Language and Communication

Functions of verbal behavior

2009-10-30T19:21:00.000-07:00

Functions of verbal behavior
Verbal behavior has various at the same time. One of the most importance functions of verbal behavior is to communicate but not all verbal behavior is communicate it has communication as its primary function.

The production of verbal art or literature can in principle serve any of a wide range of functions, including but not restricted to communication.

Here are some of the other functions which can be served by verbal behavior and which are sometimes served specifically by verbal art:

Entertainment
The display of skill
Praise of a good patron, or censure of an enemy
The promotion of cultural values and morality
The expression of mutual experience, thus bonding together and audience
Recording of historical events, or laws or tenets of religion
Communication with supernatural beings
The control of the physical world by magical means
Healing

Any of these functions can also be served by non-verbal behaviors: for example, while communication is one of the possible of verbal behavior, it is also possible to communicate non-verbally.
Functions of verbal behavior

Languages Styles and Language Dialects

2009-10-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

Languages Styles and Language Dialects
Consider the following sentence:
You makin’ sense, but you don’ makin’ sense!

Speakers of the standard dialect of English are likely to conclude that this sentence is ungrammatical.

The first clause lacks a (finite) verb that the standard dialect requires and the sequence do+ be in the second clause is a combination that the standard dialect prohibits.

Speakers of the standard dialect might also question the logic of the sentence (and hence, as has unfortunately happened, the logical abilities of its utterer).

After all, the two clauses appear to contradict each other.

No human language is fixed, uniform, or unvarying; all languages show variation. Actual varies from group to group, and speaker to speaker, in terms of the pronunciation of a language, the choice of words and the meaning of those words and even the use of syntactic constructions.

To take a well known example, the speech of American is noticeably different from speech of the British, and the speech of these two groups in turn is distinct from the speech of Australians.

When groups of speakers differ noticeably in their language, they are often said to speak different dialects of the language.
Languages Styles and Language Dialects

What is Phonology?

2009-09-10T01:01:00.000-07:00

What is Phonology?
Phonology is the subfield of linguistics that studies the structure and systematic patterning of sounds in human language.

The term phonology is used in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to a description of the sounds of a particular language and the rules governing the distribution of those sounds.

Thus we can talk about the phonology of English, German, or any other language.

On the other hand, it refers to that part of the general theory of human language that is concerned with the universal properties of natural sound systems (i.e., properties reflected in many, if not all, human languages).

Phonology is not specifically concerned with aspects of speech production or perception which are purely the result of the physical properties of the system.

For instance it is often said that the articulation of the ‘k’ sounds in the words car and key differ from each other slightly.

In the ‘k’ of the key the tongue is brought slightly towards the front of the mouth in comparison with the ‘k’ of car.

The reason for this, of course is that the ‘ey’ vowel of key drags the tongue forward slightly, because that vowel is produced with the tongue slightly further forward in the mouth that the ‘a’ vowel of car.

This kind of phenomenon is of great interest to those speech scientist who study the precise way in which human speech sounds are produced and their influence on each other during speaking.
What is Phonology?

Structure of language

2009-08-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

Structure of language
The structure of language, or the way of morphemes are put together to form words and sentences that are both meaningful and correct.

We used the term syntax to refer to the way words are put together into phrases and sentences.

The term grammar refers to the overall set of rules for speaking and writing a given language.

Every language has syntactic rules that govern how words are put together. In English we say “the blue hat,” while in French one would say “the hat blue”.

It is not that one way is any better that the other but, rather that one way is agreed upon as “correct” in each language and the other is not.

We can all accept the statement “I sat on the chair,” but we know that a similar statement, “the chair sat on I,” is incorrect.

The words are the same, but the difference in order makes the second example nonsensical.

Using the same reasoning, we can accept a statement as correct even of we have never heard it before in exactly that way.

This fact led a linguist named Noam Chomsky to develop a new area of linguistic study called generative or transformational grammar.

Chomsky reasoned that of a native speaker can create an infinite number of grammatically correct statements without ever having heard of them, there must be a set of underlying linguistics rules that allow a person to generate his or her language.

The process of moving from those underlying rules (which Chomsky called deep structure) to the actual statement (surface structure) is termed a transformation.

In the same way, a native speaker can reject any statements that are not correct without ever having heard them before and usually without having to think about them.

