking for. I interpreted the summary of one of the key figures to mean a historical figure who has played an important role in the development of linguistics, but if that is indeed what the assignment is looking for, I wasn’t exactly sure how to apply this to a language. I tried to give it my best shot, but sorry if it is supposed to be something entirely different.
Wilhelm von Humboldt
German linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was born in Prussia on June 22, 1767. Humboldt is especially remembered for presenting the Basque language to other European philologists; however, he was not solely a linguist, but a government diplomat and philosopher as well.
Surprisingly, during the height of his political career, Humboldt managed to find time to devout to his life as a philologist. In 1816 he published a translation of Agamemmon of Aeschylus, and in 1817 added further commentary to Adelung’s Mithridates which focused on the various world languages and dialects. The Basque language specifically captured his attention, so he visited the country and in 1821 published Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language. In this work he attempted to illustrate “by an examination of geographical placenames, that a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern Basque once extended throughout Spain, southern France and the Balearic Islands; he identified these people with the Iberians of classical writers, and he further surmised that they had been allied with the Berbers of northern Africa.” In 1828 he published Über den Dualis which is sometimes referred to as the metaphysics of language, but this work seems to have had little lasting influence.
The greatest work of his life on the ancient Kawi language of Java was never completed due to his death on April 8, 1935. In 1836 its introduction, The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind, was published, and it was later edited by his brother, Alexander von Humboldt. It is in this introduction, which is sometimes referred to as a textbook for the philosophy of speech, that Humboldt’s major contribution to the study of linguists is found. Humboldt was the first to present the view “that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community. What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish the various ways in which languages differ from each other as regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them accordingly.” Humboldt became the first to refer to human language as a rule-governed system and he described this system as one which “makes infinite use of finite means.” This idea came to have a profound influence in the 20th century as linguists began to focus more formally on syntax and semantics.
Just as Humboldt claims, in any language there are an infinite number of possible sentences. Various words can be combined in numerous ways to create meaningful sentences. The morphology of the Japanese language, the study of its word structure, allows one to see that at least in comparison to English, Japanese is relatively free in terms of where words can be placed within a sentence.
Ookii inu desu./ inu ga ookii desu. = The dog is big.
Watashi wa tomodachi to yojini toshokan de benkyooshimashita. / watashi wa toshokan de yojini tomodachi to benkyooshimashita. / tomodachi to toshokan de yojini watashi wa benkyooshimasthia. = At 4 I studied in the library with my friend.
Switching around the order of words does not change the meaning of the sentence. As Humboldt states, realizing such a distinction helps to categorize any language.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt
*http://www.nndb.com/people/302/000094020/
For this post, I decided to discuss the history of Ferdinand de Saussure. First, I want to give you all some basic background information. Saussure was born in Geneva and lived from 1857 to 1913. His most well-known work was the “Course in General Linguistics” that was published posthumously by two of his students. In this book, Saussure outlined four major ideas.
Diachrony and synchrony: These terms concern the temporal study of a language. Diachrony looks at language as a continually evolving organism that has undergone constant change over time. Synchrony, on the other hand studies the language at the here and now, looking at the state of a language at that exact moment. It is interesting to note here that synchrony can be studied without any reference to diachrony (to a degree) but that a diachronical approach to a language without a study of the present.
Langage v. langue v. parole: According to Saussure, the term “langage” represents the ability of speech available to all human beings. Langage is composed of two smaller categories. ‘Langue’ refers to the complete language system and all the signs that make it up, while ‘parole’ refers to the actual act of speaking.
Significant v. signifié: A significant is literally a ‘sign’ in a language system while the ‘signifié’ refers to whatever concept or idea the sign stands for.
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic: These are methods for looking at sentence composition. For example, to look at a sentence syntagmatically is to look at a sentence as a series of linear components such as “He+lives+here”. To look at a sentence paradigmatically, on the other hand, would be to examine all the possibilities for each part of a sentence, like “He vs. She” and “Here vs. There”, etc.
