Glotters - Language Definitions

Universal Grammar from a Martian's point of view

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:24:00 +0000

Universal grammar –the core idea

A Martian meets a terrestrial. They start conversing.

The terrestrial is surprised: ‘You speak my language very well. I guess, I am not the first human who you have conversed with.’

The Martian: ‘It’s true. I have met many humans from all over the world. They claimed to speak different languages and they also claimed that they don’t understand each other without having to learn each other’s language by making a big effort. It is very strange to me. I can understand all the languages that you claim are different. They sound the same.’

The terrestrial: ‘Noam Chomsky has already made a statement that a Martian would perceive our languages as one single language. Finally, you are the proof that universal grammar really exists. There are big debates on the question’

The Martian: ‘Or simply I am so intelligent that I can understand every language in the world, don’t you think? Because I am more intelligent, I can help you with the universal grammar issue. Let me ask you some questions which can be fundamental to investigate it. Describe a language. It doesn’t have to be a specific language, but any language. My aim is to understand the common properties of the world’s languages.

The terrestrial: A language always distinguishes nouns from verbs, or distinguishes function words from content words.

The Martian: Because of the universal properties of all languages. And how did you learn your language? Were you copying your mother’s sentences exactly as she was saying them? Was your mother correcting you?

The terrestrial: No, I wasn’t copying exactly what my mother was saying. My mom wasn’t correcting me, the opposite in fact, she was happy if I could say something. In addition, my neighbor, Simon who is a 9 year old boy, is deaf. His parents are also deaf but they learned sign language in their teens. That’s why they couldn’t learn it well and they make a lot of mistakes. However, surprisingly, Simon could learn sign language well. It is very interesting, isn’t it?

The Martian: So, you don’t learn everything from the environment as the behaviorist theory claims. It means children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them. It is poverty of the stimulus. Do you understand sentences that you haven’t heard before?

The terrestrial: Of course. I form sentences that I have haven’t heard before.

The Martian: So you can form infinite sentences using finite rules of the language. There should be a mental grammar then. You potentially could form countless sentences, this is your competence, but you form counted sentences in your usage, this is your performance.

So we can state that there are universal properties which all languages share. The child doesn’t only learn from his or her environment and his or her mistakes, but there must be an innate knowledge about the grammar that gives him or her access to learn any language. A human could form and understand sentences that he or she hasn’t heard before. This is the core idea of universal grammar.

If human language is innate, then why is there such a variety of languages? What do you think? Leave me a comment!

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Sound symbolism: the end of the dynasty

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:22:00 +0000

The Korean and Japanese languages were the main counsellors of Glottaland because they were very old and wise languages. They had particular functions: when they thought that Glottaland’s government was in trouble, they had the right to interfere and call another government to sit on the throne. The new king had to be a descendant of the Onomatopoeian dynasty and possess the capacity of creation. At that time, there were some pretenders: Clustering, Iconism and the twins, Phenomimes and Psychomimes. They all were nephews of Onomatopoeia, sons of her sister, Sound Symbolism They all possessed the capacity of creation. They formed an alliance against the new king and they won, however now they had to decide who takes the crown. More precisely, the Korean and Japanese languages were charged with this decision. They asked all the pretenders to convince them by creating new words.

The first pretender, Clustering made his presentation:

‘I am able to create semantic groups of words using only one letter. For example I have created the words which contain the letter ‘h’ and are related to housing like hut, home, hovel, habitat.’

The second pretender was Iconism:

‘I create words which contain meaningful letters. Look at these examples: 'stamp', 'stomp', 'tamp', 'tromp', 'tramp', and 'step'. If you put ‘m’ before ‘p’, it makes the action more powerful. I have created a meaning for every letter. For example: the front vowels such as i, e represent gentle narrow subjects and back vowels such as o, u represent strong broad subjects.’

