Languages, cultures and societies. Postgraduate studies in ...
Languages & Cultures of East Asia
Transcript of Languages & Cultures of East Asia
Languages & Cultures of East Asia
Relationships Between Languages
Test your knowledge – Quiz
1. Chinese and Japanese are related languages.
2. There are five vowel sounds in English
3. Educated people speak more grammatically than do uneducated people.
4. Linguists are people who speak many languages.
5. The languages of ‘primitive’ people have simpler grammars than do languages such as English.
Test your knowledge – Quiz
1. All languages in the world have nouns and verbs.
2. We should say ‘It’s I’ rather than ‘It’s me.’
3. A language which has never been written is not really a language.
4. As a language is passed on from one generation to the next, it tends to get corrupted.
Test your knowledge – Quiz
1. English is a simpler language than Latin or Greek.
2. Spoken language is a degenerate form of language; real language is what is written.
3. It’s easier to learn Cantonese if your ethnic roots are in Hong Kong.
4. It’s natural to start a sentence with the subject and follow it with the verb.
Test your knowledge – Quiz
1. How many languages are there in the world?
a. 100
b. 500
c. 1000
d. more than 2000
– Atlas 6000
– Comrie 4000
Why is this question impossible to answer?
Why is this impossible to answer?
1. Many parts of the world are not well studied
– Papua New Guinea
only recently studied
•contains 1/5th of the
world’s languages
World Map
Why is this impossible to answer?
� Many parts of the world are still not studied
– there are still other remote areas
Why is this impossible to answer?
2. Difficult to distinguish between a dialect and a language
– decision is often made on social-political
grounds
• European language divisions based on social factors
•German/Dutch
•Which country is dominant?
Why is this impossible to answer?
Difficult to distinguish between a dialect and a language
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
what does this mean?
Why is this impossible to answer?
� Linguistic criterion:
– mutual intelligibility
– if they are mutually intelligible � dialects
of the same language
– if they are not � different languages
Why is this impossible to answer?
� (Dis)advantages
1. Chinese ‘languages’ rather than Chinese
dialects
– Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually
intelligible
2. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish...?
•turn out to be
dialects
Swedish, Norwegian and Danish
Difficult to distinguish between
language and dialects
contradictory results:
– dialect chain
A � B � C � D
but
A ≠ D
Difficult to distinguish between
language and dialects
Difficult to distinguish between
language and dialects
Notion of mutual intelligibility is
also a matter of degree
• Intelligibility increases with
familiarity
• Easier to understand when you
want to understand
Why is this question impossible to
answer?
Language change
– Where do we draw the line?
– Latin � French, Italian
• considered different languages
– Ancient Greek � Modern Greek
• considered stages of the same language
– Old English � Modern English vs.
– Anglo-Saxon � English
Why is this question impossible to
answer?
3. Many languages are on the verge of extinction
� there are only a handful of these
speakers, in old age
� Ainu
� ½ the world’s languages will become
extinct in the next 100 years
Which languages have the
most speakers?
� Chinese 1000 (in millions)
� English 350
� Spanish 250
� Hindi 200
� Japanese 120
� Korean 60
What does it mean to say
that two languages belong
to the same language family?
Same Language Family
� English and German vs.
� English and Russian
� http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017
Same Language Family
� Share a set of features
– Attributed to a common ancestor
• English man man’s
• German Mann Manns
– hypothesis:
• had a common ancestor
Germanic Language Family
English German Icelandic
Germanic
If two languages share some similarities, is it necessarily true
that they belong to the same language family?
No.
Explanations for similarities among languages
1. Genetic relationship
Indo-European
English (Germanic)Latin-base (Romance)
1. foot pedometer, pedal, podiatrist
2. father petrineal
3. three triangle, tripod
4. tooth dental, orthodontist
5. heart cardiac, cardiology
2. Chance
(similarities btwn languages just by chance)
English Mbabaram (Australian)
dog dog
German Zuni
nass nas 'wet'
Sanskrit Malay
dva dua 'two'
3. Language Universals
� The sound ma in ‘mother’
– English ‘mother’ Chinese ‘ma’ Sanskrit ‘mata’
– Onomatopoeia
English: English:
cock-a-doodle-doo tik-tock ding-dong
German: Malay:
kikariki tik, tuk ting, tong
Japanese:
kokekokko
3. Language Universals
� Certain language features frequently co-occur
– if a language is SOV, postpositions rather than prepositions
• ‘the table on’
� Word order typology
S = Subject, O= Object, V = Verb
1. SOV (Japanese, Korean) most frequent
2. SVO (English, Chinese) next most frequent
3. VSO (Welsh, Samoan) less frequent
Other orders are less common.
4. Borrowing
� English
French period � William the Conqueror 1066 AD (Norman French) for almost 300 years. (1362, English reestablished as language of courts)
1. Government
2. Law
3. Military
4. Religion
5. Meat on the table
4. Borrowing
� Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese
– shared features:
• tones
• mono-syllabic
• simple syllable structure
• lexical items
– result of Chinese cultural influence
– not because they are genetically related