1205: Practice with Seeing (Color Week: 6) Mar 28, 2018

Concerning whether or not people can see colors they have no word for, one common and fairly logical idea is that it comes down to training. While certain people like W.H.R. Rivers had ideas that related to evolutionary biology, and thought that cultures with fewer colors were less physically advanced, a less racist response could simply come down to training; people taught to look out for more different colors could just train them selves to see more than otherwise, even if everyone is physiologically the same. This is the same explanation for how people who speak Guugu Yimithirr have an innate sense of cardinal directions. There are some flaws to this idea however. Firstly, it is possibly to see something and not have a single word to describe it, either using approximations or adjectives (such as 'light'), and also plenty of people (including English speakers) use nouns in lieu of colors all the time, such 'rose', 'violet' or 'orange'.  If we include these ones, pretty much everyone will be on the same footing and the Sapirian- or Whorfian-type notions that language determine the way one is able to think are harder—though by no means impossible—to argue.
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1204: Non-Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 5) Mar 27, 2018

Following from yesterday's post about the somewhat arbitrary nature of confirming what hues go along with what basic color categories, it might also lead to the question of why a language would have a term for a red—or any other color—at all. This is not to say that it should be strange that languages develop words for this, but that peoples will associate certain groupings of shades and hues to the same few colors in the first place, across cultures (more or less). Of course, there are also color terms outside of the basic color categories, such as English's 'vermillion', 'scarlet', and 'magenta', but these are not the most general. Indeed, consider being in a paint store where it is possible to see squares with thousands of different colors with all sorts of names such as Benjamin Moore's "Magic Potion" (a sort of violet). However, 'Magic Potion', and moreover even the umbrella term 'violet' can both exist under the umbrella of 'purple'. Indeed, even if someone saw—for physiological reasons—Magic Potion as something more like the similar 'Mauve Desert' (also available from Benjamin Moore) they could both be lumped under 'purple'. No one knows exactly how other's will interpret colors visually, so language has to approximate and generalize, and not every individual's nor every languages color will be identical, even if it translates as something usually the same.
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1203: Color-Groupings across Languages (Color Week: 4) Mar 26, 2018

Though language is one of the best ways we have to communicate, because people cannot convey an entire thought-process ever, there is always some ambiguity of the meaning of signs (words). Many—thousands if not more—shades exist that could be denoted with a basic color categories [2], so for instance, a scarlet may be different from a tan red and both are different to fire-engine red, but all could still generally be called ‘red’. One could ask then: how do people know what to assign ‘red’ to?—and more importantly for our purposes—will this differ from language-to-language?
To answer the first question (without getting into biology, neurology, or much childhood’s language-acquisition), the answer is that assuming, controversially, that people can all see the same way regardless of language, people only have to get used to grouping different shades from trial-and-error when learning language from infancy. The second question is more simple answered: yes. Statistically, for example, the range of what a French ‘verde’ (‘green’) conveys is different to the range of colors understood by English’s ‘green’. People are not limited or enhanced by speaking French in this case, so much as translations are not exactly 1-to-1, simply due to cultural norms.

1202: Russian Blues (Color Week: 3) Mar 25, 2018

Russians blues are quite famous among cat-lovers and (some) linguists, but for a very different reason. Russian has two basic color categories for what would both in English only be 'blue', which fascinates (some) linguists. The word 'siniy' (синий) roughly translates to the English for 'blue', but the word 'goluboy' (голубой) translates to 'light blue'. Of course, this is expressible in English, and also there will be some variation from speaker-to-speaker about what is considered which in the same way as there may be variation about how to consider any transitional color like vermillion, but some research, such as that of Jonathan Winawer, has suggested that Russian speakers are marginally faster at detecting distinctions of blues compared to English speakers. The reaction-times for seeing blues of both Russians and English-speakers evened out, however, when they were given more tasks. The experiment had a small sample-size and only looked at bilingual Russian speakers too, which was the exact reason that people criticized the perhaps-revolutionary research of Berlin and Kay, which popularized the study of colors as they relate to language, though the study has existed for some time. Winawer's research is quite popular among a general audience generally but many linguists and anthropologists are skeptical.
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1201: Nominal Color-Replacement (Color Week: 2) Mar 24, 2018