Chomsky argues that the deep structure of all languages are the same, and that all born with an innate knowledge of deep structure.

They are also born with the capacity for making transformation, regardless of the deep and surface structures of their language.
Structure of language

Linguistics and the Study of Form

2009-08-05T18:51:00.000-07:00

Linguistics and the Study of Form
In the twentieth century, linguistics has been prominent in the study of form, partly because linguistics form is particularly rich and complex.

The prominence of linguistics has enabled to have a significant influence on the development of other disciplines which study form in areas other than language: anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, musicology, film theory and literary study for example.

This influence has come about for basically two reasons. First, one of the most influential early works on linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1913), suggested that the methods of linguistics might be extended to all communicative systems whether or not they use language, to become the basis of a general semiotics.

Second, contact between two Europeans who met in New York in the 1940s, the linguist Roman Jakobson and the anthropologist Claude Levi–Strauss. Left the latter convinced that phonology (the study of linguistics sounds) could provide a methodological basis for all the human sciences, and thus laid the path towards the French structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, in which linguistics inspired a range of disciplines.

The influence of linguistics on other disciplines, including the study of literature, has been fruitful, but also had the effect of de-emphasizing the specificity of linguistics and the distinctive status of linguistics form.

Thus it has become common to describe various kinds of non-linguistics form by using the terminology of linguistics: writes refer to ‘the syntax of film’ or ‘the language of clothing’, for example.

And literary form is sometimes analyzed as tough it was like linguistics form: thus narratives are sometimes seen as analogous to sentences.

These kinds of approach see ‘form; as something very general which exists similarly in many different media.

In opposition to these tendencies, most kinds of modern linguistics emphasize the distinctive characteristics of language, and the fact that when linguistics form is brought proper focus, it does not resemble any other kind of form.

This has been a fundamental principle of generative linguistics from its inception with Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure (1957).

It has also been the basis for a claim about the human mind: if linguistic form is different from any other kind of form then the human child’s ability to acquire a language so rapidly and efficiently (and therefore learn how to speak and understand a language) might be based on some propensity towards the learning of specifically linguistics form.

Thus it is possible that linguistics form emerges from mental structures which are specialized for language and with which human are born.

This has a further implication for literary linguistics. If linguistics form depends on specific mental structure and certain aspects of linguistics forms are adapted to literary use in ways which conform to general principle across languages, then it is possible that by studying the adaption of linguistics form in literary form we can therefore study the mind.

Literary scholars have sometime been content to borrow the terminology of linguistics while being resistant to the psychological implications of linguistics theory; both tendency can be traced to the same underestimation of the distinctiveness of linguistic form.
Linguistics and the Study of Form

Communication and Emotion

2009-06-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

Communication and Emotion
Communication is possible without words too. And this is largely thanks to the basic emotions every share.

When anthropologists first come onto contact with a previously isolated people, their only means of communication is via facial expressions and bodily gestures, many of which are specifically designed to express emotions.

The anthropologists may smile, an expression that will be recognized immediately by the isolated tribespeople.

The tribespeople may smile in return, showing that they share the same basic emotional repertoire.

Different cultures have elaborated on this repertoire, exalting different emotions, downgrading others and embellishing the common feelings with cultural nuances, but these differences are more like those between two interpretations of the same musical works, rather than those between different compositions.

Just as two orchestras will play the same symphony slightly differently, so two cultures will play out their emotional repertoire in different tones.

It will be clear to all however, that the score is the same.
Communication and Emotion

Communicative Act Potential

2009-06-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

Communicative Act Potential
Sentences also exhibit meaning properties and relations that words and phrases may lack.

One important property of a sentence is its communities act potential.

Sentences with different structures often have different communicative functions – they are conventionally used to perform different communicative acts in speaking.

Thus, a speaker who wants to assert or state that something is true will normally utter a declarative sentence such as Snow is white.

On the other hand, if the speaker wants to issue an order, request, or command, then an imperative sentence such as Leave the room! is appropriate.

Finally, if speaker wants to ask a question, then the obvious choice is an interrogative sentence such as What time is it? As a first approximation we could diagram these facts a s follows:

a. Declarative sentence – Used to constate (assert, state, claim, etc.)
b. Imperative sentence – Used to direct (order, request, command, etc.)
c. Interrogative sentence – Used to question.

