The Origin and Nature of Language

Language Universals

2006-11-13T13:45:00.000-08:00

Assignment for November 28, 2006

Read about language universals and then write a response
indicating how your language of choice corresponds to them.

http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb8/misc/lfb/html/text/2frame.html

Genetics and DNA

2006-10-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

Assignment for November 16, 2006.

View the Genographic Project: https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

Examine carefully the time line. Draw some conclusions looking backwards from your own language of choice to earlier places and times.

History and Archeology

2006-10-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Assignment for November 9, 2006.

Find and examine an early historical or legendarian explanation for the origin of language (The Bible, Koran, Greek or Roman Mythology, other?). Also look at some of the links below related to archeological finds that may help explain language. Also look at http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html.

For your comment put together an outline and bibliography of what resources exist for the study of your chosen language.

do not yet agree on when or how language use first emerged among humans or their ancestors. Estimates of the time frame of its origin range from forty thousand years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man, to about two million years ago, during the time of Homo habilis.

Some authorities believe that language arose suddenly, about 40,000 years ago. This is the time period from which we first see cultural artifacts, such as cave paintings and carved figurines. The relatively sudden appearance of these artifacts lead some to speculate that the cultural leap may have been prompted by the development of language which in turn allowed greater creativity to flourish.

Studies of the skulls of Neanderthals (approximately 60,000 years ago) indicate that they would not have been capable of the full range of vowels used by modern humans. However, as pointed out by linguist Steven Pinker, a full range of vowels is not necessary for rudimentary speech. Even relatively complicated speech would be possible so long as a sufficient number of distinguishable consonants were in use.

Fossil evidence indicates that the main areas of the brain associated with language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area) may have begun to enlarge as long ago as 1 – 1.5 million years, in Homo erectus. However the most complete fossil erectus (nicknamed Turkana Boy; about 1.5 million years old) appears to have lacked a sufficiently tuned ribcage capable of fine control of speech.

The recently discovered Homo floresiensis' ancestors are assumed to have utilized some kind of seafaring device like a raft to reach the island where H. floresiensis dwelt, furthermore, it would seem probable that this process of colonization was an intentional one, and due to the complexity of such a task, it is suggested that H. floresiensis and its ancestor, mid-late H. erectus, must have possessed some form of language which, albeit primitive, would have been able to convey complex concepts. Analysis of the brain of H. floresiensis suggests intellectual capabilities which were comparable to other humans of that time, that is, also not widely divergent from primitive H. sapiens.

Writings Systems II

2006-10-02T11:14:00.001-07:00

Assignment for November 7, 2006

Go to omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/definition.htm) and examine the writing systems from logographics to undeciphered systems. Look for information on the Rosetta Stone and its decipeherment. Based on that experience write a blog entry on how you would go about making sense of a system that you were seeing for the first time.

Writings Systems

2006-10-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

Assignment for November 2, 2006

Go to omniglot (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/definition.htm) and examine the writing systems from abjads to syllbaries. Bring to class a lovely spelling of your first and late name in at least five different languages or systems. Be creative and precise. For many writing is still a revered art.

Asian Languages

2006-10-02T10:09:00.000-07:00

For October 31, 2006

Examine the list of languages below. Choose one family of languages and provide in your comment a brief overview of the history of that language. Characterize the writing system and what if anything we know of its development and relationship to other language families.

Languages of Asia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are a wide variety of languages spoken throughout Asia, comprising a number of families and some unrelated isolates. Many languages have a long tradition of writing.
Sino-Tibetan
Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Nepal Bhasa
Indo-European languages are widely spoken in southern and western Asia, as well as Asian Russia:
Indo-Iranian languages: Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Kurdish
Slavic languages: Russian
Austronesian languages:
Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, Tetum, Javanese
Semitic languages:
Arabic, Hebrew
Turkic languages:
Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Tatar, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur
Mongolic languages
Tai-Kadai languages
Austroasiatic languages
Eskimo-Aleut languages
Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
Uralic languages
Dravidian languages
The Altaic languages are a somewhat disputed grouping including Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungustic languages, with Korean and Japanese included by some. Another disputed language family, the Ural-Altaic languages, is formed with the addition of Uralic languages to these.
A number of isolated languages - languages with no demonstrable links to other tongues - are also spoken in Asia:
Yukaghir languages
Nivkh

Nostratic and Amerind

2006-10-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Assignment for October 26, 2006

Read the posts on Nostratic and Amerind. Then post your own comment of 250 words giving an opinion on the plausibility of either or an alterantive explanation for something earlier or outside of Indo-European.

