Cara: if you click on the picture you go to the site where I found the image.
Micro: the IndoEuropean family is named after the locations of its farthest branches, but it is not based on geography but rather the fact that these languages are all related and believed to have descended from a common ancestral language (spoken by people in either Turkey or the Ukraine, around 7-8000 years ago).
The Asian languages include several separate and unrelated language families, including Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan etc.), Austronesian (Malay, Tagalog (Phillipines), Tahitian etc.), Altaic (Mongolian, Manchu), and Japanese and Korean each as independent languages (some people group these in with Altaic, but it is controversial).
For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics for some basics.
But, I mostly put this up because I thought it looked so beautiful!
And, also, can't forget that Farsi (Iran) and many of the languages of South Asia (Pakistan, India etc.) are IndoEuropean, so that's in the 'Asian' version too!
When I was working up north, I had the opportunity to learn Inuktitut to the level of a 4-5 year old.
What I found interesting were the similarities between it and French. I'm not kidding. And it wasn't so much in terms of words or syntax, but more in terms of sounds and the way the language feels.
Although, being almost tri-lingual, I think that may be an aspect of my brain or something.
All languages have similarities. They usually arise out of 4 basic areas.
First, they may be related. Most IndoEuropean languages share some characteristics because they are descended from an ancestral language.
Second, languages borrow from each other. So, Japanese and Korean have certain similarities because historically they have had a lot of contact, even though they may not be related (this point is contentious, though, but it's just one example).
Third, they may have things in common because there are certain patterns of characteristics in language. For instance, if you have verbs at the end of your sentence, like Japanese and Hindi, then you tend to modify nouns with adjectives and relative clauses in front of the noun, and have prepositions after the noun (postpositions). English has the verb in the middle, and has adjectives and prepositions in front of the noun, and relative clauses after. But, English and Hindi are related to each other, and Japanese is unrelated to both.
Finally, languages share certain universal characteristics. For example, it is almost universally agreed (though there are a few interesting potential counterexamples) that all languages have nouns and verbs, and they all have consonants and vowels, though what falls into each category can differ a lot! These may seem obvious, but there is no agreed upon answer as to why it is that way. Kind of like physics - why do we have the kinds of subatomic particles we do, and not others? Why is the speed of light exactly what it is, and not faster or slower? So it is with language - could we recognize a language that didn't use nouns, or verbs?
So for Inuktitut and French, the language families aren't related, and contact b/w the two cultures could arguably be considered minimal.
But what about the feel? Can languages differ in warmth, in value of expression? And I mean this in an etic way.
For interest, and pardon my lack of proper terminology, I understand Inuktitut to be one of those languages that uses compound words, like German. You can literally have a sentence-word! So verbs are followed by suffixes that give a sense of value and tense.
Relative to your explanation, I get the impression that in Inuktitut, one modifies nouns with adjectives and relative clauses after the noun, and also have prepositions after the noun but before the adjectives and relative clauses (midpositions!).
Inuktitut is what is known as a polysynthetic language, one where, as you say, a word can be the equivalent of an entire sentence in another language. This is far more than compounding of the type even seen in German - even there, you need a subject and a verb to make a minimal sentence. In polysynthetic languages, you can have subject, object, verb, adjectives, and all kinds of things rolled up into one 'word'. Very intriguing.
As for the 'feel' of a language, while I don't deny it, and have experienced it myself (I'm very partial to Portuguese), the 'science' of linguistics doesn't really concern itself with that very much. Linguists like to focus on concrete stuff (as much as that's possible when you deal with something going on inside people's heads), and impressionistic qualities of language are largely ignored - something I don't entirely agree with, but there it is.
i read a very interesting essay today by a scientist bemoaning the lack of serious, rigorous scientific study of the "paranormal".
100 years ago, she argued, scientists were very interested in ideas of psychic phenomena, and did very serious intense research into it with well-documented experiments, etc.
these days, she says, science has become very insular and is concerned only with it's own interests. as a result, she says scientists have created a world for themselves that is free of mystery, wonder, or magic. and yet (she notes), the general public is still very, very intested in these ideas, as evidenced, for e.g. by the huge # of TV shows dealing with these subjects.
the point is that almost every "science", linguistics included, have become too concerned with the minutae of their subjects, and have lost the driving curiosity and sense of wonder and beauty that once formed the very backbone of the disciplines in the first place.
not to dis linguistics, of course, but that merely fit in w/ the point sky was just making about linguistics ignoring the impressionistic qualities of language in favour of the concrete.
maybe we should create a new, mystical language using only words from the "word verification" on this blog.