The last pretenders were the twins, Phenomimes and Psychomimes:

‘We are the most powerful creators. We create words from intangible and invisible senses. We imitate soundless states. Phenomime creates words that depict states, conditions, or manners of the external world such as "damp" or "stealthily". Psychomime creates words that depict psychological states or physical feelings.’

Well, the counsellors, the Korean and Japanese languages had already encountered the twins because they had infected their structure with these types of words. For example, Japanese was full of the so-called i-type adjectives which represent emotive states like kanashii "sad" or sabishii "lonely". For that reason, the two wise languages chose the twins for the throne of Glottaland. However, their reign didn’t last long because Arbitrariness arrived to govern the kingdom of languages. He was the creation of Ferdinand de Saussure, the linguist who destroyed the magic of Glottaland and founded modern 'scientific' linguistics.

Ideophone vs Onomatopoiea: The Civil War

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:20:00 +0000

Ideophone was born as prince of Glottaland. He was the son of Onomatopoeia who was a very good and successful queen. However, she applied very strict rules to govern the kingdom. Her success laid in her strictness. She decided to teach Ideophone the principles of creating words in the way she practised them. Actually as a child, Ideophone was very similar to his mother: he could imitate the sounds and create words from their sounds.

However, as he grew up, he started showing interest in other things beyond the sounds. He liked the colors of the grass and the sky, he liked how flowers smell, so he liked nature very much. One day, he discovered how to imitate these properties of nature and from that moment, he learned how to create words from colors and smells. Every day he learned something new, every day he created new words. But he did all his activities in secret because he feared his mother’s reaction.

Once Ideophone went to the city to visit his people and see how they lived. As he was walking, he saw people moving. He couldn’t resist: he created words from the movements he saw. After that he saw a girl laughing. He immediately created a new word. Then he saw a man crying. A new word arose again. He became capable of making words which resembled movements and emotions. Ideophone’s talents went very far beyond Onomatopoiea’s.

The queen learned about Ideophone’s talent and his disobedience to the rules, because some languages came to the queen to complain. The Korean language complained because Ideophone created a new separate word class in the Korean structure. The Mundang language complained because the prince infected several of her word classes. The Japanese language complained because Ideophone’s creations occur within her utterances and they are inseparable from the other elements of the utterance.

Onomatopoiea got very angry because she couldn’t allow him to create new words in different ways. She couldn’t allow to develop new abilities. She wanted him to follow the queen’s way of creation. She got so angry that she decided to punish him by forbidding from using his talents.

However, Ideophone had already created so many new words which showed a high degree of grammatical independence, that he could initiate a civil war against his mother. He got stronger and stronger because he never stopped the creation. In the end, Ideophone usurped the queen and became the king of Glottaland. However, there were other pretenders to the crown too…

Onomatopoeia: the true story

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:16:00 +0000

Once there was a little girl born in Glottaland. As she was growing up everybody could see that she had a special talent: she was able to imitate every sound she heard around her. She could imitate the animals’ sounds like the birds while they were singing or the wind whispering through the leaves. She could also imitate the noise made by devices and objects.

It was said when she was just a child, she was playing on the street of the village when she saw a man “slapping” a door. Suddenly she started saying “knock knock”. She was inventing her first word inspired by an action.

With time she had learned how to repeat human vocal sounds like babbling and coughing.
She developed a special talent to create words which resemble the very noise or sound itself. Her name was Onomatopoeia.

One day, as she was walking towards the town, she saw a group of languages who were talking about a legend. They were telling an ancient Greek myth about the creator of languages. According to this myth the one who could imitate the sounds of the nature, is the real creator of the very first human language and for this reason he/she would have the right to govern Glottaland, the kingdom of languages where all languages originated.

As she was listening, her heart started to beat faster and faster. This story felt so familiar that she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Yes, of course! She was the creator of all languages. In addition, her name had a symbolic meaning: ὀνοματοποιία in the Greek language means "making or creating names".

