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52 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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What is mutual intelligibility?
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Means that varities of the same language can be understood by speakers of each variety.
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Is Chinese a single language?
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No, it is made up of mutually unintelligible languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Wu, each with multiple dialects of its own.
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Did Latin die?
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No, it evolved
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What is an example of a language that did die?
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Manx
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What percent of languages have fewer than 100 speakers?
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50%
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What is the predominant reason that langauges die?
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Speakers gradually use them less and less in favor of a language that appears to offer greater economic or educational opportunities
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What is the classic pattern of language loss?
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Three generations: the parents are monolingual, their children become bilingual adopting a new language, and their children's children grow up monolingual in the new language
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How does genetic classification categorize languages?
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Categorizes languages according to their descent.
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How does linguistic topology categorize languages?
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Classifies language according to their structural characteristics, without regard for genetic relationship
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What are structural characteristics that occur in all or most languages claled?
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Linguistic universals
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What are the 3 classifications of language?
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1. Genetic classification
2. Linguistic topology 3. Areal Classification |
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What are absolute universals?
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Structural patterns and traits that occur in all languages
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What are implicational universals?
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Specify that the presence of one trait implies the presence of another, but not vice versa.
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What is the markedness theory?
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Marked traits are considered to be more complex and/or universally rarer than unmarked characteristics. A marked trait is usually found in a particular language only if its unmarked counterpart also occurs.
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How many phoneme are in the most common vowel system?
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Five phenomes
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What is the most commonly occurring vowel phoneme in the world?
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/a/
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Relate short vowels and long vowels.
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short vowels > long vowels
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What type of consonants do all languages have?
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Stops
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What are the most common stop phonemes?
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/p,t,k/
- /t/ is the most commonly occurring phoneme -There are no languages that lack all three |
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Relate voiced obstruent phonemes and voiceless obstruent phonemes
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Voiceless obstruents > voiced obstruents
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Relate voiceless sonorants and voiced sonorants.
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Voiced sonorants > voiceless sonorants
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Relate stop phonemes and frictaves.
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Stops > frictaves
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What are affricates?
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Consonants that begin as stops, (such as /d,t/), and end as fricatives, (such as /s,f/)
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Relate stops, affricates, and fricatives.
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Stops > fricatives > affricates
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What are languages called that use pitch to make meaning distinctions between words?
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Tone languages
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What is an example of a tone language?
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Mandarin
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Relate contour tones and level tones.
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Level tones > contour tones
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Relate complex contour tones and simple contour tones.
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Simple contour tones > Complex contour tones
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What are fixed stress languages?
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Languages in which the position of stress on a word is predictable.
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What is a free stress language?
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The position of stress is not predictable; also called phonemic stress, because of its role in distinguishing between words
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What is an isolating or analytic language? Give an example.
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No affixes; categories, such as number and tense would therefore have to be expressed by a separate word.
Example: Mandarin |
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What is a polysynthetic language?
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Contains affixes that often express meanings.
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What are synthetic languages?
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Permit multimorphemic words, but one word does not usually mean a whole sentence.
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What is an agglutinating language?
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Words can contain several morphemes; easily divided into their component parts
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What is a fusional language?
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Consist of several morphemes; in contrast to agglutinating systems, the afixes in fusional alnguages often mark several frammaticla categories simultaneously
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If a word has both a derivational and an inflectional affix, which one is closer to the root? Give an example.
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Derivational
Example: friend-ship-s |
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If a language has only suffixes, what else will it be limited to?
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Pospositions
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What are the three most common word orders in descending order of frequency?
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SOV, SVO, VSO
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What word order is found in very few languages?
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OVS or OSV
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If a language has VO word order, will it have prepositions or postpositions?
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Prepositions
Example translation: "saw I MY mother" |
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If a language has OV word order, will it have prepositions or postpositions?
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Postpositions
Example translation: "dog-ERG boy bit" |
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What is the grammatical relation hierarchy?
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subject > direct object > other
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Do vowel systems try to keep vowels as similar or as distant as possible?
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Distant
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Do stop phoneme systems try to keep the stop phonemes as similar or as distant as possible?
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Distant, which is why /p,t,k/ are most common.
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How many sub-branches are there in the Germanic branch?
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Three: East, North, and West
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Which sub-branch of the Germanic branch is the oldest?
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East Germanic
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Describe North Germanic.
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Norther Germanic = Scandinavian; language of the Vikings
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From which sub-branch of the Germanic branch does English come?
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West Germanic, along with German, Yiddish, and Dutch
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what language is most closely related to English?
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Frisian, spoken on the north coast of HOlland and on the Frisian Islands
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What are languages with no known relatives called?
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Isolates
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What is an example of an isolate?
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Basque
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What are the four types of morphology systems?
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1. Isolating - different words for each indicator
2. Synthetic - one affix can mean many things 3. Agglutinating - words can contain different morphemes but each is divided into its component parts 4. Fusions - words can contain different morphemes that represent multiple things |
