Chapter 6: Language

Question 1

What is a lingua franca?

Answer 1

A common language used among speakers of different languages for the purpose of trade and commerce.

Question 2

What is the Nostratic language?

Answer 2

It is believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-Europeam, but also of the Kartvelian languages, Uralic-Altaic, Dravidian, and Afro-Asiatic languages.

Question 3

What is the term for local or regional characteristics of a language (pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary, cadence, and pace of speech)?

Answer 3

Dialect

Question 4

What is the name for a place name?

Answer 4

Toponym

Question 5

What are sound shifts?

Answer 5

Slight changes in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin

Question 6

What is a language?

Answer 6

A systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, gestures, marks, or articulate vocal sounds

Question 7

What is the name for a variant of a language that a country’s political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in the government, schools, media, and other areas?

Answer 7

Standard language

Question 8

What is an isogloss?

Answer 8

A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs

Question 9

What are language families? Give 2 examples.

Answer 9

Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin. Indo-European and Dravidian.

Question 10

What are language subfamilies? Give 2 examples.

Answer 10

Group of languages with more definite commonality (Romance or Germanic). These are often divided into individual language groups which consist of individual languages.

Question 11

How many language families are there in the world today?

Answer 11

Twenty

Question 12

What is the major language of the Indo-European language family?

Answer 12

English

Question 13

What is the major language of the Sino-Tibetan language family?

Answer 13

Chinese

Question 14

What is the major language of the Japanese-Korean language family?

Answer 14

Japanese/Korean

Question 15

What is the major language of the Afro-Asiatic language family?

Answer 15

Arabic

Question 16

What is the major language of the Dravidian language family?

Answer 16

Telegu

Question 17

What is the major language of the Niger-Congo language family?

Answer 17

Hausa

Question 18

What is the name of the way of charting the diversification of languages over time?

Answer 18

Backward reconstruction

Question 19

Jones observed that Sanskrit was closely related to what language?

Answer 19

Ancient Greek and Latin

Question 20

What did Jakob Grimm discover?

Answer 20

He observed that related languages have similar consonants which soften over time.

Question 21

What is language divergence?

Answer 21

Differentiation over time and space; languages branch into dialects, become isolated, then new languages develop.

Question 22

What is language convergence?

Answer 22

When long-isolated languages made contact; linked to human mobility (relocation diffusion); complicates the rules of reconstruction.

Question 23

What is language replacement?

Answer 23

Modification or supplanting of a language by stronger cultures (acculturation)

Question 24

What is the Conquest Theory?

Answer 24

The hearth of the Proto-Indo-European language was modern-day Ukraine; people used horses, wheel, and trade, spread language westward toward Europe.

Question 25

What is the Agriculture Theory?

Answer 25

The hearth of Proto-Indo-European language was Anatolia (Turkey); Ukraine relied on nomadic pastoralism, not farming; more words for mountains and other high-relief landforms; leading hearth for agriculture was Mesopotamia.

Question 26

What is the Renfrew Model?

Answer 26

Proposed that three source areas of agriculture each gave rise to a great language family.