I should clarify: I think every linguist I've ever met loves something about working with language, and one can only really study it if they are genuinely curious about its true nature.
But, the collaborative nature of a scientific discipline requires you to be able to put down your observations into terms that can be shared, so that they can then be taken up by others, expanded, and grow into something larger and hopefully closer to the truth. I think its just the nature of that kind of collaboration with a multitude of other potential partners which makes it appear 'free of mystery and wonder'. The agreed-upon terms and referents of the discipline itself are constantly growing and expanding, too, as a result.
One has to start somewhere. Linguistics is a young science, and probably still has to really find its way.
I believe it can - but those terms are still not agreed upon, both as to what they are and what they refer to. Science is a collaboration that takes place over years and long distances, and so it can be slow moving, especially in a small field (there are just a handful of grad students in linguistics in Manitoba, for example). The fact is, there are a whole lot more intelligent people who would rather study engineering, or marketing.
I think sometimes I can speak 'squirrel'. I wish there was a machine that I could buy to actually speak squirrel. Type in some words, and voila. why haven't they made a machine for that yet? Whales, sure that's easy talk, but squirrel, that's one furious and rageful language.
Does linguistics include communications with the animal kingdom?
I believe that some Japanese company created a device to allow you to communicate with your dog - no idea how well it works.
There are linguists who do study animal communication, but very often they are on the fringe. That is, they don't really follow accepted practices within linguistics, and so other linguists find it hard to look at their data and see the same things that they are claiming. Gorillas and chimps are some of the more well known cases, and it is interesting because it brings up the question of what is language, and what is it not?
By the way, language is not just sound. The study of American Sign Language is a big topic at the U of M, and even everyday English involves a huge amount of non-spoken communication. Gesture (which can be taken to encompass body language, facial expression, stance, etc.) is an important topic in contemporary lingustics. I wrote a paper last year exploring the origins of both vocalizing and gesture in human evolution, and it might surprise you to learn that they might have had very different original purposes (of course, no one will ever know for sure...)
That sounds like an interesting paper, is it on-line somewhere?
I like thinking of gesture as language. I think there are some people who forget that language is more than words. I suppose one might say art is a language. Man, the word 'language' might even be a broader term then the word 'art'.
Which brings me to another interesting point....these comments, emails, are all language and lack so much when it comes to the communication we use with people face-to-face, everyday. All that gesture, and expression lost. I wonder if the computer age will eventually commandeer these things. I suppose it's happening already(webcams). I wonder if this virtual stuff will ever replace afce-to-face completely. Alright, who's the science fiction writer out there, write a story where the human race no longer has one on one contact anymore and they just sit in front of their boxes and type messages to each other. (oh crap, that's what we're doing right now?!?!?!)
I put the paper up on my site, if you're *really* interested (it's 25 pages of linguisticky stuff...) Just type in www.onosson.com/phon evol paper.doc in your browser, it should download.
Certainly, there are people who forget that gesture is language. Sign language wasn't even really recognized in linguistics until the 1970s, and has faced a long, hard road to gain acceptance. People still talk about speech as equivalent to language. But, there are lots of reasons to think that language didn't even start as speech (see my paper...) For example, our close primate relatives are able to learn to communicate using manual (hand) gestures, but they lack certain physical characteristics which allow us to produce speech (incidentally, babies and young children also lack some of these characteristics, and gain them as they age).
Your point about the internet and electronic communication is very interesting. I for one find communication on the phone almost excruciating, due to the lack of physical presence and interaction. But, I actually enjoy this type of blogging/commenting conversation. I think it's the way that time constraints are lifted, so you can really think about what you want to say, revise and edit it before putting it out there. Not that I always do that, but the option is there. But I can't imagine it ever replacing face to face real human contact. Not as long as we're humans.
A Love for Art was a collaborative blog for visual artists, musicians, writers, and social scientists. This blog has evolved into a new blog called BETA, go check it out!
21 comments:
Very cool, do they have an asian (?) version of this?
cool
Where did you get this, I'd like to show my class at school.
So so cool.
Cara: if you click on the picture you go to the site where I found the image.
Micro: the IndoEuropean family is named after the locations of its farthest branches, but it is not based on geography but rather the fact that these languages are all related and believed to have descended from a common ancestral language (spoken by people in either Turkey or the Ukraine, around 7-8000 years ago).
The Asian languages include several separate and unrelated language families, including Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan etc.), Austronesian (Malay, Tagalog (Phillipines), Tahitian etc.), Altaic (Mongolian, Manchu), and Japanese and Korean each as independent languages (some people group these in with Altaic, but it is controversial).
