Ling 317 Exam 1

Front 1

sir william jones

Back 1

known for finding relationship between languages of Europe and languages of india

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afroasiatic

Back 2

language family who's sub family is semitic. languages are spoken in africa and western asia

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akkadian

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extinct semitic language. used cuneiform writing system

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aramaic

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sub family of the semitic family. the script from aramaic was adopted and modified by arabic and hebrew

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ashoka

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edicts written o pillars written in brahmi script, evidence of buddhism

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aspiration

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some letters are accompanied by a burst of air leaving the mouth. pin is aspirated, spin is not

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august comte

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french philosopher, founder of sociology

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brahmi script

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one of the earliest forms of writing in the indian subcontinent. the script has had influence of dravidian languages as well as sanskrit and other indic languages. ashoka pillars are written in this

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bucephalus

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alexander the great's horse.

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case marking

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serves to discriminate between functions performed by noun phrases. they are marked on the noun

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champollion

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known for deciphering hieroglyphics and being one of the founders of egyptology

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classifying systems (see sliver and miller)

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languages like navajo and chinese have classifying systems. In navajo, the classifiers of verbs would be based on the object being used, like whether the object was round or was flexible, etc. this would be used in addition to stating the subject and object of the sentence.

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coptic

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latest form of the egyptian language. the script was influenced by greek and demotic. was replaced by arabic as the language of egypt.

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creole

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a complete language, learned by the children of pidgin speakers, so it has native speakers

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cunieform

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one of the earliest writing systems. languages such as akkadian and hittite use adaptations of cuneiform as a means for written language

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demotic

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script of the egyptian language, came after hieratic and before coptic

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devanagari

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alphabet of india and nepal, indic part of brahmi script family

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dyaus pita

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last remnant of the chief god of proto indo european religion, closely compared to zeus

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double articulation

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speech can be broken in to two different parts, phonemes and morphemes

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dravidian

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language family of south india and sri lanka, not similar to other languages around the world, includes telugu and tamil.

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early modern english

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15th century - 1800s, great vowel shift, inflection was simpler

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germanic

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into european, west,east, north germanic,

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hebrew

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part of semitic language family. writing developed from aramaic alphabet

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hieratic

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cursive hieroglyphs, came before demotic

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hieroglyphic

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earliest known writing system of the egyptian language, parent system to hieratic. used logographic and alphabetic elements

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hittite

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extinct language family of anatolian family, cuneiform writing

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idiom

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a phrase or expression that has a figurative or sometimes literal meaning. you have to learn them, can't figure them out. get the hang of or put up with

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inalienable possesion

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possessions that can't be taken away, like your limbs

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indo iranian

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part of the indo european family, contains indic and iranian sub families

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long s

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formerly used in place of the s in the beginning or middle of a word

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middle english

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11-th to 15th century, loans words from french, drastic simplification of old english

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mitchif

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languages spoken by metis in canada, mixed language composed of elements of from plain crees and french

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morpheme

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smallest linguistic unit that has meaning

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morphology

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the rules for using and combining morphemes

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old english

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5th-11th century, highly inflected latin, mostly germanic vocabulary

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oracle bones

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used in divination, would break th bones then write on them

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phoneme

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basic sounds from which linguistic expressions are constructed

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phylogeny

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the history or course of development of languages, family tree

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pidgin

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a language that is formed when people who speak different languages form a makeshift way to communicate. no native speakers.

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polysynthesis

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the combining of many morphemes to form a language

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proto language

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the language that a language family has descended from.

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rosetta stone

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language learning program, or decree from ptolemy in egytian hieroglyphs, greek, and demotic

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sanskrit

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into european language, indic subgroup. written in brahmi originally.

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semitic

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language family of afroasiatc, includes arabic, hebrew

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shang

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Chinese Dynasty where oracle bone divination took place

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the steppe hypothesis

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speakers of the proto indo european language in the pontic steppe spread the language along with cultural innovations in 4000 BCE

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subject verb agreement

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the subject and verb tense need to match in number, singular plural

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suemrian

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from mesopotamia, alongside akkadian, both influenced each other

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syntax

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the way in which words are put together to form a sentence

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tacitus

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Roman Scholar, Wrote Germania, book that describes the land, people and customs of the Germanic people. Found loan words between roman and german

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uralic languages

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languages from northern europe, Finnish, estonian, hungarian

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voicing

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when pronouncing a voiced letter the vocal cords vibrate, when pronouncing a voiceless let the cords do not vibrate. P is voiceless and b is voiced

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zhou

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Chinese Dynasty, that conquered the Shang

Front 54

Explain what makes it possible for humans to produce and understand infinitely many sentences, even though we have finite memories and can’t memorize them all.