Having outlined some of the general ideas theorized by Saussure, I would like to apply one of them to Spanish: the idea of diachrony and synchrony. While it would be far too ambitious to attempt a basic outline of the entire history of the Spanish language, I want to share a feature of the development of Spanish that I just recently learned (diachrony) and a few issues concerning Spanish in the here and now (synchrony).
Spanish is a Romance language that developed out of Latin. However, it has also been influenced historically by many other languages such as Arabic and Euskara, the language of the Basque region. What I learned today while doing research for this post was that, if you compare the vocabulary of Latin and Spanish, there are many words in which a Latin “f” changes to a soundless Spanish “h” (as someone who has never studied Latin, this is fascinating to learn – something like Grimm’s Law, Spanish-style). This is believed to be because of the influence of Euskara on the Spanish language in the past. Examples include Latin ‘ferrum’ (iron) to Spanish ‘hierro’ or Latin ‘farina’ (flour) to Spanish ‘harina’.
Presently, an issue in the Spanish-speaking world is the controversy over “leismo” and “loismo”. In Spanish “le” is the indirect object pronoun. However, in some parts of Spain, this word has replaced the direct object pronoun when referring to animate objects in common usage. This process is known as “leismo” and is seen in other Spanish-speaking parts of the world as grammatically incorrect. Similarly, “loismo” is the reversal of the process, where direct object pronouns take the place of indirect object pronouns. While it could be said that “loismo” makes logical sense and clears up gender confusion about the neutral “le” without tacking on a prepositional phrase, which is the grammatically correct procedure, the Real Academia Española has never accepted the practice and it has since developed a negative social connotation.
Hope you all found this helpful!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo%C3%ADsmo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leismo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_history_of_spanish
Structural Linguistics
The structuralist movement had its origins in America, where anthropologists were concerned with recording and preserving the languages and cultures of indigenous Americans before they disappeared. Since there were no written records of these languages, study was limited to observation and recording of the living languages. Franz Boas believed that the understanding of a people’s language is crucial for the understanding of their culture, since it would allow an observer to take part in the daily lives of the speakers. This American approach to linguistics was furthered by Leonard Bloomfield, who, in 1933, published his book Language, which was the first important book to pull together the field of linguistic analysis.
This subject interested me because in modern Italy, there is substantial discussion about the preservation of regional dialects. Today’s standard Italian is in fact what was once only the Florentine regional dialect. For a long time, the Italian peninsula was divided in several independent regions. It was not until the unification of Italy in 1871 that a national language was needed. Because of Florence’s literary history as the birthplace of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, its dialect was deemed to be the best for a national language. Today, only this dialect (now called italiano standard) is taught in schools and used in official matters, and with the spread of film and television, it is becoming more and more firmly cemented in the lives of all Italians. However, dialects continue to exist, with particular strength in poorer, southern regions. Many Italians know both standard Italian as well as their local dialect, but members of the older generations who were not formally educated know only dialect, and many young people only know standard Italian. There are movements both for preserving dialect and for eliminating it. I would not be surprised if some of those who wish to preserve dialect for its cultural value would be interested in structural linguistics as a means of studying and recording their dialect, since Italian does not have a clear method for writing dialects. Vowel sounds tend to be further back in the mouth in southern dialects, and some dialects use phonemes that do not appear in standard Italian. For example, in some regions the phoneme /k/ is replaced by the phoneme /x/ which does not correspond to any standard letters. I believe that many proponents of dialect preservation would agree with Boas’ philosophy that in order to understand the culture of a region, one must understand the local language, or, in this case, dialect. Many songwriters and poets continue to write using dialect, as they feel that one cannot fully express the richness of a particular region using only standard Italian. I’m sure that this matter would be of great interest to many structuralist linguists.
Avram Noam Chomsky, born December 7, 1928, is credited with changing the face of contemporary linguistic studies. His major work, Syntactic Structures, explores the concepts of context-free grammar. This theory suggests that the syntax of all language can be characterized by a context-free grammar; extended, the theory introduces the idea of a universal grammar, or a basic grammatical structure universal in human language that is an innate part of our intelligence. Later, Chomsky introduced generative grammar, a theory and method that addresses both the surface and deep levels of grammar.
