It would be interesting to cite the part of Steven Pinker’s discussion on why language is only partially learned. He explains that children acquire just bits of the language and how this is related to the universal grammar (Pinker 242-243). The first reason is obvious: it would be difficult for the brain during the evolution to develop a neuronal structure that would store an immense number of words. The second reason for partial learning, somewhat more interesting in the light of historical linguistics, is that “language inherently involves sharing a code with other people”:

An innate grammar is useless if you are the only one possessing it: it is a tango of one, the sound of one hand clapping. But the genomes of other people mutate and drift and recombine when they have children. Rather than selecting for a completely innate grammar, which would soon fall out of register with everyone else’s, evolution may have given children an ability to learn the variable parts of language as a way of synchronising their grammars with that of the community (Pinker 243).

This “sharing” is immensely important, not only because of the obvious reasons (a language dies with its speakers), but also because of acquisition/transfer of language, or, as already noted “a grammar” in Hale’s terminology. Hale refers to “grammar” as a knowledge state, shaped in acquirer’s mind when the acquirer is exposed to primary linguistic data (PLD, provided by E-Language). The data interacts with the acquirer’s hardcoded linguistic ability (“initial state of knowledge of language”), or universal grammar. We can label the steps of “grammar” acquisition as S1, S2 and so on. At an Sn stage we can claim that acquisition is over.

There are several interesting conclusions related to the acquisition process. The first is in defining the steps of acquisition and answering why the definition is important in the context of “grammar” and E-language. The answer is that acquirers adopt a grammar by rejecting the S1 stage in favour of the S2 to reach the level when they can generate the PLD to which they were initially exposed (Hale 13). What exactly happens between the stages, and whether there are some key elements regarding the language change, or whether there are conditions that influence the change – are rather interesting questions that Hale addresses, too. However, they are out of the scope of this Paper, so it would suffice to state that children in their mature states of language acquisition speak like people to whose language they were exposed, effectively updating PLD for the future acquirers.

The second important conclusion is that in this model there must be a terminal state of acquisition. The absence of it would cause a serious problem: if the acquirers continue to modify their knowledge state, if they continue to learn the “grammar” throughout their life, there would be no stage in the language definable as “synchronic state”. Without synchronous states of language, linguists could not set the markers for the study of the differences between the states, or, in other words, there would be no valid empirical framework for the diachronic study (Hale 14).

Previous text in the series: Mutual intelligibility, Wave Theory
Next text: Historical Linguistics: Remarks (soon)

Related posts:

1. Mutual intelligibility, Wave Theory (5/7)
2. Language – Synchrony and Diachrony (4/7)
3. Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One (2/7)

IPA phonetic notation is easy to read for linguists, but to those less experienced it can be confusing. Luckily, Mr Armstrong created multimedia IPA charts, containing consonants (pulmonic and non-pulmonic), vowels, diacritics, suprasegmentals, diphtongs and triphtongs.

The International Phonetic Alphabet is used in many well-know dictionaries, such as Oxford’s, so students of English language will find Suprasegmentals Table extremely useful: it shows and plays the recorded speech that demonstrate stress, vowel length, syllable break, linking, as well as tones and word accents (level and contour).

IPA is a system for phonetic notation. It was created by the International Phonetic Association and represents sounds of spoken language. Many thanks to Mr Anderson for creating his website that is very useful to all interested in fascinating world of language and phonetics.

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The most detailed is Jones (1975), who lists the important and less important diphthongs. The “essential diphthongs” (98) are: ei, ou, ai, au, ɔi, iə, ɛə, ɔə, uə; including “rising” ones: ĭə, ŭə, ŭi. Jones than continues with the note that two of those diphthong can be ignored by foreign speakers: ɔə and ŭi. The diphthong ɔə because it is replaced by ɔ: and ŭi since “it can always be replaced by disyllabic u-i”. “(…) [N]ine further  non-essential diphthongs”, according to Jones, are: oi, ui, eə, aə, aə, oə, ŏi, ĕə, ŏə. They can be replaced by their “fuller forms”.

