Liquor and other volatile liquids
- Liquor, distilled alcoholic drinks
- Tincture, an extract of plant or animal material dissolved in ethanol
- Volatile (especially flammable) liquids, such as
- Ethanol, also known as drinking alcohol
- Gasoline (or petrol), a clear petroleum-derived flammable liquid that is used primarily as a fuel
- Petroleum ether, liquid hydrocarbon mixtures used chiefly as non-polar solvents
- White spirit or mineral spirits, a common organic solvent used in painting and decorating
Spirituality and mood
- Spirituality, pertaining to the soul or spirit
- Spirit (vital essence), the non-corporeal essence of a being or entity
- Vitalism, a belief in some fundamental, non-physical essence which differentiates organisms from inanimate, material objects
- Pneuma, an ancient Greek word for 'breath' or 'wind', but also 'spirit' or 'soul'
- Soul, the spiritual part of a living being, often regarded as immortal
- Mind-body dualism, the view that mind and body are distinct and separable
- Geist, a German word corresponding to ghost, spirit, mind or intellect
- Psyche (psychology), a Greek word for 'soul' or 'spirit' and used in psychology
- Genius (mythology), a Latin word for a divine spirit present in every individual person, place, or thing
- Spirit, a supernatural and incorporeal or immaterial being
- Spirit world (Spiritualism), the world or realm inhabited by spirits
- Ghost, the soul or spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear to the living
- Deity, a being considered divine or sacred
- Angel, a spiritual being
- Demon, an evil spirit
- Tutelary deity, a guardian spirit
- Jinn, a morally ambivalent invisible entity, partly physical in nature.
- A being in a vision
- Spirit, nature or conception of a deity or their influence
- Holy Spirit, a divine force, manifestation of God in the Holy Trinity, or agent of divine action, according to Abrahamic Religions
- Pneumatology, the study of the Holy Spirit in Christian theology
- Great Spirit, conception of a supreme being prevalent among some Native American and First Nations cultures
- Holy Spirit, a divine force, manifestation of God in the Holy Trinity, or agent of divine action, according to Abrahamic Religions
- Spirit, a mood, usually in reference to a good mood or optimism ("high spirits")
- Spirit, a feeling of social cohesiveness and mutual support, such as:
- School spirit, a sense of a supportive community at an educational institution
- Team spirit, such as that encouraged by team building activities
Companies and brands
- SPIRIT Consortium, a group of vendors and users of electronic design automation tools
- Spirit (Belgium), a name for the Social Liberal Party, a Flemish left-liberal political party
- Spirit Airlines, an American ultra-low-cost carrier
- Spirit of Atlanta Drum and Bugle Corps, based in Atlanta, Georgia
- Spirit DataCine, a device for digitization of motion picture film
- Spirit DSP, a company that develops software for voice and video communication
- Spirit Petroleum, an American brand created by the Petroleum Marketers Oil Corporation
- Spirit Pub Company, in the United Kingdom based in Burton upon Trent
- Spirit (Sirius), a Contemporary Christian music radio station
Film and television
- Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, a 2002 animated film
- The Spirit, a 2008 film based on the Eisner comic
- Spirit, a 2012 Malayalam satirical comedy film
- Spirits, a 2004 Philippine fantasy series
- "Spirits" (Stargate SG-1), a television episode
- Spirit (G.I. Joe), a fictional character
- Spirit (She-Ra), a fictional character
- Spirit, a character from the Ōban Star-Racers animated television series
Music
Bands
- Spirit (band), an American 1960s and 1970s rock band
- Spirits (band), a 1995 male/female dance music duo from England
Albums
- Spirits (Albert Ayler album), 1966
- Spirit (Spirit album), 1968
- Spirits (Lee Konitz album), 1971
- Spirit (John Denver album), 1976
- Spirit (Earth, Wind & Fire album), 1976
- Spirit (Malachi Thompson album), 1983
- Spirits (Keith Jarrett album), 1985
- The Spirit (album), 1991
- Spirits (Gil Scott-Heron album), 1994
- Spirit, a 1995 album by Caroline Lavelle
- Spirit (Sean Maguire album), 1996
- Spirit (Willie Nelson album), 1996
- Spirits (Misato Watanabe album), 1996
- Spirit (Jewel album), 1998
- Spirits (Pharoah Sanders album), 2000
- Spirit, a 2006 album by Apse
- Spirit (Eluveitie album), 2006
- Spirit (J-Rocks album), 2007
- Spirit (Leona Lewis album), 2007
- Spirit (Preston Reed album), 2007
- Spirit (This Condition album), 2010
- Spirit (Hitomi album), 2011
- Spirit (Reckless Love album), 2013
- Spirit (Amos Lee album), 2016
- Spirit (Depeche Mode album), 2017
- Spirits (Nothing More album), 2022
Songs
- "Spirit" by War from The Black-Man's Burdon, 1970
- "Spirit" by Van Morrison from Common One, 1980
- "Spirit" (Bauhaus song), 1982
- "Spirit" by Faith No More from Introduce Yourself, 1987
- "Spirit" by Phuture, 1994
- "Spirits" (Meja song), 2000
- "Spirit" by Caesars from Paper Tigers, 2005
- "Spirit" by Ghost from Meliora, 2015
- "Spirits" (The Strumbellas song), 2015
- "Spirit" by J Hus, 2017
- "Spirit" (Kwesta song), 2017
- "Spirit!!" by Band-Maid from World Domination, 2018
- "Spirit" (Beyoncé song), 2019
Places
- Spirit (community), Wisconsin, an unincorporated US community
- Spirit, Wisconsin, a US town
Sports
- Spirit (League of Legends player) (born 1996), South Korean esports player
- Spirit Racing, a 1980s auto racing team
Vehicles
- Advanced Soaring Concepts Spirit, a single-seat glider
- AMC Spirit, a subcompact automobile built from 1979 to 1983
- B-2 Spirit, a US Air Force stealth bomber
- Dodge Spirit, a mid-size car built from 1989 to 1995
- Spirit-class cruise ship, operated by Carnival Cruise Line and Costa Cruises
- Spirit (rover) (MER-A), one of two rovers in NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission
- World Aircraft Spirit, a Colombian/American light-sport aircraft
Other uses
- Spirit (building), a skyscraper on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia
- Spirit (comics character), title character of the comic strip The Spirit by Will Eisner
- Spirit (media personality) (born 1975), American television and radio personality
- Spirit (sculpture), a statue depicting John Denver by Sue DiCicco in Colorado, US
- Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry, a 20th-century poetry magazine published by the Catholic Poetry Society of America
- The Spirit (statue), a statue of Michael Jordan outside Chicago's United Center
- Spirit Parser Framework, an object-oriented parser-generator framework
- 37452 Spirit, an asteroid named after the Mars rover
- Spirit, an item introduced in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
See also
- Free spirit (disambiguation)
- Spirited, a 2010 Australian TV drama series
- Spirited (film), an American Christmas musical film
- Spiritual (disambiguation)
- Spiritus (disambiguation)
- All pages with titles containing spirit
- All pages with titles containing spirited
If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Proper_hindi&redirect=no
Hindi (Devanāgarī: हिन्दी[d], Hindī), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी Mānak Hindī),[18] is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been described as a standardised and Sanskritised register[19] of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas of North India.[20][21][22] Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the two official languages of the Government of India, along with English.[23] It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states.[24][25][26][27] Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.[28]
Hindi is the lingua franca of the Hindi Belt. It is also spoken, to a lesser extent, in other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginised variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi).[24][25] Outside India, several other languages are recognised officially as "Hindi" but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other dialects, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, which has an official status in Fiji,[29] and Caribbean Hindustani, which is spoken in Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana.[30][31][32][33] Apart from the script and formal vocabulary, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu, another recognised register of Hindustani as both share a common colloquial base.[34]
Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English.[35] If counted together with the mutually intelligible Urdu, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.[36][37] According to reports of Ethnologue (2022, 25th edition) Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world including first and second language speakers.[38]
Etymology
The term Hindī originally was used to refer to inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It was borrowed from Classical Persian هندی Hindī (Iranian Persian pronunciation: Hendi), meaning "of or belonging to Hind (India)" (hence, "Indian").[39]
Another name Hindavī (हिन्दवी) or Hinduī (हिन्दुई) (from Persian: هندوی "of or belonging to the Hindu/Indian people") was often used in the past, for example by Amir Khusrow in his poetry.[40][41]
The terms "Hindi" and "Hindu" trace back to Old Persian which derived these names from the Sanskrit name Sindhu (सिन्धु), referring to the river Indus. The Greek cognates of the same terms are "Indus" (for the river) and "India" (for the land of the river).[42][43]
History
Middle Indo-Aryan to Hindi
Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is a direct descendant of an early form of Vedic Sanskrit, through Shauraseni Prakrit and Śauraseni Apabhraṃśa (from Sanskrit apabhraṃśa "corrupt"), which emerged in the 7th century CE.[44]
The sound changes that characterised the transition from Middle Indo-Aryan to Hindi are:[45]
- Compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding geminate consonants, sometimes with spontaneous nasalisation: Skt. hasta "hand" > Pkt. hattha > hāth
- Loss of all word-final vowels: rātri "night" > rattī > rāt
- Formation of nasalised long vowels from nasal consonants (-VNC- > -V̄̃C-): bandha "bond" > bā̃dh
- Loss of unaccented or unstressed short vowels (reflected in schwa deletion): susthira "firm" > sutthira > suthrā
- Collapsing of adjacent vowels (including separated by a hiatus: apara "other" > avara > aur
- Final -m to -ṽ: grāma "village" > gāma > gāṽ
- Intervocalic -ḍ- to -ṛ- or -l-: taḍāga "pond" > talāv, naḍa "reed" > nal.
