Category: Linguistics

🎧 Lectures 17-19 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 17-19: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 17: Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past
When a dialect of a language is used widely in writing and literacy is high, the normal pace of change is artificially slowed, as people come to see "the language" as on the page and inviolable. This helps create diglossia.

Lecture 18: Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style
We often see the written style of language as how it really "is" or "should be." But in fact, writing allows uses of language that are impossible when a language is only a spoken one.

Lecture 19: Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar
Understanding language change and how languages differ helps us see that what is often labeled "wrong" about people's speech is, in fact, a misanalysis.

Interesting to hear about the early “canonization” of English grammar by Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray.

🎧 Lectures 15-16 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 15-16: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 15: Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line?
Dialects of one language can be called languages simply because they are spoken in different countries, such as Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The reverse is also true: The Chinese "dialects" are distinctly different languages.

Lecture 16: Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth
Diglossia is the sociological division of labor in many societies between two languages, with a "high" one used in formal contexts and a "low" one used in casual ones—as in High German and Swiss German in Switzerland.

🎧 Lecture 14 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 14: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter John McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 14: Dialects—Subspecies of Species
The first of five lectures on dialects probes the nature of these "languages within languages." Dialects are variations on a common theme, rather than bastardizations of a "legitimate" standard variety.

🎧 Lecture 13 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 13: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 13: The Case For the World’s First Language
Despite the hostility of most linguists to the Proto-World hypothesis, there is increasing evidence that many of the world's language families do trace to "mega-ancestors," even if evidence for a Proto-World remains lacking.

🎧 Lectures 10-12 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 10-12: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 10: Language Families—Diversity of Structures
Semitic languages assign basic meanings to three-consonant sequences and create words by altering the vowels around them. In Sino-Tibetan languages, a sentence tends to leave more to context than we often imagine possible.

Lecture 11: Language Families—Clues to the Past
The distribution of language families shows how humans have spread through migration. We trace the Austronesian language family to its origins on Formosa. Similar work sheds light on the history of Africa and North America.

Lecture 12: The Case Against the World’s First Language
A few linguists have claimed to reconstruct words from the world's first language, but this work is extremely controversial. Professor McWhorter presents the case against this theory, called the "Proto-World" hypothesis.

🎧 Lecture 9 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 9: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 9: Language Families—Tracing Indo-European
Linguists have reconstructed the proto-language of the Indo-Europeans by comparing the modern languages. Applying this process, we learn the Proto-Indo-European word for sister-in-law that was spoken 6,000 years ago.

🎧 Lectures 6-8 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 6-8: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 6: How Language Changes—Many Directions
The first language has evolved into 6,000 because language change takes place in many directions. Latin split in this way into the Romance languages as changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin.

Lecture 7: How Language Changes—Modern English
As recently as Shakespeare, English words had meanings different enough to interfere with our understanding of his language today. Even by the 1800s, Jane Austen's work is full of sentences that would now be considered errors.

Lecture 8: Language Families—Indo-European
The first of four lectures on language families introduces Indo-European, which probably began in the southern steppes of Russia around 4000 B.C. and then spread westward to most of Europe and eastward to Iran and India.

 

 

🎧 Lectures 4 and 5 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 4: How Language Changes—Building New Material
Language change is not just sound erosion and morphing, but the building of new words and constructions. This lecture shows how such developments lead to novel grammatical features.

Lecture 5: How Language Changes—Meaning and Order
The meaning of a word changes over time. Silly first meant "blessed" and acquired its current sense through a series of gradual steps. Word order also changes: In Old English, the verb usually came at the end of a sentence.

Some great examples of words changing over time:
eke name – nick name
(my) mine Ellie – Nellie and (my) mine Edward – Ned
brid (bird) / fowl
silly (blessed)
verb endings and conjugations
n’est verb pas in French in which pas means literally “step”

🎧 Lectures 2 and 3 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 2: When Language Began
We look at evidence that language is an innate ability of the human brain, an idea linked to Noam Chomsky. But many linguists and psychologists see language as one facet of cognition rather than as a separate ability.

Lecture 3: How Language Changes—Sound Change
The first of five lectures on language change examines how sounds evolve, exemplified by the Great Vowel Shift in English and the complex tone system in Chinese.

Interesting to hear him describe Chomsky first for his politics. I’ve always thought of him as a linguist first and only secondarily for his politics.

🎧 The Story of Human Language | The Great Courses

Listened to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics
Language defines us as a species, placing humans head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators. But it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries, allowing us to ponder why different languages emerged, why there isn't simply a single language, how languages change over time and whether that's good or bad, and how languages die out and become extinct. Now you can explore all of these questions and more in an in-depth series of 36 lectures from one of America's leading linguists. You'll be witness to the development of human language, learning how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today and gaining an appreciation of the remarkable ways in which one language sheds light on another. The many fascinating topics you examine in these lectures include: the intriguing evidence that links a specific gene to the ability to use language; the specific mechanisms responsible for language change; language families and the heated debate over the first language; the phenomenon of language mixture; why some languages develop more grammatical machinery than they actually need; the famous hypothesis that says our grammars channel how we think; artificial languages, including Esperanto and sign languages for the deaf; and how word histories reflect the phenomena of language change and mixture worldwide.
I had started this some time in the past, but starting over again from the beginning.

Listened to the first 15 minutes tonight.

👓 Shavian alphabet | Wikipedia

Read Shavian alphabet (Wikipedia)
The Shavian alphabet (also known as the Shaw alphabet) is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of conventional spelling. It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as "phonetic" as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply "misspellings".
hat tip to

👓 Why you should learn the Skwxwú7mesh language | YOUR CONTEXT

Read Why you should learn the Skwxwú7mesh language (yourcontext.org)
As the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger puts it, Squamish is a ‘severely endangered’ language. However, the picture is not so gloomy. Current efforts to revitalize the Skwxwú7mesh language, and culture, include the amazing work by Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which has been collaborating with SFU for a full-time immersion program that produces fluent native speakers. Obviously, the venerable goal of this initiative it to ensure future Squamish generations speak their language and live their culture, as their natural, historical right.
I like where this piece is going, but at the rate we’re losing languages, it’s awfully difficult to know where to start… Sometimes just picking one and going with it can be of immense value.

This also reminds me of a powerful infographic about languages.

🎧 George Lakoff on How Trump uses words to con the public | Reliable Sources podcast

Listened to George Lakoff on how Trump uses words to con the public by Brian Stelter from Reliable Sources | CNN

President Donald Trump has "turned words into weapons" -- and journalists are providing additional ammunition.

That's according to Trump critic George Lakoff, a renowned linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. Lakoff wrote in a recent article for the Guardian that the president manipulates language to control the public narrative. The press, he said, functions as a sort of "marketing agency for [Trump's] ideas" by repeating his claims, even when trying to fact-check or debunk his statements.

"By faithfully transmitting Trump's words and ideas, the press helps him to attack, and thereby control, the press itself," he writes.

As the guest on this week's Reliable Sources podcast, Lakoff spoke to Brian Stelter about Trump's linguistic frames, what the press should do differently, and why journalists need to tackle Trump's words like a "truth sandwich."

👓 What English Would Sound Like If It Was Pronounced Phonetically | Open Culture

Read What English Would Sound Like If It Was Pronounced Phonetically (Open Culture)
The English language presents itself to students and non-native speakers as an almost cruelly capricious entity, its irregularities of spelling and conjugation impossible to explain without an advanced degree.