She yelled: ‘Glottaland! Here I am. Your only creator! I am Onomatopoeia. I am the creator of all human languages in the world. I have created the very first words by imitating their nature. I am the evidence for how natural a language is. The legend is true. Greek philosophers also knew the truth: that language itself is derived from natural sounds in the world around us. You have to kneel down before me!’

The folk of Glottaland laughed.
‘You are no one, young lady!” – said someone from the crowd – “ It’s only a myth. Nobody believes in this story anymore.”.
”If you had created the words from their sounds, how would you explain that different languages refer to the same thing with different words? Why don’t all languages use your words?’

‘I have created the very first words imitating their natural sounds.” – replied Onomatopoeia –“I have shown a way of creation to you, ungrateful languages. All of you are different, all of you have different characteristics, you are different from each other typologically, you have founded different language families. If you are different, you certainly approach the world differently. You certainly perceive the noises differently, you name things differently.”

A wise old language showed up from the crowd. He was very angry and he was yelling around: ‘Shut up, stupid modern languages. You are so sceptical that you can’t see the truth! The myth is true!’ And while he was saying it, he took out the crown of Glottaland.

Form that moment begins the story of the royal dynasty of Glottaland.

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Animal communication vs. human language 2. – differences

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:15:00 +0000

Charles Hockett was disappointed because he couldn’t find the main distinguishing characteristics between animal communication systems and human language. However, at the end he seemed to have found a solution and he wanted to share it with Tarzan.

Hockett: ‘I thought about our discussion on animal communication and human language differences last time. I reached some conclusions. I made a list thanks to you! I am going to share the main design features of human language. First of all, I must tell you that the basis is the same: signs! We both communicate based on signs. The key difference here is that the sign system for animals is inborn, while we acquire these signs from the society and transmit them culturally. Only the capacity to create these signs, is inborn. This is called traditional or cultural transmission. ‘

Tarzan: ‘OK, it’s true the way that animals communicate is biological. Although some animals living in isolation, are unable to develop the calls for their species. It seems to be community dependent, doesn’t’ it? ’

Hockett: ‘But there is more. Another important human language characteristic is interchangeability. To my knowledge, males of some species produce different signs from females and they are not able to interchange the signs of the other gender.’

Tarzan: ‘Yes, as you said, there are some species which are unable to interchange the male sign with the female sign. However, it’s not universal for animal communication. I can accept it as a relative feature of human language, but not absolute.’

Hockett: ‘Ok, it’s true. There is another feature. Human language is symbolic. The signs of human language are arbitrary and there is no meaningful connection between a sound form and its meaning. We can call it arbitrariness.’

Tarzan: ‘It’s not an absolute feature for human language. Think about onomatopoeias: words that resemble the sounds that they refer to. The way these words have been created are not arbitrary.’

Hockett: ‘By the way, creation! Listen to this. Here you cannot object! The animal calls always depend on their genes, hence biology. Animals always produce the same signs. Human signs can change even rapidly depending on language change features. New words can be invented, while animals have to evolve in order that their signs change. For animals, each meaning can be expressed in only one way, while for humans, one meaning can be expressed in many ways. We can call it productivity or creativity.’

Tarzan: ‘Hmm. It’s very interesting! But it seems, it’s about the human mind, not the language itself. Human language is a result of the mind, a creation of mind. Creativity is a characteristic of humans, not a characteristic of language. So, to find a solution for the description of human language, we should start by studying the mind!’

Hockett: ‘OK, Tarzan. You will not object to the upcoming feature. I have found a very interesting characteristic of language: duality of patterning. It means, meaningful messages contain meaningful smaller units like words or morphemes, however these meaningful units can be divided in meaningless units like phonemes.’

Tarzan: ‘You are right. No objection. In addition, I would add that the grammar could be an absolute characteristic of human language. I have heard about Chomsky who claims that humans possess an innate universal grammar that is not possessed by other species.’