- v > b: vivāha "marriage" > byāh
Hindustani
During the period of Delhi Sultanate, which covered most of today's north India, eastern Pakistan, southern Nepal and Bangladesh[46] and which resulted in the contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures, the Sanskrit and Prakrit base of Old Hindi became enriched with loanwords from Persian, evolving into the present form of Hindustani.[47][48][49][50][51][52] The Hindustani vernacular became an expression of Indian national unity during the Indian Independence movement,[53][54] and continues to be spoken as the common language of the people of the northern Indian subcontinent,[55] which is reflected in the Hindustani vocabulary of Bollywood films and songs.[56][57]
Dialects
Before the standardisation of Hindi on the Delhi dialect, various dialects and languages of the Hindi belt attained prominence through literary standardisation, such as Avadhi and Braj Bhasha. Early Hindi literature came about in the 12th and 13th centuries CE. This body of work included the early epics such as renditions of the Dhola Maru in the Marwari of Marwar,[58] the Prithviraj Raso in the Braj Bhasha of Braj, and the works of Amir Khusrow in the dialect of Delhi.[59][60]
Modern Standard Hindi is based on the Delhi dialect,[44] the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding region, which came to replace earlier prestige dialects such as Awadhi and Braj. It has come out from the extraction of Persian and Arabic words from Khariboli. Earliest examples could be found as Prēm Sāgar by Lallu Ji Lal, Batiyāl Pachīsī of Sadal Misra and Rānī Kētakī Kī Kahānī of Insha Allah Khan which were published in Devanagari script during early of the 19th centuries.[61]
Urdu – considered another form of Hindustani – acquired linguistic prestige in the latter part of the Mughal period (1800s), and underwent significant Persian influence. Modern Hindi and its literary tradition evolved towards the end of the 18th century.[62] John Gilchrist was principally known for his study of the Hindustani language, which was adopted as the lingua franca of northern India (including what is now present-day Pakistan) by British colonists and indigenous people. He compiled and authored An English-Hindustani Dictionary, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, The Oriental Linguist, and many more. His lexicon of Hindustani was published in the Perso-Arabic script, Nāgarī script, and in Roman transliteration. He is also known for his role in the foundation of University College London and for endowing the Gilchrist Educational Trust. In the late 19th century, a movement to further develop Hindi as a standardised form of Hindustani separate from Urdu took form.[63] In 1881, Bihar accepted Hindi as its sole official language, replacing Urdu, and thus became the first state of India to adopt Hindi.[64] However, in 2014, Urdu was accorded second official language status in the state. [65]
Independent India
After independence, the government of India instituted the following conventions:[original research?]
- standardisation of grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee's report was released in 1958 as A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi.
- standardisation of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.
On 14 September 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted Hindi written in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Republic of India replacing Urdu's previous usage in British India.[66][67][68] To this end, several stalwarts rallied and lobbied pan-India in favour of Hindi, most notably Beohar Rajendra Simha along with Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Kaka Kalelkar, Maithili Sharan Gupt and Seth Govind Das who even debated in Parliament on this issue. As such, on the 50th birthday of Beohar Rajendra Simha on 14 September 1949, the efforts came to fruition following the adoption of Hindi as the official language.[69] Now, it is celebrated as Hindi Day.[70]
Official status
India
Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with the official language of the Indian Commonwealth. Under Article 343, the official languages of the Union have been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English:
(1) The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.[30]
(2) Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement: Provided that the President may, during the said period, by order authorise the use of the Hindi language in addition to the English language and of the Devanagari form of numerals in addition to the international form of Indian numerals for any of the official purposes of the Union.[71]
Article 351 of the Indian constitution states:
It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Union Government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351),[72] with state governments being free to function in the language of their own choice. However, widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, especially in South India (such as those in Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which provided for the continued use of English indefinitely for all official purposes, although the constitutional directive for the Union Government to encourage the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced its policies.[73]
Article 344 (2b) stipulates that the official language commission shall be constituted every ten years to recommend steps for progressive use of Hindi language and imposing restrictions on the use of the English language by the union government. In practice, the official language commissions are constantly endeavouring to promote Hindi but not imposing restrictions on English in official use by the union government.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following Indian states: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.[74] Hindi is an official language of Gujarat, along with Gujarati. [75] It acts as an additional official language of West Bengal in blocks and sub-divisions with more than 10% of the population speaking Hindi.[76][77][78] Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of official language in the following Union Territories: Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.
Although there is no specification of a national language in the constitution, it is a widely held belief that Hindi is the national language of India. This is often a source of friction and contentious debate.[79][80][81] In 2010, the Gujarat High Court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such.[82][83] In 2021, in a Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act case involving Gangam Sudhir Kumar Reddy, the Bombay High Court claimed Hindi is the national language while refusing Reddy bail, after he argued against his statutory rights being read in Hindi, despite being a native Telugu speaker. Reddy has filed a Special Leave Petition before the Supreme Court, challenging the Bombay High Court's observation, and contended that it failed to appreciate that Hindi is not the national language in India.[84][85] [86] In 2021, Indian food delivery company Zomato landed in controversy when a customer care executive told an app user from Tamil Nadu, "For your kind information Hindi is our national language." Zomato responded by firing the employee, after which she was reprimanded and shortly reinstated.[87][88]
In 2018, The Supreme Court has stayed a judgment of Madhya Pradesh High Court that held that the Hindi version of enactment will prevail if there is a variation in its Hindi version and English version. The prominence thus attached to English over Hindi in the judgement underlines the social significance of English over Hindi. [89]
Fiji
Outside Asia, the Awadhi language (an Eastern Hindi dialect) with influence from Bhojpuri, Bihari languages, Fijian and English is spoken in Fiji.[90][91] It is an official language in Fiji as per the 1997 Constitution of Fiji,[92] where it referred to it as "Hindustani", however in the 2013 Constitution of Fiji, it is simply called "Fiji Hindi" as the official language.[93] It is spoken by 380,000 people in Fiji.[90]
Nepal
Hindi is spoken as a first language by about 77,569 people in Nepal according to the 2011 Nepal census, and further by 1,225,950 people as a second language.[94] A Hindi proponent, Indian-born Paramananda Jha, was elected vice-president of Nepal. He took his oath of office in Hindi in July 2008. This created protests in the streets for 5 days; students burnt his effigies; there was general strike in 22 districts. Nepal Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that his oath in Hindi was invalid and he was kept "inactive" as vice-president. An "angry" Jha said, "I cannot be compelled to take the oath now in Nepali. I might rather take it in English."[95]
South Africa
Hindi is a protected language in South Africa. According to the Constitution of South Africa, the Pan South African Language Board must promote and ensure respect for Hindi along with other languages.[15] According to a doctoral dissertation by Rajend Mesthrie in 1985, although Hindi and other Indian languages have existed in South Africa for the last 125 years, there are no academic studies of any of them - of their use in South Africa, their evolution and current decline.[96]
United Arab Emirates
Hindi is adopted as the third official court language in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.[e][97] As a result of this status, the Indian workforce in UAE can file their complaints to the labour courts in the country in their own mother-tongue.[98]
Geographical distribution
Hindi is the lingua franca of northern India (which contains the Hindi Belt), as well as an official language of the Government of India, along with English.[71]
In Northeast India a pidgin known as Haflong Hindi has developed as a lingua franca for the people living in Haflong, Assam who speak other languages natively.[99] In Arunachal Pradesh, Hindi emerged as a lingua franca among locals who speak over 50 dialects natively.[100]
Hindi is quite easy to understand for many Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, which, like Hindi, is a standard register of the Hindustani language; additionally, Indian media are widely viewed in Pakistan.[101]
A sizeable population in Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, can also speak and understand Hindi-Urdu due to the popularity and influence of Bollywood films, songs and actors in the region.[102][103]
Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis (people having roots in north-India but having migrated to Nepal over hundreds of years) of Nepal. Apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the "Hindi Belt" of India. A substantially large North Indian diaspora lives in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Fiji and Mauritius, where it is natively spoken at home and among their own Hindustani-speaking communities. Outside India, Hindi speakers are 8 million in Nepal; 863,077 in United States of America;[104][105] 450,170 in Mauritius; 380,000 in Fiji;[90] 250,292 in South Africa; 150,000 in Suriname;[106] 100,000 in Uganda; 45,800 in United Kingdom;[107] 20,000 in New Zealand; 20,000 in Germany; 26,000 in Trinidad and Tobago;[106] 3,000 in Singapore.