It seems to be a part of the semantics of these structural types (declarative, imperative, interrogative) that they have the distinct communicative function as above.

In any event, we would not say someone understood sentences of these types unless that person understood the differences in communicative function.

That these different types of sentences had these different normal uses is an important semantic fact.

However, the field of semantics has traditionally concentrated on the assertive function of language, concerning itself mainly with the properties and relations that declarative sentences have regarding truth.
Communicative Act Potential

Early Years of Telegraph

2009-05-18T22:38:00.000-07:00

Early Years of Telegraph
In early years of telegraphy, telegraph wires ran above the ground.

Then in 1847, the chemist, and physicist Michael Faraday suggested insulating them with gutta-percha so that they could be laid underground or on the seabed.

The first London to Paris cable was in use in 1851 and after several attempts, transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1865.

By this time the telegraph was firmly establish, at the end of the 1860s 111,000 miles (180,000 km) of telegraph wires crisscrossed continental Europe.

One of the great advantages of the telegraph was the speed with which news could now be collected and distributed.

London’s The Times likened the transatlantic cable to he arrival of Columbus in the new World, though at the same time the editor warned his reporter that ‘telegrams are for facts; background and comment must come by post’.

He telegraph service quickly revolutionized journalism.

By end of the 1850s, as many as 120 provincial newspapers in Great Britain received news by wired from parliament daily, and the London based news agency that Julius Reuter has first started in Germany sent foreign news to editors in every town in the country.

Another innovation that the telegraph brought was the foreign correspondent or war correspondent - the man on the spot at momentous events who could send news as soon as it happened, instead of weeks or months later.
Early Years of Telegraph

Linguistics Form and Literary Form

2009-04-29T17:37:00.000-07:00

Linguistics Form and Literary Form
Verbal behavior is the production of texts, products which have verbal form in the media of writing or speech.

Some of those texts are verbal art, also called ‘literature’: they are literary texts.

Literary texts have linguistics form because they are texts (the product of verbal behavior), and they also have literary form.

Consider for example the following fragment of a literary text by Shakespeare.

It has both linguistics form and literary form, and certain aspects of the literary form are adaptations of the linguistics form.

So long as men can breathe and eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Among this text’s elements of linguistics form are the words which it uses, and the ways in which those words are combined into the complex linguistics structures called ‘sentences’.

This elements of linguistic form are not specific to literature.

In contrast, it also has specifically literary form, which includes the organization of the words into constituents called ‘lines ‘ and the matching of sounds to create a rhyme between the final parts of each line.

Both of these elements of literary form are adaptations of elements of the linguistics form of the text.

Thus the division of the text into lines depends on the organization of the text into distinct words, which is an aspect of linguistics form: the literary line-division coincides with the linguistics word-division.

And the possibility of rhyme depends on the linguistics formal organization of sounds into syllables: rhyme always involves a specified sub-part of a syllable and must therefore be defined in terms of aspects of linguistics form.

The division of a text onto lines and the creation of rhyme are both characteristics of literary texts, and are not found in all kinds of verbal text: this is why we classify them as specifically literary form and not linguistics form more generally.

However, though these are specifically literary form they depend on linguistics form for their existence: they are adaptations of linguistics form to literary form.
Linguistics Form and Literary Form

Color categories

2009-03-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

Color categories
One of the most intriguing examples of folk categories is the colors that different language languages recognize.

We all know that there is a very wide range of colors in nature. If you ever tried to decide what color to paint your house and have pored over dozens of color charts at the paint store, you know how many variations of the same color there can be.

We can look at ten different shades of green, and even though we can see that there are different, we still call them all “green”, thus lumping them into the same category.

An interesting experiment is to take finely graded color samples (such as those in a custom-mixed paint color chart) ranging from green to blue, including perhaps 20 to 30 shades.

If you look at both extremes, you can easily say that one is green and the other one is blue.

The hard part is drawing the line between one shade and another, saying that one belongs to the category “green” and the other to the category “blue”.

In fact sometimes we get around this problem by inventing another category, “blue green”.

In our language the category “blue-green” is really not a separate category but merely a convenient label for the transition between two categories.

We know this because we do not have a separate word for it. This indicates to us that, while blue and green are significant, the transition form one to the other is less so.

But in the other language there could easily be a word that designates “blue-green” as a separate category.