Nostratic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A schematic representation of one version of the Nostratic language family
Nostratic, a hypothetical ancestral language, purportedly served as the root language from which a large number of the language families of Europe, Asia, and Africa may have descended.
The Nostratic languages would thus constitute a linguistic super-family or high-order grouping of languages. However, the theory does not have wide acceptance among mainstream linguists, and the methodology used in its support has been heavily criticised.
Edward Finnegan offered a pithy summation of the current state of the Nostratic and Proto-World hypotheses, saying "there's too much there to be nothing, but not enough there to be something."
1 Origin of the Nostratic theory
2 Membership
3 Background: From Indo-European to Nostratic
4 Reconstructed phonology
4.1 Consonants
4.2 Vowels
5 A sample Nostratic etymology
6 Nostratic Urheimat
7 Criticisms of the Nostratic theory
8 Nostratic Poetry
9 References
10 See also
11 External links
//
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Origin of the Nostratic theory
In 1903 the pioneering Danish linguist Holger Pedersen proposed "Nostratian," a proto-language for the proto-languages of the Indo-European, Uralic, Afro-Asiatic and Eskimo-Aleut language families. The name derives from the Latin word nostras, meaning 'our fellow-countryman' (plural: nostrates).
While the hypothesis did not make much headway in the West, it became quite popular in the former Soviet Union. Working independently at first, Vladislav Illich-Svitych (1934-66) and Aron Dolgopolsky (1930- ) elaborated the modern version of the theory during the 1960s. Under the slightly modified name "Nostratic" they expanded it to include additional language families. Illich-Svitych also published a comprehensive dictionary of the hypothetical language.
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Membership
Proponents of the Nostratic theory have assigned various (and varying) language families to the Nostratic superfamily. However, general agreement exists on including at a minimum the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic languages. Following Pedersen, Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky, many advocates of the theory have included the Afro-Asiatic languages as well, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg and others from the late 1980s onward suggested a reassessment of this position.
A fairly representative grouping would include:
Afro-Asiatic
Kartvelian
Indo-European
Uralic
Dravidian
Altaic
Eskimo-Aleut
The Sumerian and Etruscan languages, usually regarded as language isolates, are thought by some to be Nostratic languages as well. (Others, however, consider them members of a postulated sister grouping called Dené-Caucasian.)
In 1987 Joseph Greenberg proposed a similar or overlapping macrofamily which he called Eurasiatic and which he linked, remotely, to the Amerind languages of the Americas. It excluded some of the above-listed familes, most notably Afro-Asiatic. At about this time Russian Nostraticists, notably Sergei Starostin, constructed a revised version of Nostratic which was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but which similarly left out Afro-Asiatic.
Recently, however, a consensus has been emerging among the proponents of the Nostratic theory. Greenberg in fact basically agreed with the Nostratic concept though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan R. Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afro-Asiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Starostin's school has re-included Afro-Asiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the superfamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise placement of Kartvelian and Dravidian.
Although Greenberg speculated that both the Amerind and the Nilo-Saharan families or superfamilies are related to Nostratic, their actual inclusion within the latter does not have strong support even amongst Nostraticists.
It is too early to evaluate the hypotheses of remoter affiliations in which Nostratic itself is incorporated into an even broader linguistic 'mega-phylum', sometimes called Borean, which would also include at least the Dené-Caucasian, and perhaps the Amerind and Austric superfamilies.
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Background: From Indo-European to Nostratic
One can best understand the concept of the Nostratic languages in the context of the discovery, methods of investigation, and application of the Indo-European family of languages. When Sir William Jones first suggested the Indo-European hypothesis in 1786, he backed up his idea with a systematic examination of what one might term "phono-semantic sets" — words which, in different languages, had both similar sounds and meanings. Jones essentially argued that too many of these sets occurred for mere coincidence to explain their existence, laying particular emphasis on the resemblance between morphological patterns: declensions and conjugations. He proposed that the languages in question must have stemmed from one language at some time in the past, and that they diverged from one another due to geographical separation and the passage of time. The idea of a "root language" thus took hold, a concept to which the evolution of the Romance languages from Latin offered itself as a clear parallel.
A second major concept to keep in mind involves the argument, starting with Jacob Grimm, that languages would not evolve in a haphazard manner, but rather that they evolved according to certain rules. Using these rules, one could theoretically run the evolutionary process backwards and reconstruct the root language. Comparative linguists have done this, producing parts of the hypothetical language, named Proto-Indo-European.
A third concept suggests that, by analysing the words in the Proto-Indo-European language, one can to some extent examine the time and place of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Words for concepts and objects that were not familiar to these people would receive essentially random names after the time when the languages began to split; only things they knew would produce phono-semantic sets in their successor languages. Proto-Indo-European features many words related to agriculture, animal husbandry, and plains-like landscapes. From this, scholars have plausibly argued that Proto-Indo-European existed as a living language some time from 6000 BC to 4000 BC, in the plains to the north of the Black Sea. (As a measure of the difficulty of this task, some argue that the reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European, together with other known information about migrations, indicates a northern Anatolian landscape, although this area notably lacks in flat ground.)
Altogether, the Indo-European hypothesis has proven wildly successful, and naturally linguists have tried to apply the same general theory to a wide variety of other languages. Many languages, though not all, have been shown to be related to other languages, forming large families similar to Indo-European. These families have been only as "high-level" as the connections which have plausibly been made. On the face of it, though, it is logical that the family tree could converge further, and that some or all language families could be related to one another.
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A sample Nostratic etymology
As an example of the kind of etymologies put forward by supporters of the Nostratic hypothesis, we can cite the following (from Bomhard and Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily, p. 219).
Proto-Nostratic *bar-/*bər- 'seed, grain':
A. Proto-Indo-European *b[h]ars- 'grain': Latin far 'spelt, grain'; Old Icelandic barr 'barley'; Old English bere 'barley'; Old Church Slavonic brašъno 'food'. Pokorny 1959:111 *bhares- 'barley'; Walde 1927-1932. II:134 *bhares-; Mann 1984-1987:66 *bhars- 'wheat, barley'; Watkins 1985:5-6 *bhares- (*bhars-) 'barley'; Gamkrelidze-Ivanov 1984.II: 872-873 *b[h]ar(s)-.
B. Proto-Afro-Asiatic *bar-/*bər- 'grain, cereal': Proto-Semitic *barr-/*burr 'grain, cereal' > Hebrew bar 'grain'; Arabic burr 'wheat'; Akkadian burru 'a cereal'; Sabaean brr 'wheat'; Harsūsi berr 'corn, maize, wheat'; Mehri ber 'corn, maize, wheat'. Cushitic: Somali bur 'wheat'. (?) Proto-Southern Cushitic *bar-/*bal- 'grain (generic) > Iraqw balaŋ 'grain'; Burunge baru 'grain'; Alagwa balu 'grain' K'wadza balayiko 'grain'. Ehret 1980:338.
C. Dravidian: Tamil paral 'pebble, seed, stone of fruit'; Malayalam paral 'grit, coarse grain, gravel, cowry shell'; Kota parl 'pebble, one grain (of any grain)'; Kannaḍa paral, paral 'pebble, stone' Koḍagu para 'pebble'; Tuḷu parelụ 'grain of sand, grit, gravel, grain of corn, etc.; castor seed'; Kolami Parca 'gravel'. Burrow-Emeneau 1984:353, no. 3959.
D. Sumerian bar 'seed'.
Comments
— This exemplifies what some linguists find suspect about the Nostratic hypothesis: a single proto-form is being suggested as the ancestor of words meaning 'barley', 'wheat', 'pebbles', and 'seeds'.
— On the other hand, proponents point to parallels in standard Indo-European etymological dictionaries in which seemingly disparate meanings can convincingly be derived from reconstructed proto-forms.
Even within English, the word 'grain' has a wide range of meanings:
'grain' of sand (= 'pebble, gravel, grit, etc.')
'grain' of salt (= small crystal of salt)
'grain' = 'seed' or 'fruit' of a cereal grass
overall term for plants producing 'grain'
'grain' of wood (= stratification of wood fibers)
'small quantity', a 'minute portion', or the 'least amount possible' (as in, 'not a grain of truth in what she said'), etc.
— Yet others argue that the terms on this list are not all from equal eras. The usage of the word grain in 'a grain of truth' is far predated by the usage of the word 'grain'.
For comparison, here is a typical Indo-European etymology (from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, p. 598):
PIE *pʰeis-/*pʰis- 'thresh; mill (grain)': Ved. Skt. pináṣṭi 'threshes; grinds', piṣṭá- 'threshed, ground', Avest. pišant- 'threshing', Gk. ptíssō 'thresh, grind', Lat. pīnsō 'thresh, grind', Lith. paisýti 'thresh barley a second time, cleaning it of husks' (Būga 1958-1961:I.300), Czech pěchovati 'stamp, pound, ram down'; nominal derivatives: Skt. peṣṭar- 'one who threshes', Lat. pistor 'miller, baker', pīsō 'mortar', pīlum, pistillum 'pestle', MHG vīsel 'mortar', OCS pĭšeno 'meal, flour', OPruss. som-pisinis 'bread made from coarse-ground flour'.
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Nostratic Urheimat
Bomhard considers that the Nostratic urheimat was the mesolithic or pre-neolithic epipaleolithic Middle East. Looking at the cultural assemblages of this period, two in particular stand out as being possible precursors to the Nostratic language family. One of these is the Natufian (10,500-8,500 BCE) culture of Palestine and the Levant, that also influenced cultures outside the region in Southern Anatolia, for example the Belbasi (Cilicia) 13-10,000 BCE has Kebaran influence whilst the Beldibi (10-8,500 BCE) shows clear Natufian influence. The Kebaran culture of Palestine (18,000-10,500 BCE), not only introduced the microlithic assembly into the region, and was clearly ancestral to the Natufian culture, it also has African afininity with the Outacha retouch with the microlithic Halfan culture of Egypt (24-17,000 BCE). The second possibility as a culture associated with the Nostratic family is the Zarzian (12,400-8,500 BCE) culture of the Zagros mountains, stretching northwards into Kobistan in the Caucasus and eastwards into Iran. In Western Iran the M’lefatian (10,500-9,000 BCE) culture was ancestral to the assemblages of Ali Tappah (9,000-5,000 BCE) and Jeitun (6,000-4,000 BCE). Even further east the Hissar culture has been seen as the mesolithic precursor to the Keltiminar (5,500-3,500 BCE) culture of the Kirghiz Steppe.
To have spread so widely suggests some cultural advantages were possessed by these people. It has been proposed that the broad spectrum revolution of Andrew Sherrat, associated with microliths, the use of the bow and arrow, and the domestication of the dog, all of which are associated with these cultures, may have been the cultural "motor" that led to their expansion. Certainly cultures with these adaptations (at Franchthi cave in the Aegean, Lipinski Vir in the Balkans, and the Murzak-Koba (9,100-8,000 BCE) and Grebenki (8,500-7,000 BCE) cultures of the Ukrainian steppe, all of which had these cultural adaptations.
The continuing search for a cultural urheimat for the Nostratic languages will of course only continue if the existence of the language family becomes firmly established.
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Criticisms of the Nostratic theory
Many modern linguists express considerable skepticism of the data put forward to demonstrate interrelationships between the various language families under the Nostratic umbrella. The main criticism of Nostratic holds that the methodology used leads people to see patterns that actually result from coincidences. In reconstructing Nostratic, supporters do not use the techniques that linguists have established to prevent false positives, such as insisting on examining only regular sound shifts.[citation needed]
Certain critiques have pointed out that the data from individual, established language families that is cited in Nostratic comparisons often involves a high degree of errors; Campbell (1998) demonstrates this for Uralic data.
Most of the proposed phono-semantic sets appear much more speculative than those used to group languages into the accepted families — one technique used to support a similar super-family famously "demonstrated" in the 1960s that English belonged to a proposed Central-American language family. [citation needed]
The technique of comparing grammatical structures (as opposed to words) has suggested to some that the Nostratic candidates lack interrelatedness.
The proposed Nostratic language "super-family" hypothesis suggests links between many Eurasian language families. The precise nature of the links remains the subject of debate, however, as proponents have not agreed on the set of families to include.
Many mainstream linguists have dismissed claims (by Aharon Dolgopolsky, among others) that the words reconstructed for Proto-Nostratic point to a pre-agricultural society in the Middle East (as one might expect for a language pre-dating Proto-Indo-European). [citation needed]
Some linguists also object to the assumption that languages must ultimately all stem from one reconstructable root. Linguists know that unrelated languages in close geographical proximity can trade vocabulary, syntax, and other features, and some suggest that the present-day "family" structure of languages may simply exemplify an aberration. [citation needed]
Certain linguists suggest that in the absence of rapid technological change (which did not occur prior to about the 8th millennium BC) the tendency for languages to trade features with each other would drown out the tendency of languages to evolve. In such circumstances, the axiom that languages change in a manner that can be reversed does not hold before a certain point in the past, and one thus cannot reconstruct older proto-languages (Nostratic or otherwise) using the techniques used to reconstruct the proto-languages of the accepted major language families (all of which, linguists believe, post-date the invention of agriculture). [citation needed]
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References
Allan R. Bomhard and John C. Kerns, The Nostratic Macrofamily: A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship. Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. ISBN 3-11-013900-6
Campbell, Lyle (1998). "Nostratic: a personal assessment". In Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (eds.), Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 142. John Benjamins.
Campbell, Lyle (2004). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav V. Ivanov, Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, translated by Johanna Nichols, 2 volumes. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. ISBN 3-11-014728-9
M. Kaiser and V. Shevoroshkin (1988). "Nostratic". Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 17:309–329.
Trask, R. L. Historical Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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See also
Borean languages
Eurasiatic languages
Indo-Uralic languages
Proto-Pontic language
Proto-World language
Universal grammar
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External links
New York Times article
Nostratic studies in Russia
"Was Nostratic a real language?"
Mother Tongue, issue 31 - contains a table of various linguists' versions of Nostratic. (Warning: image files.)
"Nostratic language"
"Nostratic"
"Nostraticist Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych"
Sergei Starostin's proposed descent tree for "Borean" languages including Nostratic
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages"