In the end, professor Hockett developed the design features of language by having long discussions with his wild friend who lacked a human language. The design features contain sixteen features, but we have discussed only the most important ones here.

Do you know all the sixteen features? Write them in the comments!

Animal communication vs. human language 1. - Similarities

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:08:00 +0000

Tarzan had many animal friends who he was communicating with. He was told he wasn’t using a language but a different kind of communication system because animals don’t have languages. But he didn’t believe that his communication system wasn’t a language and he decided to pursue it.

He went to discuss this with Charles Hockett who was a linguistic anthropologist and was studying the distinguishing characteristics of human language from animal communication.

Tarzan: ‘How are the forms of communication used by animals different from human language?’

Hockett: ‘You know the vocal-auditory channel is for human language. We hear and speak, right?’

Tarzan: ’So, are you saying that sign languages are not languages? Aren’t there sign languages?’

Hockett: ‘Hmm. You are right. There are sign and even written languages. Let’s look for something else! Aha! Humans communicate with signs! Think about words! Words are the most commonly used signs for human communication. ‘

Tarzan: ’Sorry, Mr. Hockett, but you are confusing me. Do you mean that animals don’t use signs for communication? I know many species that use them. For example, foxes have 20 distinct forms of vocalization.’

Hockett: ‘Ok then. The difference lies in the sounds. Humans express emotions by adding different tones to their words.’

Tarzan: ‘Actually, it’s a similarity again. My vervet monkey friends use three distinct alarm calls depending on the type of predator. Their babies use the same cry/ call for an incoming eagle and any birds when they are very small, but then they learn distinct warning calls to distinguish an eagle from other birds. Exactly the same way that a human baby learns to call his/her mother with a different cry from the rest.’

Hockett: ‘Ok, but humans can communicate about distant things in time or space. Animals cannot do that. We can call this feature displacement’.

Tarzan: ‘Can they not? Well, listen to this. Honeybees have two kinds of dances to communicate the distance of the food. They dance in a circle if the food is 50-60 meters away and they use the waggle dance if the food is further away. In addition, they point out the direction where the food is located with their dance. They demonstrate displacement, don’t they?’

Hockett: ‘Oh yes. There is one thing more. Can animals lie? They can’t lie or deceive. It’s a specific human ability which is called prevarication.’

Tarzan: ‘I am really sorry, but I have to correct you again. Many of my animal friends lie or deceive continuously. Think of insects that imitate being leaves. Isn’t it deception? Or don’t you know Koko, the sign gorilla? She claimed that her kitten did something bad that she (Koko) actually did.’

Hockett: ‘Oh no! So, what is the difference between human language and animal communication?’

What do you think? Write your answer in the comments!

The human language

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:07:00 +0000

Human language

Tarzan was told that he had to learn a human language. He got very upset because he didn’t even know what a language was. So, first he decided to learn what language means.

On his way, he encountered a language philosopher with whom he started to communicate in mentalese (as he lacked a human language). Tarzan asked him whether he knew what language was.

The language philosopher obviously knew what language was:

‘A natural language can be spoken, written or signed. Language is a mental faculty which makes a human capable of learning, of understanding and of producing a language. This faculty is universal for all humans. It means, every cognitively sane children can learn a language because the ability to acquire a language, is innate. Of course, the environment also plays a very important role because we learn from the society.’

As Tarzan heard it, he got upset again because he lost hope that he could learn a language. He wasn’t a child anymore and all his efforts to understand what people said, were in vain. But he didn’t give up and he asked where to go to get more information.

The language philosopher: ‘Go to cognitive sciences and neurolinguistics as they approach the language from this innatist point of view. You have to learn about universal grammar and the theories of Noam Chomsky if you want to know more about this view. Other cognitive scientists, for example, Steven Pinker, claim that language is an instinct. Others again think that there is a language organ somewhere in the brain. Or Terrence W. Deacon says that languages are like viruses. Other approaches view the language as a tool for communication which was developed to serve humans in order to express themselves. Language is a means for manipulation: humans manipulate objects and each other by using languages. The grammar of the language has gone through an adaptive process to serve the communicational need of human. ’

Tarzan became sad. He had thought language was like music and a means for expressing emotions as Rousseau and Herder said. Or at least the result of a logical expression of rational thought as Kant and Descartes approached it. But in any case, not looking at language as an inferior system subordinated to humans.