Comparison with Modern Standard Urdu
Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu are two registers of the same language and are mutually intelligible.[108] Both Hindi & Urdu share a core vocabulary of native Prakrit and Sanskrit-derived words.[34][109][110] However, Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and contains more Sanskrit-derived words than Urdu, whereas Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script and uses more Arabic and Persian loanwords compared to Hindi.[111] Because of this, as well as the fact that the two registers share an identical grammar,[22][34][109] a consensus of linguists consider them to be two standardised forms of the same language, Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu.[108][22][34][21] Hindi is the most commonly used official language in India. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan and is one of 22 official languages of India, also having official status in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Telangana,[112] Andhra Pradesh[113] and Bihar.[114]
Script
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida. Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is written from left to right. Unlike Sanskrit, Devanagari is not entirely phonetic for Hindi, especially failing to mark schwa deletion in spoken Standard Hindi.[115]
Romanization
The Government of India uses Hunterian transliteration as its official system of writing Hindi in the Latin script. Various other systems also exist, such as IAST, ITRANS and ISO 15919.
Romanized Hindi, also called Hinglish, is the dominant form of Hindi online. In an analysis of YouTube comments, Palakodety et al., identified that 52% of comments were in Romanized Hindi, 46% in English, and 1% in Devanagari Hindi.[5]
Phonology
Vocabulary
Traditionally, Hindi words are divided into five principal categories according to their etymology:
- Tatsam (तत्सम transl. "same as that") words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections).[116] They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindi नाम nām / Sanskrit नाम nāma, "name"; Hindi कर्म karm / Sanskrit कर्म karma, "deed, action; karma"),[117] as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. प्रार्थना prārthanā, "prayer").[118] Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Amongst nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit non-inflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension.
- Ardhatatsam (अर्धतत्सम transl. "semi-tatsama") words: Such words are typically earlier loanwords from Sanskrit which have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed. (e.g. Hindi सूरज sūraj from Sanskrit सूर्य sūrya)
- Tadbhav (तद्भव transl. "born of that") words: These are native Hindi words derived from Sanskrit after undergoing phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit कर्म karma, "deed" becomes Shauraseni Prakrit कम्म kamma, and eventually Hindi काम kām, "work") and are spelled differently from Sanskrit.[116]
- Deshaj (देशज transl. "of the country") words: These are words that were not borrowings but do not derive from attested Indo-Aryan words either. Belonging to this category are onomatopoetic words or ones borrowed from local non-Indo-Aryan languages.
- Videshī (विदेशी transl. "foreign") words: These include all loanwords from non-indigenous languages. The most frequent source languages in this category are Persian, Arabic, English and Portuguese. Examples are क़िला qila "fort" from Persian, कमेटी kameṭī from English committee and साबुन sābun "soap" from Arabic.
Hindi also makes extensive use of loan translation (calqueing) and occasionally phono-semantic matching of English.[119]
Prakrit
Hindi has naturally inherited a large portion of its vocabulary from Shauraseni Prakrit, in the form of tadbhava words. This process usually involves compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding consonant clusters in Prakrit, e.g. Sanskrit tīkṣṇa > Prakrit tikkha > Hindi tīkhā.
Sanskrit
Much of Modern Standard Hindi's vocabulary is borrowed from Sanskrit as tatsam borrowings, especially in technical and academic fields. The formal Hindi standard, from which much of the Persian, Arabic and English vocabulary has been replaced by neologisms compounding tatsam words, is called Śuddh Hindi (pure Hindi), and is viewed as a more prestigious dialect over other more colloquial forms of Hindi.
Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for native speakers. They may have Sanskrit consonant clusters which do not exist in native Hindi, causing difficulties in pronunciation.[120]
As a part of the process of Sanskritization, new words are coined using Sanskrit components to be used as replacements for supposedly foreign vocabulary. Usually these neologisms are calques of English words already adopted into spoken Hindi. Some terms such as dūrbhāṣ "telephone", literally "far-speech" and dūrdarśan "television", literally "far-sight" have even gained some currency in formal Hindi in the place of the English borrowings (ṭeli)fon and ṭīvī.[121]
Persian
Hindi also features significant Persian influence, standardised from spoken Hindustani.[111][122][page needed] Early borrowings, beginning in the mid-12th century, were specific to Islam (e.g. Muhammad, islām) and so Persian was simply an intermediary for Arabic. Later, under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, Persian became the primary administrative language in the Hindi heartland. Persian borrowings reached a heyday in the 17th century, pervading all aspects of life. Even grammatical constructs, namely the izafat, were assimilated into Hindi.[123]
Post-Partition the Indian government advocated for a policy of Sanskritization leading to a marginalisation of the Persian element in Hindi. However, many Persian words (e.g. muśkil "difficult", bas "enough", havā "air", x(a)yāl "thought", kitab "Book", khud "Self") have remained entrenched in Modern Standard Hindi, and a larger amount are still used in Urdu poetry written in the Devanagari script.
Arabic
Arabic also shows influence in Hindi, often via Persian but sometimes directly.[124]
| Arabic word | Hindi word (Devanagari) |
Gloss |
|---|---|---|
| وقت waqt | वक़्त vaqt | time |
| قميص qamīṣ | क़मीस qamīz | shirt |
| كتاب kitāb | किताब kitāb | book |
| نصيب naṣīb | नसीब nasīb | destiny |
| كرسي kursiyy | कुर्सी kursī | chair |
| حساب ḥisāb | हिसाब hisāb | calculation |
| قانون qānūn | क़ानून qānūn | law |
| خبر ḵabar | ख़बर xabar | news |
| دنيا dunyā | दुनिया duniyā | world |
Media
Literature
Hindi literature is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); Śṛṇgār (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); Vīgāthā (epic); and Ādhunik (modern).
Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was primarily written in other varieties of Hindi, particularly Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but to a degree also in Delhavi, the basis for Modern Standard Hindi. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect.
Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri in 1888, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi.[126] The person who brought realism in Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement. Literary, or Sāhityik, Hindi was popularised by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular with educated people.[citation needed]
The Dvivedī Yug ("Age of Dwivedi") in Hindi literature lasted from 1900 to 1918. It is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who played a major role in establishing Modern Standard Hindi in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.
In the 20th century, Hindi literature saw a romantic upsurge. This is known as Chāyāvād (shadow-ism) and the literary figures belonging to this school are known as Chāyāvādī. Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Mahadevi Varma and Sumitranandan Pant, are the four major Chāyāvādī poets.
Uttar Ādhunik is the post-modernist period of Hindi literature, marked by a questioning of early trends that copied the West as well as the excessive ornamentation of the Chāyāvādī movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.
Internet
Hindi literature, music, and film have all been disseminated via the internet. In 2015, Google reported a 94% increase in Hindi-content consumption year-on-year, adding that 21% of users in India prefer content in Hindi.[127] Many Hindi newspapers also offer digital editions.
Sample text
The following is a sample text in High Hindi, of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):
- Hindi in Devanagari Script
- अनुच्छेद 1(एक): सभी मनुष्य जन्म से मर्यादा और अधिकारों में स्वतन्त्र और समान होते हैं। वे तर्क और विवेक से सम्पन्न हैं तथा उन्हें भ्रातृत्व की भावना से परस्पर के प्रति कार्य करना चाहिए।
- Transliteration (ISO)
- Anucchēd 1 (ēk): Sabhī manuṣya janma sē maryādā aur adhikārō̃ mē̃ svatantra aur samān hōtē haĩ. Vē tark aur vivēk sē sampanna haĩ tathā unhē̃ bhrātr̥tva kī bhāvanā sē paraspar kē pratī kārya karnā cāhiē.
- Transcription (IPA)
- [ənʊtːʃʰeːd eːk | səbʰiː mənʊʂjə dʒənmə seː məɾjaːd̪aː ɔːɾ əd̪ʰɪkaːɾõː mẽː sʋət̪ənt̪ɾə ɔːɾ səmaːn hoːteː hɛ̃ː‖ ʋeː t̪əɾk ɔːɾ ʋɪʋeːk seː səmpənːə hɛ̃ː t̪ətʰaː ʊnʰẽː bʰɾaːtɾɪt̪ʋə kiː bʰaːʋənaː seː pəɾəspəɾ keː pɾət̪iː kaːɾjə kəɾnaː tʃaːhɪeː‖]
- Gloss (word-to-word)
- Article 1 (one) – All humans birth from dignity and rights in independent and equal are. They logic and conscience from endowed are and they fraternity in the spirit of each other towards work should.
- Translation (grammatical)
- Article 1 – All humans are born independent and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with logic and conscience and they should work towards each other in the spirit of fraternity.
See also
- Hindi Belt
- Bengali Language Movement (Manbhum)
- Hindi Divas – the official day to celebrate Hindi as a language.
- Languages of India
- Languages with official status in India
- Indian states by most spoken scheduled languages
- List of English words of Hindi or Urdu origin
- List of Hindi channels in Europe (by type)
- List of languages by number of native speakers in India
- List of Sanskrit and Persian roots in Hindi
- World Hindi Secretariat
Notes
- (third official court language)
References
–"How many Indians can you talk to?". www.hindustantimes.com. Retrieved 22 December 2019.