Amerind languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amerind is one of the three main families in Joseph Greenberg's controversial classification of all Native American languages, obtained by his mass lexical comparison method — the other two being the widely accepted Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut families. These three groupings represent three distinct waves of migration in Greenberg's theory, with all American languages outside the Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut family being part of Amerind. His classification was laid out in a controversial book published in 1987, Language in the Americas.
Greenberg's proposal is generally rejected by historical linguists for two reasons:
The method by which he claims to have demonstrated the relationship, mass lexical comparison, is known to be unsound in that it cannot distinguish chance resemblances from those due to a historical relationship among the languages and in that it provides no means of distinguishing resemblances due to common descent from those due to language contact.
The data on which his claim is based contains an excessively large number of errors. Those who have reviewed his data for languages in which they have expertise typically estimate that fifty percent of the data is in error. In some cases, 100% of his data is erroneous.
A further problem is that he used many old and obscure sources but in violation of normal scholarly standards did not provide citations for the data that he used, making it extremely difficult to check.
The term is also occasionally used to refer (broadly) to the various indigenous languages of the Americas. Some linguists use Amerindian in this sense so as to avoid confusion with Greenberg's proposed language family.
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References
Adelaar, Willem F. H. (1989). [Review of Greenberg, Language in the Americas]. Lingua, 78, 249-255.
Berman, Howard. (1992). A comment on the Yurok and Kalapuya data in Greenberg's Language in the Americas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58 (2), 230-233.
Bonnichsen, Robson; & Steele, D. Gentry (Eds.). (1994). Method and theory for investigating the peopling of the Americas. Peopling of the Americas publications. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University, Center for the Study of the First Americans. ISBN 0-9129-3309-7.
Campbell, Lyle. (1988). [Review of Language in the Americas, Greenberg 1987]. Language, 64, 591-615.
Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
Chafe, Wallace. (1987). [Review of Greenberg 1987]. Current Anthropology, 28, 652-653.
Goddard, Ives. (1987). [Review of Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas]. Current Anthropology, 28, 656-657.
Goddard, Ives. (1990). [Review of Language in the Americas by Joseph H. Greenberg]. Linguistics, 28, 556-558.
Goddard, Ives. (1996). The classification of native languages of North America. In I. Goddard (Ed.), Languages (pp. 290-323). Handbook of North Americans Indians (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution.
Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-1604-8774-9.
Goddard, Ives; & Campbell, Lyle. (1994). The history and classification of American Indian languages: What are the implications for the peopling of the Americas?. In R. Bonnichsen & D. Steele (Eds.), Method and theory for investigating the peopling of the Americas (pp. 189-207). Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University.
Golla, Victor. (1987). [Review of Joseph H. Greenberg: Language in the Americas]. Current Anthropology, 28, 657-659.
Golla, Victor. (1988). [Review of Language in the Americas, by Joseph Greenberg]. American Anthropologist, 90, 434-435.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1960). General classification of Central and South American languages. In A. Wallace (Ed.), Men and cultures: Fifth international congress of anthropological and ethnological sciences (1956) (pp. 791-794). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). Language in the Americas: Author's précis. Current Anthropology, 28, 647-652.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1989). Classification of American Indian languages: A reply to Campbell. Language, 65, 107-114.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (1996). In defense of Amerind. International Journal of American Linguistics, 62, 131-164.
Kimball, Geoffrey. (1992). A critique of Muskogean, 'Gulf,' and Yukian materials in Language in the Americas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58, 447-501.
Matisoff, James. (1990). On megalo-comparison: A discussion note. Language, 66, 106-120.
Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
Poser, William J. (1992). The Salinan and Yurumanguí data in Language in the Americas. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58 (2), 202-229. PDF
Rankin, Robert. (1992). [Review of Language in the Americas by J. H. Greenberg]. International Journal of American Linguistics, 58 (3), 324-351.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerind_languages"

Indo-European

2006-09-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

Read the passage on Indo-European. Find ten words in your own language that can be traced back to indo-european. How did you select those words? Are any trends visible in teh change of the stems of the words.

The Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, as well as many spoken in Southwest Asia, Central Asia and South Asia. Contemporary languages in this family with more than 100 million native speakers each include Hindi, Spanish, English, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, French, German and Punjabi. Numerous national or minority languages with fewer than 100 million native speakers also exist. Indo-European has the largest numbers of speakers of the recognised families of languages in the world today, with its languages spoken by approximately 3 billion native speakers.[2] The Indo-Iranian languages form the largest sub-branch of Indo-European.[3]

Classification

Indo-European
Indo-Germanic (obsolete)
Geographic
distribution: Before the 15th century, Europe, and South, Central and Southwest Asia; today worldwide.
Genetic
classification: One of the world's major language families; although some have proposed links with other families, none of these has received mainstream acceptance.
Subdivisions:
Albanian
Anatolian
Armenian
Balto-Slavic
Celtic
Germanic
Greek
Indo-Iranian
Italic (including Romance)
Tocharian

Orange: countries with a majority of speakers of IE languages
Yellow: countries with an IE minority language with official status
The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include (in historical order of their first attestation):
Anatolian languages, earliest attested branch, from the 18th century BC; extinct, most notably including the language of the Hittites.
Indo-Iranian languages, descending from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian
Indo-Aryan languages, including Sanskrit, attested from the mid 2nd millennium BC
Iranian languages, attested from roughly 1000 BC in the form of Avestan, and from 520 BC in the form of Old Persian
Dardic languages
Nuristani languages
Greek language, fragmentary records in Mycenaean from the 14th century BC; Homeric traditions date to the 8th century BC. See Proto-Greek language, History of the Greek language.
Italic languages, including Latin and its descendants (the Romance languages), attested from the 7th century BC.
Celtic languages, Gaulish inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC; Old Irish texts from the 6th century AD, see Proto-Celtic language.
Germanic languages (including Old English and English), earliest testimonies in runic inscriptions from around the 2nd century, earliest coherent texts in Gothic, 4th century, see Proto-Germanic language.
Armenian language, attested from the 5th century.
Tocharian languages, extinct tongues of the Tocharians, extant in two dialects, attested from roughly the 6th century.
Balto-Slavic languages, believed by many Indo-Europeanists to derive from a common proto-language later than Proto-Indo-European, while skeptical Indo-Europeanists regard Baltic and Slavic as no more closely related than any other two branches of Indo-European.
Slavic languages, attested from the 9th century, earliest texts in Old Church Slavonic.
Baltic languages, attested from the 14th century, and, for languages attested that late, they retain unusually many archaic features attributed to Proto-Indo-European.
Albanian language,; attested from the 15th century; relations with Illyrian, Dacian, or Thracian proposed.
In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages have existed:
Illyrian languages — possibly related to Messapian or Venetic; relation to Albanian also proposed.
Venetic language — close to Italic.
Liburnian language — apparently grouped with Venetic.
Messapian language — not conclusively deciphered.
Phrygian language — language of ancient Phrygia, possibly close to Greek, Thracian, or Armenian.
Paionian language — extinct language once spoken north of Macedon.
Thracian language — possibly close to Dacian.
Dacian language — possibly close to Thracian and Albanian.
Ancient Macedonian language — probably related to Greek; some propose relationships to Illyrian, Thracian or Phrygian.
Ligurian language — possibly not Indo-European; possibly close to or part of Celtic
No doubt other Indo-European languages once existed which have now vanished without leaving a trace. Scholars cannot classify the fragmentary Raetian language with any certainty.
Specialists have postulated the existence of further subfamilies, among them Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Aryan. Neither of these has achieved wide acceptance. Indo-Hittite refers to the hypothesis that a significant separation occurred to split Anatolian from all the remaining groups.
[edit]
Satem and Centum languages

Diachronic map showing the Centum (blue) and Satem (red) areals. The supposed area of origin of satemization is shown in darker red (Sintashta/Abashevo/Srubna cultures).
Many scholars classify the Indo-European sub-branches into a Satem group and a Centum group. This terminology comes from the varying treatments of the three original velar rows. Satem languages lost the distinction between labiovelar and pure velar sounds, and at the same time assibilated the palatal velars. The centum languages, on the other hand, lost the distinction between palatal velars and pure velars. Geographically, the "eastern" languages belong in the Satem group: Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic (but not including Tocharian and Anatolian); and the "western" languages represent the Centum group: Germanic, Italic, and Celtic. The Satem-Centum isogloss runs right between the Greek (Centum) and Armenian (Satem) languages (which a number of scholars regard as closely related), with Greek exhibiting some marginal Satem features. Some scholars think that some languages classify neither as Satem nor as Centum (Anatolian, Tocharian, and possibly Albanian). Note that the grouping does not imply a claim of monophyly: we do not need to postulate the existence of a "proto-Centum" or of a "proto-Satem". Areal contact among already distinct post-PIE languages (say, during the 3rd millennium BC) may have spread the sound changes involved.
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Suggested superfamilies
Some linguists propose that Indo-European languages form part of a hypothetical Nostratic language superfamily, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as South Caucasian languages, Altaic languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, and Afro-Asiatic languages. This theory remains controversial, like the similar Eurasiatic theory of Joseph Greenberg, and the Proto-Pontic postulation of John Colarusso.
[edit]
History

See also: Proto-Indo-European, Historical linguistics, Glottochronology.
[edit]
History of the idea of Indo-European
The first proposal of the possibility of common origin for some of these languages came from Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn in 1647. Van Boxhorn suggested their derivation from "Scythian". However, the suggestions of van Boxhorn did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
The hypothesis re-appeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory, and Bopp's Comparative Grammar, appearing between 1833 and 1852 counts as the starting-point of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline.
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Reconstructions and hypotheses
Scholars have dubbed the common ancestral (reconstructed) language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). They disagree as to the original geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat" or "original homeland") from where it originated. Two main candidates exist:
the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (see Kurgan)
Anatolia (see Colin Renfrew).
Proponents of the Kurgan hypothesis tend to date the proto-language to ca. 4000 BC, while proponents of Anatolian origin usually date it several millennia earlier, associating the spread of Indo-European languages with the Neolithic spread of farming (see Indo-Hittite).
[edit]
The Kurgan hypothesis
Main article: Kurgan hypothesis
Marija Gimbutas originally suggested the Kurgan hypothesis in the 1950s. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, chalcolithic steppe cultures of the 5th millennium BC between the Black Sea and the Volga spoke early PIE.
Kurgan hypothesis timeline:

late Proto-Indo-European language in the Kurgan framework
4500 - 4000: Early PIE. Sredny Stog, Dnieper-Donets and Samara cultures, domestication of the horse.
4000 - 3500: The Yamna culture (prototypical kurgan-building) emerges in the steppe, and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus. Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation of Proto-Anatolian before this time.
3500 - 3000: Middle PIE. The Yamna culture reaches its peak: it represents the classical reconstructed Proto-Indo-European society, with stone idols, early two-wheeled proto-chariots, predominantly practising animal husbandry, but also with permanent settlements and hillforts, subsisting on agriculture and fishing, along rivers. Contact of the Yamna culture with late Neolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized" Globular Amphora and Baden cultures. The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the early Bronze Age, and bronze weapons and artifacts enter Yamna territory. Probable early Satemization.