The language philosopher continued: ‘According to the structuralist view of Ferdinand de Saussure language is a closed structural system. It means, language has rules which link particular signs to particular meanings. Chomsky worked out the generative theory of grammar which is based on the assumption that language is a construction of sentences that can be generated by transformational grammar.’

Tarzan was becoming sadder and sadder and he was going to give up understanding all these definitions, when he got the last stab.

The language philosopher: ’Whatever the language is, it’s certain that language is unique to humans.’

Tarzan collapsed. He had thought he had been communicating with his animal friends, but the language philosopher said, it wasn’t a language. He didn’t understand what the difference between animal and human communication was. The only thing he clearly understood was that he knew nothing about language. His mind was full of questions, doubts and curiosity. That’s why, he decided to clarify the position of languages…

Linguistics and linguist: the investigation

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 11:56:00 +0000

The linguist and linguistics

A group of linguists were caught because they have stolen a human language from the language bank . The police is interrogating one of them.

The policeman: “Well, you claim that you are a linguist. We have heard about you and your band before. Nobody knows what a linguist does, but the police! Some linguists work for us too: they translate documents, they interpret at the court. So, basically you are a translator, is it true?”

The linguist: “No, I am a general linguist. I study languages like Noam Chomsky. I study the language as a phenomenon. I examine the functions of language in general, I analyze language form, language meaning, and language in context.”

The policeman: “Hmm. But you know many languages, don’t you?

The linguist: “I know the structure of many languages, but I don’t speak them. I only speak English. For my profession it’s not necessary to speak the languages that I work with. Some of my colleagues have specialized in particular languages and they speak them too. “

The policeman: “Clear. Explain your working methods to me! How do you analyze languages? Where do you work?

The linguist: “It’s complicated. I would need a life sentence to explain everything. Well, firstly to analyze a language we have to describe its sounds. Phonetics deals with speech and non-speech sounds. We have to study the meaning of the elements of the language. The field which studies it, is called semantics. Another very important part of the language is the grammar which is the system of governing rules in a certain language. The grammar has three big parts: phonology, morphology and syntax. Descriptive linguistics deals with these elements of language. There are many other branches of linguistics: structural linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, historical and evolutionary linguistics and so on. But if you want to know more about these fields, you have to ask my colleagues because being a general linguist doesn’t mean knowing everything about linguistics. Well, answering your question about our working place/spot, I can say that the places can be very different: linguists can work inside the academy or outside. So, we can be professors at a university, we can work for research institutes outside the academy. We can decide to teach a language, we can be translators or interpreters as you mentioned, or we can work as a forensic linguists. As far as physical spots are concerned, academic linguists can do their research in a library, but they can go to work in the field to document research about a language.”

The policeman: “Now everything is clear! The only thing that I don’t understand is why you study languages.”

The linguist: “It’s a passion. But of course, there are some more practical reasons as well. For example, computational linguists study human languages in order to reproduce them. They study how to teach languages to machines or produce automatic translations.”

The policeman: “Aha! So, you steal human languages in order to put them inside machines, so that machines will govern humans. It’s a crime against mankind!”

So, the linguist was arrested and he had to defend himself in court.

How would you defend him if you were his lawyer?

Tell me in a comment!

Grammaticalization: how to destroy a language?

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 11:54:00 +0000

Have you ever asked yourself how to destroy a language?

Well, Language Omega has asked because he has just conquered the country of Language Alpha and he wants to rule its people. He has very good counsellors: Christian Lehmann who wrote a fundamental work in the field: Thoughts on Grammaticalization, and Heine and Reh who wrote another important book: Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages.

