Chapter 6

Question 1

Sanskrit (where from, what time, etymology)

Answer 1

Ancient Indian language, 1500 BCE, sum (complete) + krt (created), “completed, refined, perfected

Question 2

Sir William Jones

Answer 2

English judge, wrote paper on Sanskrit

Question 3

Rasmus Rask

Answer 3

Danish linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Lithuanian and Armenian

Question 4

Franz Bopp

Answer 4

German linguist, extended the list of related languages to include Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages

Question 5

Cognates

Answer 5

words in related languages which developed from the same ancestral root. Sound changes can be deduced from them.

Question 6

Indo-European

Answer 6

group of modern (and dead) languages

Question 7

Proto-Indo-European (what is it, when did it exist)

Answer 7

extinct maternal proto-language, 3000 years

Question 8

language family

Answer 8

All languages descending from one common ancestral language, and are thus related to each other

Question 9

Comparative linguistic reconstruction

Answer 9

a comparison of cognates across sister languages in order to reconstruct the ancestral language forms.

Question 10

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction

Answer 10

Plausibility and Majority rule

Question 11

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Plausibility

Answer 11

Most likely phonetic/phonological process

Question 12

Principles of Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction: Majority rule

Answer 12

if there is no probability preferences for phonetic rules, follow the majority of the daughter language forms.

Question 13

PLAUSIBILITY EXAMPLES

Answer 13

a sound is more likely to be deleted rather than to be inserted;
before front vowels, a sound is likely to be palatalized;
between vowels, a voiceless consonant is likely to be voiced;
in word-final position, a voiced segment is likely to be devoiced;
assimilations are very common, etc

Question 14

Internal reconstructions

Answer 14

reconstructions of earlier forms within one language

Question 15

How many languages are there in the world?

Answer 15

5000-7000, one language dies every two weeks

Question 16

Problems with determining the number of languages in the world are:

Answer 16

Language death,
Difficulties of differentiating between dialects vs languages
Some new languages discovered

Question 17

Examples of dead languages

Answer 17

Ainu (Japan), Manx (Isle of Man)

Question 18

Examples of dying languages

Answer 18

Canadian Doukhobor Russian

Question 19

Australian aboriginal languages (number of surviving languages)

Answer 19

263

Question 20

Examples of endangered languages

Answer 20

Michif (1000 Canada), Inari Saami (400 Finland), Comanche (200 USA), Ingrian (100 Russia), Salish (56 Canada), Eyak (1 Alaska)

Question 21

Spanish

Answer 21

Castilian vs Catalan (different languages or dialects?)

Question 22

Koro

Answer 22

2008, a National Geographic expedition, Arunachal Pradesh region of India, About 100 speakers left (young people have switched to Hindi)

Question 23

Light Warlpiri

Answer 23

created by children in the town of Lajamanu (in northern Australia), a mixture of the local aboriginal language Warlpiri with English and Kriol

Question 24

types of language classification

Answer 24

genetic, typological, areal

Question 25

typological language classification

Answer 25

compare and group languages according to similarities in their structures

Question 26

language universals

Answer 26

features believed to be found in all/most languages (e.g., all languages have lexical categories of words (parts of speech)

Question 27

Vowels universals (6)

Answer 27

1. A tendency towards symmetry (use of front/back, open/close) 2. counter-tendency: dissymmetry (front unrounded vowels /i,e/ and back rounded /u, o/ are common, but not the opposite; 3. /a/-like vowels are common, so are /i/,/u/ 4. Low vowels /a/ tend to be unrounded 5. If a language has contrastive nasal vowels, it also has oral 6. If a language has contrastive long vowels, it also has short

Question 28

Consonants universals

Answer 28

1. A weaker tendency towards symmetry (front and back of the tongue) 2. All languages have stops 3. The most common stop is k (p, b, g, t) 4. The most common fricative is /s/ 5. Most languages have at least 1 nasal (m) 6. Most languages have at least one liquid 7. If a language has voiced obstruents> has voiceless 8. Sonorants are typically voiced 9. If there are voiceless sonorants, there are voiced 10. If there are fricatives, there are stops 11. If there are affricates, there are fricatives and stops

Question 29

Abkhaz

Answer 29

2 vowels, 76 consonants. Is a north west caucasian language Autonomous villa(?) in Georgia(?) Speakers in Turkey, Syria, Jordan, America Wide range of allophones in different consonantal environments Differentiate something (???) Influenced by Russian lexically