Certainly there is no reason why this could not be done – after all, isn’t green a transition between blue and yellow?
Color categories

Sumerians: Words and figures

2009-03-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

Sumerians: Words and figures
The Sumerians were the first people to develop a system of arithmetic.

Adding subtracting and multiplying were important skills when handling goods such as sacks of grain or heads of cattle in quantities.

The Sumerians also developed an efficient system of weights and measures and their supreme invention – that of writing – arose from the practical need to keep records of goods for the purposes of trade, or tax collection.

Those records began in the simplest way with picture images of the item - an ox head for example – and a number of dots to indicate the quantity.

Symbols were drawn on a soft clay tablet using a sharpened reed. The tablet was then baked in a kiln to harden it.

Originally list of items were arranged in vertical columns starting from the top right hand side.

Around the 3000 BC, however, scribes found that they could write better by turning the tablets and writing from left to right, in horizontal rows.

At the same times, the original pointed stylus was abandoned in favor of one with a wedge shaped tip.

Scratching with a point was prone to leave untidy ridges: the new wedge shaped stylus could be pressed into clay to leave a crisper impression.

Stylized images, composed entirely of cuneiform, or ‘wedge-shaped’, marks made up the writing system used in Mesopotamia.
Sumerians: Words and figures

Morpheme

2009-02-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

Morpheme
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language. The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

Once we have identified phonemes the next step is to put sounds together into meaningful units.

A unit of meaning is called morpheme, and it may include one phoneme or several.

It may also include such things as pitch and tone, which can change the meaning of a sound - every child knows from the tone of his or her mother’s voice whether she is angry or happy.

A morpheme then is a meaningful unit of sound or sounds in a particular language.

Must remember that language is a form of symbolic communication and that the meaning of the sounds in a language are arbitrary, being what ever the people who speak them agreed upon.

We say water while the French say eau (pronounced “oh”) and the Spanish say agua. All three words mean the same thing because the people who use them agreed that they do.

Morphemes should not be thought of in terms of written words; they are more than just the sounds those words represent.

There are morphemes in languages for which there is no writing. And some morphemes can have several forms, both writing and spoken.
Morpheme

Theories of Meaning

2009-01-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

Theories of Meaning
It would take a whole semantic theory to answer the questions raised below, but in the history of semantics a few “leading ideas” have emerged concerning the nature of meaning, and a brief look at some of these proposal is instructive.

As a preliminary we should note that in everyday English, the word mean has a number of different uses many of which are not relevant to the study of languages:

That was no mean (insignificant) accomplishment.
This will mean (result in) the end of our regime.
I mean to help if I can.
Keep off the grass! This means (refers to) you.
His losing his jobs means (implies) that he will have to look again.
Lucky strikes means (indicates) fine tobacco.
Those clouds mean (are a sign of) rain.
She doesn’t mean (believe) what she said.

These uses of word mean can all paraphrased by other expressions (indicated in parenthesis above). None of the, is appropriate for our discussion of word meaning. Rather, we will use the terms mean and meaning as they are used in the following examples:

Procrastinate, means “to put things off.”
In saying “it’s getting late,” she meant that we should leave.

These two uses of the word mean exemplify two important types meaning: linguistics meaning and speaker meaning.
Theories of Meaning

Phonetics

2009-01-13T01:56:00.000-08:00

Phonetics
The study of the sounds of language is called phonetics. If you were suddenly placed in a situation in which you could not understand what was being said, the first you would do is try to recognize the sounds people were making.

The important or critical sounds of a language are called phonemes.

The study of phonemes also includes such factors as stress or accent, and pitch and tone. One of the reasons that we have so much trouble pronouncing foreign words is that they include phonemes that are not part of our own language.

One way we can tell the phonemes or important sounds in a language from ones that are not is by recognizing minimal pairs.

This is a way of separating those sounds that change meaning from those that do not. For instance, you can recognize where certain people come from by the way they speak English.

Some people have what we call a British accent and they sound different form people raised in New England, New York City or Georgia. Yet even though they sound different we can still understand what they say because their use of sounds does not change the meaning of their words.