Another of Chomsky’s contributions in some ways mirrors Saussure’s distinctions between langue and parole. Instead of “the totality of a language” versus “the act of speaking,” Chomsky describes competence, or knowledge of rules and structure, versus performance, which is language as it is spoken every day. Previously, linguists studied performance, but Chomsky argued that the “real” rules that native speakers in particular are aware of hold just as much importance as more organic language that omits these rules. Chomsky’s theories are essentially an argument against behavioralists like B.F. Skinner, who believed that all matters of human behavior including language are learned and not “pre-programmed” in any way. By focusing on the rules of competency and not on the questionable performance of language, Chomsky hoped to come closer to the universal grammar. If he could identify the rules that native speakers know and recognize (but don’t necessarily use), he might be able to find correlations between the known rules of other languages.
Someone with the high competency of a native speaker of French would realize that when another Francophone says, “Non, c’est pas,” the second person is ignoring the “ne” double negative rule, abbreviating his or her utterance from the correct “ce n’est pas.” This does not stop Francophones (or even any French students) from omitting “ne” for the sake of brevity and more casual speech, but the casual “c’est pas” is still not technically correct French.
Addendum:
I used p. 413 of the text and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky
The fact the Dionysius Thrax and other Greek scholars in his period focused almost exclusively on the written grammar of Classical Greek is fitting in a way, because that is the only means by which we are really able to study the language today. Born in 170BCE, he probably wrote the “Art of Grammar” (τέχνη γραμματική) around 100BCE. This was the first formal grammar of Greek (and thus the first formal Grammar in the West), but it was still fairly limited by modern standards as it only covered the morphological structure of Classical Greek and contained nothing about syntax.
Thrax defines grammar as “the practical knowledge of the general usages of poets and prose writers”, and this belief is on par with most of his contemporaries. Living 200-400 years after the heyday of Classical Greek literature, Thrax was trying to do his best to preserve a language that by his time was being lost to Koine (κοινή), or “common” Greek. Thrax and the other Alexandrian scholars were certainly prescriptivists , who believed that Koine was a degeneration of the Classical Greek used by writers such as Herodotus and Plato.
Interestingly enough, Classical Greek in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE had its fair share of various dialects too. While the Classical Greek learned today is generally Attic Greek, the dialect spoken and written on the Attic Peninsula (namely Athens), but not all ancient writers used this. The historian Herodotus, for instance, was not from Athens but from Halicarnassus, which was on the other side of the Aegean Sea. Herodotus wrote in the Doric dialect, a main feature of which was the common use of an α in many words instead of the Attic η.
While Thrax would certainly be disgusted if he heard Modern Greek today (if he could understand it), the efforts he and other Alexandrian scholars made to preserve Classical Greek certainly paid off over the past two millennia. He was certainly not the last to believe that Classical Greek was a perfect language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_Thrax
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine
Leonard Bloomfield was an American Linguist who’s ideas were prominent from 1930-1950. His primary literary contribution to the field of linguistics was his book, Language, written in 1933. The book’s major significance was in demonstrating his scientific approach to the study of language.
Bloomfield believed that languages should be studied and analyzed in a very systematic, scientific way, much in the same way a traditional scientist would approach an investigation into his field of study. Therefore, he resented an impressionistic approach to languages, a person’s opinions and predispositions should not be a part of a study of languages. Bloomfield is quoted as having said, “If you want to compare two languages, it helps to know one of them!” I believe that what he means by this is that unless you really have an understanding for how one language functions, you cannot accurately state the differences between it and another language. Any observations are merely good guesses, assumptions, or broad observations. Bloomfield advocated the collection of scientific data. Part of his scientific method for studying language involved breaking sentences up into their components. This particular way of looking at a language is called structural linguistics.
Bloomfield was also interested in behavioral linguistics, especially in his way of studying meaning. Behavioral linguistics approaches language from a more psychological standpoint, and looks at how what is spoken actually affects a person’s behavior.
