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Bakovic All Languages Are Odd
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Transcript of Bakovic All Languages Are Odd
8/8/2019 Bakovic All Languages Are Odd
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All languages are oddEric Baković — Linguistics
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In what region of the world arethe most languages spoken?
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• “Languages are very un-evenly distributed amongthe countries of the world.The map tries to capture this
fact by rendering each coun-try in a size corresponding tothe number of languagesspoken in it. (Because of the
inherent problems in accom-plishing this, sizes are ratherapproximate). The ten sha-ded countries are those in
which more than 200 lan-guages are in use.”
— Limits of Language
, byMikael Parkvall
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• ‘Run-of-the-mill’ (Western) languages
• English, Spanish, French, German,Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, …
• ‘Exotic’ languages
• Most languages of Africa, NativeAmerica, aboriginal Australia, lesser-
known East Asian nations, …• Somewhere in between
• Slavic languages, Chinese, Japanese,Korean, Arabic, Turkish, …
Language exoticism
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The exoticism continuum
less exotic more exotic
English WalpiriRussian Turkish Quechua
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Linguistic basis?
• There is absolutely no linguistic basisfor the exoticism continuum!
• Our judgments about the relativeexoticism of languages is most closelycorrelated with our judgments aboutthe relative exoticism of the languages’
speakers (≈ people from those places).• Also: the more familiar a language (or
its people), the less exotic we think it is.
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Language families?
• “But aren’t language families wildly
different from each other?” — you ask.
• After all, western/European languages
tend to be closely related (Romance
languages, Germanic languages, etc.)
• Perhaps these language families happen
to be boring in ways that others aren’t.
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One goal of this talk• I have a handful of examples of what
appear to be exotic features of more exotic
languages to show you.
• (You may be familiar with some of them.)
• In each case, I’ll show you how less exotic
languages (English and others) have acorresponding exoticizable feature.
• (Though you probably didn’t think of thesefeatures in this way before.)
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Another, similar goal
• ‘Dialects’ are often thought to be failedattempts by the uneducated to speak the standard language of the educated.
• But derided dialect features are in manycases distinguished features of other standard languages.
• The basis for both the derision and thedistinction is similarly non-linguistic:the attitudes are really about people.
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• Does thought
determine language,
or does language
determine thought?
• (And what does that
even mean?)
Example 1: words & thoughts
Steven Pinker
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• Benjamin Lee Whorf
• “We dissect nature along lines laid
down by our native languages. [T]heworld is presented in a kaleidoscopic
flux of impressions which has to be
organized by our minds—and thismeans largely by the linguistic
systems in our minds.”
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Eskimo words for snow
• “Eskimos have x words for snow.”
• x = 9, 48, 200, 400, … ?
• ‘Eskimos’ = exotic. (Right?)
• ‘Eskimo languages’: Yupik, Inuit
• Synonymous words meaning snow , or
words for different types of snow?
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English words for snow
• English has plenty of words to describe
different types of snow.
• snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche,
hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting
• … “snizzling”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• Geoffrey K. Pullum
• “The alleged lexical extravagance of theEskimos comports so well with the many
other facets of their polysynthetic perversity:rubbing noses; lending their wives tostrangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwingGrandma out to be eaten by polar bears.”
• Pinker: “[T]he supposedly mind-broadeninganecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizingwillingness to treat other cultures’ psychologiesas weird and exotic compared to our own.”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• “Among the many depressing things
about this credulous transmission and
elaboration of a false claim is that evenif there were a large number of roots for
different snow types in some Arctic
language, this would not , objectively, beintellectually interesting; it would be a
most mundane and unremarkable fact.”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• “Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists
have names for leaf shapes; interiordecorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different
names for fonts […]. Would anyone think
of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in
bad linguistics textbooks?”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• “[From a textbook:] ‘It is quite obvious
that in the culture of the Eskimos … snowis of great enough importance to split up
the conceptual sphere that corresponds to
one word and one thought in English intoseveral distinct classes …’”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• “Imagine reading: ‘It is quite obvious
that in the culture of printers … fonts
are of great enough importance to split
up the conceptual sphere that
corresponds to one word and one
thought among non-printers intoseveral distinct classes …’”
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Example 1: words & thoughts
• “Utterly boring, even if true. Only the
link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-knawing hunters of the ice-
packs could permit something this trite
to be presented to us forcontemplation.”
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Example 2: word classes
• Some languages group nouns into classes.
• Most typical (= least exotic!): gender
• masculine, feminine; maybe neuter
• Romance languages, German
• Some more exotic languages use moreexotic noun classification systems.
• (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)
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Dyirbal noun classes• Dyirbal is an Australian aboriginal language
with four noun classes:
I. animate objects, menII. women, water, fire, violenceIII. edible fruit and vegetablesIV. miscellaneous (includes things not
classifiable in the first three)• Class II inspired the title of George Lakoff’s
1987 book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.
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Other Australian languages
• Ngangikurrunggurr has noun classes
reserved for canines, and hunting
weapons, and Anindilyakwa has a
noun class for things that reflect light.
Diyari distinguishes only between
female and other objects. Perhaps the
most noun classes in any Australianlanguage are found in Yanyuwa, which
has 16 noun classes.
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Other Australian languages• Yanyula has 15 noun classes, including
nouns associated with food, trees andabstractions, in addition to separate
classes for men and masculine things,women and feminine things. In themen’s dialect, the classes for men and
for masculine things have simplified toa single class, marked the same way asthe women’s dialect marker reservedexclusively for men.