The use of minimal pairs allows us to see what range of sounds can be used in a word without changing its meaning.
Phonetics

Element of Language

2008-12-23T07:48:00.001-08:00

Element of Language
An anthropologist who goes into the field faces many of the same problems that any student of new languages faces. Anthropological linguistics tries to over come some of these problems by looking at language in general rather than at specific languages. In this approach there are three main areas of concern: sound, meaning and structure.

Human beings are able to make wide range of sounds. If you have heard people speaking other language, you know that they sound different from English, not just because the words unfamiliar but because some of the sounds used are not used in the English language.

Hebrew for example, has many sounds made deep in the throat that are unlike anything that occurs in English. Chinese may have a “sing-song” effect when spoken by a native, a pattern quite different from the English speech.

Some African languages use clicks as part of their speech, sound like those might use in calling a horse or those you might produce when making idle (but meaningless) sounds with your tongue.
Element of Language

Linguistic heritage with three revolutions

2008-12-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

Linguistic heritage with three revolutions
Three successive revolutions have transformed the nature of human being communication. In all three revolutions, the communicative use of language has undergone a change of function. The first revolution began with the invention of writing system. In principle, this freed man from the ephemeral limitations of the spoken word. But writing and reading, and thereby access to codified knowledge, remain a privileged activity of scribes and the educated minority, and the experience of the common man remained limited to a face to face oral culture.

The second revolution, with the invention of mechanized printing, made mass literacy possible. This Gutenberg revolution enabled mass education. It dramatically expanded the horizons of the ordinary citizen’s community and made democratic participation in the government of nation states effectively possible for the first time. One side effect was to standardize the form of written language and written text has dominated the structure of knowledge, communication and culture for five hundred years until present day.

We are now in the early stages of the third and most radical revolution of all, where computer based information and communication technologies (ICTs) give the individual the power of instant world-wide access to information through a fluid and natural mix of written text, graphic images and sound. This information revolution is giving birth to the information society, in which the role of language itself is once again being transmuted, by the effects of screen based multimedia communication networks like the internet.
Linguistic heritage with three revolutions

Semantics: part of grammar

2008-12-04T19:23:00.000-08:00

Semantics: part of grammar
Semantics has not always enjoyed a prominent role in modern linguistics. From World War 1 to the early 1969s semantics was viewed, especially in the United States as not quite respectable: its inclusion in a grammar (as linguist sometimes called a scientific description of a language) was considered by many as either a sort of methodological impurity or an objective to be reached only in the distance future. But there is as much reason to consider semantics a part of grammar as syntax or phonology. It is often said that a grammar describes what fluent speakers know of their language – their linguistics competence. If that is so, whatever fluent speakers know of their language is a proper part of a description of that language. In other words, appealing to what fluent speakers know about their language counts as motivation for including a phonological fact or a syntactic fact in the grammar of that language, then the same sort of consideration motivates the inclusion of semantic facts.

A more general consideration also motivates us to include semantics in the part of grammar of a language. A language is often defined as a conventional system for communication, a system for conveying messages. Moreover, communication can be accomplished (in the system) only because words have certain meanings; therefore, to characterize this system – the language – it is necessary to describe these meanings. Hence, if a grammar describes a language, part of it must describe meaning, and thus the grammar must contain semantics. Taking these two considerations together, it seems reasonable to conclude that semantic information is an integral part of a grammar.
Semantics: part of grammar

Language as Social Process

2008-11-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

Language as Social Process
Sociolinguistics is the appropriate contemporary term for the issue and problems that face language and a social community. Although the term has become over associated with dialects and regional variations of language, it should be used in accordance with its original definition, which referred to any correlation between language use and the social occasion that prompted it. This would include face to face encounters, speech acts, speech episodes, and the like.

A speech community is at the core of sociolinguistics and has attracted much attention, but its sense remains ambiguous. The concept of speech community is fundamental because it establishes the unit of understanding as social rather than linguistics. One begins with the problem of a social unit (e.g., family, decision making group, couple, and organization) and then considers the entire communication system that constitutes the social unit. Language problems are defined as problems of communications and social functioning. Some theorists used term to refer to people who use the same speech signals and thereby emphasize large scale groups who share a language. Some linguists have used the term in this way to describe the ideal speaker in the ideal speech community.