In relating structural linguistics to French, a French sentence is normally organized subject, verb, and object. Clauses in sentences are introduced by conjunctions, such as qui, que, or lequel, and can be a part of either the subject phrase or the object phrase. Clauses contain their own verbs. If the object is replaced by a pronoun, it becomes part of the verb phrase.
Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag made a fabulous discovery, which is known as head-directionality. Head-directionality is a syntactic parameter that allows us an explanation as to how languages are constructed.
This parameter is especially useful in "figuring out" languages such as German and Dutch. Some languages such as Nupe, are also understood with this parameter.
Head directionality is very difficult to explain in so little time, (ask Chengcheng!) Basically, it refers to the dominating particle of a phrase. For example, the head of a verb phrase is the verb. If a language is head final, the verb will come after a noun phrase, whereas head initial languages have the verbs come first.
This is really helpful for explaining French adjective constructions. How can it be that you can place adjectives after the nouns, but sometimes before? This parameter in combination with the verb attraction parameter allow for us to explain this.
If you'd like to learn more about this, please see Mark Baker's book, "The Atoms of Language" or Usama Sultan who teaches in the Arabic dept here. I could also draw pretty graphs of this idea...
Cheers.
Although not mentioned in the text above or one of the videos we watched in class, King Sejong is considered one of the most recognized linguists in Korea. As a leader in charge of creation of Hangul – writing system for the Korean language – King Sejong seem to be a good choice.
King Sejong, born in 1397 and died in 1460, is considered one of the best kings in the history of Korea. He oversaw the expansion of territory, advancement in technology (namely invention of pluviometer, metal typeprinting, and sundial), improvement of agricultural efficiency, revision of law, publication of medical documents, and even organization of musical records. He thought that as a sovereign entity, Korea should have its own writing system that is easy to learn to boost the literacy rate and educate the common people. Despite the strong opposition from many aristocrats, he recruited bright young linguists to work on the creation of a new writing system that would be better suited for Korean.
Before Hangul was published in 1446, the only way to record a language was using Chinese characters. Despite its geographic proximity and countless cultural exchanges, Korean as a language was very much different from Chinese. Therefore, most of the population was illiterate with the exception of the aristocrats who learned Chinese.
Unlike other achievements of his time, he is accredited the most for the creation of Hangul, mainly due to his high involvement. Not only did he provide the atmosphere for excellent scholars to research on a new language, but he also was a great linguist, one who specialized phonetics and morphology.
In order to invent a writing system, he had to know other languages and their writing systems in dept. He sent his linguists to different areas of China to learn about other languages and even ordered them to visit a prominent Chinese linguist, Hwang Chan, who was exiled to Manchuria at the time.
Before his death, King Sejong was able to publish a writing system that was scientific and philosophical. The consonants look like the shapes of the vocal organ when they are pronounced. For example, bilabial letters like ㅁ(m), ㅂ(b), and ㅍ(p), are based on the shape of the lips. Also, dental or alveolar letters like ㄴ(n), ㄷ(d), ㅌ(t), and ㄹ(l) are based on the shape of the tongue as it touches the top of the mouth. All the vowels are derivations from three notations: ∙, ㅡ, ㅣ. For example, a simple vowel, ‘ㅑ’ is made up of ㅣ+ :. According to the Hoonminjunghoom Haeraebon, which is a book explaining the making of Hangul, ∙ represents the universe, ㅡ represents the earth, andㅣrepresents the man. Also, the ten simple vowels, ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅗㅛㅜㅠㅡ ㅣ, represent yin and yang with Five Elements, which have a profound meaning of nature in Confucianism.
Unlike any linguists, King Sejong and his scholars studied languages, and especially their writing systems to invent a new set of alphabets. The scientific value of Hangul is well-recognized that one of the awards from the UNESCO given to those who had contributed greatly to reduce the illiteracy rate is called King Sejong Literacy Prize. Instead of looking at the structure or the universality, King Sejong studied other languages for their practicality and origin of their morphology and phonology. On top of this, he took an extra step to add philosophical values to the new writing system.
Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), famous for his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, considerably aided the expansion of the Italian Renaissance through his support of the use of vernacular. At the time, Europeans had generally accepted Greek and Latin as principal languages, but many spoke their own regional tongues, as well. Dante’s essay De Vulgari Eloquentia presented his positive views of vernacular and encouraged regional individualism that eventually helped fuel the Italian Renaissance. As is present in many of his works, Dante’s opinion of language was mostly based in religion. He believed the story of the Tower of Babel, in which God punishes his people for attempting to build a tower to Heaven, by creating several different languages and hindering communication. Dante then placed every language he knew on a map of Europe, splitting the continent into three sections. The northern section contained the Germanic languages, the East spoke Greek languages, and the South used three languages, which he named based on their words for “yes”: oc (Occitan), sì (Italian), and oïl (Gallo-Romance languages like French). In search of an ideal vernacular, Dante’s essay outlined grammar, which was a strict set of rules that were supposed to make natural languages more uniform. This inquiry into the constructs of human speech was the first step in the creation of grammars for all European languages.
In 1492, following Dante’s lead, Spanish linguist Antonio de Nebrija compiled the first collection of Spanish grammar, called Gramática Castellana. The volumes, five books in all, represented different aspects of the Spanish language, intended for both native and nonnative speakers. For native speakers, Nebrija focused mainly on grammar, to show Spanish’s Latin roots; for nonnative speakers, he emphasized phonology and morphology.
I found it quite interesting that despite having likely no exposure to linguistics, Dante took steps toward the modern fields of comparative linguistics and sociolinguistics. His divisions of European languages are quite accurate and correspond, in particular, to the evolution of Spanish. The languages Dante classified as “oc,” known as modern Occitan, were spoken in the northeastern region of Spain, Catalunya. A relative of Occitan and the official language of the region, Català (or, in Spanish, Catalán), presents an interesting social issue in modern Spain. Despite its striking resemblance to Spanish and a high rate of mutual intelligibility, Catalán carries a strong sense of nationalism for its speakers. In Catalunya, it is quite common to hear people say, “aquí, no se habla español; se habla català!” (Roughly: here, we do not speak Spanish; we speak Catalàn!). Although residents of Catalunya are not quite as adamant of separatists as those of the Basque region, they still consider their own language and culture very separate from that of Spain. To me, it seemed that the people of Catalunya could be seen as simply following Dante’s orders: they speak their own vernacular and intend to keep it that way. Thus, according to Dante, Spaniards should continue speaking Castellano (the official name of the Spanish spoken in Spain) and maintain their culture, just as speakers of Catalán should do with their own. (I suppose I took a bit of a sociological approach to this one…)
In addition to the provided article, I also referenced:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_vulgari_eloquentia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language
Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BC), is a Roman scholar and writer who did the most influential work of Roman period. Unlike most Roman writers, Marcus didn’t follow Greek categories and terminology but codified Latin grammar under the headings of etymology, morphology, and syntax in De lingua latina ( “On the Latin language”, which consisted of 26 books). But my eyes were caught by the vew that he held that language is first and foremost a social phenomenon with a communicative purpose; only secondarily is it a tool for logical and philosophical enquiry.
I cannot agree more with such a statement, according to my instincts so far. Here I’m going to present some of my thoughts or let me put it in this way, whims:
As we have discussed before, it does seem odd that Chinese lacks tenses. I’ve been thinking about it and so far my take on this “phenomenon” is that maybe at the beginning of Chinese civilisation people held a completely different concept of time(might be under some religious influence). It’s true that Chinese people created calender way earlier than other civilisations. But what’s the whole point of having a calender? Did we want to use calender as a measure to mark the sequence of events that happened and to avoid confusion? Or, did we want to make some sense out of this whole “mess” of time so that we could plan ahead our life more precisely? But think about it, time is a continuity and actually cannot be divided into yesterday, today and tomorrow. We live at the moment, which does not last and could be refered to both past and future depending on the context. To put us human-beings in a bigger picture, how much do we know about the universe or the time , or whatever, even though we’ve been trying to trace back and see what resulted in the whole world. But if time is a continuity and something must happen before and after another, there is no point of tracing back or looking forward. Only present is valid. That may explain why Chinese only has present tense.( The so-called rules I talked about of present and future tenses are more about modern Chiinese. Classic Chinese very rarely observes those “tense indicators”). Now you may wonder how this relates to a social phenomenon. In the past year in US, I feel that people here have a much stronger sense of time. I remember at a dinner table at my host family, everyone took out a calender and see when they would meet again. I swear this has never happened in my life in China before( in business and political situations this might happen but never with families and friends). You may say that life here is more “colorful” and people have more choices thus have to plan ahead But I do think there is some social implications underlying it. And languages manifest these implications.