Question 30

Prosodic ways of marking words and word boundaries

Answer 30

stress, tone, pitch accent

Question 31

Types of stress languages

Answer 31

Fixed and free stress

Question 32

Fixed stress

Answer 32

Latin, Hebrew (penultimate, antepenultimate), Amicus optima vitae possessio. Polish (penultimate), Penultimate syllable = before the last (2nd from the end)

Question 33

Free stress

Answer 33

Russian, English | oknO, Oknami, Okon; Import, impOrt

Question 34

Tonal languges

Answer 34

pitch movement in the syllable is used for lexical distinctions ex: chinese, burmese, latvian, norwegian

Question 35

Pitch accent languages

Answer 35

Words have lexical distinctions depending on the patterns of alternating H (high) and L (low) pitched syllables ex: Japanese, Ancient Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Korean

Question 36

Isolating (analytic languages)

Answer 36

1 word = 1 root morpheme. No affixes. Categories of tense, number, person, etc. are expressed by separate words. Examples: Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese

Question 37

Polysynthetic

Answer 37

1 word  1 sentence. Many roots and affixes expressing genders, numbers, object characteristics, etc. Examples: Cree, other North American aboriginal languages

Question 38

Agglutinating languages

Answer 38

1 word = root+ affixes, where 1 affix represents 1 constant grammar category Examples: Turkish, Finnish, Estonian, Nahuatl, Quechua, Japanese

Question 39

Fusional (inflectional) languages

Answer 39

1 word = root(s) + affixes + flexions, where 1 affix represents a particular kind of grammatical or semantic meaning, and the flexion (inflectional affix, ending) reflects a few grammatical categories (e.g., gender, number, person or tense, etc.) Examples: Latin, Russian, German, French

Question 40

Genetic classification

Answer 40

Classification based on language origins, whereby related languages are grouped into “families”

Question 41

When and where did Indo-European language family come from? How is it the largest language family and how is it not?

Answer 41

Proto-Indo-European ~ 4000-10000 BCE The largest on earth by the number of speakers (close to 2 billion) and the 4th largest family by the number of languages it incorporates.

Question 42

Major Currently Existing branches of the Indo-European family

Answer 42

Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Slavic

Question 43

Examples of languages in germanic branches

Answer 43

west: english, frisian, german, hutterisch, yiddish, afrikaans, dutch, saxon east: gothic, vandalic, burgundian north --> west scandinavian: faroese, icelandic east scandinavian: danish, jutish, swedish

Question 44

Slavic branches and examples

Answer 44

West: czech, slovak, polish south: bulgarian, macedonian, serbo-croation, clovene east: russia, ukranian, byelorussian

Question 45

Indo-Iranian branches and examples

Answer 45

Indic: hindi-urdu, bengali, marathi, romany Iranian: persian (farsi), kurdish

Question 46

Uralic and altic (origin)

Answer 46

ural and altai mountains

Question 47

uralic languages fetures

Answer 47

Agglutinating, no gender, some have vowel harmony; high numbers of noun cases

Question 48

altaic family branches and examples

Answer 48

``` turkic: turkish, turkmen, azerbaijani, tartar, etc Mongolic: mongolian, buryat Tungusic: evenski, nanai, manchu japonic?: japanese, ryukyan korean?: korea ```

Question 49

dravidian language family (where, features, examples)

Answer 49

Area : Southern India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal. Language examples: Tamil, Malayalam Features: SOV, agglutinating, non-tonal, initial stress

Question 50

Tai-Kadai family (where, features, examples)

Answer 50

Language examples: Thai, Laotian, Shan. Area: Burma and Thailand. Characteristics: Tonal.

Question 51

Sino-Tibetan

Answer 51

the 2nd largest family by speakers numbers) 300 languages of China, Tibet

Question 52

Austronesian (where, examples, homeland)

Answer 52

Languages spoken on Madagascar, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, Java. Examples: Hawaiian, Malay, Tagalog Homeland – Taiwan? (2% aboriginal population) Canoes.

Question 53

INDO-PACIFIC family (where, how old, features)

Answer 53

mostly Papua New Guinea, where 850 languages are spoken; the most linguistically diverse country of the world More ancient than Austronesian (6-40 thousand yrs migration) Tone, Nouns have cases, but not numbers

Question 54

language branches in africa

Answer 54

nilo-saharan, niger-congo, khoisan

Question 55

Eskimo-Aleut language family

Answer 55

``` Aleut (only Aleut, spoken on Aleut islands) Eskimo branch (Inuit and Yupik subbranches) ```

Question 56

Devanagari script

Answer 56

used initially for Sanskrit, later for Hindi & other Ianguages of India

Question 57

1899 Monier-Williams

Answer 57

Sanskrit-English dictionary

Question 58

Accuracy of reconstruction in Latin

Answer 58

Latin> Romance languages = 1000 years Latin had noun cases, none of the Romance languages do. We would have reconstructed Latin as a language with no noun cases, if we had no records of written Latin. “the longer in the past the proto-language split up, the more linguistic changes will have accumulated and the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct with full success”

Question 59

Why do languages die?