They are concerned with identifying a language and discovering the universal features of that language. The term is used in this case to outline a group of speakers who share a tongue. A second use of the term speech community draws on a sociological or anthropological perspective in which a “group of people” is defined according to any of the various cultural or social conditions that occasion their organization

But language is more than a social group’s mechanism for making meaning. Language, or symbol using ability, is the defining characteristics of humans. Much philosophical inquiry has been devoted to a definition of humankind. Language was born to serve communication and is, therefore a social process; some continued understanding of language is necessary.
Language as Social Process

Concepts of Phonetics

2008-11-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

Concepts of Phonetics
Phonetics is concerned with how speech sounds are produced on the vocal tract as well as with the physical properties of the speech sound waves generated by the larynx and vocal tract. Whereas the term phonetics usually refers to the study of the articulacy and acoustic properties of sounds, the term phonology, is often used to refer to the abstract principles that govern the distribution of sounds in a language.

Physiology of Speech
At its fundamental level speech signal is a rapidly flowing series of noises that are produced inside the throat, mouth and nasal passages and that radiate out from the mouth and sometimes the nose. One common sense view is that learning to speak a language requires only the control of a few muscles that move the lips, jaw and tongue. These anatomical structures are the most easily observed in any case. In reality the situation is much more complex, for over 100 muscles exercise direct and continuous during the production of the sound waves that carry speech. These sounds waves are produced by complex interaction of:

An outward flow of air from lungs
Modifications of the airflow at the larynxAdditional modifications of the airflow by a position and movements of the tongue and other anatomical structures of the vocal tract.

Concepts of Phonetics

Concept of Language

2008-10-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Concept of Language
How many words do we know? We all have the intuition that our vocabulary cannot be too enormous since we don’t remember having to learn a lot of words. Yet when we think about it, we realize that the world around us appears to be infinite in scope, How do we use a finite vocabulary to deal with potential infinite number of situations we encounter in the world? Our vocabulary also has an open-endedness that contributes to our creative use of language.

Researcher said that children just entering school “command 13,000 word. A typical high school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.” This number (120,000) may appear to be large, but think of example of all the people and all the places (streets, cities, countries, etc) can be name. In sum, any one who has mastered a language has mastered an astonishingly long list of facts encoded in the form of words. The list of words for any language (though not complete list) is referred to as its ‘lexicon’.

When we think about our native language, the existence of words seems obvious. After all, when we hear others speaking our native language we hear them uttering words. In reading a printed message, we see words on the page neatly separated by spaces. But now imagine yourself in a situation where everyone around you is speaking a foreign language that you have just started to study. Suddenly the existence of words no longer seems obvious. While listening to a native speaker of French, or Navajo or Japanese, all you hear is a blur of sound, as you strain to recognized words you have learned. If only the native speaker would slow down a little, you would be able to divide that blur of sound into individual words. The physical reality of speech is that for the most part the signal is continuous, with no breaks at all between words. The ability to analyze a continuous stream of sound (spoken language) into discrete units is far from trivial and it constitutes a central part of language comprehension. When you have mastered language, you are being able to recognized individual words without effort.
Concept of Language

Glottochronology Method

2008-10-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

Glottochronology Method
Glottochronology is a method that uses mathematical formula for estimating the amount of time that has passed since two languages develop from ancestral tongue. This involves counting the number of similar or cognate words and applying the formula to estimate the rate at which such words could be expected to change. Glottochronology is coming from two Greek words, glotta, meaning “tongue” and chronos, meaning “time.”

Glottochronology is possible because there are a number of things for which all languages have words, for example, certain colors, aspects of the physical envelopment, qualities of objects such as hot or cold, and so on. Because this is so, we can usually find words with roughly the same meaning in different languages, whether they are related languages or not.

The task then becomes one of making a list of words from one language and seeking cognates in another. Such lists need not be long; they rarely contain more than 200 items. The next task is to determine the number of words that cognates, that is, the number of words similar in meaning and in the ways they sound. Using a formula developed by the anthropological linguist Morris Swadesh, we can estimate that on the average a single language will lose or change about 19% of its basic words every 1000 years, or put it another way , it will keep about 81%.
Glottochronology Method

History of British Telegraph and Speed of News

2008-09-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

History of British Telegraph and Speed of News
In the early years of telegraphy, telegraph wires run above the ground. Then in 1847 the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday suggested insulating them with gutta-percha, so that they could be laid underground or on the seabed. The first London to Paris was in use in 1851 and after several attempts, a transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1865. By this time the telegraph was firmly established; at the end of the 1860s 111,000 miles of telegraph wires crisscrossed continental Europe.