Another example would be Japanese. I just talked a friend and came to a conclusion that Japanese is a very structurally classified language. In Japanese, you add different prefix and/or suffix to a verb when you are talking to people who are “higher” than you( honorific form) such as professor or even upper-class students, to peers(normal form) and to yourself( humble form). As for the word “I” has five variations depending on if you are female, male trying to be polite or authority(only for male), etc. Which is more shocking to me, the word “you” can never be used to address people who are in “higher” position. It even doesn’t exist in written language( if I understand it right). So when I am talking to a professor face to face or writing to a friend, I have to use their names instead of simply say “you” which is considered rude. A friend from Maymar confirmed that this is the case in his country too, where people use “you” to address people who are in “lower” status. Japanese even has five variations to different degrees of kindness. I have to Chinese used to have similar things too. For example, the emperor has specific words to refer to himself. When you talk to an emperor or give something to him, you use different verbs.(think about the difference between dedicate and give) However, this has never been a systematic structure in our language. Especially after the revolution in 1919, we got rid of traditional Chinese which contains many of these classifying indicators. This might be a prime example to back up the point that language is a social phenomenon which faciliates human communications in specific social contexts.
(a quick question: is today’s assignment grammatically correct? How can we “apply” a figure to a language? )
,
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928 and attended the University of Pennsylvania between 1945 and1950, where he began his study of linguistics.
Chomsky was taught the historical principles of linguistics by his father William Chomsky, who was a Hebrew scholar. Among his many accomplishments, Chomsky is most famous for his creation and work on generative grammar, which developed from his interest in modern logic and mathematical foundations.
Generative grammar refers to a particular set of formal rules for a specific language. A generative grammar in this sense is a formal tool that can “generate” all the grammatical sentences of a language. In particular, generative grammar is a method that can be used to decide whether any given sentence is grammatical or not. In most cases, a generative grammar is capable of generating an infinite number of strings from a finite set of rules. Chomsky hoped to come closer to the universal grammar by trying to focus on rules of competency. He believed that if he could identify the rules that native speakers know and recognize there might be a correlation of rules to different languages.
This idea however was challenged because Chomsky’s syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language.
Sometimes the idea of generative grammar does not work when applied to languages which have not previously been studied, and many alterations in generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of languages analyzed.
For example in Japanese, there would be 6 different ways to produce the sentence: “I eat dinner at seven o’clock”:
私は / 七時に / 晩ご飯を / 食べます。(I am / 7:00 / dinner / eat)
私は / 晩ご飯を / 七時に / 食べます。(I am / dinner / 7:00 / eat)
晩ご飯を / 七時に / 私が / 食べます。(Dinner / 7:00 / I am / eat)
晩ご飯を / 私が / 七時に / 食べます。(Dinner / I am / 7:00 / eat)
七時に / 晩ご飯を / 私が / 食べます。(7:00 / Dinner / I am / eat)
七時に / 私は / 晩ご飯を / 食べます。(7:00 / I am / Dinner / eat).
Notice that in all 6 sentences, the verb must always be placed at the end. Japanese grammar structure is relatively free compared to other languages. Although native speakers might be able tell the subtle differences between the 6 sentences stated above, the sentences are all grammatically correct and all have the same meaning.
Chomsky’s idea of generative grammar does not necessarily hold true in the case of Japanese in that grammar is not tightly structured like it is in English or perhaps other Romance languages.