Answer 59

The threat to minority languages around the world comes from the changing economic and political landscape, globalization, imperialism, and urbanization as well as from majority languages

Question 60

Top 10 Languages by N of L1 speakers

Answer 60

1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Spanish 3. English 4. Hindi 5. Arabic 6. Portuguese 7. Bengali 8. Russian 9. Japanese 10. Javanese

Question 61

most common vowels

Answer 61

i - 87.1% a – 86.9% u – 81.8%

Question 62

most common consonants

Answer 62

``` m - 94.2% k - 89.4% j - 83.8% p - 83.2% w - 73.6% b - 63.6% h - 61.9% g - 56.1% N - 52.6% ? - 47.9% n - 44.8% ```

Question 63

types of syllables

Answer 63

CV - Japanese, Hawaiian V(C) CV(C) Hebrew, Arabic, German

Question 64

universal syllable tendencies

Answer 64

CV syllable If there is a CCV syllable, there is CV If there is a (C)VCC syllable, there is (C)VC and (C)V

Question 65

mixed type languages

Answer 65

Exhibit elements of 2 other types English – synthetic fusional + isolating Plural: cat-cats, bright – brighter

Question 66

East Germanic Branch: Gothic, Vandalic,Burgundian

Answer 66

Gothic – spoken by Goths. Oldest attested Germanic language due to 4th century Bible copy. Bishop Ulfilas (or Wulfila, d 383) designed an alphabet based on Greek. Historic home: Baltic sea coast (Poland). Invaded Roman Empire in the 3rd-4th centuries AD, settled in Iberian peninsular (West Goths) and Italy (East Goths), their kingdoms finally defeated in 8thc.

Question 67

Hutterisch

Answer 67

Hutterites in Central Canada and Northern and Northwestern USA Protestant Reformation in Europe in the early 16th century; Jakob Hutter (died in 1536). Of about 40,000 speakers of Hutterisch, 29,200 are in Canada. West Germanic subgroup of Germanic languages 50% intelligible to Standard German speakers

Question 68

Plautdietsch

Answer 68

West Germanic language and “the tongue of the Netherlandic-Prussian-Russian Mennonites” (Epp, 1987). Origin: the Netherlands during the Protestant Reformation. Menno Simmons, the 16th century Protestant leader. 50% comprehensible to German speakers Mennonites initially used a Low German dialect in their everyday life and Dutch as the language of worship and written communication. In the 1550s, they immigrated to the delta of the Vistula River (the area that later became West Prussia), and thus the language experienced some influence from Prussian Low German.

Question 69

italic branch

Answer 69

romance -- from latin "romanice"

Question 70

Catalan

Answer 70

The regional language of Catalonia (around Barcelona). 40-50% of the Catalan people are still retaining the language as their mother tongue. The survival is attributed to “above all the fidelity of the majority of the inhabitants” of Barcelona and the neighbouring areas (Harris & Vincent, 2001, p. 13). Catalan is 60-70% intelligible to the speakers of Spanish (Lindsay, 2009)

Question 71

uralic family

Answer 71

``` finno-ugric -- ugric (hungarian, khanty, mtansi), finnic (finnish, estonian, karelian, veps, ingrian) Mari -- mari mordvin -- erzya, moksha permian -- udmurt, komi saami -- saami samoyed -- nenets, enets, selkup ```

Question 72

cacausian language gamily

Answer 72

south -- georgian, laz, svan north west -- kabardian, adyghe northeast -- chechen, lezghian, avar

Question 73

caucasian family characteristics

Answer 73

Usually inflectional, Complex verbal systems, High cons/vowel index.

Question 74

AUSTRALIAN

Answer 74

perhaps the same family, perhaps not Before invasion – 250 languages, now – 60; 20 spoken on the daily basis 11% of aboriginal population can speak their languages

Question 75

Afro-asiatic family

Answer 75

(375 languages, 300 million speakers) Sometimes called “Hamito-Semitic” (French tradition) but let’s not use that term because it’s not PC Homeland of proto-language – Ethiopia? Sahara? Red Sea coast? includes Arabic, Hebrew, Egyptian

Question 76

Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages

Answer 76

a two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound, VSOs, a complicated consonant system, includes glottalized, pharyngealized and other secondary articulations; a templatic morphology (infixes, prefixes and suffixes).