–"Hindi and the North-South divide". 9 October 2018.
–Pillalamarri, Akhilesh. "India's Evolving Linguistic Landscape". thediplomat.com. Retrieved 22 December 2019.
Urdu, like Hindi, was a standardized register of the Hindustani language deriving from the Delhi dialect and emerged in the eighteenth century under the rule of the late Mughals.
Two forms of the same language, Nagarai Hindi and Persianized Hindi (Urdu) had identical grammar, shared common words and roots, and employed different scripts.
The national language of India and Pakistan 'Standard Urdu' is mutually intelligible with 'Standard Hindi' because both languages share the same Indic base and are all but indistinguishable in phonology and grammar (Lust et al. 2000).
The position of Hindi-Urdu among the languages of the world is anomalous. The number of its proficient speakers, over three hundred million, places it in third of fourth place after Mandarin, English, and perhaps Spanish.
The "Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb" is one such instance of the composite culture that marks various regions of the country. Prevalent in the North, particularly in the central plains, it is born of the union between the Hindu and Muslim cultures. Most of the temples were lined along the Ganges and the Khanqah (Sufi school of thought) were situated along the Yamuna river (also called Jamuna). Thus, it came to be known as the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with the word "tehzeeb" meaning culture. More than communal harmony, its most beautiful by-product was "Hindustani" which later gave us the Hindi and Urdu languages.
But with the establishment of Muslim rule in Delhi, it was the Old Hindi of this area which came to form the major partner with Persian. This variety of Hindi is called Khari Boli, 'the upright speech'.
Persian became the court language, and many Persian words crept into popular usage. The composite culture of northern India, known as the Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb was a product of the interaction between Hindu society and Islam.
... more words of Sanskrit origin but 75% of the vocabulary is common. It is also admitted that while this language is known as Hindustani, ... Muslims call it Urdu and the Hindus call it Hindi. ... Urdu is a national language evolved through years of Hindu and Muslim cultural contact and, as stated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, is essentially an Indian language and has no place outside.
...Hindustani, Rekhta, and Urdu as later names of the old Hindi (a.k.a. Hindavi).
It might be useful to recall here that Old Hindi or Hindavi, which was a naturally Persian- mixed language in the largest measure, has played this role before, as we have seen, for five or six centuries.
During the time of British rule, Hindi (in its religiously neutral, 'Hindustani' variety) increasingly came to be the symbol of national unity over against the English of the foreign oppressor. And Hindustani was learned widely throughout India, even in Bengal and the Dravidian south. ... Independence had been accompanied by the division of former British India into two countries, Pakistan and India. The former had been established as a Muslim state and had made Urdu, the Muslim variety of Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani, its national language.
Hindustani - term referring to common colloquial base of HINDI and URDU and to its function as lingua franca over much of India, much in vogue during Independence movement as expression of national unity; after Partition in 1947 and subsequent linguistic polarization it fell into disfavor; census of 1951 registered an enormous decline (86-98 per cent) in no. of persons declaring it their mother tongue (the majority of HINDI speakers and many URDU speakers had done so in previous censuses); trend continued in subsequent censuses: only 11,053 returned it in 1971...mostly from S India; [see Khubchandani 1983: 90-1].
The everyday speech of well over 50,000,000 persons of all communities in the north of India and in West Pakistan is the expression of a common language, Hindustani.
The Hindi film industry used the most popular street level version of Hindi, namely Hindustani, which included a lot of Urdu and Persian words.
Spoken Hindi is akin to spoken Urdu, and that language is often called Hindustani. Bollywood's screenplays are written in Hindustani.
In the 1980s and '90s, at least three million Afghans--mostly Pashtun--fled to Pakistan, where a substantial number spent several years being exposed to Hindi- and Urdu-language media, especially Bollywood films and songs, and being educated in Urdu-language schools, both of which contributed to the decline of Dari, even among urban Pashtuns.
Most Afghans in Kabul understand and/or speak Hindi, thanks to the popularity of Indian cinema in the country.
Urdu is closely related to Hindi, a language that originated and developed in the Indian subcontinent. They share the same Indic base and are so similar in phonology and grammar that they appear to be one language.
High Hindi written in Devanagari, having identical grammar with Urdu, employing the native Hindi or Hindustani (Prakrit) elements to the fullest, but for words of high culture, going to Sanskrit. Hindustani proper that represents the basic Khari Boli with vocabulary holding a balance between Urdu and High Hindi.
The primary sources of non-IA loans into MSH are Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Turkic and English. Conversational registers of Hindi/Urdu (not to mentioned formal registers of Urdu) employ large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords, although in Sanskritized registers many of these words are replaced by tatsama forms from Sanskrit. The Persian and Arabic lexical elements in Hindi result from the effects of centuries of Islamic administrative rule over much of north India in the centuries before the establishment of British rule in India. Although it is conventional to differentiate among Persian and Arabic loan elements into Hindi/Urdu, in practice it is often difficult to separate these strands from one another. The Arabic (and also Turkic) lexemes borrowed into Hindi frequently were mediated through Persian, as a result of which a thorough intertwining of Persian and Arabic elements took place, as manifest by such phenomena as hybrid compounds and compound words. Moreover, although the dominant trajectory of lexical borrowing was from Arabic into Persian, and thence into Hindi/Urdu, examples can be found of words that in origin are actually Persian loanwords into both Arabic and Hindi/Urdu.
- "Hindi content consumption on internet growing at 94%: Google". The Economic Times. 18 August 2015. Archived from the original on 15 February 2018. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
Bibliography
- Bhatia, Tej K. (11 September 2002). Colloquial Hindi: The Complete Course for Beginners. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-83534-8. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
- Grierson, G. A. Linguistic Survey of India Vol I-XI, Calcutta, 1928, ISBN 81-85395-27-6 (searchable database).
- Koul, Omkar N. (2008). Modern Hindi grammar (PDF). Springfield, VA: Dunwoody Press. ISBN 978-1-931546-06-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 July 2014. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
- McGregor, R.S. (1995). Outline of Hindi grammar: With exercises (3. ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Pr. ISBN 978-0-19-870008-1. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
- Frawley, William (2003). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics: AAVE-Esparanto. Vol.1. Oxford University Press. p. 481. ISBN 978-0-195-13977-8.
- Parthasarathy, R.; Kumar, Swargesh (2012). Bihar Tourism: Retrospect and Prospect. Concept Publishing Company. p. 120. ISBN 978-8-180-69799-9.
- Masica, Colin (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29944-2.
- Ohala, Manjari (1999). "Hindi". In International Phonetic Association (ed.). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: a Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press. pp. 100–103. ISBN 978-0-521-63751-0.
- Sadana, Rashmi (2012). English Heart, Hindi Heartland: the Political Life of Literature in India. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26957-6. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
- Shapiro, Michael C. (2001). "Hindi". In Garry, Jane; Rubino, Carl (eds.). An encyclopedia of the world's major languages, past and present. New England Publishing Associates. pp. 305–309.
- Shapiro, Michael C. (2003). "Hindi". In Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. pp. 250–285. ISBN 978-0-415-77294-5.
- Snell, Rupert; Weightman, Simon (1989). Teach Yourself Hindi (2003 ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-142012-9.
- Taj, Afroz (2002) A door into Hindi. Retrieved 8 November 2005.
- Tiwari, Bholanath ([1966] 2004) हिन्दी भाषा (Hindī Bhasha), Kitab Pustika, Allahabad, ISBN 81-225-0017-X.
Dictionaries
- McGregor, R.S. (1993), Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary (2004 ed.), Oxford University Press, USA.
- Hardev Bahri (1989), Learners' Hindi-English dictionary, Delhi: Rajapala
- Mahendra Caturvedi (1970), A practical Hindi-English dictionary, Delhi: National Publishing House
- Academic Room Hindi Dictionary Mobile App developed in the Harvard Innovation Lab (iOS, Android and Blackberry)
- John Thompson Platts (1884), A dictionary of Urdū, classical Hindī, and English (reprint ed.), LONDON: H. Milford, p. 1259, retrieved 6 July 2011
Further reading
- Bangha, Imre (2018). "Hindi". In Fleet, Kate; Krämer, Gudrun; Matringe, Denis; Nawas, John; Stewart, Devin J. (eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE. Brill Online. ISSN 1873-9830.