Spectrogram of the diphthong /ai/ as pronounced by a famous British actress.

Thus Jones gives 10 important diphthongs: ei, ou, ai, au, ɔi, iə, ɛə, uə, ĭə and ŭə. (They are not in slash parentheses; they are left as in the original text).

The next author is J. D. O’Connor (1973), who list 9 diphthongs (153): /eɪ/, /əʊ/, /ɑɪ/, /aʊ/, /ɔɪ/, /ɪə/, /ɛə/, /ɔə/ and /ʊə/. He then continues with the explanation that /ɔ:/ and /ɔə/ are not separated in pronunciation (“relatively few RP speakers make a contrast”) , so /ɔə/ is not essential.

In O’Connor’s division there are 8 essential diphthongs in British English (RP), as shown above.

Gimson (1970) refers to diphthongs as “diphthongal vowel glides” (126), and lists 8 of them (pp. 127 – 144): /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /ɔɪ/, /əʊ/, /ɑʊ/, /ɪə/, /ɛə/ and /ʊə/. Gimson goes at great depths and analyses each of the diphthongs, further explaining their long and short forms, as well as the variants.

Thus, according to Gimson, there are 8 significant diphthongs in RP English.

To see the sources for the above, visit Books & References page.

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Max Weinreich wrote that “a language is a dialect which has an army and a navy” and after this quotation Campbell (193) explained how the definition of language is not entirely a linguistic matter. For example, although Norwegians and Swedes understand each other, their languages have different names. Even more strikingly, in China there are many dialects and understanding between their speakers varies significantly. In accordance with the mutual intelligibility criterion, a linguist would categorize them as separate languages, but all those dialects are by recognized by the Chinese government as the single Chinese language. The mutual intelligibility is not reliable even to distinguish a dialect from a language. The criterion states that “[e]ntities which are totally incomprehensible to speakers of other entities clearly are mutually unintelligible, and for linguists they therefore belong to separate languages” (ibid). Campbell illustrated the problem by explaining that Portuguese speakers understand Spanish very well, which does not apply to the extent to which Spanish speakers understand Portuguese. In Europe during nineties, the naming of new languages, such as Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, came after the disintegration of the former Serbo-Croatian language.
However, dialectology plays an important role in historical linguistics. One of the attempts to explain change was given by Johannes Schmidt, who in 1872 published the improved version of the “Wave Theory”, a model:

[W]here changes were said to emanate from a centre as waves on a pond do when a stone is thrown into it, where waves from one centre … can cross or intersect … waves coming from other … centres. Changes due to language contact (borrowing) were seen as analogous to successive waves crossing one another …. (Campbell 189)

To discuss which definition of language can be used in the synchronic empirical study, we must mention Chomsky, who distinguished “externalized” and “internalized” language, or E-language and I-language, respectively – in the synchronic language states. To Chomsky, E-Language is “normative”, which is his term for the sociopolitical language, it is “the construct … understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain”; conversely, I-Language is “some element of the mind of the person who knows the language, acquired by the learner, and used by the speaker-hearer”.

In the context of historical linguistics it is significant that I-Language consists of elements that create a generative system of language. This idea is important, because linguistic competence in humans is not a mere transfer of sets of utterances (“normative” language), “but rather … the coming into being in the mind of the acquirer of a system for generating linguistic representations” (ibid). Put in another way, it is possible to contrast “aspects of the output conditioned by features of the grammar and those … conditioned by extragrammatical factors” (ibid). By including this into the study of historical linguistics, the discipline improved form the stage of deciphering dead languages to modern theories and significant relationships between language, mind, reality and society.

Previous: Historical Linguistics: “Language” – Synchrony and Diachrony,
Next: Language Acquisition and Historical Linguistics (soon)

Related posts:

1. Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One (2/7)
2. Early Development (1/7)
3. Books and References

Saussure claimed, in citation given by Hale (6), that to examine language in a synchronic view means to focus on “reality of speakers”, while diachronic study implies not examining language, but “a series of events that modify it”. Put in another way, in synchronic examination linguists observe the snapshots of languages, i.e. the states of languages at a particular moment in history. Once this is accomplished, scholars are usually speaking about contemporary language. The diachronic examination then includes finding answers about what happens between two or more stages of a language during the time.