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**http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/chomsky_noam.html
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
I took a different approach to this assignment and studied one of the key linguistic figures from the Crystal reading. Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is a renowned British linguist who developed systemic functional linguistics. Halliday was a student of John Rupert Firth, another famous British linguist best known for his development of polysystemicism. Halliday began his career studying Chinese language and literature, but in the 1950’s he switched the shift of his study to the field of linguistics. His main interest was the application of linguistic principles to education methods. In 1975, Halliday developed a model of seven functions that motivate children to learn language. These are the instrumental, regulatory, interaction, personal, heuristic, imaginative and representational functions. These functions describe our relationships with other people and with our environment, illustrating how we express our needs to each other and ask questions about the world.
Systemic functional linguistics takes a very different approach to language than structural linguistics. The most important element of systemic functional linguistics is the social context of an interaction. In other words, context and function give meaning to language. In this approach, language is analyzed in terms of field (“the nature of the social interaction taking place”), tenor (“the social roles and relationships of participant”), and mode (“the symbolic organization of the text”).
I’m a little confused as to how I might apply Halliday to Spanish. I think my best bet is to give examples of the various types of communication and examine them in some different contexts.
Instrumental: “Tengo hambre” (I’m hungry)
Regulatory: “Ven aquí” (Come here)
Interaction: “Te quiero” (I love you)
Personal: “Me gusta el color azúl” (I like the color blue)
Heuristic: “Cómo funciona una avión?” (How does an airplane work?)
Imaginative: “Hacía una vez…” (Once upon a time….)
Representational: “Mi escuela tiene 8 maestras” (My school has 8 teachers)
According to Halliday and the systemic functional linguists, these sentences only have meaning in terms of their social context. For example “te quiero” from a mother to a daughter has an entirely different function (and hence meaning) than it would from a boyfriend to a girlfriend. The regulatory “ven aquí” would also have two very different meanings if directed to a fellow student or if directed at a teacher. We sense this distinction as regulatory speech is allowed between students and from a teacher to a student, but considered inappropriate from a student to a teacher. In a third example, people can express personal opinions such as “me gusta el color azúl” simply to share these ideas with others, or as part of a game or activity. If young children are playing a board game which requires them to state personal opinions in order to move on, the context is distinct from two friends sharing ideas and getting to know one another better.
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Halliday
http://language.la.psu.edu/spcom497b/halliday.html
In my years living in China, I have never heard of any legend that even mentions a little about of the origin of language. I have been trying hard to find the evidence to prove my IGNORANCE. However, I have to share the shock with BK that there really isn’t an equivalent of ancient Chinese “Tower of Babel”.
In the most well-known legend of the origin of the universe in China (see below), it seems to me that my ancestors assumed that human beings were born with the ability to communicate through speech. (Note: There are several legends about the origins of WRITING!)
One legend of the origin of Chinese writing system:
Cang Jie (Traditional Chinese: 倉頡, Simplified Chinese: 仓颉, pinyin: Cāng jié) is a legendary figure in ancient China, claimed to be an official historian of the Yellow Emperor and the inventor of the Chinese characters. Legend has it that he had four eyes and eight pupils. When he invented the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and the sky rained millets. He is not considered to be a historical figure, or at least, not considered to be sole inventor of Chinese characters. The Cangjie method, a Chinese character input method, is named after him.
A rock on Mars visited by Mars rover Spirit is named after him by the rover team.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie
The Beginning of Chinese Culture
Long ago, there was a god named Pang Gu. He created the world by separating the heaven and the earth from chaos. In the beginning, the universe was like an egg and there was only chaos in the egg. Pan Gu had slept in the egg for over 18,000 years. Then one day, he woke up and cracked the egg into pieces. By separating the heavy and light parts of the egg, he created the heaven and the earth. Pan Gu stood on the earth and held up the heaven using his hands, and then he had grown with the heaven until the form of the world for another 18,000 years. Many trillion years after Pan Gu's death, a goddess with a snake's body and a human's face came to existence. This goddess was named, Ni Wo.