mid-3rd millennium BC distribution
3000 - 2500: Late PIE. The Yamna culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe. The Corded Ware culture extends from the Rhine to the Volga, corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, but still in loose contact and thus enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups (except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, already isolated from these processes). The Centum-Satem division has probably run its course, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.
2500 - 2000: The breakup into the proto-languages of the attested dialects has done its work. Speakers of Proto-Greek live in the Balkans, speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian north of the Caspian in the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. The Bronze Age reaches Central Europe with the Beaker culture, whose people probably use various Centum dialects. Proto-Balto-Slavic speakers (or alternatively, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic communities in close contact) emerge in north-eastern Europe. The Tarim mummies possibly correspond to proto-Tocharians.

mid 2nd millennium BC distribution
2000 - 1500: Invention of the chariot, which leads to the split and rapid spread of Iranian and Indo-Aryan from the Andronovo culture and the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex over much of Central Asia, Northern India, Iran and Eastern Anatolia. Proto-Anatolian splits into Hittite and Luwian. The pre-Proto-Celtic Unetice culture has an active metal industry (Nebra skydisk).
1500 - 1000: The Nordic Bronze Age develops (pre-)Proto-Germanic, and the (pre-)Proto-Celtic Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures emerge in Central Europe, introducing the Iron Age. Proto-Italic migration into the Italian peninsula. Redaction of the Rigveda and rise of the Vedic civilization in the Punjab. Flourishing and decline of the Hittite Empire. The Mycenaean civilization gives way to the Greek Dark Ages.

distribution around 250 BC
1000 BC - 500 BC: The Celtic languages spread over Central and Western Europe. Northern Europe enters the Pre-Roman Iron Age, the formative phase of Proto-Germanic. Homer initiates Greek literature and early Classical Antiquity. The Vedic civilization gives way to the Mahajanapadas. Zoroaster composes the Gathas; rise of the Achaemenid Empire, replacing the Elamites and Babylonia. The Scythians supplant the Cimmerians (Srubna culture) in the Pontic steppe. Armenians succeed the Urartu culture. Separation of Proto-Italic into Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan, and foundation of Rome. Genesis of the Greek and Old Italic alphabets. A variety of Paleo-Balkan languages have speakers in Southern Europe. The Anatolian languages suffer extinction.
A strength of the Kurgan hypothesis lies in the fact that part of its proposed mode of spread (military conquest by horsemen) agrees with historical reports about the spread of early Greek and early Indo-Aryan peoples.

post- Roman Empire and Migrations period distribution

late medieval distribution (after Islamic, Hungarian and Turkic expansions)
[edit]
The Anatolian hypothesis
Main article: Anatolian hypothesis
Colin Renfrew in 1987 suggested [4] an association between the spread of Indo-European and the Neolithic revolution, spreading peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor (Anatolia) from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming (wave of advance). Accordingly, all the inhabitants of Neolithic Europe would have spoken Indo-European tongues, and the Kurgan migrations would at best have replaced Indo-European dialects with other Indo-European dialects.
According to Renfrew [5], the spread of Indo-European proceeded from "Pre-Proto-Indo-European" in 6500 to Archaic PIE in 5000 BC, with the historical Indo-European families developing from 3000 BC from "Balkan PIE".
The main strength of the farming hypothesis lies in its linking of the spread of Indo-European languages with an archeologically known event that likely involved major population shifts: the spread of farming (though the validity of basing a linguistics theory on archeological evidence remains disputed).
While the Anatolian theory enjoyed brief support when first proposed, the linguistic community in general now rejects it. While the spread of farming undisputedly constituted an important event, most see no case to connect it with Indo-Europeans in particular, seeing that terms for animal husbandry tend to have much better reconstructions than terms related to agriculture. The linguistic community further notes that linguistic evidence suggests a later date for Proto-Indo-European than the Anatolian theory predicts.
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Other hypotheses
Tamaz Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov in 1984 placed the Indo-European homeland on Lake Urmia [6]. They suggested that Armenian stayed in the Indo-European cradle while other Indo-European languages left the homeland and migrated on a route that led them along the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea to the steppe north of the Black Sea. This migration route allegedly explains the existence of Tocharic, and the assumed early contacts between Indo-European and Uralic languages. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov also originated the Glottalic theory.
Some people have pointed to the Black Sea deluge theory, dating the genesis of the Sea of Azov to ca. 5600 BC, as a direct cause of Indo-European expansion.[7] This event occurred in still clearly Neolithic times and happened rather too early to fit with Kurgan archaeology. One can still imagine it as an event in the remote past of the Sredny Stog culture, with the people living on the land now beneath the Sea of Azov as possible pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Other theories exist, often with a nationalistic flavour, sometimes bordering on national mysticism, and typically positing the development in situ of their proponents' respective homes. For a prominent modern example of such, note the Indian theories that derive Vedic Sanskrit from the Indus valley civilization, postulating that Vedic Sanskrit essentially equates to Proto-Indo-European, and that all other dialects must ultimately trace back to the early Indus valley civilization of ca. 3000 BC (see Aryan Invasion Theory and Out of India theory for a discussion). Various nationalistic European groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries espoused other theories along these lines. For example, a suggested location of the proto-language in Northern Europe became involved in justifying the view of the German people as "Aryan". For a modern version of the hypothesis of European origin of PIE see the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (proposed by Italian theorists) that derives Indo-European from the European Paleolithic cultures.
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Sound changes

Main article: Indo-European sound laws
As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, changing according to various sound laws evidenced in the daughter-languages. Notable cases of such sound laws include Grimm's law in Proto-Germanic, loss of prevocalic *p- in Proto-Celtic, loss of prevocalic *s- in Proto-Greek, Brugmann's law in Proto-Indo-Iranian, as well as satemization (discussed above). Grassmann's law and Bartholomae's law may or may not have operated at the common Indo-European stage.
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References

Leszek Bednarczuk (ed.), Języki indoeuropejskie. PWN, Warsawa. 1986 (in Polish). .
Mallory, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-27616-1.
Ryan, William; Pitman, Walter (1998). Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About The Event That Changed History. New York: Touchstone. ISBN 0-684-85920-3.
August Schleicher, A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages (1861/62).
Watkins, Calvert (2000). The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-08250-6.
[edit]
Cited references
^ 449 according to the 2005 SIL estimate, about half (219) belonging to the Indo-Aryan sub-branch.
^ the Sino-Tibetan family of tongues has the second-largest number of speakers.
^ in terms of geography (stretching from the Caucasus to South India), as well as of variety (308 languages according to SIL) and of speakers (more than one billion).
^ Renfrew, Colin (1987). Archeology and Language. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-521-38675-6.
^ Renfrew, Colin (2003). “Time Depth, Convergence Theory, and Innovation in Proto-Indo-European”, Languages in Prehistoric Europe. ISBN 3-8253-1449-9.
^ Gamkrelidze, Tamaz V.; Vjacheslav V. Ivanov (1995). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans. Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-014728-9.
^ Ryan and Pitman 1998:208-213
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See also

Language family
Indo-European studies
Proto-Indo-European language
List of Indo-European roots
List of Indo-European languages
List of languages
[edit]
External links

[edit]
Databases
The Indo-European Database
IE language family overview (SIL)
Indo-European at the LLOW-database
Indo-European Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin
[edit]
Lexicon
Indo-European Roots, from the American Heritage Dictionary.
Indo-European Root/lemmas (by Andi Zeneli)

Comparative Linguisitics

2006-09-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

Read the passage on Comparative linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Select ten words in English and your own language that are clearly related and give the historical developmetns that resulted in the individual forms.

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness.

Relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative linguistics aims to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is the comparative method, which aims to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon. In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be highly regular. Although the proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative methods are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The most notable example of this is Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European consonant system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite, which proved to have exactly the consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.

Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related, the comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative method has not generally produced results that have met with wide acceptance. A number of methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary have been developed to overcome this limitation. The theoretical basis of such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies.

The earliest method of this type was glottochronology, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a core vocabulary of 100 (later 200) items that are cognate in the languages being compared. Glottochronology has met with continued scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Even more controversial is mass lexical comparison, which disavows any ability to date developments, aiming simply to show which languages are more and less close to each other, in a method similar to those used in cladistics in evolutionary biology. However, since mass comparison eschews the use of reconstruction and other traditional tools, it is flaty rejected by the majority of historical linguists.

Such vocabulary-based methods are able solely to establish degrees of relatedness and cannot be used to derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the shared items of compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems - without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are cognate. However, lexical methods can be validated statistically and by their consistency with independent findings of history, archaeology and population genetics.

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparative linguistics:

* Linguistic typology compares languages in order to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the world's language is respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example). Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one reconstruction may be preferred to another as typologically more plausible.
* Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of different languages, particular as evidenced in loan words. Any empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language's vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings.
* Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.