It was discussed in the first post of Color Week that blue is usually the last color to receive a basic color category, but it is not as simple as that. This should be clarified to mean that it is introduced consistently late, because it is very common for words for browns, oranges, and grays to come later, or before, so there is some variation to that. Often, this is because until then, speakers of a language with fewer basic color categories will use nouns or some other adjectives to fill in for those such words; it is very common for words equivalent to 'water' or 'sky' to fill the gap of 'blue', or certain flowers for other colors etc. in the same way that English speakers might describe scents by their relation to other scents, becasue there are few basic terms for scents in English. Even English's 'red'—the only color for which a Proto-Indo-European root is found—is derived etymologically from words meaning 'earth' and 'clay'. Moreover, the words for 'orange' and 'gold'—the colors—are still very obviously from 'orange' and 'gold'—the fruit and metal—the former of which English only adopted several centuries ago. This, and the fact that some languages have a spectrum not of light-and-dark but of wet-and-dry colors begins to show that people will still be able to communicate easily enough without certain terms. The effect of this, however, will be discussed tomorrow with regard to the blues in Russian.

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1200: Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 1) Mar 23, 2018

This is the first post of Color Week to celebrate the 1,200th post! Thank you for your support and please share.
The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and peoples such as even the Ancient Greeks would only be detecting greens and other similar colors beforehand. If this were true, it would support the idea that language has an effect on the relationship between neurology and physiology. However, recently people have also noted that blues are less common in nature, and do not act as natural warnings in the same way that plants and animals flaunt reds as meaning 'dangerous', so there would have been less of a need for this practically, but not a lack in the actual vision. Both of these ideas will be challenged and supported on the blog over the next 6 days.
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1199: Suffix Verbs (Turkish Copula) Mar 22, 2018

Some ideas can be conveyed without a verb, and examples of this often relate to copula verbs (i.e. verbs that connect other words, such as 'to be'). African American English and Latin both regularly omit them in general, and some languages like Russian and Hungarian omit them in specific contexts (in this case it is with the third person) but there are more than the two options to either have the verb present or omit it. In Turkish, which is a highly agglutinative language, the copula is included not as a verb in its own right but as a suffix, even though it is still meaningful. One of the ways that this is relevant is that Turkish has vowel-harmony meaning that the vowels of a affix change depending upon the vowels of the stem, and this happens for the copula in Turkish. Also, other verbs including Turkish's negative copula can take suffixes, but the positive copula cannot, even though it carries essentially the same meaning. It is possibly the only irregular verb in Turkish, and for non-Turkish speakers may be the first encounter with suffix-verbs.
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1198: Defective Verbs pt. 4 (Classic Greek) Mar 21, 2018

This is the fourth and final post in the short series about defective verbs. While just about any language will have defective verbs, due to random change over long periods of time, Classical Greek only has defective verbs, which is to say that no verb can be used for all nine persons (in addition to singular and plural, Greek has a dual number for pairs of objects). This is not to say that it is impossible to express certain things because certain verbs only happen to conjugate for certain persons—anything can be communicated in any language, even if the means are different. Either verbs will not have a form for certain numbers like duals or not exist in certain tenses for semantic reasons, or otherwise, one verb will be used in certain contexts, and another will be used in others to communicate the same meaning.

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1197: Defective Verbs pt. 3/4 (Modals) Mar 20, 2018

To follow up on the previous two days about defective verbs, not only are words possibly defective if they conjugate to some but not all persons, but there are verbs that care defective for other reasons. Modal verbs like 'will' 'may' and 'can', lack the forms for infinitive (e.g. *'to may'), future aspect (*'I will might'), participle (*'maying'), imperative (*'would!'), and gerund (*"my maying is a skill"). This is in contrast to defective verbs like 'rain', because 'I rain' is not possible for semantic reasons, but given that the 'I would can' is not possible but "I would be able to" is acceptable means that the issue is at least partly syntactic and not merely semantic. This is at least partly true of other non-modal verbs such as 'to be' which cannot be used in certain forms such as in this case the imperative 'be!'. If you know of any others, write a comment.
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1196: Defective Verbs pt.2/4 (Semantics) Mar 19, 2018