Nvwa is the ancestor of mankind in the mythology of ancient China. As legend goes, she smelted the five-colored stones to mend the firmament (sky), cut off the feet of the great turtle to support the four pillars of the universe, controlled the flood, and drove away fierce beasts so as to let the people live in peace. Another legend says, she made persons with yellow clay, and married her brother, Emperor Fuxi, turning a relationship of brother and sister into a marriage, and multiplying mankind. Thus, later generations adored her as a goddess of marriage and reproduction, especially in charge of matters of copulation between men and women. Learners of cultural history regard her as a goddess that came into being in the era of worship of the female genital organ.
Many years later, the people that Ni Wa had created had reproduced and populated the Earth, but they had no knowledge and lived in caves. Ni Wa was no longer with them. However, five saviors of the Chinese people came -
"Housing Emperor” - He taught the people how to build houses and shelter instead of living in caves. This gave the Chinese people the knowledge to create housing where ever they went.
"Fire Emperor."- He taught the Chinese people how to create fire from sticks. With their new found skills of cooking food, Chinese cuisine started.
"Domestication Emperor" who taught the Chinese people how to fish and tame animals so that humans didn't have to be nomadic. They no longer needed to follow the animals so that their supply of food could be steady.
"Gardening Emperor" came and taught the Chinese people how to plant and raise crops. Finally, the Chinese people could settle down and civilization truly started. After they settled down, the "Gardening Emperor" became known as Yan Di(炎帝), one of the founding fathers of the Chinese people.
After Yan Di's death, his son was deemed as an unfit emperor, and people tried to replace him. Fighting broke out for many years. Finally, Huang Di（黄帝）, or Yellow Emperor, stopped all the fighting and once again reunited China. Under Huang Di's rule, Huang Di taught the Chinese people music, mathematics, and the use of tools. He also taught them how to extract silk from the worm, and how to make a compass. This time period was similar to the European Renaissance and the rule under Huang Di was known as the first true Chinese history.
After Hwang Di's death, his great-grandson, Yao Di(尧), one of Chinese history's noble kings, gave the throne to a competent successor instead of his son. This person was named, Shun Di（舜）. Shun Di did the same thing with the throne and passed it on to a more competent ruler, Yu Di（禹）. However, Yu Di was the last emperor to pass the throne to non-family. Yu Di founded the Xia dynasty and from then on, emperial thrones became a family "business."
Source:
http://chineseculture.about.com/library/weekly/aa082098.htm
http://chineseculture.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://library.advanced.org/12255/library/mythology/myth1.html
It might be disappointing to know that foremost among Chinese scholars who touched upon the origin of language is the Confucian philosopher Xun Zi ( Hsun Tzu)( 荀子). He wrote a chapter on the “Rectification of Names”（正名） developing a theme that had been introduced by Confucius saying,” let the ruler be ruler, the subject subject, let the father be father, and the son son.” He believed that language, like the other artifacts of civilization, was the creation of the sage-kings of old. However, he did not mean the earliest mythical sage-kings, such as Yao and Shun, but the later kings of Zhou dynasty. At the outset of his essay he says:
-----“In the case of legal terms, they followed the practices of the Yin dynasty; in the case of terms pertaining to ranks and titles, they followed Zhou practice and for the names of ceremonies and ceremonial objects, they followed ritual practice. For the common names applied to all the various things of creation, they followed the established customs of China….”
However, I don’t think either Xun Zi or Confucius was actually trying to explain how humans started to open their mouth and make noises for communication purposes. Their theories are based on the fact that people can already speak.... This seems odd… Wasn’t there anybody who was curious about the origin of language in Chinese ancient history? Opps….
Source:
“ Oriental Ideas on the Origin of Languages” , Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.99, N0. 1
Chinese:
The Erya (Chinese:尔雅) is the oldest extant Chinese dictionary. 3rd century BC
A few centuries after, Xu Shen(许慎) analytically organized characters in the comprehensive Shuowen Jiezi(說文解字/说文解字), 100CE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuowen_Jiezi
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AD%97%E5%85%B8
The first book that systematically illustrates Chinese grammar: “ Ma Shi Wen Tong”(马氏文通)，by Jianzhong Ma(马建忠) , 1898
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A9%AC%E6%B0%8F%E6%96%87%E9%80%9A
History of Chinese language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language#History
Works by Bernhard Karlgren, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Karlgren
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