1187: A Decline in Declension? Mar 10, 2018

Anyone who has studied an inflected language as a native-speaker of an uninflected language may have the question "do people always use cases right?". After all, there are plenty of examples showing that often, the rules of word-order as a method for supplying syntactic information are subverted, as with starting a clause with an object or sometimes just plain broken, as with "...than me" as opposed to "...than I". The answer to the question is that languages with a lot of morphology tend to lose those agglutinative tendencies over time, as was the situation with Ancient Latin's seven cases becoming five in Classical Latin and then as it morphed into Vulgar Latin (and became the modern Romance Languages), the cases were lost wholesale. Even some speaker of Modern Spanish often use pronouns instead of conjugational endings, as is the case in English. Does this mean that eventually there will be no inflection?—no. Logically, a heavily inflected language is more likely to lose morphological structures than gain them given there is only so much inflection a language can have anyway (though this number is quite high; e.g. Kalaallisut has 34 conjugational endings just for present tense indicative active verbs, while most languages only have 6 or fewer).

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1186: Lingua Francas Mar 9, 2018

Following yesterday's post about the effects of globalization on language, it should be noted that this is not a new problem only. While it is true that globalization is increasing in just about every sphere, any time that two or more groups come into contact with one another there will be the same problems. For instance, for a long time, Malay has been a lingua franca in Indonesia and Polynesia, especially around Borneo, even though there are as many as thousands of languages spoken in that area. There was an increased need in the 15th century to have a lingua franca as the region was becoming Islamicized, and many writings from the time indicate a high rate of second-language Malay-learning as evidenced by frequent usage of loan words from Arabic and Sanskrit, but also many more local languages. For instance, a letter from the early 16th century written to the king of Portuguese by Sultan Abu Hayat shows signs of Ternate-influence, but regardless that neither Portuguese nor Ternate are related to Malay, it was the lingua franca.

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1185: Globalization and Language Mar 8, 2018

It used to be the case that languages and dialects could easily be tied to people-groups, but with the rise of globalization, people are abandoning their older languages for more profitable languages and creoles. As has been discussed here before, most of the world's languages are spoken by the minority of people; an estimated 10% of people speak 95% of all languages, with everyone else speaking the same handful. Historically, colonization and other national and regional foreign-occupations lead to the displacement or replacement of different languages, the affect of which is still present in the Americas and Australia especially, but this has happened everywhere. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is that people abandon their "local languages" in order to gain access to economic opportunities. While those are sinister or unfortunate, those sorts of issues are indeed more preventable than another large cause, which is globalization does not lead people to adopt certain lingua franca for economic reasons, or the purposes of cross-cultural communications, but also people move around more in general, which means that even non-endangered languages, and dialects thereof, are changing in increasingly broader senses. It is not really possible to halt this type of natural language-change.
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1184: Significance of 'Snuck' Mar 7, 2018

Is it 'snuck' or 'sneaked'?

Linguists don't tend to like prescriptivism, so to say "it ought to be sneaked" is not seen as especially productive per se, but it does lead to some larger linguistic insights. Indeed, traditionally the word was 'sneaked', but what the existence of 'snuck' demonstrates is that there is a natural inclination (sometimes) to conjugate verbs as strong. Most of the time, these strong verbs like 'swim, swam, swum', tend to be holdovers from much older verbal systems, dating back to Old English. Indeed, most strong forms for strong nouns and verbs in English and other languages like German are on the decline, but a few newer forms are emerging, such as 'snuck' for 'sneaked' becoming even more popular, and less significantly, the rise of 'swang' rather than 'swinged', which still has some work to do.

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1183: Computer Languages Mar 6, 2018

The question "how many languages are there?" is hard to answer not only because of the possible lack of differentiation of dialects, but also because language is not only natural anymore. Not only are there a few invented languages that people use in varying contexts including Esperanto or even Klingon, but far more significantly: computers have their own languages, so to speak. This takes multiple forms; not only are there various coding-languages with different vocabulary and syntax—more simple than human-language—which are not merely ways to transcribe a limited set of commands from another language, and are indeed can be used generatively, but also other parts of a computer will require different codes—such as for a CPU—that the rest of the systems do not understand.

This is a complicated subject, so if you have any questions or comments of what you'd like explored here in the future, feel free to write a comment.