For more info, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_linguistics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics for some basics.
But, I mostly put this up because I thought it looked so beautiful!
And, also, can't forget that Farsi (Iran) and many of the languages of South Asia (Pakistan, India etc.) are IndoEuropean, so that's in the 'Asian' version too!
When I was working up north, I had the opportunity to learn Inuktitut to the level of a 4-5 year old.
What I found interesting were the similarities between it and French. I'm not kidding. And it wasn't so much in terms of words or syntax, but more in terms of sounds and the way the language feels.
Although, being almost tri-lingual, I think that may be an aspect of my brain or something.
What fo you think?
All languages have similarities. They usually arise out of 4 basic areas.
First, they may be related. Most IndoEuropean languages share some characteristics because they are descended from an ancestral language.
Second, languages borrow from each other. So, Japanese and Korean have certain similarities because historically they have had a lot of contact, even though they may not be related (this point is contentious, though, but it's just one example).
Third, they may have things in common because there are certain patterns of characteristics in language. For instance, if you have verbs at the end of your sentence, like Japanese and Hindi, then you tend to modify nouns with adjectives and relative clauses in front of the noun, and have prepositions after the noun (postpositions). English has the verb in the middle, and has adjectives and prepositions in front of the noun, and relative clauses after. But, English and Hindi are related to each other, and Japanese is unrelated to both.
Finally, languages share certain universal characteristics. For example, it is almost universally agreed (though there are a few interesting potential counterexamples) that all languages have nouns and verbs, and they all have consonants and vowels, though what falls into each category can differ a lot! These may seem obvious, but there is no agreed upon answer as to why it is that way. Kind of like physics - why do we have the kinds of subatomic particles we do, and not others? Why is the speed of light exactly what it is, and not faster or slower? So it is with language - could we recognize a language that didn't use nouns, or verbs?
You're very knowledgable, that's good.
So for Inuktitut and French, the language families aren't related, and contact b/w the two cultures could arguably be considered minimal.
But what about the feel? Can languages differ in warmth, in value of expression? And I mean this in an etic way.
For interest, and pardon my lack of proper terminology, I understand Inuktitut to be one of those languages that uses compound words, like German. You can literally have a sentence-word! So verbs are followed by suffixes that give a sense of value and tense.
Relative to your explanation, I get the impression that in Inuktitut, one modifies nouns with adjectives and relative clauses after the noun, and also have prepositions after the noun but before the adjectives and relative clauses (midpositions!).
Crazy.
Inuktitut is what is known as a polysynthetic language, one where, as you say, a word can be the equivalent of an entire sentence in another language. This is far more than compounding of the type even seen in German - even there, you need a subject and a verb to make a minimal sentence. In polysynthetic languages, you can have subject, object, verb, adjectives, and all kinds of things rolled up into one 'word'. Very intriguing.
As for the 'feel' of a language, while I don't deny it, and have experienced it myself (I'm very partial to Portuguese), the 'science' of linguistics doesn't really concern itself with that very much. Linguists like to focus on concrete stuff (as much as that's possible when you deal with something going on inside people's heads), and impressionistic qualities of language are largely ignored - something I don't entirely agree with, but there it is.
There it is.
i read a very interesting essay today by a scientist bemoaning the lack of serious, rigorous scientific study of the "paranormal".
100 years ago, she argued, scientists were very interested in ideas of psychic phenomena, and did very serious intense research into it with well-documented experiments, etc.
these days, she says, science has become very insular and is concerned only with it's own interests. as a result, she says scientists have created a world for themselves that is free of mystery, wonder, or magic. and yet (she notes), the general public is still very, very intested in these ideas, as evidenced, for e.g. by the huge # of TV shows dealing with these subjects.
the point is that almost every "science", linguistics included, have become too concerned with the minutae of their subjects, and have lost the driving curiosity and sense of wonder and beauty that once formed the very backbone of the disciplines in the first place.
WHEW... i'm done.
not to dis linguistics, of course, but that merely fit in w/ the point sky was just making about linguistics ignoring the impressionistic qualities of language in favour of the concrete.
maybe we should create a new, mystical language using only words from the "word verification" on this blog.
ojwcq!
I should clarify: I think every linguist I've ever met loves something about working with language, and one can only really study it if they are genuinely curious about its true nature.