Defective verbs [1], which can't be fully conjugated, sometimes are that way by chance, but other times it is for semantic reasons. For instance, it has been discussed here many times how verbs like 'rain' or 'snow' (or just about any others that relate to the weather) are stated impersonally. Indeed, it is not possible to say 'I rained earlier' or 'I snowed earlier', becasue those actions simply are not physically possible. Therefore, verbs like that are considered defective because there is no first person or second person form for the verb. Interestingly, it is far more acceptable to apply human-qualities to inanimate things than the other way around; personification allows many verbs to not be defective or anything similar, though usually there are not verbs that relate to human action that are defective in the first place.
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1195: Defective Verbs pt. 1/4 (Chance) Mar 18, 2018

Verbs are incredibly versatile, but this is not to say that they are beyond limitations. Some verbs, called "defective verbs" cannot be completely conjugated in some way or another. Because English is not a heavily inflected language, these defective verbs are rarer than in other heavily inflected languages such as Greek or Latin. Defective verbs in Latin sometimes are considered defective if there has not been a discovered instance of its usage outside of a few ways, such as the verb 'ait' or 'aiunt' meaning 'he/they speak', which is said to only be used in the third person, but theoretically could have been found in other persons. In English, there are a few verbs like this, such as 'beware', which exists almost exclusively in the imperative (e.g. 'beware of the monster") or as an infinitive (e.g. "you ought to beware of the monster") but almost never as a finite verb, and especially not with conjugational endings, such as "he bewares" or "I bewared". Hypothetically, there is nothing wrong with the syntax or semantics of this, but that is not how the verb is used. Moreover, you may believe that this is because 'beware' has the infinitive 'to be' at the beginning, therefore the defective qualities are sensible, but this defective nature is not true of other verbs that come from 'to be', such as 'behave'. There will be more about defective verbs in English over the next two days.

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1194: to be (again) Mar 17, 2018

As has been mentioned here before, the verb 'to be' is irregular, but this is in part because its conjugational forms come from 3 or 4 different origins. Indeed, many of the words that gave rise to the forms of 'to be' today were irregular in its own right. 'Am' and 'is' come from an older Indo-European (IE) root that is shared with the the corresponding versions of Latin for 'to be', i.e. 'sum' and 'est'. Not all of the words that gave rise to the current conjugational forms meant 'to be' always, such as the root of 'was' and 'were' which came from an IE root meaning ‘remain’. The forms 'be' and 'been' also come from an IE root, but it is less obvious at first glance; they are related to the Latin 'fui' meaning 'become' and Greek 'phuein' meaning 'bring forth'. This sort of relationship between [b] and [p], and also [f], are quite common across languages in the same family because they are quite phonetically similar.

1193: Degrees of Linguistic Endangerment Mar 16, 2018

Pirahã is not considered endangered necessarily—to be precise, it is merely considered vulnerable—even with only a few hundred speakers (approximately 250 and 390). Lombard, on the other hand has 3,500,000 speakers and is considered "definitely endangered". To reconcile this, it must be noted that 'endangered' is more complicated than the number of speakers. There are several factors than go into this categorisation, including how much the language is taught to children in school, how much the language is used officially, and how much the language is used in the home, along with how much other languages are spoken along side it in those same places. Also, for a language not spoken in urban areas, or at least for a language not used much for business, if members of the community urbanize there is a good chance that the rate of language-use will decrease. Insular communities therefore are less likely to see as high a risk of extinction as another language spoken by a more open community, even of the same or larger population. Finally, if the language is only spoken by older people, it will likely not survive long past that generation; a language spoken by 50,000 people only in their teens and twenties is theoretically less seriously endangered than one spoken by 5,000,000 people only over 65.
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1192: Morphophonologically Illogical Mar 15, 2018