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1182: Why Death is Euphemized Mar 5, 2018

Following the post on taboo, the reason that words are felt so powerfully is because lexicon can evoke extralinguistic responses. Ultimately all sounds are arbitrarily assigned to signs, and even when words are imitative, there is no reason that those words are and others are not. However, lexical groups (such as that of swear words) can trigger physical responses, not because of the phonetic qualities or even the meaning of the word, but because of the social significance of the word. In cultures that practice taboo, words that were the names of those who have died have become like swears only because of extralinguistic factors. For this reason, the practice of making words taboo is found to occur independently all over the world, from Africa to the Pacific to the Americas. Indeed, the cueing of death is so commonly painful—in varying senses of that word—that it is rare to not find euphemistic options such as in English 'passed on', 'no longer with us' because like any euphemism, the idea is understood, but it does not trigger the same neurological responses.
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1181: Taboo Mar 4, 2018

Taboo is a concept used in many cultures, but the traditional sense is often misunderstood due to its interpretation in English, where it can simply refer to something forbidden. The term was introduced into English by Captain Cook after he encountered the Tonga people who practiced Taboo, as is fairly common of Pacific Islanders, and also certain indigenous Americans. The practice involves not using a word that carries certain spiritual significance, including names of those whom have died. Since these cultures used names based off of words that appear in normal contexts as well, this could mean that any word used as a name for a now-deceased person could not be used. This would sometimes even extend to words that relate to the original, either semantically or phonetically, depending upon the people-group. Of course, people need to use these signs, so this practice results in certain words changing rapidly from one word to another. Among other things, this speeds up the rate at which dialects diverge from each other, and makes communication between these different groups of people potentially offensive without meaning to be. This is somewhat similar to not using the name of the divine among those who practice Abrahamic religions.
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1180: Showing Definite Articles with Case Mar 3, 2018

Plenty of languages don't have definite or indefinite articles, but as with everything, there are ways to get around this information. Sometimes this happens that the older form of languages that now have these articles, such as English and French which came from the article-lacking Old English (OE) and Latin gain these through deictic pronouns (e.g. 'that' and 'this'). Other languages just use context as well; it is fairly easy to know in the context of a conversation whether a noun is definite (e.g. 'the book') or indefinite (e.g. 'a book') or not defined (e.g. 'books'). Moreover, this is clearer in Latin, OE, and other more inflected languages like Russian that use cases, though of course languages like German have both cases and these articles. Kalaallisut has no definite articles but they have ways to get around that with cases as well, on the part of the agent. For example, in an active construction that uses a transitive verb, the ergative case  will be used to indicate that the argument (conceptually similar to an object) is definite, but will use the absolutive case to indicate that the argument is indefinite. This is in spite of the fact that an absolutive is the argument (i.e. like an object, not a subject) of a transitive verb, but in this situation the construction is subverted to note a difference in meaning.
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1179: Loaded Verbs: Marking for Subject & Objects Mar 2, 2018

Verbs are marked for subjects; in English, even passive constructions are not marked by agent, but by subject, e.g. "you are commanded by her", not "you is...". Some languages, however, distinguish between the subject and the agent—as is the case in English's passive—in the active voice as well. This, called the ergative is true of many languages, but it raises an important question:
Should the verbs be marked for subject or agent?
For Kalaallisut a.k.a West Greenlandic—which uses the ergative case rather than nominative—this is a trick question, because both are marked, and moreover, when there is possession, both are marked on the noun as well. Because verbs are marked for the subject and object, in addition to everything else that is conveyed with conjugation (person, number, tense, mood, voice), a single verb can contain all of the information that in English would require a whole clause. A pleasant example is with "I love you", which requires three words in English—and while French for instance uses the reflexive to shorten things somewhat with "je t'aime"—but in Kalaallisut it is 'asavakkit', with 'asa-' meaning 'love' and '-avakkit' being a common element meaning "I—you", such as with "Ikiorsinnaavakkit?" ("can I help you").
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1178: 4th Person (Kalaallisut) Mar 1, 2018

Nouns and verbs are always going to be in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, right?
Not necessarily. Even without conjugations, every language will have these three grammatical numbers—one for the speaker, one for the listener, and one for everyone else—so even conceptually it may seem impossible to have a fourth person, but actually some languages do. Kalaallisut, for instance, has a fourth person, which has two similar uses; it is used as the subject for subordinate verbs in the third person, and as a noun's possessor when they both reference the same 3rd person subject. That may sound fairly convoluted, but it can also sort of be considered as 'he' or 'his' when they reference the subject being 3rd person, and 'he' or 'his' when they reference someone or something besides the subject as being 4th person. For instance, "Aligoĸ illua takuaa" means "Aligoĸ saw (the) house", but specifically "Aligoĸ saw the other person's house". Otherwise, the word for 'house' becomes 'illuni' in "Aligoĸ illuni takuaa" i.e. "Aligoĸ saw his own house". It can sometimes be hard to wrap one's (own) head around concepts that may seem very foreign, but it shows the extent to which nothing can be assumed about language.
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1177: Word Families Feb 28, 2018