But, the collaborative nature of a scientific discipline requires you to be able to put down your observations into terms that can be shared, so that they can then be taken up by others, expanded, and grow into something larger and hopefully closer to the truth. I think its just the nature of that kind of collaboration with a multitude of other potential partners which makes it appear 'free of mystery and wonder'. The agreed-upon terms and referents of the discipline itself are constantly growing and expanding, too, as a result.
One has to start somewhere. Linguistics is a young science, and probably still has to really find its way.
iwfti, definition: clarification
why can't the magic and mystery of language be shared in terms that others can understand?
Fascinating conversation above leads me to believe it can be further expanded? No?
ontbfy
I believe it can - but those terms are still not agreed upon, both as to what they are and what they refer to. Science is a collaboration that takes place over years and long distances, and so it can be slow moving, especially in a small field (there are just a handful of grad students in linguistics in Manitoba, for example). The fact is, there are a whole lot more intelligent people who would rather study engineering, or marketing.
kcyjp, definition: hope
Science is magic, and those that do not realise it are ignorant of their own fantastic powers.
All knowledge is bound by creativity; hope, love, curiosity, all of these things give it life and shape.
Look at this figure of a language family, it is the shape of growth, of the first sound, of the early openings into realisation, the twelve gates!
I see! I see!
Underneath the many dreamless eyes that wake up to stare blindly into the chaos of our lives, is potential, such emptiness is only potential.
And as you focus, some will follow.
ytutjwxx - purpose
Hmph! Shhhhhh. Hmph! Shhhhhhh. Hmph!
Kersplut. Kerrrrrsplut. Splut.
tnvdld = language is sound
I think sometimes I can speak 'squirrel'. I wish there was a machine that I could buy to actually speak squirrel. Type in some words, and voila. why haven't they made a machine for that yet? Whales, sure that's easy talk, but squirrel, that's one furious and rageful language.
Does linguistics include communications with the animal kingdom?
I believe that some Japanese company created a device to allow you to communicate with your dog - no idea how well it works.
There are linguists who do study animal communication, but very often they are on the fringe. That is, they don't really follow accepted practices within linguistics, and so other linguists find it hard to look at their data and see the same things that they are claiming. Gorillas and chimps are some of the more well known cases, and it is interesting because it brings up the question of what is language, and what is it not?
By the way, language is not just sound. The study of American Sign Language is a big topic at the U of M, and even everyday English involves a huge amount of non-spoken communication. Gesture (which can be taken to encompass body language, facial expression, stance, etc.) is an important topic in contemporary lingustics. I wrote a paper last year exploring the origins of both vocalizing and gesture in human evolution, and it might surprise you to learn that they might have had very different original purposes (of course, no one will ever know for sure...)
mlena = human-animal
Yes. Language is many things.
That sounds like an interesting paper, is it on-line somewhere?
I like thinking of gesture as language. I think there are some people who forget that language is more than words. I suppose one might say art is a language. Man, the word 'language' might even be a broader term then the word 'art'.
Which brings me to another interesting point....these comments, emails, are all language and lack so much when it comes to the communication we use with people face-to-face, everyday. All that gesture, and expression lost. I wonder if the computer age will eventually commandeer these things. I suppose it's happening already(webcams). I wonder if this virtual stuff will ever replace afce-to-face completely. Alright, who's the science fiction writer out there, write a story where the human race no longer has one on one contact anymore and they just sit in front of their boxes and type messages to each other. (oh crap, that's what we're doing right now?!?!?!)
and ALfA is born.
fxdfwlav - Fast Forward Wash Cycle
I put the paper up on my site, if you're *really* interested (it's 25 pages of linguisticky stuff...) Just type in www.onosson.com/phon evol paper.doc in your browser, it should download.
Certainly, there are people who forget that gesture is language. Sign language wasn't even really recognized in linguistics until the 1970s, and has faced a long, hard road to gain acceptance. People still talk about speech as equivalent to language. But, there are lots of reasons to think that language didn't even start as speech (see my paper...) For example, our close primate relatives are able to learn to communicate using manual (hand) gestures, but they lack certain physical characteristics which allow us to produce speech (incidentally, babies and young children also lack some of these characteristics, and gain them as they age).
Your point about the internet and electronic communication is very interesting. I for one find communication on the phone almost excruciating, due to the lack of physical presence and interaction. But, I actually enjoy this type of blogging/commenting conversation. I think it's the way that time constraints are lifted, so you can really think about what you want to say, revise and edit it before putting it out there. Not that I always do that, but the option is there. But I can't imagine it ever replacing face to face real human contact. Not as long as we're humans.
fykawe communicating
And, thanks everyone for the great conversation!
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