With strong verbs (i.e. verbs that conjugate internally) the vowels change from a high or mid vowel like [i] or [e] to a lower vowel like [a] (either mid or low), or occasionally the vowels move from front to back for present and past tense respectively. The height or lowness is determined by where the tongue is in the mouth (see the diagram below). This can be seen with 'sing' in the present tense becoming 'sang' in the perfect tense. Moreover, this can be seen with truly irregular verbs (unlike 'sing', 'sang', 'sung' which is regular) such as 'to be'. With the 3rd person singular it appears as 'is' in the present tense with a high vowel, and 'was' in the imperfect tense with the back vowel /ʊ/. However, 'are' is present tense and has a low vowel, but the past tense form 'were' has a mid vowel, which is higher. Does that mean the rule is imperfect (not referring to the grammar here)?—not really, because this is an irregular verb, and not only does it not follow standard morphological rules. Becasue there is not an apparent structure thereto, even when the morphology relates to phonology as it does with strong verbs, this does not mean that morphophonological conventions correct for this illogicality.

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1191: Non-Future "As Soon As" Mar 14, 2018

As has been discussed here, while there is a past tense and a future aspect in English, both of them overlap somewhat with the present tense, syntactically. This is true of non-past before in which a subordinate clause with 'before' at the start will take the present tense, even though it is semantically in the past (even more so than the independent clause, indeed). This is also the exact same situation with 'after' possibly, but there are other words for which the present tense is used to indicate semantic future. The phrase "as soon as" like in "as soon as I finish game, we will go out" indicates that the action of completing the work is sometime in the future, but is grammatically present. Notably, both here and with non-past before, the reason that it is present tense is because it must act in a sequence with another future aspect or past tense verb respectively. If you have other examples, please comment.
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1190: Kangaroo and wendoree Mar 13, 2018

There is a myth both discussed and debunked in the 2016 film Arrival that the word 'kangaroo' is derived from a foreigner asking a native Australian what the animals are called, to which the aborigine replied 'kangaroo' meaning "I don't understand". This is just a made up story, but it does remind us that linguistic communication will always be limited in its ability to allow people to truly understand each other. Moreover, this sort of thing did really happen in Australia; the Wendoree swamp which is now the name for a nearby town and lake derives from William Yuille asking a native Australian woman for the name of the swamp, to which she replied ‘wendaaree’ meaning ‘go away'.
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1189: Inter-Linguistic Influences Mar 12, 2018

Following a post the other day about a change in morphology in certain languages, it should be noted that much of the cause of that change is due to interlinguistic influence. For instance, it was said here that people sometimes use pronouns in Modern Spanish rather than whatever verb-ending would carry that same information as happens in English where conjugation is minimal, but in the examples of Spanish, this occurs more often in U.S. Spanish, especially in the Spanish of immigrants to the U.S.. On the other hand, Tocharian—a now-extinct Indo-European language from
 modern northwest China—has eleven cases, but some have suggested that as many as half of these derived from or were influenced by neighboring Uralic cases. Considering that modern Finnish—a Uralic language—has fifteen cases, it is not hard to imagine a language of that family leading to increased declensional endings in another language.
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1188: Closed Lexical Classes / "Slash" Mar 11, 2018

There are many different parts of speech, also called lexical class; some are open meaning that people can create words that belong to that class fairly easily, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but closed lexical classes rarely change over time at all. Things like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles haven't really changed in the last 800 years in English, some going back even twice as long. However, every so often something will change. The reason for this is that unlike nouns which are needed to represent lots of different things, conjunctions and other closed lexical classes already contain enough words to cover semantic needs. However, every so often one will fill a new role and catch on, such as the conjunction 'slash'. This only came about with the rise of typing, and was further reinforced through texting. Earlier—and still today—people word express certain dualities such as having the same person be a friend as well as a coworker with 'and', but now many people use 'slash' i.e. "she is my friend/coworker". Moreover, a habit from texting was borrowed into speech wherein a person writes two unrelated statements back-to-back e.g. "I went to the cinema/I'm hungry" meaning it is not only a replacement for 'and' but also has its own separate function. Perhaps one day people will consider it just as normal as any other well-established conjunction.
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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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