- Bhatia, Tej K. A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition. Leiden, Netherlands & New York, NY: E.J. Brill, 1987. ISBN 90-04-07924-6
External links
- Languages with Linglist code
- Hindi
- Hindi languages
- Hindustani language
- Fusional languages
- Indo-Aryan languages
- Official languages of India
- Standard languages
- Languages of Uttar Pradesh
- Languages of Rajasthan
- Languages of Himachal Pradesh
- Languages of Madhya Pradesh
- Languages of Bihar
- Languages of Jharkhand
- Languages of Jammu and Kashmir
- Languages of Maharashtra
- Languages of Arunachal Pradesh
- Languages of West Bengal
- Languages of Assam
- Languages of Gujarat
- Languages of Mizoram
- Languages of Pakistan
- Languages officially written in Indic scripts
- Lingua francas
- Subject–object–verb languages
- Sahitya Akademi recognised languages
- Languages written in Devanagari
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi
A city proper is the geographical area contained within city limits.[1][2] The term proper is not exclusive to cities; it can describe the geographical area within the boundaries of any given locality. The United Nations defines the term as "the single political jurisdiction which contains the historical city centre."[3]
City proper is one of the three basic concepts used to define urban areas and populations.[4] The other two are urban agglomeration, and the metropolitan area. In some countries, city limits that act as the demarcation for the city proper are drawn very wide, in some very narrow. This can be cause for recurring controversy.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_proper
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa, Jupiter, Sarah, Microsoft) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation).[1][2][3][4] Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique (the Hendersons, the Everglades, the Azores, the Pleiades). Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns (the Mozart experience; his Azores adventure), or in the role of common nouns (he's no Pavarotti; a few would-be Napoleons). The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention.[5][6]
A distinction is normally made in current linguistics between proper nouns and proper names. By this strict distinction, because the term noun is used for a class of single words (tree, beauty), only single-word proper names are proper nouns: Peter and Africa are both proper names and proper nouns; but Peter the Great and South Africa, while they are proper names, are not proper nouns (though they could be said to function as proper noun phrases). The term common name is not much used to contrast with proper name, but some linguists have used the term for that purpose. Sometimes proper names are called simply names, but that term is often used more broadly. Words derived from proper names are sometimes called proper adjectives (or proper adverbs, and so on), but not in mainstream linguistic theory. Not every noun or a noun phrase that refers to a unique entity is a proper name. Chastity, for instance, is a common noun, even if chastity is considered a unique abstract entity.
Few proper names have only one possible referent: there are many places named New Haven; Jupiter may refer to a planet, a god, a ship, a city in Florida, or a symphony; at least one person has been named Mata Hari, but so have a horse, a song, and three films; there are towns and people named Toyota, as well as the company. In English, proper names in their primary application cannot normally be modified by articles or another determiner,[citation needed] although some may be taken to include the article the, as in the Netherlands, the Roaring Forties, or the Rolling Stones. A proper name may appear to have a descriptive meaning, even though it does not (the Rolling Stones are not stones and do not roll; a woman named Rose is not a flower). If it had once been, it may no longer be so, for example, a location previously referred to as "the new town" may now have the proper name Newtown, though it is no longer new and is now a city rather than a town.
In English and many other languages, proper names and words derived from them are associated with capitalization; but the details are complex, and vary from language to language (French lundi, Canada, un homme canadien, un Canadien; English Monday, Canada, a Canadian man, a Canadian; Italian lunedì, Canada, un uomo canadese, un canadese). The study of proper names is sometimes called onomastics or onomatology, while a rigorous analysis of the semantics of proper names is a matter for philosophy of language.[citation needed]
Occasionally, what would otherwise be regarded as a proper noun is used as a common noun, in which case a plural form and a determiner are possible. Examples are in cases of ellipsis (for instance, the three Kennedys = the three members of the Kennedy family) and metaphor (for instance, the new Gandhi, likening a person to Mahatma Gandhi).[7][8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun
Witoto, Huitoto or Uitoto is an indigenous American language or language family spoken in Colombia and Peru.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witoto_language
Secret language may refer to:
- Cant (language), also known as cryptolect, the jargon or argot of a group, often employed to exclude or mislead people outside the group
- Argot, strictly a proper language with its own grammar, used to prevent understanding by outsiders; sometimes argot is used as a synonym of cant or jargon
- Sacred language, also called a ceremonial or a ritual language, which is only learned and used by a select initiated group
See also
- Cryptography, the practice and study of hidden information
- Language game, a system of manipulating spoken words to render them incomprehensible to the untrained ear
If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_language
Georgian (ქართული ენა, romanized: kartuli ena, pronounced [ˈkʰɑɾtʰuli ˈɛnɑ]) is the most widely spoken Kartvelian language; it also serves as the literary language or lingua franca for speakers of related languages.[2] It is the official language of Georgia and the native or primary language of 87.6% of its population.[3] Its speakers today number approximately four million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_language
The proper (Latin: proprium) is a part of the Christian liturgy that varies according to the date, either representing an observance within the liturgical year, or of a particular saint or significant event. The term is used in contrast to the ordinary, which is that part of the liturgy that is reasonably constant, or at least selected without regard to date, or to the common, which contains those parts of the liturgy that are common to an entire category of saints, such as apostles or martyrs.[citation needed]
Propers may include hymns and prayers in the canonical hours and in the Eucharist.[citation needed]
West
The proper of the mass, strictly speaking, consists of the Introit, Gradual, Alleluia or Tract, Sequence, Offertory, and Communion - in other words, all the variable portions of a mass which are spoken or sung by the choir or the people.[citation needed]
East
![[icon]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section is empty. You can help by adding to it. (March 2023) |
References
- Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
- Order of Mass
- Eastern Christian liturgy
- Catholic liturgy
- Liturgy of the Hours
- Christian liturgical music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_(liturgy)
The Hunnic language, or Hunnish, was the language spoken by Huns in the Hunnic Empire, a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic tribal confederation which invaded Eastern and Central Europe, and ruled most of Pannonian Eastern Europe, during the 4th and 5th centuries CE. A variety of languages were spoken within the Hun Empire.[1] A contemporary report by Priscus has that Hunnish was spoken alongside Gothic and the languages of other tribes subjugated by the Huns.[2]
As no inscriptions or whole sentences in the Hunnic language have been preserved, the attested corpus is very limited, consisting almost entirely of proper names in Greek and Latin sources.[3]
The Hunnic language cannot be classified at present,[4][5] but due to the origin of these proper names it has been compared with Turkic,[5][6] Mongolic, Iranian, and Yeniseian languages,[7] or various Indo-European languages.[8] Other scholars consider the available evidence inconclusive and the Hunnish language therefore unclassifiable.[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunnic_language
An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data[1] but sometimes due to the confounding influence of language contact, if different layers of its vocabulary or morphology point in different directions and it is not clear which represents the ancestral form of the language.[2] Some poorly known extinct languages, such as Gutian and Cacán, are simply unclassifiable, and it is unlikely the situation will ever change.
A supposedly unclassified language may turn out not to be a language at all, or even a distinct dialect, but merely a family, tribal or village name, or an alternative name for a people or language that is classified.
If a language's genetic relationship has not been established after significant documentation of the language and comparison with other languages and families, as in the case of Basque in Europe, it is considered a language isolate – that is, it is classified as a language family of its own. An 'unclassified' language therefore is one which may still turn out to belong to an established family once better data is available or more thorough comparative research is done. Extinct unclassified languages for which little evidence has been preserved are likely to remain in limbo indefinitely, unless lost documents or a surviving speaking population are discovered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclassified_language
Proper right and proper left are conceptual terms used to unambiguously convey relative direction when describing an image or other object. The "proper right" hand of a figure is the hand that would be regarded by that figure as its right hand.[1] In a frontal representation, that appears on the left as the viewer sees it, creating the potential for ambiguity if the hand is just described as the "right hand".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_right_and_proper_left
In the philosophy of language, a proper name – examples include a name of a specific person or place – is a name which ordinarily is taken to uniquely identify its referent in the world. As such it presents particular challenges for theories of meaning, and it has become a central problem in analytic philosophy. The common-sense view was originally formulated by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic (1843), where he defines it as "a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about but not of telling anything about it".[1] This view was criticized when philosophers applied principles of formal logic to linguistic propositions. Gottlob Frege pointed out that proper names may apply to imaginary and[ambiguous] nonexistent entities, without becoming meaningless, and he showed that sometimes more than one proper name may identify the same entity without having the same sense, so that the phrase "Homer believed the morning star was the evening star" could be meaningful and not tautological in spite of the fact that the morning star and the evening star identifies the same referent. This example became known as Frege's puzzle and is a central issue in the theory of proper names.
Bertrand Russell was the first to propose a descriptivist theory of names, which held that a proper name refers not to a referent, but to a set of true propositions that uniquely describe a referent – for example, "Aristotle" refers to "the teacher of Alexander the Great". Rejecting descriptivism, Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan instead advanced causal-historical theories of reference, which hold that names come to be associated with individual referents because social groups who link the name to its reference in a naming event (e.g. a baptism), which henceforth fixes the value of the name to the specific referent within that community. Today[vague] a direct reference theory is common, which holds that proper names refer to their referents without attributing any additional information, connotative or of sense, about them.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_name_(philosophy)
Assamese (/ˌæsəˈmiːz/[4]), also Asamiya ([ɔxɔmija] অসমীয়া),[5] is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam, where it is an official language, and it serves as a lingua franca of the wider region.[6] The easternmost Indo-Iranian language, it has over 15 million speakers according to Ethnologue.[1]
Nefamese, an Assamese-based pidgin in Arunachal Pradesh, was used in as the lingua franca till it was replaced by Hindi; and Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language,[7] continues to be widely used in Nagaland. The Kamtapuri language of Rangpur division of Bangladesh and the Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri districts of India are linguistically closer to Assamese, though the speakers identify with the Bengali culture and the literary language.[8] In the past, it was the court language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century.[9]
Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Assamese evolved at least before the 7th century CE[10] from the middle Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit.[11] Its sister languages include Angika, Bengali, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Chakma, Chittagonian, Hajong, Rajbangsi, Maithili, Rohingya and Sylheti. It is written in the Assamese alphabet, an abugida system, from left to right, with many typographic ligatures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assamese_language
The Austroasiatic languages[note 1] /ˌɒstroʊ.eɪʒiˈætɪk, ˌɔː-/, are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Austroasiatic constitute the majority languages of Vietnam and Cambodia. There are around 117 million speakers of Austroasiatic languages.[1] Of these languages, only Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon have a long-established recorded history. Only two have official status as modern national languages: Vietnamese in Vietnam and Khmer in Cambodia. The Mon language is a recognized indigenous language in Myanmar and Thailand. In Myanmar, the Wa language is the de facto official language of Wa State. Santali is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The rest of the languages are spoken by minority groups and have no official status.