There is also a wide body of publications containing language comparisons that are considered pseudoscientific by linguists; see pseudoscientific language comparison.
[edit]

See also

* Historical linguistics
* Comparative method
* Glottochronology
* Mass lexical comparison
* Sound law

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics"

Category: Historical linguistics

History of Lingusitics

2006-09-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

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

[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
Modern linguistics

[edit]
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.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
Generative linguistics
[edit]
Other specialties
From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
[edit]
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.
[edit]
Line notes

^ James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, The Origin and Progress of Man and Language (6 volumes, 1773-1792)

Semantics and Meaning

2006-09-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

Read the wikipedia entry on Semantics and Linguistic meaning

Prepare a concise list (25 roots) that have meaning in your language.
Make a separate list of the meaningful units that are used with nouns, verbs and modifiers in your language along with their meanings

Meaning (linguistics)
From Wikipedia,
In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Restated, the communication of meaning is the purpose and function of language. A communicated meaning will (more or less accurately) replicate between individuals either a direct perception or some sentient derivation thereof. Meanings may take many forms, such as evoking a certain idea, or denoting a certain real-world entity. Linguistic meaning is studied in philosophy and semiotics, and especially in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and logic, and communication theory. Fields like sociolinguistics tend to be more interested in non-linguistic meanings. Linguistics lends itself to the study of linguistic meaning in the fields of semantics (which studies conventional meanings and how they are assembled) and pragmatics (which studies in how language is used by individuals). Literary theory, critical theory, and some branches of psychoanalysis are also involved in the discussion of meaning. Legal scholars and practitioners have discussed the nature of meaning of statutes, precedents and contracts since Roman law. However, this division of labor is not absolute, and each field depends to some extent upon the others.
Questions about how words and other symbols mean anything, and what it means to something is meaningful, are pivotal to an understanding of language. Since humans are in part characterized by their sophisticated ability to use language, it has also been seen as an essential subject to explore in order to understand human experience.
Contents

The nature of meaning

In the introduction, it was mentioned that meanings are considered to be abstract logical objects. However, this explanation has not necessarily satisfied those who have inquired into the nature of meaning. Many philosophers, including Plato, Augustine, Peter Abelard, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, and W.V. Quine have concerned themselves with providing alternative explanations.
The nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, is mainly established by Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas (also known as the AAA framework). According to this classic tradition, 'meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean (intend, express or signify)'. One term in the relation of meaning necessarily causes something else to come to the mind in consequence. In other words: 'a sign is defined as an entity that indicates another entity to some agent for some purpose'.
The types of meanings vary according to the types of the thing that is being represented. Namely:
There are the things in the world, which might have meaning;
There are things in the world that are also signs of other things in the world, and so, are always meaningful (i.e., natural signs of the physical world and ideas within the mind);
There are things that are always necessarily meaningful, such as words, and other nonverbal symbols.
All subsequent inquiries emphasize some particular perspectives within the general AAA framework.
The major contemporary positions of meaning come under the following partial definitions of meaning:
Psychological theories, exhausted by notions of thought, intention, or understanding;
Logical theories, involving notions such as intension, cognitive content, or sense, along with extension, reference, or denotation;
Message, content, information, or communication;
Truth conditions;
Usage, and the instructions for usage; and
Measurement, computation, or operation.
[edit]
Idea theories of meaning
To the question, "what really is a meaning?", some have answered, "meanings are ideas". By such accounts, "ideas" are either used to refer to mental representations, or to mental activity in general. Those who seek an explanation for meaning in the former sort of account endorse a stronger sort of idea theory of mind than the latter.
Each idea is understood to be necessarily about something external and/or internal, real or imaginary. For example, in contrast to the abstract meaning of the universal "dog", the referent "this dog" may mean a particular real life chihuahua. In both cases, the word is about something, but in the former it is about the class of dogs as generally understood, while in the latter it is about a very real and particular dog in the real world.
[edit]
Stronger idea theories
The classical empiricists are usually taken to be the most strident defenders of strong forms of idea theories of meaning.
David Hume is well-known for his belief that thoughts were kinds of imaginable entities. (See his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section 2). It might be inferred that this perspective also applied to a theory of meaning. Hume was adamant about one point: that any words that could not call upon any past experience were without meaning. His forebearer, John Locke, seemed a bit more reserved in his analysis. Locke considered all ideas to be both imaginable objects of sensation and the very unimaginable objects of reflection. He stressed, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that words are used both as signs for ideas -- but also to signify the lack of certain ideas.
However, over the past century, strong forms of the idea theories of meaning have been criticized by many philosophers for several reasons.
One criticism made as early as George Berkeley and as late as Ludwig Wittgenstein, was that ideas alone are unable to account for the different variations within a general meaning. For example, any hypothetical image of the meaning of "dog" has to include such varied images as a chihuahua, a pug, and a Black Lab; and this seems impossible to imagine, all of those particular breeds looking very different from one another. Another way to see this point is to question why it is that, if we have an image of a specific type of dog (say of a chihuahua), why it should be entitled to represent the entire concept.
Another criticism is that some meaningful words, known as non-lexical items, don't have any meaningfully associated image. For example, the word "the" has a meaning, but one would be hard-pressed to find a mental representation that fits it. Still another objection lies in the observation that certain linguistic items name something in the real world, and are meaningful, yet which we have no mental representations to deal with. For instance, it is not known what Bismarck's mother looked like, yet the phrase "Bismarck's mother" still has meaning.
Another is a problem of composition - that it is difficult to explain how words and phrases combine into sentences if only ideas were involved in meaning.
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Weaker idea theories