People may be fairly familiar with the concept of a language-family, as it shows many of the relationships that languages have to each other. Nevertheless, it is not the only type of family that linguists are concerned with, such as also word-families. Much like how Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian etc. are all considered Romance languages becasue they derive from Latin, many words for relating to 'nose' now, including 'snout', 'snot', 'sneeze' etc comes from the Proto-Indo-European 'snu', making it a word family. These do not have to come from extinct sources however, and in Kalaallisut for example, there are many words that come from 'oqaq' ('tongue') that all still relate to it somehow, such as 'oqarpoq' ('says'), 'oqaaseq' ('word'), 'oqaluppoq' ('speaks'), 'oqaasilerisoq' ('linguist'), as well as some more complicated ones, such as 'oqaatiginerluppaa' which means 'speak badly about him'. Indeed, this style of derivation is quite common in Inuit-Yupik languages, and it contributes to the existence of stereotypically long words, because even long complex ideas expressed in a single word often come from one of not too many roots.  If you can think of any word-families, include some examples in a comment.
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1176: Exception to Duality of Patterning Feb 27, 2018

Imagine a language where every word had a unique sound: no compounds, no affixes, and no phonemes. Even in terms of logistics, that is hard to picture, because there are thousands of words, and each would need its own completely different sound, eventually probably relying on snorts, sniffs, and knocks. This idea is called the "duality of patterning" and as logical as it is, it is not true of all languages, as it only takes one language to break the rule. While it can be said to be true of all known spoken languages, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a language forming within a community with large rates of deafness in Israel. It has been assessed that the language uses gestures exist independently. Most [all other] sign languages rely on combinations of other smaller gestures to convey what can be thought of as words; indeed in this way other sign languages have morphology, and can therefore be assessed on a sub-word level in the same way as spoken languages. What this means, in addition to being an exception to what was assumed a necessary part of language, it that the users of ABSL must know an enormous amount of gestures.
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1175: Adjunct-Order Feb 26, 2018

Much like there is an order to how adjectives are used based upon what they connote—e.g. size comes before shape—there is an order to adjuncts in certain languages as well. This is somewhat more complicated since adjectives that do not indicate case tend to be fixed to the noun, but adjuncts are not as fixed. It is why in English, one can say
"yesterday, I helped the rude customer" or
"I helped the rude customer yesterday"
but the 'rude' cannot be moved throughout the sentence. Nevertheless, in some languages like German, and to a lesser extent English, will arrange their adjuncts by what they mean. In German, the order is: time, cause, mood, and location; these can be thought to answer the questions "When? Why? How? Where?". All of this, however, for German adjuncts or English adjectives alike can be subverted if the speaker is attempting to emphasize one element or another. This is true of many things, because the more abnormal something appears, the more focus it will get; this extra attention is also true of whatever is at the beginning of a statement.
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1174: Duality of Patterning Feb 25, 2018

As was mentioned in the discussion of semiotics, human language is arbitrary; there is no reason that the arrangements of sounds that make up each word should be the ones they are, even if a few of them are imitative. However, not only is it impressive that people know and repeat the precise arrangements of sounds as they do, but spoken languages also rely on building words out of smaller parts. These smaller parts can be as large as elements and affixes, or as small as phonemes and sounds generally, but this means that each word will not have its own unique sound. It is theoretically possible to have assign each word as a different sort of sound, such as a snort for 'dog', a sniff for 'cat', a squeal for 'fish' and so on, but this is not the case. This is called the duality of patterning, and it means not only can people use alphabets for their languages, but also that people can build large phonetic systems for language.

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1173: Topic Prominence Feb 24, 2018

In English, it is common for the subject to be the first part of a sentence, whether or not the clause is active or passive. There are ways to avoid this however, depending upon the circumstance, including beginning with an adjunct, such as  with "in English" at the beginning of this paragraph. Some languages, such as Japanese and Korean, place less emphasis on the subject than English—a subject prominent language—does, and instead have topic-prominence. In these languages, rather than always differentiating between the subject and the object, speakers can also differentiate between the topic—what is being talked about—and the comment—what is being said about the topic. In English, the subject is understood to be the topic naturally, which is why the passive voice in necessary for an inversion of the object, but topic-prominent languages don't need a passive necessarily. The effect of topic-prominence is still present in English to an extent; the invented sentence "oranges: he like to eat them" may sound odd out of context, but it is perfectly grammatical. Furthermore, this style of sentence-organization is quite popular in advertising.
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1172: Ethnolects Feb 23, 2018