However, do we know what a synchronic definition of language is? It appears that throughout literature there has been a “clear mixing … between an empirically useful conception of ‘language’ (as the object of study of linguistics) and more everyday uses of this term” (Hale 6). Hale further informs us that he is going to use the word “language” as a predominantly sociopolitical term, while “grammar” will mean “the object of study of linguistics as a discipline” (ibid). He did this in order to focus on the linguistic domain of language and to reject the possible misinterpretation due to an overlap of sociopolitical meaning of the word “language”, with that of the linguistic meaning.

Previous: Historical Linguistics: Trubetzkoy and Chomsky,
Next: Mutual intelligibility, Wave Theory

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1. Trubetzkoy, Chomsky (3/7)
2. Early Development (1/7)
3. Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One (2/7)

The programme synthesises F1, F2, F3 and F4 formants from several sources (rectangle, triangle, sine, sampled and noise). It “demonstrates formant-based synthesis of vowels in real time, in the spirit of Gunnar Fant’s Orator Verbis Electris (OVE-1) synthesiser of 1953” (from the About window).

„Formants are defined by Fant  as ‘the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P(f)|’ of the voice. Formant is also used to mean an acoustic resonance,[2] and, in speech science and phonetics, a resonance of the human vocal tract. It is often measured as an amplitude peak in the frequency spectrum of the sound, using a spectrogram (in the figure) or a spectrum analyzer, though in vowels spoken with a high fundamental frequency, as in a female or child voice, the frequency of the resonance may lie between the widely-spread harmonics and hence no peak is visible. In acoustics, it refers to a peak in the sound envelope and/or to a resonance in sound sources, notably musical instruments, as well as that of sound chambers” — Wikipedia.

The window of the Formant Synthesis Demo

The download link is on the Formant Synthesis Demo site.

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Noam Chomsky is one on the greatest linguists and thinkers of the twentieth century. He is credited for significant shift towards synchronic examination of language within historical linguistics. However, the influence was mutual, since the discipline itself affected Chomsky’s philosophy. Reading historical linguistics motivated Chomsky to develop a “rationalist” approach. This was in contrast with the then current “empirists’ view” that human mind gets all content by “’learning’ it from environmental conditions” (McGilvray 14):

The rationalist recognizes, of course, that experience and “external” factors play a role in the mind’s “choosing” which concepts to activate or develop. But the rationalist denies that external elements shape and constitute concepts via the operations of some sort of domain-general learning procedure such as hypothesis formation and testing. Circumstances serve to “occasion” or “trigger” the introduction of a concept; crucially, the mind’s own machinery dictates what “patterns” in the data count as appropriate “occasions.” The patterns are, in a sense, built into the mind all along. (ibid)

This would give rise to new theories with a focus on language acquisition, again reaffirming the significance of contemporary language examination for historical linguistics.

Next: Historical Linguistics: “Language” – Synchrony and Diachrony
Previous: Historical Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One

Related posts:

1. Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One (2/7)
2. Early Development (1/7)
3. Books and References

Grimm’s sound change description had flaws. The first one was the absence of the shift of p t k after Germanic fricatives, but in 1830s it was clear to most linguists that this change did not affect clusters of consonants after Germanic fricatives (ibid 30). After that, Hermann Grassman (1809-77) solved the problem of the aspirates: he defined the loss of aspiration in Greek and Latin. This was followed by Karl Verner’s (1846-96) explanation on how Indo-European voiceless stops in a voiced context, if not preceded by an accent, become voiced fricatives.

This investigation in phonetic change was one of the most fascinating periods in the early era of historical linguistics, and surely a most notable one. New discoveries continued after the well-known work of Franz Bopp (1791-1867) was published, about the Sanskrit system of conjugation compared with that of Greek.

The consequence of these developments was that the new linguistic discipline was changing from a descriptive to a more investigative and more systematic research.