Memberships of a graded class
But the idea theory of meaning has lately been defended in new form by contemporary cognitive scientists Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff. Called the theory of prototypes, it suggests that classes are understood on the basis of the ideas we might have about particular, ideal member(s) of the class.
For example, the category of "birds" may have the idea of a robin as the prototype -- the ideal kind of bird. With experience, we come to grade the members of the class as being more or less bird-like by comparing the members to the prototype. So, for example, a penguin or an ostrich would sit at the edge of the meaning of "bird", because a penguin is unlike a robin. If true, then this theory would account for the concern expressed by Wittgenstein (above). In which case, one of the more decisive criticisms against the idea theory of meaning would be overcome.
There are many contemporary philosophers (Ned Block, Gilbert Harman, H. Field) and cognitive scientists (G. Miller and P. Johnson-Laird) who insist that the meaning of a term can be found by investigating its role in relation to other concepts and mental states. These philosophers endorse a view called "conceptual role semantics". Those proponents of this view who understand meanings to be exhausted by the content of mental states can be said to endorse "one-factor" accounts of conceptual role semantics. With this emphasis upon meaning as an aspect of human psychology, they fit within the tradition of idea theories.
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Truth and meaning
Some have asserted that meaning is nothing substantially more or less than the truth conditions they involve. For such theories, an emphasis is placed upon reference to actual things in the world to account for meaning, with the caveat that reference more or less explains the greater part (or all of) meaning itself.
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Logic and language
One set of philosophers who advocated a truth-theory of meaning were the logical positivists, who put stock in the notion that the meaning of a statement arose from how it is verified.
Logic and reality were at the core of their understanding of truth and meaning. To understand this insight, some explanation of the history of logic is necessary.
Classical logicians had known since Aristotle how to codify certain common patterns of reasoning into logical form. But in the 19th century, Western philosophy took a turn toward language philosophy. This shift in interest is tied closely to the development of modern logic. Modern logic began with the work of the German logician Gottlob Frege in the late nineteenth century. Frege, along with contemporaries George Boole and Charles Sanders Peirce, advanced logic significantly by introducing Sentential connectives (like and, or and if-then), and quantifiers like all and some. Much of this work was made possible by the development of set theory.
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Gottlob Frege
Modern philosophy of language began with the discussion of sense and reference in Gottlob Frege's essay Über Sinn und Bedeutung (now usually translated as On Sense and Reference).
Frege noted that proper names present at least two problems in explaining meaning.
Suppose, as one might casually say, the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Sam, then, means a person in the world who is named Sam. But if the object referred to by the name did not exist -- i.e., Pegasus -- then, according to that theory, it would be meaningless. And that seems wrong.
There may also be two different names that refer to the same object -- Hesperus and Phosphorus, for example -- which were once used to describe the Morning Star and Evening Star. However, it turns out that astronomers have discovered that the Morning Star and Evening Star are the same thing: both refer to the planet Venus. If the words meant the same thing, then substituting one for the other in a sentence would not result in a sentence that differs in meaning from the original. But in that case, "Hesperus is Phosphorus" would mean the same thing as "Hesperus is Hesperus". This is clearly absurd, since we learn something new and unobvious by the former statement, but not by the latter.
Frege can be interpreted as arguing that it was therefore a mistake to think that the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Instead, the meaning must be something else—the "sense" of the word. Two names for the same person, then, can have different senses (or meanings): one referent might be picked out by more than one sense. This sort of theory is called a mediated reference theory.
Frege argued that, ultimately, the same bifurcation of meaning must apply to most or all linguistic categories, such as to quantificational expressions like "All boats float". Ironically enough, it is now accepted by many philosophers as applying to all expressions but proper names.
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Bertrand Russell
Logical analysis was further advanced by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their groundbreaking Principia Mathematica, which attempted to produce a formal language with which the truth of all mathematical statements could be demonstrated from first principles.
Russell differed from Frege greatly on many points, however. He rejected (or perhaps misunderstood) Frege's sense-reference distinction. He also disagreed that language was of fundamental significance to philosophy, and saw the project of developing formal logic as a way of eliminating all of the confusions caused by ordinary language, and hence at creating a perfectly transparent medium in which to conduct traditional philosophical argument. He hoped, ultimately, to extend the proofs of the Principia to all possible true statements, a scheme he called logical atomism. For a while it appeared that his pupil Wittgenstein had succeeded in this plan with his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus".
Russell's work, and that of his colleague G. E. Moore, developed in response to what they perceived as the nonsense dominating British philosophy departments at the turn of the century, a kind of British Idealism most of which was derived (albeit very distantly) from the work of Hegel. In response Moore developed an approach ("Common Sense Philosophy") which sought to examine philosophical difficulties by a close analysis of the language used in order to determine its meaning. In this way Moore sought to expunge philosophical absurdities such as "time is unreal". Moore's work would have significant, if oblique, influence (largely mediated by Wittgenstein) on Ordinary language philosophy.
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Other truth theories
The Vienna Circle, a famous group of logical positivists from the early 20th century (closely allied with Russell and Frege), adopted the verificationist theory of meaning. The verificationist theory of meaning (in at least one of its forms) states that to say that an expression is meaningful is to say that there are some conditions of experience that could exist to show that the expression is true. As noted, Frege and Russell were two proponents of this way of thinking.
A semantic theory of truth was produced by Alfred Tarski for the semantics of logic. According to Tarski's account, meaning consists of a recursive set of rules that end up yielding an infinite set of sentences, "'p' is true if and only if p", covering the whole language. His innovation produced the notion of propositional functions discussed on the section on universals (which he called "sentential functions"), and a model-theoretic approach to semantics (as opposed to a proof-theoretic one). Finally, some links were forged to the correspondence theory of truth (Tarski, 1944).
Perhaps the most influential current approach in the contemporary theory of meaning is that sketched by Donald Davidson in his introduction to the collection of essays Truth and Meaning in 1967. There he argued for the following two theses:
Any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions--as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms.
Giving the meaning of a sentence, he further argued, was equivalent to stating its truth conditions. He proposed that it must be possible to account for language as a set of distinct grammatical features together with a lexicon, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences built up from these.
The result is a theory of meaning that rather resembles, by no accident, Tarski's account.
Davidson's account, though brief, constitutes the first systematic presentation of truth-conditional semantics. He proposed simply translating natural languages into first-order predicate calculus in order to reduce meaning to a function of truth.
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Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke examined the relation between sense and reference in dealing with possible and actual situations. He showed that one consequence of his interpretation of certain systems of modal logic was that the reference of a proper name is necessarily linked to its referent, but that the sense is not. So for instance "Hesperus" necessarily refers to Hesperus, even in those imaginary cases and worlds in which perhaps Hesperus is not the evening star. That is, Hesperus is necessarily Hesperus, but only contingently the morning star.
This results in the curious situation that part of the meaning of a name - that it refers to some particular thing - is a necessary fact about that name, but another part - that it is used in some particular way or situation - is not.
Kripke also drew the distinction between speaker's meaning and semantic meaning, elaborating on the work of ordinary language philosophers Paul Grice and Keith Donnellan. The speaker's meaning is what the speaker intends to refer to by saying something; the semantic meaning is what the words uttered by the speaker mean according to the language.
In some cases, people do not say what they mean; in other cases, they say something that is in error. In both these cases, the speaker's meaning and the semantic meaning seem to be different. Sometimes words do not actually express what the speaker wants them to express; so words will mean one thing, and what people intend to convey by them might mean another. The meaning of the expression, in such cases, is ambiguous.
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Critiques of truth-theories of meaning
W.V. Quine attacked both verificationism and the very notion of meaning in his famous essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". In it, he suggested that meaning was nothing more than a vague and dispensable notion. Instead, he asserted, what was more interesting to study was the synonymy between signs. He also pointed out that verificationism was tied to the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and asserted that such a divide was defended ambiguously. He also suggested that the unit of analysis for any potential investigation into the world (and, perhaps, meaning) would be the entire body of statements taken as a collective, not just individual statements on their own.
Other criticisms can be raised on the basis of the limitations that truth-conditional theorists themselves admit to. Tarski, for instance, recognized that truth-conditional theories of meaning only make sense of statements, but fail to explain the meanings of the lexical parts that make up statements. Rather, the meaning of the parts of statements is presupposed by an understanding of the truth-conditions of a whole statement, and explained in terms of what he called "satisfaction conditions".
Still another objection (noted by Frege and others) was that some kinds of statements don't seem to have any truth-conditions at all. For instance, "Hello!" has no truth-conditions, because it doesn't even attempt to tell the listener anything about the state of affairs in the world. In other words, different propositions have different grammatical moods.
Deflationist accounts of truth, sometimes called 'irrealist' accounts, are the staunchest source of criticism of truth-conditional theories of meaning. According to them, "truth" is a word with no serious meaning or function in discourse except to affirm an expression. For instance, for the deflationist, the sentences "It's true that Tiny Tim is trouble" and "Tiny Tim is trouble" are equivalent. In consequence, for the deflationist, any appeal to truth as an account of meaning has little explanatory power.
The sort of truth-theories presented here can also be attacked for their formalism both in practice and principle. The principle of formalism is challenged by the informalists, who suggest that language is largely a construction of the speaker, and so, not compatible with formalization. The practice of formalism is challenged by those who observe that formal languages (such as present-day quantificational logic) fail to capture the expressive power of natural languages (as is arguably demonstrated in the awkward character of the quantificational explanation of definite description statements, as laid out by Bertrand Russell).
Finally, over the past century, forms of logic have been developed that are not dependent exclusively on the notions of truth and falsity. Some of these types of logic have been called modal logics. They explain how certain logical connectives such as "if-then" work in terms of necessity and possibility. Indeed, modal logic was the basis of one of the most popular and rigorous formulations in modern semantics called the Montague grammar. The successes of such systems naturally give rise to the argument that these systems have captured the natural meaning of connectives like if-then far better than an ordinary, truth-functional logic ever could.
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Usage and meaning
Throughout the 20th Century, English philosophy focused closely on analysis of language. This style of analytic philosophy became very influential and led to the development of a wide range of philosophical tools.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was originally an artificial language philosopher, following the influence of Russell, Frege, and the Vienna Circle. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus he had supported the idea of an ideal language built up from atomic statements using logical connectives. However, as he matured, he came to appreciate more and more the phenomenon of natural language. Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, signalled a sharp departure from his earlier work with its focus upon ordinary language use. His approach is often summarised by the aphorism "the meaning of a word is its use in a language".
His work would come to inspire future generations and spur forward a whole new discipline, which explained meaning in a new way. Meaning in natural languages was seen as primarily a question of how the speaker uses language to express intentions.
This close examination of natural language proved to be a powerful philosophical technique. Practitioners who were influenced by Wittgenstein's approach have included an entire tradition of thinkers, featuring P. F. Strawson, Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, R. S. Peters, and Jürgen Habermas.
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J. L. Austin
At around the same time Ludwig Wittgenstein was re-thinking his approach to language, reflections on the complexity of language led to a more expansive approach to meaning. Following the lead of George Edward Moore, J. L. Austin examined the use of words in great detail. He argued against fixating on the meaning of words. He showed that dictionary definitions are of limited philosophical use, since there is no simple "appendage" to a word that can be called its meaning. Instead, he showed how to focus on the way in which words are used in order to do things. He analysed the structure of utterances into three distinct parts: locutions, illocutions and perlocutions. His pupil John Searle developed the idea under the label "speech acts". Their work greatly influenced pragmatics.
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Peter Strawson
Past philosophers had understood reference to be tied to words themselves. However, Sir Peter Strawson disagreed in his seminal essay, "On Referring", where he argued that there is nothing true about statements on their own; rather, only the uses of statements could be considered to be true or false.
Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the ordinary use perspective is its insistence upon the distinctions between meaning and use. "Meanings", for ordinary language philosophers, are the instructions for usage of words - the common and conventional definitions of words. Usage, on the other hand, is the actual meanings that individual speakers have - they things that an individual speaker in a particular context wants to refer to. The word "dog" is an example of a meaning, but pointing at a nearby dog and shouting "This dog smells foul!" is an example of usage. From this distinction between usage and meaning arose the divide between the fields of Pragmatics and Semantics.
Yet another distinction is of some utility in discussing language: "mentioning". Mention is when an expression refers to itself as a linguistic item, usually surrounded by quotation marks. For instance, in the expression "'Opopanax' is hard to spell", what is referred to is the word itself ("opopanax") and not what it means (an obscure gum resin). Frege had referred to instances of mentioning as "opaque contexts".
In his essay, "Reference and Definite Descriptions", Keith Donnellan sought to improve upon Strawson's distinction. He pointed out that there are two uses of definite descriptions: attributive and referential. Attributive uses provide a description of whoever is being referred to, while referential uses point out the actual referent. Attributive uses are like mediated references, while referential uses are more directly referential.
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Paul Grice
The philosopher Paul Grice, working within the ordinary language tradition, understood "meaning" to have two kinds: natural and non-natural. Natural meaning had to do with cause and effect, for example with the expression "these spots mean measels". Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, had to do with the intentions of the speaker in communicating something to the listener.
In his essay, Logic and Conversation, Grice went on to explain and defend an explanation of how conversations work. His guiding maxim was called the cooperative principle, which claimed that the speaker and the listener will have mutual expectations of the kind of information that will be shared. The principle is broken down into four maxims: Quality (which demands truthfulness and honesty), Quantity (demand for just enough information as is required), Relation (relevance of things brought up), and Manner (lucidity). This principle, if and when followed, lets the speaker and listener figure out the meaning of certain implications by way of inference.
The works of Grice led to an avalanche of research and interest in the field, both supportive and critical. One spinoff was called Relevance theory, developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson during the mid-1980s, whose goal was to make the notion of relevance more clear. Similarly, in his work, "Universal pragmatics", Jurgen Habermas began a program that sought to improve upon the work of the ordinary language tradition. In it, he laid out the goal of a valid conversation as a pursuit of mutual understanding.
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Inferential role semantics
Main article: Inferential role semantics
Michael Dummett argued against the kind of truth-conditional semantics presented by Davidson. Instead, he argued that basing semantics on assertion conditions avoids a number of difficulties with truth-conditional semantics, such as the transcendental nature of certain kinds of truth condition. He leverages work done in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a kind of inferential role semantics, where:
The meaning of sentences and grammatical constructs is given by their assertion conditions; and
Such a semantics is only guaranteed to be coherent if the inferences associated with the parts of language are in logical harmony.
A semantics based upon assertion conditions is called a verificationist semantics: cf. the verificationism of the Vienna Circle.
This work is closely related, though not identical, to one-factor theories of conceptual role semantics.
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Critiques of use theories of meaning
Cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor has noted that use theories (of the Wittgensteinian kind) seem to be committed to the notion that language is a public phenomenon -- that there is no such thing as a "private language". Fodor criticizes such claims because he thinks it is necessary to create or describe the language of thought, which would seemingly require the existence of a "private language".
Some philosophers of language, such as Christopher Gauker, have attacked use theories of meaning by denying that the discovery of a speaker's intentions is a necessary part of the listener's strategies in decoding and inferring.
In the 1960s, David Lewis published another thesis of meaning as use, as he described meaning as a feature of a social convention (see also convention (philosophy) and conventions as regularities of a specific sort. Lewis' work was an application of game theory in philosophical matters. Conventions, he argued, are a species of coordination equilibria.
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Translation
W.V. Quine argued for the indeterminacy of translation; that is, that it is in principle not possible to be absolutely certain of the meaning that a speaker attaches to an utterance. All that can be done is to examine the utterance as a part of the overall behaviour of the individual, and to use these observations to interpret the meaning of any utterances. For Quine, as for Wittgenstein and Austin, meaning is not something that is associated with a word or sentence, but is one aspect of the overall behaviour and culture of the speaker.
Quine's intellectual disciple, Donald Davidson, sought to find the meaning of an utterance in its truth-conditions. He proposed translating the sentences of a natural language such as English into first-order predicate calculus, and using the Truth-conditional semantics thus obtained as the definitive meaning of the utterance.
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Linguistic approaches to meaning

Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena like words, phrases, and sentences, and each seems to have a different kind of meaning. Individual words all by themselves, such as the word "bachelor," have one kind of meaning, because they only seem to refer to some abstract concept. Phrases, such as "the brightest star in the sky", seem to be different from individual words, because they are complex symbols arranged into some order. There is also the meaning of whole sentences, such as "Barry is a bachelor", which is both a complex whole, and seems to express a statement that might be true or false.
In linguistics the fields most closely associated with meaning are semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals most directly with what words or phrases mean, and pragmatics deals with how the environment changes the meanings of words. Syntax and morphology also have a profound effect on meaning. The syntax of a language allows a good deal of information to be conveyed even when the specific words used are not known to the listener, and a language's morphology can allow a listener to uncover the meaning of a word by examining the morphemes that make it up.
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Semantics
The field of semantics examines the ways in which words, phrases, and sentences can have meaning. Semantics usually divides words into their sense and reference. The reference of a word is the thing it refers to: in the sentence "Give the guy sitting next to you a turn", the guy refers to a specific person, in this case the male one sitting next to you. This person is the phrase's reference. The sense, on the other hand, is that part of the expression that helps us to determine the thing it refers to. In the example above, the sense is every piece of information that helps to determine that the expression is referring to the male human sitting next to you and not any other object. This includes any linguistic information as well as situational context, environmental details, and so on. This, however, only works for nouns and noun phrases.
There are at least four different kinds of sentences. Some of them are truth-sensitive, which are called indicative sentences. However, other kinds of sentences are not truth-sensitive. They include expressive sentences, like "Ouch!"; performative sentences, such as "I damn thee!"; and commandative sentences, such as "Get the milk from the fridge". This aspect of meaning is called the grammatical mood.
Among words and phrases, different parts of speech can be distinguished, such as noun phrases and adjectival phrases. Each of these have different kinds of meaning; nouns typically refer to entities, while adjectives typically refer to properties. Proper names, which are names that stand for individuals, like "Jerry", "Barry", "Paris," and "Venus," are going to have another kind of meaning.
When dealing with verb phrases, one approach to discovering the way the phrase means is by looking at the thematic roles the child noun phrases take on. Verbs do not point to things, but rather to the relationship between one or more nouns and some configuration or reconfiguration therein, so the meaning of a verb phrase can be derived from the meaning of its child noun phrases and the relationship between them and the verb.
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Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure described language in terms of signs, which he in turn divided into signifieds and signifiers. The signifier is the sound of the linguistic object (like Socrates, Saussure didn't much concern himself with the written word). The signified, on the other hand, is the mental construction or image associated with the sound. The sign, then, is essentially the relationship between the two.
Signs themselves exist only in opposition to other signs, which means that bat has meaning only because it is not cat or ball or boy. This is because signs are essentially arbitrary, as any foreign language student is well aware: there is no reason that bat couldn't mean "that bust of Napoleon over there" or "this body of water". Since the choice of signifiers is ultimately arbitrary, the meaning cannot somehow be in the signifier. Saussure instead defers meaning to the sign itself: meaning is ultimately the same thing as the sign, and meaning means that relationship between signified and signifier. This, in turn, means that all meaning is both within us and communal. Signs mean by reference to our internal lexicon and grammar, and despite their being a matter of convention, that is, a public thing, signs can only mean to the individual - what red means to one person may not be what red means to another. However, while meanings may vary to some extent from individual to individual, only those meanings which stay within a boundary are seen by other speakers of the language to refer to reality: if one were to refer to smells as red, most other speakers would assume the person is talking nonsense (although statements like this are common among people who experience synesthesia).
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Pragmatics
Pragmatics studies the ways that context affects meaning. The two primary forms of context important to pragmatics are linguistic context and situational context.
Linguistic context refers to the language surrounding the phrase in question. The importance of linguistic context becomes exceptionally clear when looking at pronouns: in most situations, the pronoun him in the sentence "Joe also saw him" has a radically different meaning if preceded by "Jerry said he saw a guy riding an elephant" than it does if preceded by "Jerry saw the bank robber" or "Jerry saw your dog run that way".
Situational context, on the other hand, refers to every non-linguistic factor that affects the meaning of a phrase. Nearly anything can be included in the list, from the time of day to the people involved to the location of the speaker or the temperature of the room. An example of situational context at work is evident in the phrase "it's cold in here", which can either be a simple statement of fact or a request to turn up the heat, depending on, among other things, whether or not it is believed to be in the listener's power to affect the temperature.
When we speak we perform speech acts. A speech act has an illocutionary point or illocutionary force. For example, the point of an assertion is to represent the world as being a certain way. The point of a promise is to put oneself under an obligation to do something. The illucutionary point of a speech act must be distinguished from its perlocutionary effect, which is what it brings about. A request, for example, has as its illocutionary point to direct someone to do something. Its perlocutionary effect may be the doing of the thing by the person directed. Sentences in different grammatical moods, the declarative, imperative, and interrogative, tend to perform speech acts of specific sorts. But in particular contexts one may perform a different speech act using them than that for which they are typically put to use. Thus, as noted above, one may use a sentence such as "it's cold in here" not only to make an assertion but also to request that one's auditor turn up the heat. Speech acts include performative utterances, in which one performs the speech act by using a first person present tense sentence which says that one is performing the speech act. Examples are: 'I promise to be there', 'I warn you not to do it', 'I advise you to turn yourself in', etc. Some specialized devices for performing speech acts are exclamatives and phatics, such as 'Ouch!' and 'Hello!', respectively. The former is used to perform an expressive speech act, and the latter for greeting someone.
Pragmatics, then, reveals that meaning is both something affected by and affecting the world. Meaning is something contextual with respect to language and the world, and is also something active toward other meanings and the world.
In applied pragmatics (such as neuro-linguistic programming), meaning is constituted by an individual through the active significance generated by the mental processing of stimuli input from the sensory organs. Thus, people can see, hear, feel/touch, taste and smell, and form meanings out of those sensory experiences, actively and interactively.
Even though a sensory input created by a stimulus cannot be articulated in language or signs of any kind, it can nevertheless have a meaning. This can be experimentally demonstrated by showing that people behaviourally respond in specific, non-arbitrary ways to sensing a stimulus, consciously or sub-consciously, even although they have no way of telling what it is or means, and no possible way of knowing what it is or what it means.
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See also

Meaning (non-linguistic)
Fields
General Semantics, semiotics, Semantics, Pragmatics
Perspectives
logical positivism
ordinary language philosophy
Theories
causal theory of names
theory of descriptions
definite descriptions
universal grammar
Considerations
idea
image
information
sense
symbol
symbol grounding problem
metaphor
Important theorists
J. L. Austin
Roland Barthes
Noam Chomsky
Umberto Eco
Viktor Frankl
Paul Grice
Saul Kripke
Charles Peirce
Bertrand Russell
Ferdinand de Saussure
John Searle
Claude Lévi-Strauss
P. F. Strawson
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Further reading

Akmajian, Adrian, Richard Demers, Ann Farmer, and Robert Harnish. Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication, 4th edition. 1995. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Allan, Keith. Linguistic Meaning, Volume One. 1986. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things With Words. 1962. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality : A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. 1967. First Anchor Books Edition. 240 pages.
Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Meaning, 2nd edition. 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dummett, Michael. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd Edition. 1981. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. The Frege Reader. Edited by Michael Beaney. 1997. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959. Anchor Books.
Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words. 1989. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Searle, John and Daniel Vanderveken. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. 1985. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John. Speech Acts. 1969. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John. Expression and Meaning. 1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stonier, Tom: Information and Meaning. An Evolutionary Perspective. 1997. XIII, 255 p. 23,5 cm.

Semantics

Semantics (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts. By the usual convention that calls a study or a theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.
Though terminology varies, writers on the subject of meaning generally recognize two sorts of meaning that a significant expression may have: (1) the relation that a sign has to objects and objective situations, actual or possible, and (2) the relation that a sign has to other signs, most especially the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.
Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any manner of objective reference, as its denotation. Some theorists refer to the relation between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation, but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the denotative aspect, using other terms or altogether ignoring the connotative aspect.

