Languages & Linguistics
Language Isolate
A language isolate is a language that has no known relationship to any other language. It is a language that has not been shown to be related to any other language family, and therefore, it is considered a language isolate. Examples of language isolates include Basque, Ainu, and Burushaski.
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eBook - PDF- Lyle Campbell(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
CHAPTER 1 Language IsolateS AND THEIR HISTORY Lyle Campbell 1 INTRODUCTION How many Language Isolates are there in the world? (And, how many language families are there?) Most linguists do not know, and opinions vary greatly. To answer these ques -tions is complicated because of differing views about fundamental issues in historical lin-guistics and because of the limited amount of information that is available to us on a good number of these languages. This chapter attempts to answer the questions: how many Language Isolates are there? How can we advance knowledge of the history of Language Isolates? What lessons does the study of specific isolates offer for understanding better the history of Language Isolates in general and of other specific isolates? What are the prospects for finding relatives for some Language Isolates, for showing that they belong together with other languages in a family of related languages? 1 So, what is a Language Isolate? The standard definition is that a Language Isolate is a language that has no known relatives, that is, that has no demonstrable phylogenetic relationship with any other language. It is a language which has not been shown to be the descendent of any ancestral language which has other descendants (other daughter languages). Thus, Language Isolates are in effect language families that have only one member. The best-known and most cited Language Isolates are Basque, Burushaski, and Ainu, though there are many others not so well known represented in this book. Since Language Isolates are often contrasted with families made up of related lan-guages, we also need to ask, what is a language family? A language family is a set of languages for which there is sufficient evidence to show that they descend from a single common ancestral language and are therefore phylogenetically related to one another.
eBook - PDF- David Crystal, Alan C. L. Yu, David Crystal, Alan C. L. Yu(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
isolated (adj.) A type of opposition recognized in Prague School phonology, distinguished from proportional. The opposition between English /v/ and /l/ is iso- lated, because there are no other segments that are contrasted in this particular way, i.e. voiced labio-dental fricative v. voiced lateral. The opposition between /f/ and /v/, however, is proportional, because there are other oppositions in the language which work in parallel, e.g. /s/ v. /z/, /θ/ v. /ð/. isolated language see isolate isolating (adj.) A term which characterizes a type of language established by com- parative linguistics using structural (as opposed to diachronic) criteria, and focusing on the characteristics of the word: in isolating languages, all the words are invariable (and syntactic relationships are primarily shown by word-order). Vietnamese, Chinese and many South-East Asian languages are often cited as good instances of isolating languages. As always with such general classifications, the cat- egories are not clear-cut: different languages will display the characteristics of isola- tion to a greater or lesser degree. An alternative term is analytic, seen as opposed to synthetic types of language (agglutinative and inflecting), where words contain more than one morpheme. isolation (adj.) see isolating isolect, isolex, isomorph, isophone, isopleth, isoseme (n.) see iso- isomorphism (n.) A property of two or more structures whose constituent parts are in a one-to-one correspondence with each other, at a given level of abstraction. For example, a syntactic and a semantic analysis would be isomorphic if for each syn- tactic unit there were a corresponding semantic unit, e.g. subject+verb+object: actor+action+goal. Likewise, a structural isomorphism may occur between lan- guages or dialects, e.g. in vocabulary (the kinship terms in language X may be isomorphic with those in language Y).
eBook - ePub- Zoran Nikolic(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Collins(Publisher)
Language IsolateS
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WHAT ARE Language IsolateS?