Ethnologue identifies 168 Austroasiatic languages. These form thirteen established families (plus perhaps Shompen, which is poorly attested, as a fourteenth), which have traditionally been grouped into two, as Mon–Khmer,[2] and Munda. However, one recent classification posits three groups (Munda, Mon-Khmer, and Khasi–Khmuic),[3] while another has abandoned Mon–Khmer as a taxon altogether, making it synonymous with the larger family.[4]
Austroasiatic languages have a disjunct distribution across Southeast Asia and parts of India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Southern China, separated by regions where other languages are spoken. They appear to be the extant original languages of Mainland Southeast Asia (excluding the Andaman Islands), with the neighboring, and sometimes surrounding, Kra–Dai, Hmong-Mien, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan languages being the result of later migrations.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austroasiatic_languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources,[1][2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.[3] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.
Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. Although Chinese linguists generally include Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages within Sino-Tibetan, most other linguists have excluded them since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.[1]
According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families.[2][3] A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are:[citation needed] the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan family, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China.
Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including language isolates.[4]
There are also many dead languages which have no native speakers living, and extinct languages, which have no native speakers and no descendant languages. Finally, there are some languages that are insufficiently studied to be classified, and probably some which are not even known to exist outside their respective speech communities.
Membership of languages in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to descend "genetically" from a common ancestor. Speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original speech community gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process.[5]
Genealogically related languages present shared retentions; that is, features of the proto-language (or reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing (convergence). Membership in a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations; that is, common features of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family. For example, Germanic languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language.[citation needed] These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all Germanic languages.
Structure of a family
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (May 2022) |
Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade.
Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus in how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, and groups into complexes. A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language.
The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied[by whom?] to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods.
There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry[6] that was verified statistically.[7] Languages interpreted in terms of the putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion).[8]
Dialect continua
Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take the form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic, the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as a single language.
A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within a Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family.
Isolates
Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates, essentially language families consisting of a single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today.[9] An example is Basque. In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them.
It is commonly misunderstood that language isolates are classified as such because there is not sufficient data on or documentation of the language. This is false[neutrality is disputed] because a language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship is found with any other known language.[9]
A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier. For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. Another well-known isolate is Mapudungun, the Mapuche language from the Araucanían language family in Chile.[clarification needed] A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language, spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In the latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family.[citation needed]
Proto-languages
A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue, which is one that a specific person has been exposed to from birth[10]),[excessive detail?] being the root which all languages in the family stem from. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher. This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families. For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing.
Other classifications of languages
| This section needs additional citations for verification. (May 2022) |
Sprachbund
A sprachbund is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent.[11]
Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with the language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be "areal features". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not a linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family.
Contact languages
The concept of language families is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects, which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed.[12] It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer. Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact, which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages. In addition, a number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known.
Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for the purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin. Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate the other language.[13]
See also
- Constructed language
- Endangered language
- Extinct language
- Language death
- List of revived languages
- Global language system
- ISO 639-5
- Linguist List
- List of language families
- List of languages by number of native speakers
- Origin of language
- Proto-language
- Proto-Human language
- Tree model
- Unclassified language
- Father Tongue hypothesis
- Farming/language dispersal hypothesis
References
- "Languages in Contact | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2 October 2020.
Further reading
- Boas, Franz (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Vol. 1. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology. ISBN 0-8032-5017-7.
- Boas, Franz. (1922). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 2). Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington, D.C.: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
- Boas, Franz. (1933). Handbook of American Indian languages (Vol. 3). Native American legal materials collection, title 1227. Glückstadt: J.J. Augustin.
- Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
- Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press.
- Goddard, Ives (Ed.). (1996). Languages. Handbook of North American Indians (W. C. Sturtevant, General Ed.) (Vol. 17). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. ISBN 0-16-048774-9.
- Goddard, Ives. (1999). Native languages and language families of North America (rev. and enlarged ed. with additions and corrections). [Map]. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press (Smithsonian Institution). (Updated version of the map in Goddard 1996). ISBN 0-8032-9271-6.
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnologue: Languages of the world (15th ed.). Dallas, TX: SIL International. ISBN 1-55671-159-X. (Online version: Ethnologue: Languages of the World).
- Greenberg, Joseph H. (1966). The Languages of Africa (2nd ed.). Bloomington: Indiana University.
- Harrison, K. David. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Oxford University Press.
- Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
- Ross, Malcolm. (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages Archived 8 June 2004 at the Wayback Machine". In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples (PDF)
- Ruhlen, Merritt. (1987). A guide to the world's languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- Sturtevant, William C. (Ed.). (1978–present). Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 1–20). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. (Vols. 1–3, 16, 18–20 not yet published).
- Voegelin, C. F. & Voegelin, F. M. (1977). Classification and index of the world's languages. New York: Elsevier.
External links
- Linguistic maps (from Muturzikin)
- Ethnologue
- The Multitree Project
- Lenguas del mundo (World Languages)
- Comparative Swadesh list tables of various language families (from Wiktionary)
- Most similar languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family
Category:Historical linguistics
| Library cataloging and classification | |
|---|---|
| main topic | historical linguistics, diachronic comparative linguistics[*] |
| Dewey Decimal | 417 |
| Universal Decimal | 81-112 |
Subcategories
This category has the following 26 subcategories, out of 26 total.
A
- Archaic words and phrases (6 C, 14 P)
C
- Comparative linguistics (5 C, 25 P)
D
- Dialectology (6 C, 30 P)
E
- Extinct languages (6 C, 38 P)
H
- Historical linguists (4 C, 147 P)
I
- Isoglosses (18 P)
J
L
- Long-range comparative linguistics (2 C, 2 P)
N
- Nasalization (1 C, 8 P)
P
- Proto-languages (5 C, 145 P)
R
- Reconstructed languages (2 C, 2 P)
S
- Swadesh lists (1 P)
U
- Urheimat (5 P)
Pages in category "Historical linguistics"
The following 127 pages are in this category, out of 127 total. This list may not reflect recent changes.
A
C
G
H
I
L
- Language change
- Language death
- Language family
- Language history
- Latin word order
- Law of Hobson-Jobson
- Layering (linguistics)
- Lexical diffusion
- Lexicostatistics
- Linguistic distance
- Linguistic homeland
- Linguistic reconstruction
- Linkage (linguistics)
- List of ancestor languages
- List of languages by first written account
- List of proto-languages
- Loanword
P
R
S
Y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_linguistics
Two languages have a genetic relationship, and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor, or one is descended from the other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship.[1][2]: 184
An example of linguistic genetic relationship would be between the Romance languages, such as Spanish, French, and Romanian, all descended from the spoken Latin of ancient Rome.[note 1][3]
Language relationships can inform to some extent about possible genetic relationships in the biological sense. For example, if all languages stem from a single origin, it strongly implies that all humanity may have been collected together at some point in history. However, counterexamples exist, such as in the case of adoption and intermixing of specific languages.[clarification needed][citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_relationship_(linguistics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_linguistics
The Ukrainian orthography of 1904 (Ukrainian: Український правопис 1904 року, romanized: Ukrainskyi pravopys 1904 roku) is the official Ukrainian orthography in Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century. The spelling was officially formalized in the publication "Ruthenian orthography with a dictionary" (Ruthenian: Руська правопись зі словарцем), which was prepared and approved by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv. Not only Western Ukrainian linguists, but also, among others, such Dnieper scholars as Ahatanhel Krymskyi, Yevhen Tymchenko, Mykhailo Hrushevskyi, and V. Doroshenko took part in the creation of this orthographic manual.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_orthography_of_1904
Latin word order is relatively free. The subject, object, and verb can come in any order, and an adjective can go before or after its noun, as can a genitive such as hostium "of the enemy". A common feature of Latin is hyperbaton, in which a phrase is split up by other words: Sextus est Tarquinius "it is Sextus Tarquinius".
A complicating factor in Latin word order is that there are variations in the style of different authors and between different genres of writing. In Caesar's historical writing, the verb is much likelier to come at the end of the sentence than in Cicero's philosophy. The word order of poetry is even freer than in prose, and examples of interleaved word order (double hyperbaton) are common.