The definitive establishment of the systematic character of historical linguistics was given to it by the Neogrammarians. Karl Brugmann (1849-1919) was one of the most prominent representatives of the Neogrammarian hypothesis, which was devised by a group of linguist in Leipzig and Munich. As language materials and knowledge about linguistics were becoming more abundant, the Neogrammarians believed they had “enough evidence to declare that sound change was invariably regular – that is, that a given sound in a given context in a given language always changed in the same way, without exception” (Trask 111).

The following stage in the development of historical linguistics was the focus on the social and psychological aspects of the language change. In one of his essays  Brugmann defines language as having double nature: psychological and physical. Brugmann criticised his predecessors for not paying attention to the psychological side of speech, which was, according to this scholar, important for fuller understanding of the sound change (Lehmann 31). Indeed, this standpoint will later initiate psycholinguistic examination of language. Brugmann was very critical of the works of that time, stating that linguists needed to study living languages as well, not only “dead” ones. He formulated “two most important principles of the neogrammarian movement: first, every sound change takes place according to laws that admin no exception. Second, form association, that is, the creation of new forms by analogy, plays a very important role in the life of language” (Lehmann 31).

One of the best-known linguists of all times is Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). His lectures Cours de linguistiqe generale (1916), published by his students, explained how Saussure referred “to language in general as langage, to the underlying structure as langue and to spoken language as parole” (Lehmann 34). The theoretical frame Saussure constructed enabled linguists in general to distance themselves from “psychological emphasis of the neogrammarians”.

At the beginning of 19th century sociology as a discipline began its development, and affected other humanities. Linguistics was not an exception. Antonie Meillet, Saussure’s student, in his famous Oslo lectures (1924) claimed that “a language cannot be understood if we do not have an idea of the conditions under which the people who use it live” and further, that linguists are interested “not in the norms but in the way in which language is used”, as cited by Lehmann (35). This greatly contributed to dialectology, and to the research on how a language changes in contact with speakers of a different language or dialect.

Next: Historical Linguistics: Trubetzkoy and Chomsky
Previous: Introduction to Historical Linguistics

Related posts:

1. Early Development (1/7)

To state what this implies and to try to give an answer in terms of empirical knowledge – means facing several problems. The key concepts, language and change, are not easily defined. What language is in some theoretical works depends on whether the term is used with a social or a linguistic meaning, whereas the change is one of the most important topics of historical linguistics and it is central for many theories.

This text is an attempt to summarise important aspects of the study of language history, at the preference of its author. The starting point for this is Historical Linguistics: Theory and Method by Mark Hale, or to be precise the first chapter of it. Further theoretical frame is provided by the work of Herbert Schendl, Winfred P. Lehman, Lyle Campbell, Steven Pinker and R. L. Trask. The bibliography is available here.

Early Works in Historical Linguistics (400 BC – 18th century)

We will trace back meticulous interest in language to 400 BC. It is assumed that a man named Panini, who lived at that time, bequeathed us a detailed Sanskrit grammar. He was motivated by a wish to preserve Vedic texts as integrally as possible, in order to convey and preserve divine thought for the future generations.

In the times of Old Greek and Latin languages, scholars were particularly interested in oratorical and philosophical nuances of language. The Greeks were especially concerned with etymology.

The interest in language in medieval Europe was vivid also due to religious interests, and from this period originates rich Latin corpus.

Hebrew thinkers wanted to know what the origin of language was, and why there were so many languages (Lehmann 23). The same questions puzzle modern science, although allegorical explanations of the past have no impact on modern reasoning as they had on Hebrews and Christians in the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century religious thought still thrived, helped by then “accepted … authority of the Old Testament” (Lehmann 26). One of the most prominent thinkers of the age was Konrad Gesner (1516-1565), who made a classification of languages in his work Mithridates (1655). Like most of the scholars of that time, including Dante Alighieri and Samuel Butler (Wardhaugh 29), he believed that Hebrew language was the source of all languages. This “Hebraic hypothesis” (Lehmann 26) was rejected by Gottfried William von Leibniz (1646-1714), who studied ethnic origins and the connections among languages. Although his classifications were not very conclusive (ibid), they paved the way for the successive thinkers of the period.

