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ling 102 - midterm 1
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| symbolic signs | relationship between signifier and signified is not obvious or direct, is arbitrary |
| indexical signs | relationship between signifier and signified is neither arbitrary nor direct |
| ideographic, syllabic, abjads, abugidas, phonemic, phonetic | types of writing systems |
| pictographic and logographic | the two ideographic systems |
| ideograms | a written character that symbolizes an idea without indicating anything about pronunciation |
| 6,900 | the number of living languages in the world (according to the Ethnologue) |
| mutual intelligibility | the ability of speakers of different but related languages to understand one another |
| genetic classification | classification of languages into families based on descent from common ancestor |
| cognates | words that look similar and are related in two or more languages |
| morris swadesh | american linguist who made swadesh lists which consist of 100-200 basic vocab to use when comparing languages |
| typological classification | classification of languages into types based on shared characteristics but not common history |
| isolates | a language with no demonstrated relationship to other languages |
| west germanic, north germanic, east germanic | the branches of the germanic language family |
| english, frisian, dutch, german | languages in the west germanic branch |
| icelandic, norwegian, danish, swedish | languages in the north germanic branch |
| gothic (extinct) | languages in the east germanic branch |
| semiotics (semiology) | the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretation |
| signifier | the part of the sign that we sense |
| signified | the meaning that is represented by the sign |
| iconic signs | relationship between signifier and signified is obvious and direct |
| pictograms | very iconic, they look like what they represent |
| logograms | signifier doesn't resemble the signified |
| egyptian hieroglyphs and sumerian cuneiform | began with highly iconic signs (pictographic) but in late forms, composed of signs representing consonants, morphemes, and determinatives |
| chinese writing | started as iconic (pictographic) and later developed into a more logographic system |
| rebus writing | when logograms are used to represent syllables (consonants and vowels) or individual sounds |
| japanese | uses logographic signs and syllabary systems |
| abugida | a phonemic writing system that represents consonants with full graphemes and vowels with diacritics |
| diacritics | marks added to sound transcription symbols to give them a particular phonetic value |
| phoenician | system that is pure abjad; precursor to brahimi, greek, aramaic alphabets; ordered their alphabet according to the acrophonic principle |
| phonemic systems | used to represent all the distinct sounds of a language with one symbol; ideally one grapheme per distinct sound; roman alphabets, english, korean, greek, etc. |
| thaana | system with consonants as characters and vowels as diacritics (not optional) |
| indo-european language family | includes most languages in europe, northern india, and some languages in the middle east |
| joseph scaliger | person who originally proposed 4 related families in europe based on the words for 'God' |
| james parsons | person who recognized similarities among european and indian languages; looked at basic vocabulary to compare; added languages and families that were similar |
| sir william jones | person often credited with solely proposing the IE hypothesis (which is false); interested in making a sanskrit-european connection; compared forms of grammar which was fairly new |
| case | suffixes on nouns that tell you the function of the noun in a sentence |
| comparative method | using cognates and regular sound correspondences to compare languages |
| proto-language | a reconstructed hypothetical common ancestral language of two or more living languages |
| Kurgan Hypothesis | says that the homeland for PIE speakers was the Russian Steppes (modern day Ukraine); lived here until about 5000 BC |
| Anatolian Hypothesis | says that PIE speakers come from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey); lived here until 7000 BC |
| morphology | study of the structure of words |
| morphological typology | the study and classification of language based on how morphemes create words |
| morpheme | in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix) |
| synthetic | language that uses large numbers of bound morphemes and often combines strings of them to form a single word |
| isolating | a language with relatively few morphemes per word and fairly simple rules for combining them; each morpheme behaves like an independent word |
| fusional language | a type of synthetic language in which the words in a sentence cannot be segmented into morphemes with 1:1 match of form and meaning; these languages have many morphemes per word, but few phonetic forms; |
| agglutinating language | a language that allows a great number of morphemes per word and has highly regular rules for combining morphemes; these are languages where each morpheme in a word has a distinct and unique phonetic meaning |
| serial verbs | use more than one verb as part of a verbal construction in a sentence |
| paradigm | a systematical grammatical form for a word class |
| syncnetism | when one fused form has several distinct meanings usually from parts of a paradigm merging over time |
| Arabic | system where consonants and long vowels are written out; short vowels typically unwritten; word roots are built of 3 consonants |
Created by:
elenavm
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