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as borne on the syntactic levels of words, phrases, sentences, and sometimes larger units of discourse, generically referred to as texts. As with any empirical science, semantics involves the interplay of concrete data with theoretical concepts, and specializations have developed that focus on different parts of that interaction, for example, the semantics of natural languages and formal languages, respectively.
Depending on the perspective taken up, semantics may include the study of connotative sense and denotative reference, truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.
The decompositional perspective towards meaning holds that the meaning of words can be analyzed by defining meaning atoms or primitives, which establish a language of thought. An area of study is the meaning of compounds, another is the study of relations between different linguistic expressions (homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentric, and endocentric).
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Logic and mathematics

Many of the formal approaches to semantics applied in linguistics, mathematical logic, and computer science originated in techniques for the semantics of logic, most influentially being Alfred Tarski's ideas in model theory and his semantic theory of truth. Also, inferential role semantics has its roots in the work of Gerhard Gentzen on proof theory and proof-theoretic semantics. One of the most popular alternatives to the standard model theoretic semantics is truth-value semantics.
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Computer science

In computer science, considered in part as an application of mathematical logic, semantics reflects the meaning of programs.
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Psychology

In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience, while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience.

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Semasiology

In International Scientific Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.
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See also

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Major theorists
Aristotle
Thomas Aquinas
Augustine of Hippo
J.L. Austin
Jeremy Bentham
Rudolf Carnap
Janet Dean Fodor
Gottlob Frege
Nelson Goodman
H.P. Grice
Jürgen Habermas
Ray Jackendoff
Saul Kripke
John Locke
John Stuart Mill
Charles W. Morris
Charles Sanders Peirce
C.K. Ogden
Plato
I.A. Richards
Bertrand Russell
Ferdinand de Saussure
Alfred Tarski
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Linguistics and semiotics
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Discourse representation theory
General semantics
Natural semantic metalanguage
Pragmatic maxim
Pragmaticism
Pragmatism
Semantic change
Semantic class
Semantic feature
Semantic field
Semantic lexicon
Semantic progression
Semantic property
Semeiotic
Sememe
Semiosis
Semiotics
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Logic and mathematics
Formal logic
Game semantics
Model theory
Possible world
Proof-theoretic semantics
Semantics of logic
Semantic theory of truth
Truth-value semantics
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Computer science
Axiomatic semantics
Denotational semantics
Formal semantics of programming languages
Operational semantics
Semantic integration
Semantic link
Semantic network
Semantic spectrum
Semantic web
Theory-based semantics

OWL

Grammar and Syntax

2006-09-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

Read the wikipedia entried for grammar and syntax.

Develop a two page essentials of grammar/syntax guide for your own language.
What parts of speech does your language have?
How are they combined in sentences to express meaning?
What elements are present in each of those parts of speech?

Do this all without consulting outside sources- but then check your instincts with a traditional grammar of our language and document that source.

Phonetics and Phonology

2006-07-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

This is your assignment for Thursday, September 21.

How do we distinguish between the phonetics and phonology?
What are the key elements to pronouncing sounds?
How do non-linguists describe sounds?
The difference between sounds and letters, sounds and signs.
How do linguistics approach the task?
What is the IPA?

For your blog entry read the enclosed and then answer using the full IPA (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/IPA_chart_(C)2005.pdf) and the IPA for English the following questions:

How does my language fit into that scheme?
How does my language differ from English?

See the Wikipedia entry:

Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) therefore do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis.

While writing systems and alphabets are in many cases closely related to the sounds of speech, strictly speaking, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds of speech than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them, however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies. On the other hand, logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, but the information is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic refers to the portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical refers to the portion that serves as a semantic hint.

Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic due to the fact that pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are.

Phonetics has three main branches:

articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech
acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear
auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives.

There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet.

Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BCE treatise of Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today, except Tamil script, order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification.

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External links and references

Compure - Phonetic Index Search Technology
The sounds and sound patterns of language U Penn
UCLA lab data
UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive
EGG and Voice Quality (electroglottography, phonation, etc.)
single sound per symbol phonetic writing system(simple phonetic symbols for English language)
IPA handbook
Speech Analysis Tutorial
Lecture materials in German on phonetics & phonology, university of Erfurt
Real-time MRI video of the articulation of speech sounds, from the USC Speech Articulation and kNowledge (SPAN) Group

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Bibliography

Catford, J. C. (1977). Fundamental problems in phonetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-32520-X.
Clark, John; & Yallop, Colin. (1995). An introduction to phonetics and phonology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19452-5.
Hardcastle, William J.; & Laver, John (Eds.). (1997). The handbook of phonetic sciences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-8848-7.
Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ladefoged, Peter. (2003). Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-23269-9 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-23270-2 (pbk).
Ladefoged, Peter; & Maddieson, Ian. (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-19814-8 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-19815-6 (pbk).
Maddieson, Ian. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge studies in speech science and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). Phonetics: A critical analysis of phonetic theory and a technic for the practical description of sounds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pisoni, David B.; & Remez, Robert E. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of speech perception. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-6312-2927-2.
Rogers, Henry. (2000). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics. Harlow, Essex: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-38182-7.
Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2621-9404-X.

Download the IPA from here: http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook.htm

Theoretical Linguistics

2006-07-19T05:46:00.000-07:00

Assignment for Tuesday, September 19th.

Read the following entry from Wikipedia. In your own words describe the phonology (sound system), morphology (grammatical changes to words), syntax (word types, word order, etc), and semantics (how words express meaning), for your language of choice. Do not consult any other sources. Organize your presentation for the non-linguist.

Theoretical linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Theoretical linguistics is that branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. Part of this endeavor involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Phonology is often informed by phonetics, which like psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics is often not considered part of theoretical linguistics.

* 1 Phonology
* 2 Morphology
* 3 Syntax
* 4 Semantics

Phonology

Phonology is the branch of theoretical linguistics concerned with the production and comprehension of speech sounds in language.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of morphemes. A morpheme is held to be the smallest meaningful unit in a language. For example dog has one morpheme in it, while dogs has two, one meaning 'dog' and one meaning 'plural'. Morpheme boundaries can line up with word boundaries, especially in analytic language, where each word contains just one morpheme. In contrast, synthetic language has a high morpheme-to-word ratio, even in some cases having one word per sentence.

Syntax

Syntax is the study of language structure and word order. It is concerned with the relationship between units at the level of morphology. Syntax seeks to delineate exactly those sentences which make up a given language, by using formal means. Syntax seeks to describe formally exactly how structural relations between elements (lexical items/words and operators) in a sentence contribute to its interpretation. Syntax uses priciples of formal logic and Set Theory to formalise and represent accurately the hierarchical relationship between elements in a sentence. Thus, in active declaritive sentences in English the subject is followed by the main verb which in turn is followed by the object (SVO). This order of elements is crucial to its correct interpretation and it is exactly this which syntacticians try to capture. They argue that there must be such a formal computational component contained within the language faculty of normal speakers of a language and seek to describe it. Abstract syntax trees are the pirmary means of describing hierarchies in sentences.

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in words and sentences.

Topics:

Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
Lexical semantics
Structural semantics
Prototype semantics
Stylistics
Prescription
Pragmatics
Applied linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Generative linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Computational linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Etymology
History of linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems

Language as a System

2006-07-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

This is the assignment for Thursday, September 14.

The Language Museum is a good place to start. http://www.language-museum.com/
Examine five languages in addition to English and your own other language. What elements seem to be the same? Which ones are strikingly different. Make your reply at least two hundred words and be sure to include examples and enough information for others to find your resources.

A symbol is "an arbitrary or conventional sign" or "something that stands for or suggests something else" (Merriam–Webster).

A symbol, in its basic sense, is a conventional representation of a concept or quantity; i.e., an idea, object, concept, quality, etc. In more psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic in nature, and representations for these concepts are simply token artifacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning, or symbolism.

Spoken language, for example, consists of distinct auditory tokens for representing symbolic concepts (words), arranged in an order which further suggests their meaning.

Read the Wikipedia entry for "Symbols." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol

Bring to class an original example of a symbolic system.

A syllabus?

2006-06-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

What elements must be included in a twenty five class sessions:

Language as a system (CEL, 1-17)

Theoretical linguistics (CEL, 400-418)

Phonetics (CEL, 154-178)

Phonology

Morphology (CEL, 82-87)

Syntax (CEL, 88-99)

Semantics (CEL, 100-107)

The History of Linguistics/Philology (CEL, 408-418)

Historical Linguistics (CEL, 285-289)

Comparative Linguistics (CEL, 294-297)

Indo-European (CEL, 298-305)

Laws of Reconstruction

Amerind (CEL, 306-342)

Nostratic

African languages

Writing systems (CEL, 179-209)

History

Archeology

Genetics

DNA tracking

The theories

The disputes

Using the Internet

2006-06-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

For instant access to information, Wikipedia appears to offer a powerful teaching tool. For example, if the topic is phonetics and phonology, students can access the international Phonetic Alphabet, and when they are unclear of a term, they can simply click on it. This is using the ability of hyperlinks to their best advantage.

The very beginnings

2006-06-19T06:04:00.000-07:00

In trying to teach the basics of philology and linguistics to undergraduates, I have tried to recall how much I knew about language when I went to Georgetown in 1965. The answer is "basically nothing." So before we can move to an examination of how language might have developed, we must spend some time identifying what are the elements that compose a language. If as most non-linguists would assume the answer is "the word," then we must still back up to the level of phonetics (the sounds), morphemics (meaningful sub-units of a word) and syntactics (the relationship of words).

For the course I have ordered several books:

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Paperback) by David Crystal
Paperback: 488 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 2 edition (February 13, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN: 0521559677

The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language (Perennial Classics) (Paperback) by Steven Pinker
Paperback: 544 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 1st Perenn edition (November 1, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN: 0060958332

The Power of Babel : A Natural History of Language (Paperback) by John McWhorter "
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (January 2003)
Language: English
ISBN: 006052085X

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention (Hardcover) by Guy Deutscher
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books (June 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN: 0805079076

In addition one can consult Wikipedia on the origin of language and the nature of language.

Since we frequently are impressed by our latest or last reading, I admit to having been fascinated by Merritt Ruhlen's The Origin of Language. I suspect I will use that book or parts of too in my class.