In order to appreciate the linguistic diversity of our planet, we must begin with the fact that there are currently about 7,000 living languages in use around the world. In addition, several hundred extinct languages are being studied, with efforts being made to revive some of these and return them to everyday use. Most languages are grouped into language families. The concept of language families is based on the assumption that dialects of languages often evolve into separate but related languages over time. This can be described in terms of a language tree, where the proto-language forms the main ‘trunk’, and this becomes divided into language ‘branches’, representing the languages that have relatively recently separated from the proto-language. The ‘crown’ becomes more and more dense over time as new dialects develop from the branches. Although some branches will fall off over time, as languages become extinct, other branches may develop into a new language family of their own.We can see an example of a language tree in the illustration on the opposite page. The trunk represents the Germanic language, which itself formed from a branch of the Indo-European language family. The trunk eventually divided into its descendants of West, North and East Germanic branches, and thus the Germanic language became a separate language family.Over time, North Germanic further divided into new branches, becoming a new family; today those branches are Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, etc. Unfortunately, the East Germanic branch is truncated, since all languages of that family simply died out. In the distant future, some surviving languages could be divided into new branches, or they could disappear altogether.The exceptions to this rule are the Language Isolates. These are languages for which it is not possible to establish a connection with either the rest of the language branch or the complete family
eBook - PDFIntroducing Linguistics
Theoretical and Applied Approaches
- Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, John W. Schwieter(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
While many known languages have been classified into language families, several languages simply cannot be grouped as such. These languages are known as isolates. Unlike other languages, which have siblings and cousins, isolates are – to the best of our current understanding – orphan languages, with no known relatives. Two well-known isolates are Basque and Burushaski, both of which are spoken in geographically isolated, mountainous regions. Such terrain indeed promotes linguistic diversity and the sur- vival of last known members of language families. As our understanding of various languages and their history develops, the overall genetic classification of languages and labeling of some of them as isolates may change. For example, recent work by Edward Vajda has shown that an indigenous Western Siberian language called Ket, formerly considered to be an isolate, is distantly related to Athabaskan languages in North America. Classification of indigenous languages, both in North and South America, was first proposed by American linguist Joseph Greenberg. Yet, many controversies surrounding the classification of these languages are still standing. EYES ON WORLD LANGUAGES: INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES IN NORTH AMERICA There are hundreds of indigenous languages spoken in North America with the vast majority of them in different degrees of endangerment. Efforts are underway to record, maintain, and revive some of these languages. Often, indigenous languages in North America are classified into several language families: • Algonquian: Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Blackfoot, Cree (different varieties), Malecite- Passamaquoddy, Micmac, Montagnais, Munsee, Naskapi, Ojibwa (different varieties), Ottawa, Potawatomi;
- Praful Dhondopant Kulkarni(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Society Publishing(Publisher)
An Introduction to Language and Linguistics 7 1.4. ORIGIN OF LINGUISTICS AS A BRANCH OF LANGUAGE STUDIES Linguistics is the scientific study of the languages. Each human language is a complex structure of data and enables speakers of the language to talk to each other, to express considerations, hypotheses, emotions, needs, and the different things that need imparting. Etymology is the examination of these learning systems in each one of its points of view: how is such a data structure sorted out, how is it obtained, how is it used as a piece of the age and perception of messages, how might it change after some time? Linguists, subsequently, are stressed over different particular request concerning the possibility of language. What properties does each and every human language have in common? How do languages change, and to what degree are the qualifications proficient, i.e., would we have the capacity to find outlines in the qualifications? How do youths get such aggregate learning of a language in such a concise manner? What are the courses in which languages can change after some time, and are there limitations to how languages change? What is the possibility of the intellectual procedures that turned into an essential factor when we convey and fathom language? All these doubts can be solved if we study the etymology of the language and its dialects through the research in linguistics and new language technologies. Linguistics, i.e., the study of etymology that is associated with the structure of language is categorized into various subfields: 1. Phonetics – the investigation of discourse sounds in their physical viewpoints. 2. Phonology – the investigation of discourse sounds in their intellectual perspectives. 3. Morphology – the investigation of the development of words. 4. Linguistic structure – the investigation of the development of sentences. 5. Semantics – the investigation of language significance.