First of all, the counsellors suggested not destroying the language but deforming it. ‘Where the process of language deformation or let’s say, change begins, you can conquer the people of that language because they become more accepting of other changes that you want to impose on them. One of the most powerful elements of language change is grammaticalization. It’s a painful process because words which represent objects and actions, have to leave their grammatical categories and enter a new grammatical category to become grammatical markers like affixes, prepositions, etc. Sometimes a lexical word or cluster completely loses its lexical meaning, sometimes retains it and has both lexical meaning and grammatical function. A good example for grammaticalization is the English ‘will’, which status as a verb also became auxiliary.’

The counsellors described how to do grammaticalization. There are four processes to obtain efficiency:

‘’First, Semantic bleaching, or desemanticization. It’s a process when a lexical item loses its semantic content. For example, take the word ‘very’ which means ‘true’ from Latin and use it for emphasis.

Second, Morphological reduction or decategorialization. It is a process whereby something that is clearly marked (either by morphology or by function) as a member of one grammatical category shifts to be more marked or functioning as a member of another category. Take a preposition ‘off’ and use it as a verb. For example: ‘Off the pigs’.

Third, Phonetic erosion. It means, one expression after undergoing grammaticalization, loses phonetic substance. For example, take the expression ‘going to’ and throw some phonetic segments out. You’ll get ‘gonna’. The only thing you are doing is following the principle of least effort. People are lazy, they will like this new rule.

Fourth, Obligatorification. Lehmann suggested to reduce "the freedom of the language user with regard to the paradigm as a whole". It is a process when the use of a linguistic element becomes obligatory in use. For example, the French "ne...pas" started as a way to emphasize the negative, but became obligatory. The counsellors warned Language Omega. ‘Use the process of Obligatorification carefully because there are some rebels like the linguist Bybee who fights for the independent status of Obligatorification from grammaticalization and putting it in a wider category: language change.

The counsellors added an important note:

‘To rule a language, you need to know his past so that you will gain insight into how he will develop in the future. Grammaticalization can be used for these aims too as it plays an important role in the reconstruction of older states of a language.’

What examples do you have in your language for grammaticalization?

Language shift: the language cemetery

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 11:48:00 +0000

Language Alpha went to see the language therapist because he is losing his identity and he doesn’t know where he belongs any more. Where does his language soul come from?

The language therapist language analyzes him by hypnotizing him in order to reveal his origins. Language Alpha talks about his ancestors’ past in hypnosis.

‘I see a mediaeval Empire with people who are talking a strange language, called Bulgarian and I can understand it completely. It’s a Turkic language. Normally I speak neither Bulgarian nor any Turkic languages. After that I see another picture. It’s a country in the Balkans. Their language is also called Bulgarian, but I can’t understand it. Or more precisely, I understand only few elements of the language. It’s a Slavic language, no longer Turkic. After that centuries passed. I can see myself desperately seeking the Bulgarian language, my real origins, my real soul, but no hope. My real identity is the Bulgarian language and it has disappeared.’

Language Alpha wakes up, but he is very upset. What has happened to him? Has his language soul change? Or has he become a different language? Or more tragically, has his language soul died?

A language shift has occurred. It’s a is a social phenomenon. It’s different from language change as it’s not a structural change, but a replacement of the old language with a new one. Usually it occurs when a community doesn’t see any reason to maintain their ethnic language. It happens mainly in mixed-language or bilingual areas. The reasons can be immigration or preferring the language of the higher status. A rapid language shift happens when a minority has an urge to learn the language of the society where learning the language is required for success. When the speakers of one language become bilingual in another language, and gradually shift allegiance to the second language, it is called assimilation. When the speakers stop using their mother tongue, language death occurs.

The therapist calms Alpha: ‘The language is never destroyed, only transformed. Your language soul is still alive deep inside you.’

Do you think languages die or only transform?