One of the great advantages of the telegraph was the speed with which news could be collected and distributed. London’s The Times likened the transatlantic cable to the arrival of Columbus in the New World, though at the same time the editor warned his reporters that ‘telegrams are for facts: background and comment must come by post: The telegraph service quickly revolutionized journalism. By the end of the 1850s, as many as 120 provincial newspaper in Great Britain received news by wire from parliament daily, and the London based agency that Julius Reuter had first started in Germany sent foreign news to editors in every town in the country.

Another innovation that the telegraph brought was the foreign correspondent or war correspondent the man in the spot at momentous events who could send news as soon as it happened, instead of weeks or months after. The first and the greatest was W.H Russell of The Times. He was his paper’s correspondent covering several wars, including the Crimean war of the 1850 from which he sent vivid accounts of the charges of the Light and Heavy Brigades.
Just as powerful were Russell’s savage indictments of the inadequacies and inefficiencies of the British Headquarters Staff in the Crimea, and of the horrors of the hospital conditions. The influence of newspapers was now great enough for his reports to contribute to the fall of the government.
History of British Telegraph and Speed of News

How certain languages are related?

2008-09-08T15:50:00.000-07:00

How certain languages are related?
It is easy to tell that certain languages are related; by simply compare words that have the same or similar meaning. But knowing that two languages are traceable to a single parent language might not tell us very much. For example, we know that western hemisphere was settles by people who migrated from Asia and crossed the land bridge over what is now Bering Strait. We also know that this land bridge did not exist for very long and it was possible to cross only during the most recent ice age, when the sea level was low enough. Therefore we probably assume that the people who made the crossing spoke the same language or at least very similar language. If we follow this logic to its conclusion, all Indian languages are related, since they all descended from a common ancestor language.

Anthropologists who have worked with Native American groups and are familiar with more than one language are much aware that some Indian languages are much more closely related than others. Indian tribes did not simply settle in one place and stay there for thousands of years, instead, they migrated and intermingled, moving back and forth from one area to another, so that their languages grew more similar in some places and less so in others in a constantly changing patterns.
How certain languages are related?

Linguistic Change

2008-09-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

Linguistic Change
When people use the phrase evolution of language, people generally mean change over along period, perhaps thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. But people may also be interested in linguistics change over a much shorter period. Patterns of language within any society differ now from those that prevailed a few centuries ago or even a generation ago. As we know if we read an old text such as Chaucer’s Canterbury tales or even an older version of Bible, speech patterns can change rather drastically in a relatively short time. In the jargon of today, how do we describe something that is spectacular? The slang of the author’s generation included such words as groovy, neat and keen. This is linguistic archeology and evokes laughter among today’s teenager.
Linguistic Change

Primitive Languages

2008-08-10T02:41:00.000-07:00

Primitive Languages
For along time there has been a misperception that the languages spoken by certain groups are not “fully developed” or lack the ability to express emotion. Actually, there is no such thing as a truly “primitive” language. All human languages are systematic regular, highly develop and complex. In other words, there is no known society whose adult members’ speak anything that could be considered a “baby language”. However, for many years most westerners believed that “primitive” languages existed that were capable of expressing motion or distinguishing between hues of colors. This notion is quite common toward the end of the nineteenth century.

At that time concepts social evolution were widely held among Western social scientist and were as popular with government officials in colonial areas.

In writing about the Twi of Ghana a century ago, one scientist stated, “There is, as is commonly the case with languages of the lower races, a great paucity of abstract terms in (Twi), and the language is entirely deficient of such terms as space, tone, species, quality, sex, degree, etc,…. Terms of endearment are…few in numbers…. At a rough calculation, there are from three hundred and fifty to four hundred different words.” Unfortunately, this type of world view – although not widely subscribe now – is still believed by some. Karl Heider in his ‘Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors’ writes that he first went to study the Dani of New Guinea on the early 1960s he was told by a government official that the Dani language had no grammatical structure at all, and therefore no European could ever really learn it. Heider of course, knew this could not be true and came to appreciate just how complex and difficult it is to learn the Dani language. Still, the idea that some cultures have languages that are not fully “developed” is a concept that dies hard.
Primitive Languages