In terms of word order typology, Latin is classified by some scholars as basically an SOV (subject-object-verb) language, with preposition-noun, noun-genitive, and adjective-noun (but also noun-adjective) order. Other scholars, however, argue that the word order of Latin is so variable that it is impossible to establish one order as more basic than another.
Although the order of words in Latin is comparatively free, it is not arbitrary. Frequently, different orders indicate different nuances of meaning and emphasis. As Devine and Stephens, the authors of Latin Word Order, put it: "Word order is not a subject which anyone reading Latin can afford to ignore. . . . Reading a paragraph of Latin without attention to word order entails losing access to a whole dimension of meaning."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order
False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family.[1] For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. Likewise, English much and Spanish mucho came by their similar meanings via completely different Proto-Indo-European roots, and same for English have and Spanish haber. This is different from false friends, which are similar-sounding words with different meanings, but which may in fact be etymologically related.
Even though false cognates lack a common root, there may still be an indirect connection between them (for example by phono-semantic matching or folk etymology).
Phenomenon
The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct.[1][2] False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes).[2] For example, English pretend and French prétendre are false friends, but not false cognates, as they have the same origin.[3]
"Mama and papa" type
The basic kinship terms mama and papa comprise a special case of false cognates.[4][5][6][7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate
A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom, word sense, or phrase.[1][2] An example for a word sense is 'ado' in 'much ado'. An example for a phrase is 'in point' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases 'case in point' (also 'case on point' in the legal context) and 'in point of fact', but is rarely used outside of a legal context.
English-language examples
- ado, as in "without further ado" or "with no further ado" or "much ado about nothing", although the homologous form "to-do" remains attested ("make a to-do", "a big to-do", etc.)
- bandy, as in "bandy about" or "bandy-legged"
- bated, as in "wait with bated breath", although the derived term "abate" remains in non-idiom-specific use
- beck, as in "at one's beck and call", although the verb form "beckon" is still used in non-idiom-specific use
- champing, as in "champing at the bit", where "champ" is an obsolete precursor to "chomp", in current use
- coign, as in "coign of vantage"
- deserts, as in "just deserts", although singular "desert" in the sense of "state of deserving" occurs in nonidiom-specific contexts including law and philosophy. "Dessert" is a French loanword, meaning "removing what has been served," and has only a distant etymological connection.
- dint, as in "by dint of"
- dudgeon, as in "in high dudgeon"
- eke, as in "eke out"
- fettle, as in "in fine fettle",[3] although the verb, 'to fettle', remains in specialized use in metal casting.[4]
- fro, as in "to and fro"
- goodly', as in "goodly number"
- helter skelter, as in "scattered helter skelter about the office", Middle English skelten to hasten[5]
- inclement, as in "inclement weather”
- jetsam, as in "flotsam and jetsam", except in legal contexts (especially admiralty, property, and international law)
- kith, as in "kith and kin"[6]
- lo, as in "lo and behold"
- loggerheads as in "at loggerheads"[7] or loggerhead turtle
- muchness as in "much of a muchness"
- shebang, as in "the whole shebang", although the word is now used as an unrelated common noun in programmers' jargon.[8]
- shrive, preserved only in inflected forms occurring only as part of fixed phrases: 'shrift' in "short shrift"[9] and 'shrove' in "Shrove Tuesday"
- span and spick, as in "spick and span"
- turpitude, as in "moral turpitude"
- vim, as in "vim and vigor"
- wedlock, as in "out of wedlock"
- wend, as in "wend your way"[10]
- yore, as in "of yore", usually "days of yore"
"Born fossils"
These words were formed from other languages, by elision, or by mincing of other fixed phrases.
- caboodle, as in "kit and caboodle" (evolved from "kit and boodle", itself a fixed phrase borrowed as a unit from Dutch kitte en boedel)
- druthers, as in "if I had my druthers..." (formed by elision from "would rather"[11] and never occurring outside this phrase to begin with)
- tarnation, as in "what in tarnation...?" (evolved in the context of fixed phrases formed by mincing of previously fixed phrases that include the term "damnation")
- nother, as in "a whole nother..." (fixed phrase formed by rebracketing another as a nother, then inserting whole for emphasis; almost never occurs outside this phrase)
See also
- Bound morpheme
- Collocation — tendency of one word to occur near another
- Cranberry morpheme — morpheme which has no independent meaning in a lexeme
- Fossilization (linguistics)
- Siamese twins (linguistics)
References
A word or other linguistic form preserved only in isolated regions or in set phrases, idioms, or collocations
- "druthers". Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 2017-10-04.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
In historical linguistics, a daughter language, also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent.[1] If more than one language has developed from the same proto-language, or 'mother language', those languages are said to be sister languages, members of the same language family. These concepts are linked to the tree model of language evolution, in which the relationships between languages are compared with those between members of a family tree. This model captures the diversification of languages from a common source.[2]
Strictly speaking, the metaphor of the mother-daughter relationship can lead to a misconceptualization of language history, as daughter languages are direct continuations of the mother language, which have become distinct, principally by a process of gradual change; the languages are not separate entities "born" to a parent who eventually dies.
Mother languages do not "die", they become their daughter languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_language
Divergence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, specialisation, persistence, and de-categorialisation.
Divergence names a state of affairs subsequent to some change, namely the result of the process called “split” by Heine and Reh. “When a lexical form undergoes grammaticalization to a clitic or affix, the original form may remain as an autonomous lexical element and undergo the same changes as ordinary lexical items.” (Hopper 1991: 22) A possible formal distinction between divergence and split would be that the latter seems to be confined to cases where one and the same source has several targets, whereas the former merely refers to the drifting apart of previously more similar items.
The form of a lexical item may undergo different changes from its grammaticalised counterpart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergence_(linguistics)
External history of a language refers to the social and geopolitical history of the language: migrations, conquests, language contact, and uses of the language in trade, education, literature, law, liturgy, mass media, etc. It is contrasted with internal history, which refers to linguistic forms (phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) and semantics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_history
In linguistics, language death occurs when a language loses its last native speaker. By extension, language extinction is when the language is no longer known, including by second-language speakers. Other similar terms include linguicide,[1] the death of a language from natural or political causes, and rarely glottophagy,[2] the absorption or replacement of a minor language by a major language.
Language death is a process in which the level of a speech community's linguistic competence in their language variety decreases, eventually resulting in no native or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death can affect any language form, including dialects. Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a first language of an individual.[3]
In the modern period (c. 1500 CE–present; following the rise of colonialism), language death has typically resulted from the process of cultural assimilation leading to language shift and the gradual abandonment of a native language in favour of a foreign lingua franca, largely those of European countries.[4][5][6]
As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are minor languages in danger of extinction; one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050.[7][8]
Types
Language death is typically the outcome of language shift and may manifest itself in one of the following ways:
- Gradual language death: the most common way that languages die.[9] Generally happens when the people speaking that language interact with speakers of a language of higher prestige. This group of people first becomes bilingual, then with newer generations the level of proficiency decreases, and finally no native speakers exist.
- Bottom-to-top language death: occurs when the language starts to be used for only religious, literary, ceremonial purposes, but not in casual context. (As in Latin or Avestan.)
- Top-to-bottom language death: happens when language shift begins in a high-level environment such as the government, but still continues to be used in casual context.
- Radical language death: the disappearance of a language when all speakers of the language cease to speak the language because of threats, pressure, persecution, or colonisation.
- Linguicide (also known as sudden death, language genocide, physical language death, and biological language death): occurs when all or almost all native speakers of that language die because of natural disasters, wars etc. In the case of linguicide and radical death, language death is very sudden therefore the speech community skips over the semi speaker phase where structural changes begin to happen to languages. The languages just disappear.[10]
- Language attrition: the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level
- Death of all speakers: The death of all native speakers in a speech community. Death of all speakers can occur through warfare, genocide, epidemic diseases and natural disasters.
- Change in the land of a speech community: This occurs when members of a speech community leave their traditional lands or communities and move to towns with different languages. For example, in a small isolated community in New Guinea, the young men of the community move to towns for better economic opportunities.[11] The movement of people puts the native language in danger because more children become bilingual which makes the language harder to pass down to future generations.
- Cultural contact and clash: Culture contact and clash affects how the community feels about the native language. Cultural, economic and political contact with communities that speak different languages are factors that may alter a community's attitude towards their own language.[11]
The most common process leading to language death is one in which a community of speakers of one language becomes bilingual with another language, and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language until they cease to use their original, heritage language. This is a process of assimilation which may be voluntary or may be forced upon a population. Speakers of some languages, particularly regional or minority languages, may decide to abandon them because of economic or utilitarian reasons, in favor of languages regarded as having greater utility or prestige.
Languages with a small, geographically isolated population of speakers can die when their speakers are wiped out by genocide, disease, or natural disaster.
Definition
A language is often declared to be dead even before the last native speaker of the language has died. If there are only a few elderly speakers of a language remaining, and they no longer use that language for communication, then the language is effectively dead. A language that has reached such a reduced stage of use is generally considered moribund.[3] Half of the spoken languages of the world are not being taught to new generations of children.[3] Once a language is no longer a native language—that is, if no children are being socialized into it as their primary language—the process of transmission is ended and the language itself will not survive past the current generations.[12]
Language death is rarely a sudden event, but a slow process of each generation learning less and less of the language until its use is relegated to the domain of traditional use, such as in poetry and song. Typically the transmission of the language from adults to children becomes more and more restricted, to the final setting that adults speaking the language will raise children who never acquire fluency. One example of this process reaching its conclusion is that of the Dalmatian language.