Some dialects are considered ethnolects, meaning that the variety of the language is differentiated by ethnicity rather than by region. Examples of this include African-American English (AAE),  Chicano English, Jewish English, Multicultural London English (MLE) (which is also technically regional) etc. given that the dialect is associated with a people who may not all live in one area, but who all speak the same way. In all of these examples however, there is influence from other regional languages and dialects; Chicano is heavily influenced by Californian English and Mexican Spanish, AAE is influenced by Southern American English and certain West African languages, Jewish English is influenced by Yiddish and Hebrew, and so on. This is often the case with ethnolects, which are sometimes based around migration, or alternatively they act as a sort of creole such as with MLE, but this is not necessarily true; there are certain speech patterns and lexicon often associated with gay men for example, but this is due to the fact that language is also always used as a tool for identification within a group, creating a sense of unity for the in-group, and a sense of distance from an out-group.
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1171: Terms of Venery Feb 22, 2018

Names for groups of animals such as 'murder of crows', 'pod of whales', or 'tower of giraffes' are called 'terms of venery'; as the name suggests, they were originally when hunting (compare with 'venison'). Many of the names may sound silly to people now, and not unreasonably; there is no reason to memorize all of them, so in practical use people will opt for 'herd' or 'group' rather than saying other specific words, with a few exceptions for more common animals. It may seem that this is because we have less of a need to discuss animals nowadays, as few people need to hunt and farm than in the past, but before the 11th century, and in some ways even before the 14th century, nobody used terms of venery much anyway either. Considering that there would not have developed a hunting culture around, for instance, wombats (for whom a group is a 'wisdom') in England and France where these terms began, it should be reasonable that these terms developed more as a fashion and less as practical terminology. Indeed, terms of venery were only supposed to be as a linguistic mark of higher status originally, but after several books in the 15th and 16th centuries were published with these names, people kept making them up for fun, as people continue to do now.

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1170: Coordination Feb 21, 2018

Although children are taught what parts of speech are, they likely identify them intuitively, in the same as a kid would for syllables. There are tests for them, however, that syntacticians can use to prove that a word or phrase actually is one lexical class or another. One such test is called 'coordination', in which one looks at a word or phrase, guessing the part of speech thereof, and than adds another example with "and...", so for example, to determine that 'apples' is a noun phrase in 'I ate apples', one could add another noun phrase, as in 'I ate apples and pears'. This test works, however, because English already allows speakers to not have to repeat obvious elements, or otherwise the previous example-sentence would be the very clunky 'I ate apples and I ate pears', and indeed coordination is quite common in speech anyway. Considering regular speech does show, some phrases cannot be coordinated together, such as with adjuncts and arguments. This can be seen in the ungrammaticality of *"I ate the apple and with a fork", while one can say "I ate with a knife and (with a) fork".

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1169: Cornish: Dead or Alive Feb 19, 2018

Cornish is somewhat like the Schrödinger's cat of languages, as it can be considered dead, but also living. This is because usually it is easy enough to say that a language like Ancient Egyptian is dead because there are no native speakers, and scholars didn't even know how to interpret much of it before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Oppositely, English is obviously a living language, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people use it daily, many of whom can only speak English. Cornish, like many other languages, only has bilingual speakers using it, and moreover, it is not a daily part of most of those speaker's lives. None of this is rare for languages, so what separates it is that it was revived; the last native speaker died in the 18th century, and then due to efforts in revitalization for cultural purposes, a couple hundred people learned the language recently. Hebrew has shown the word that it is possible to bring back a language from its status as dead, but students and scholars also know Latin, which does not make it a living language because it is not used natively, or habitually. Ultimately, Cornish is considered a living Celtic language, but given that it had already died, and does not have a body of native speakers, it can also be argued that it is dead. What are your thoughts?
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1168: antisemitic Feb 19, 2018

While the concept of antisemitism has been around at least a couple thousand years, the term 'antisemitism' has only been around for about 140. Before then, at least in Germany, the popular term was 'Jew-hatred' („Judenhass“) but to sound more scientific and more euphemistic, Wilhelm Marr coined the term in the late 1870's. Originally, he used the term „Semitismus“ as a synonym for 'Jewish spirit' („Judenthums“), but a few years later published an antisemitic pamphlet using the word we have today: „Antisemitismus“. It quickly became so popular that within the year it was used for the name of the League of Antisemites. It is for this reason—that the term was created almost as propaganda so that bigots would sound more official and the word sounded less direct—that 'antisemitism' does not also describe hatred of all Semitic groups, including Arabs, Assyrians or Amharas. This is also not the first time that Germans have used words to describe many people—mostly Middle Eastern—and applied it to only one, as was also the case with 'Aryan'.