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Though we have finite memories, we can produce infinitely many sentences. This is because we have memorized the patterns in which sentences form. So since we all know many words, plugging these words into these many patterns give us infinitely many sentences. This is known as recursion.

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How is learning to speak one’s native language different from learning to play chess?

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Learning a native language is a developmental stage everyone goes through in life and it happens when we are young. It is hard to learn languages later on in life while you can learn how to play chess at any point in your life.

Front 56

.Why do linguists consider spoken language as primary and written language as secondary?

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spoken language was developed as part of our adaptation, and written language was invented.

Front 57

What is a “regular sound correspondence” among languages? Give an example.

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The occurrence of different sounds in the same position of the same word in different languages or dialects. Used in the comparative method.english ten two toothlatin decem duo dent

Front 58

If two languages share expressions that are similar in both sound and meaning, what are the possible explanations for this?

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When 2 languages share expressions that are similar, there are a few explanations. Borrowing is the first reason that comes to mind. Phrases between similar languages may be borrowed, or phrases that express things better may also be borrowed. For example, in English we use the French phrase “Coup d’etat” to reference an overthrowing of a government. Another explanation for this is linguistics universals. There are common properties shared across all languages. One more explanation is that the languages descend from a common parent language. They came from the same language group.

Front 59

How is it possible to make inferences about how an ancient language was pronounced if it was never written down?

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By looking at current languages and seeing their correspondences and using the comparative method. Like protogermanic, never written down. Germanic has ‘f’ while Latin and Greek have ‘p’ . More languages have ‘p’ so original sound is ‘p’.

Front 60

Chinese, Thai, and certain other languages are called “tone languages”. What does this mean?

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pitch differences infer different meanings,a language in which variations in pitch distinguish different words.

Front 61

If the languages of a language family (such as the Germanic languages) all came from the same ancestral language, why aren’t they still the same?

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No one has direct access to anyone else's grammar, only to speech - the output of a grammar; because of this, the new grammar that the child constructsmay well turn out to be subtly different from the grammars of his or her parentsand other people in the child's environment.

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What innovations did the Greeks introduce when adapting the Phoenician/Canaanite alphabet for writing Greek?

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The Greeks introduced vowels when adapting the Phoenician/Canaanite alphabet.

Front 63

Describe the process of oracle-bone divination and the nature of the associated inscriptions.

Back 63

An eggshell or bone would be poked by a wooden stick, and then they would interpret how each broke up. Later on, they would write the question on the stick, poke the shell or bone, then write the answer on the stick. If they were to ask ‘will it rain,’ and interpret the answer as ‘yes’ then it didnt rain, they would go back and look at the interpretation to see what was wrong.

Front 64

We have studied two different occasions in which writing systems were evidently invented independently. (A third resulted in the Maya script, which we skipped over.) Briefly describe the two scripts, and discuss the nature of the earliest known texts they were used to write.

Back 64

We discussed cunieform and chinese. Cunieform was mostly used to keep records. They started out as pictograms with wedge shaped marks with about 600 different signs. They could be a syllable or the word what it looks like. Chinese used oracle bones to write. They weren’t just economic records. They had questions and answers and they were dated.

Front 65

Explain what linguists mean by the “comparative method”.

Back 65

If two or more languages share similarities that are so numerous and systematicthat they cannot be ascribed to chance, borrowing, or linguistic universals, thenthe only hypothesis that provides a satisfactory explanation for those similaritiesis that they are descended from the same parent language. This is the essentialstatement of what is known as the comparative method.

Front 66

How do linguists identify subgroups within a language family? Give an example.

Back 66

Linguists identify subgroups within a language family with shared innovations. German and yiddish have ‘ts ’while others don’t, they are part of the high german family.