A well-known “linguist” of the eighteenth century was Eugene Aram (1704-59), who inferred that Celtic is one of Indo-European languages, and that Latin was not derived from Greek, as Leibniz had believed.

Up to the eighteenth century, most of the works about language were of non-investigative, descriptive nature. However, scholars interested in language began collecting significant pieces of the linguistic material. A new discipline was on the verge of its creation, backed up by a paper by Sir William Jones (1746-94) who claimed that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek were strongly connected. The interest in the new discipline gained a new momentum during the Romantic period, when the Grimm brothers published their famous collection of fairy tales, which was a reflection of the widespread belief of the period that knowledge from the past was the best means to gain fresh knowledge. They also published “a large work on early Germanic law” (Lehmann 27).

Next: Historical Linguistics from 18th Century to World War One

Stand-alone app

WordWeb is stand-alone application. You can download it from the official site, install and use without internet connection. It comes with WordNet database created by Princeton University. The database itself is very good, and you will rarely need any other explanations. However, if there is a need, upgrade is available for additional money.

Synonyms, antonyms, types – widening and narrowing meaning

WordWeb Pro is not only a dictionary, but thesaurus as well: very easy to use synonym, antonym finder. Here is the example for word “site”:

WordWeb tabs with different dictionary content

This screenshot illustrates many things. We can see that “site” is pronounced similarly as “cite” and “sight”. Tab type of lists words like “computer”, “position”, “parcel of land”, while tab types contains, amongst others, words “active site”, “camp”, “ground zero”. The first tab lists less specific words, second most specific words, so you can narrow or widen your search. Of course, there is a list of synonyms, in this case “internet site”, “place”, “website” and so on.

IPA transcription not available in default dictionary

There is one thing I feel represents major drawback: there is no IPA transcription. WordWeb with its default database (Princeton) displays nonstandard phonetic transcription (so “site” is /sIt/). I have not used Oxford or Chambers English Dictionary with WordWeb, which are also available as additional purchases, so I don’t know which transcription is used there. However, on brighter side: most of the headwords have pre-recorded pronunciation, in British and American English,  available as separate (free) download.

Language treasure in tabs

In other searches, WordWeb will display different tabs, depending on the search:

Synonyms Words which mean the same in some context
e.g. close is a synonym of shut.
Antonyms Words meaning the opposite in some context
e.g. big is an antonym of little
See Also Mostly related word forms and compounds
e.g. cut gives see also cut off, cutter, etc.
Type of Shows less specific words.
e.g. a comedy is a type of play
Types Shows more specific words.
e.g. flower has daisy as one of its types
Parts Shows words for part of an object
e.g. tree is one of the parts of a forest
Part of Shows words for a collection or the whole
e.g. bumper is a part of a car
Similar Words with meanings that are close
e.g. big is similar to huge

(Taken from WordWeb help file.)

We used WordWeb’s built-in anagram option to create a puzzle: “New meshing ‘twixt cowl”. Can you solve it? Hint: see the address bar!

Windows integration, options

The program integrates nicely with Windows. Just highlight a word and press shortcut keys to pop up the definitions. If the explanation is not enough, you can click on Wikipedia tab, which will show proper page on world’s most used reference site. It is also possible to use full text search, solve anagrams, add own definitions and create word lists (great for learning). You can use it with Microsoft Word and other processors.

Optional dictionaries

If default dictionary does not suite your needs, you can buy additional ones:

Oxford Dictionary of English
Chambers Dictionary of the English Language
Chambers Thesaurus
New Oxford American Dictionary
Australian Oxford English Dictionary
Canadian Oxford English Dictionary

It really is great dictionary, thesaurus – and more

If you are looking for great dictionary / synonym / antonym tool – you should try WordWeb Pro. Indeed, there are many free sites out there, and word definitions are easy to find, but you have to have internet connection and be patient with all those ads. WordWeb Pro works offline, with powerful dictionary tool just a shortcut away.

Free version is available here.

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3. Beolingus – Great Online German Dictionary