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Bantu noun classes
• Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun
classes called nominal classes. While no
single language is known to express all
of them, most of them have at least 10
noun classes. For example, Shona has
20 classes, Swahili has 15 , Sesotho has
18 and Luganda has 17.
• Noun Classification in Swahili , by Ellen Contini-Morava; http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/swahili/
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• What if I told you that
the everyday English
verbs hit , cut , break ,and touch belong to
different verb classes?
• (And what does that
even mean?)
English verb classes
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Pinker 2007, p. 106
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Pinker 2007, p. 103
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Pinker 2007, p. 103-104
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Pinker 2007, p. 104-105
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Pinker 2007, p. 105
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Pinker 2007, p. 105
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Pinker 2007, p. 106
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Example 3: sounds
• Some languages on the more exotic end
of the continuum have sounds knownas clicks (like tsk, tsk or tut, tut).
• Clicks are common in Bantu languages
like Zulu, but also in other languages of South Africa, such as !Xóõ and Nama.
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How to make a click
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X-ray of a click
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter13/movie.html
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Voiceless aspirated stops
labial coronal dorsal• Closure: the articulators are brought together in such a way that a
complete constriction is formed. The air from the lungs cannot escape.• Release: the articulators are pulled apart abruptly, and the pressurized
air escapes in a sudden puff, referred to as the noise burst.
• Voice onset time: a non-negligible amount of time passes between the
noise burst and the onset of vowel voicing (= vocal fold vibration).
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voiced
voicelessunaspirated
voiceless
aspirated
Voice onset time …
… in English!
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Example 4: sound patterns• A language’s sounds are not distributed
randomly in words — there are restrictions
on what sounds can co-occur.
• (This is what I study most: phonology.)
• For example, in English:
• brick shows that br can begin a word.• *bnick shows that bn cannot begin a word.
• Because blue exists, blick is a possible word!
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Turkish vowels
i
ü
e a
ö o
u
ı
front back
high
low
spread
round
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Some Turkish nouns(nominative singular)
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Turkish genitive suffix
• The genitive suffix is a high vowel.
• It copies the front/back and round/
spread quality from the previous vowel.
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Turkish plural suffix
• The plural suffix is a low spread vowel.
• It copies only the front/back quality
from the previous vowel.
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Turkish genitive plural
• The genitive suffix seems to be a high spread vowel.
• It’s because the previous vowel is the plural suffix,
which is never round.
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Some English consonants
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Past tenses of verbs
• The past tense suffix is a stop consonant.
• It copies voicing from the previous consonant.
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Plurals of nouns
• The past tense suffix is a fricative consonant.
• It copies voicing from the previous consonant.
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More English consonants
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Negatives of adjectives
• The negative prefix ends in a nasal consonant.
• It copies place of articulation from the following consonant.
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Example 5: dialect forms
• Everyone speaks a dialect of a language.
• The ‘standard language’ is just another
dialect, like any other.
• The ‘standard’ vs. ‘non-standard’
distinction has no linguistic basis.
• “A language is a dialect with an army
and a navy.” — Max Weinreich
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Double negatives
• “Two negatives make a positive.”
• A good rule of thumb for math and
logic, but not really for language.
• I don’t like nobody.
• Standard English: “I like somebody.”
• Nonstandard: “I don’t like anybody.”
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Double negatives
• Ain’t nobody done nothin’.
• If the math/logic analysis was right,this would come out negative!
• But it’s still supposed to be “wrong”
for the same reasons as the lastexample: too many negatives.
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Double negatives
• Multiple negatives are standard in other
languages — take Romance, for example.
• Spanish:
• No hice nada. = “I didn’t do anything.”
• French:
• Je ne sais rien. = “I don’t know anything.”
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Double negatives• While learning Turkish, I was getting in
trouble with some friends. A mother asked:
• Ne oldu? = “What happened?”• Trying to cover my own butt, I replied:
• Hiç bir șey oldu. = “not one thing happened”
• But I should have said:
• Hiç bir șey olmadı. = “Nothing happened.”
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Tag questions
• Most dialects of English (including the
standard) form tag questions thusly:
• That’s a nice car, isn’t it ?
• You would like to go, wouldn’t you?
• I’m at work, aren’t I ?
• She can take the subway, can’t she?
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Tag questions
• Some non-standard British dialects of
English form tag questions with innit .
• That’s a nice car, innit ?
• You would like to go, innit ?
• I’m at work, innit ?
• She can take the tube, innit ?
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Tag questions
• Standard French is not too different.
• C’est une jolie voiture, n’est-ce pas?• “It’s a nice car, is it not?”
• Tu voudrais aller, n’est-ce pas?• “You would like to go, is it not?”
• Je suis au travail, n’est-ce pas?
• “I’m at work, is it not?”
• Elle peut prendre le metro, n’est-ce pas?• “She can take the metro, is it not?”
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Tag questions
• Spanish is similar.
• Es un lindo auto, no/no ve/verdad?• “It’s a nice car, no/don’t you see/truth?”
• Quisieras ir, no/no ve/verdad?• “You’d like to go, no/don’t you see/truth?”
• Estoy en el trabajo, no/no ve/verdad?
• “I’m at work, no/don’t you see/truth?”• Puede tomar el tren, no/no ve/verdad?
• “She can take the train, no/don’t you see/truth?”
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No language is odd
• Reconciling this with the talk’s title:
• No language is really any more or lessodd (or exotic) than any other.
• Close scrutiny of a language — any language — reveals extraordinarycomplexity (and systematicity).
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Thank you.
Contact me: [email protected]