eBook - PDFLanguage and Reality
Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb
- Sydney Lamb, Jonathan J. Webster(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
393 Chapter Twenty-two WHAT IS A LANGUAGE? In reality we have to recognize as many languages as there are individuals. Hermann Paul If there is anything about language that seems obvious, both to ordinary people and to many linguistic scientists, it is that there are such things as languages, distinct from one another, each one shared by multiple people. It is also widely taken for granted that the primary object of investigation in linguistics is the language, that linguistics is the science that investigates languages. But this notion, that the linguistic world is made up of languages, does not hold up to close examination. I shall argue in this paper that it is actually impossible to define languages as distinguishable objects. This observation poses a problem for those who have proposed that linguistics is supposed to be the science which has languages as its objects of investigation (cf. Chapter 26). But behind the illusion of languages there are realities whose study offers rich rewards. The basic problem in attempting to define the language as an objective scientific concept is that of how to distinguish one language from another. I won't go into the also unsolvable problem of how to distinguish language from extralinguistic communication systems. Let us look at some attempts that have been made over the years by authorities in linguistics and see why they fail. We may begin with the attempt of Leonard Bloomfield. In his A set of postulates for the science of language (1926) he attempted to provide a logical scientific foundation for linguistics. At the time Bloomfield was generally recognized as either the leading authority on linguistics in America, or one of the two leading authorities (the other was Edward Sapir). At the beginning of the article, Bloomfield says, Revised from a paper presented at the LACUS Forum, 1986. 394
eBook - PDFOn Languages and Language
The Presidential Adresses of the 1991 Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
- Werner Winter(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
(Hammarström 1976: 1) For something like three quarters of a century now, linguists have been paying lip-service to the slogan linguistics is the scientific study of lan-guage. ...The advantage of the latter answer is that it has the effect of gob-stopper. (Mulder - Hervey 1980: 29; Mulder 1989: 2) Die Linguistik hat es sich zu ihrer Aufgabe gemacht, die von den Sprechern verwendeten sprachlichen Systeme mit ihren Einheiten zu beschreiben. Diese linguistischen Einheiten sind nicht die konkreten Äußerungen selbst oder Teile davon, sondern (wie die Phoneme, die Morpheme, usw.) Abstrakti-onen, von denen jede eine große Zahl von gesprochenen Beispielen, die in bestimmten Punkten mehr oder weniger variieren, umfaßt. (Hammarström 1970: 1) Maybe what those authors quoted earlier mean by language (singular mass noun) is just the set of all languages? Then it would differ from our answer merely terminologically. In fact, however, the notion of language as used by linguists, has always been fuzzy at best, witness: Pris dans son tout, le langage est multiforme et heteroclite; a cheval sur plusieurs domaines, ä la fois physique, physiologique et psychique, il ap-partient encore au domaine individuel et au domaine social; il ne se laisse classer dans aucune categorie des faits humains, parce qu'on ne sait comment degager son unite. (Saussure 1949: 25) Linguists all talk — sometimes rather indiscriminately — about language as a genus, about specific languages as specimens of that genus I propose to keep a strict distinction between these two types of statement: (a) statements about the genus language, which belong to linguistic theory — i. e., theoretical statements; (b) statements about a particular language, which belong to a linguistic description — i.e., descriptive statements.
eBook - PDFGrammar
A Linguists' Guide for Language Teachers
- Tom Rankin, Melinda Whong(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Overall, when considering the nature of Language, our answer to the question, ‘what is Language’ is: a rich system of communica- tion, sharing specifically linguistic design features, which is an innate biological characteristic of the species Homo sapiens. Though a shared property, as with any biological mechanism, the underlying unity permits a rich variety of forms to surface. The interesting feature of Language when considering languages cross- linguistically, is the interplay of unity and diversity. While the range of linguistic diversity grows from the same shared root of Language, this diversity is fundamentally constrained. As we develop our understanding of this unity and diversity in terms of the idea of Virtual Grammar, we will see that all forms of language are constrained in shared ways. Language learners cannot escape these constraints, even if the language we produce as learners of another language might diverge from the variety that proficient speakers speak. Even at early stages, learner language is not wild, with unconstrained variation. Discussion of language learning will be left for Chapter 4 so that we can turn to the matter of diversity amongst languages in the next section. 2.1 What Is Language? 53 2.2 LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND DIVERSITY IN LINGUISTICS The question of how many languages there are in the world is both controversial and complex, not least because of the vexed issue of determining the boundaries between one language and another (see next section). The generally accepted estimate for the number of 2.6 CASE IN POINT: NUMBER, GENERIC AND SPECIFIC MEANING Case in Point 2.3 on Number showed that languages make different levels of plurality distinction by expressing dual and paucal num- ber in addition to singular and plural. The Cushitic language Bayso is one such language, with paucal and plural marking (examples from Corbett, 2000, p. 11). (i) luban-jaa foofe. lion-paucal watch.1sg ‘I watched a few lions’ (ii) luban-jool foofe.
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