Consequences on grammar
During language loss—sometimes referred to as obsolescence in the linguistic literature—the language that is being lost generally undergoes changes as speakers make their language more similar to the language to which they are shifting. This process of change has been described by Appel (1983) in two categories, though they are not mutually exclusive. Often speakers replace elements of their own language with something from the language they are shifting toward. Also, if their heritage language has an element that the new language does not, speakers may drop it.
- overgeneralization;
- undergeneralization;
- loss of phonological contrasts;
- variability;
- changes in word order;
- morphological loss, such as was seen in Scottish Gaelic in East Sutherland, Scotland (Dorian: 1978) as fluent speakers still used the historic plural formation, whereas semi-speakers used simple suffixation or did not include any plural formation at all;
- synthetic morphosyntax may become increasingly analytic;
- syntactic loss (i.e. lexical categories, complex constructions);
- relexification;
- loss of word-formation productivity;
- style loss, such as the loss of ritual speech;[13]
- morphological leveling;[14]
- analogical leveling.
Health consequences for Indigenous communities
When a language dies, a complex loss occurs beyond speech, including connection to identity and well-being particularly in Indigenous communities, as many Indigenous peoples' identity, autonomy, and spiritual sovereignty are highly interwoven with their connection to their traditional language.[15] Given that cultural identity, language, and social traditions are deeply interwoven, language loss can be a fundamental factor of ill health in Indigenous communities.[16]
The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organization (NACCHO) defines health as not merely the physical well-being of an individual but also as social, emotional, and cultural well-being of the whole community.[15] For Aboriginal communities in Australia, language loss, as part of broad colonial attempts at culturicide, is part of a cultural loss that plays a key role in ongoing intergenerational trauma reinforcing health inequity. Linguicide plays an active role in ongoing intergenerational trauma of the Stolen Generations, which is known to negatively impact mental health, and is implicated in high suicide rates.[17]
Similar forced assimilation practices instrumental in colonial linguicide such as removal of children to residential schools have created language loss in Indigenous communities around the world. As a consequence Indigenous peoples experience heightened negative mental health effects, such as substance abuse, trauma, and depression.[16] A study conducted on Aboriginal youth suicide rates in Canada found that Indigenous communities in which a majority of members speak the traditional language exhibit low suicide rates. Contrary, suicide rates were six times higher in groups where less than half of its members communicate in their ancestral language.[18]
Many Indigenous communities take on a holistic view of health, in which a connection to culture and language is essential to well-being. Together, culture and language build the foundation of a collective identity.[19] Thus, language death can have severe effects on health.
Language revitalization
Language revitalization is an attempt to slow or reverse language death.[20] Revitalization programs are ongoing in many languages, and have had varying degrees of success.
The revival of the Hebrew language in Israel is the only example of a language's acquiring new first language speakers after it became extinct in everyday use for an extended period, being used only as a liturgical language.[21] Even in the case of Hebrew, there is a theory that argues that "the Hebrew revivalists who wished to speak pure Hebrew failed. The result is a fascinating and multifaceted Israeli language, which is not only multi-layered but also multi-sourced. The revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s)."[22]
Other cases of language revitalization which have seen some degree of success are Irish, Welsh, Basque, Hawaiian, Cherokee and Navajo.[citation needed]
Reasons for language revitalization vary: they can include physical danger affecting those whose language is dying, economic danger such as the exploitation of natural resources, political danger such as genocide, or cultural danger such as assimilation.[23] During the past century, it is estimated that more than 2,000 languages have already become extinct. The United Nations (UN) estimates that more than half of the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers and that a quarter have fewer than 1,000 speakers; and that, unless there are some efforts to maintain them, over the next hundred years most of these will become extinct.[24] These figures are often cited as reasons why language revitalization is necessary to preserve linguistic diversity. Culture and identity are also frequently cited reasons for language revitalization, when a language is perceived as a unique "cultural treasure".[25] A community often sees language as a unique part of their culture, connecting them with their ancestors or with the land, making up an essential part of their history and self-image.[26]
According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve wellbeing. There are various ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian benefits of language revival—for example, historical justice, diversity, and employability, respectively."[1]
Factors that prevent language death
Google launched the Endangered Languages Project aimed at helping preserve languages that are at risk of extinction. Its goal is to compile up-to-date information about endangered languages and share the latest research about them.
Anthropologist Akira Yamamoto has identified nine factors that he believes will help prevent language death:[12]
- There must be a dominant culture that favors linguistic diversity
- The endangered community must possess an ethnic identity that is strong enough to encourage language preservation
- The creation and promotion of programs that educate students on the endangered language and culture
- The creation of school programs that are both bilingual and bicultural
- For native speakers to receive teacher training
- The endangered speech community must be completely involved
- There must be language materials created that are easy to use
- The language must have written materials that encompass new and traditional content
- The language must be used in new environments and the areas the language is used (both old and new) must be strengthened
Dead languages
| This section needs additional citations for verification. (December 2015) |
Linguists distinguish between language "death" and the process where a language becomes a "dead language" through normal language change, a linguistic phenomenon analogous to pseudoextinction. This happens when a language in the course of its normal development gradually morphs into something that is then recognized as a separate, different language, leaving the old form with no native speakers. Thus, for example, Old English may be regarded as a "dead language" although it changed and developed into Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. Dialects of a language can also die, contributing to the overall language death. For example, the Ainu language is slowly dying: "The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists Hokkaido Ainu as critically endangered with 15 speakers ... and both Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu as extinct."[27] The language vitality for Ainu has weakened because of Japanese becoming the favoured language for education since the end of the nineteenth century. Education in Japanese heavily impacted the decline in use of the Ainu language because of forced linguistic assimilation.[28]
Language change
The process of language change may also involve the splitting up of a language into a family of several daughter languages, leaving the common parent language "dead". This has happened to Latin, which (through Vulgar Latin) eventually developed into the Romance languages, and to Sanskrit, which (through Prakrit) developed into the New Indo-Aryan languages. Such a process is normally not described as "language death", because it involves an unbroken chain of normal transmission of the language from one generation to the next, with only minute changes at every single point in the chain. Thus with regard to Latin, for example, there is no point at which Latin "died"; it evolved in different ways in different geographic areas, and its modern forms are now identified by a plethora of different names such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc. Language shift can be used to understand the evolution of Latin into the various modern forms. Language shift, which could lead to language death, occurs because of a shift in language behaviour from a speech community. Contact with other languages and cultures causes change in behaviour to the original language which creates language shift.[10]
Measuring language vitality
Except in case of linguicide, languages do not suddenly become extinct; they become moribund as the community of speakers gradually shifts to using other languages. As speakers shift, there are discernible, if subtle, changes in language behavior. These changes in behavior lead to a change of linguistic vitality in the community. There are a variety of systems that have been proposed for measuring the vitality of a language in a community. One of the earliest is the GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991.[29] A noteworthy publishing milestone in measuring language vitality is an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol. 32.2, 2011, with several authors presenting their own tools for measuring language vitality. A number of other published works on measuring language vitality have been published, prepared by authors with varying situations and applications in mind. These include works by Arienne Dwyer,[30] Martin Ehala,[31] M. Lynne Landwehr,[32] Mark Karan,[33] András Kornai,[34] and Paul Lewis and Gary Simons.[35]
See also
- Classical language
- Cultural genocide
- Cultural hegemony
- Directorate of Language Planning and Implementation
- Endangered language
- Ethnocide
- Extinct language
- International auxiliary language
- Language contact
- Language movement
- Language policy
- Language revitalization
- Language shift
- Lingua Libre
- Linguistic discrimination
- Linguistic imperialism
- Linguistic purism
- Linguistic rights
- List of last known speakers of languages
- Minority language
- Native Tongue Title
- Prestige language
- Regional language
- Rosetta Project
- The Linguists (documentary film)
References
- Lewis, M. Paul & Gary F. Simons. 2010. Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman's GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique 55(2). 103–120.
Further reading
- Abley, Mark. (2003). Spoken here: Travels among threatened languages. London: Heinemann.
- Aitchinson, Jean. (1991). Language change: progress or decay? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2007). "Linguistic sustainability for a multilingual humanity", Glossa. An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2, num. 2.
- Batibo, Herman M. (2005). Language decline and death in Africa: Causes, consequences, and challenges. Multilingual Matters.
- Brenzinger, Matthias (Ed.). (1992). Language death: Factual and theoretical explorations with special reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Brenzinger, Matthais (Ed.). (1998). Endangered languages in Africa. Cologne: Rüdiger Köper Verlag.
- Broderick, George. (1999). Language Death in the Isle of Man. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ISBN 3-484-30395-6.
- Calvet, Louis-Jean. (1998). Language wars and linguistic politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Campbell, Lyle. (1994). Language death. In R. E. Asher (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 1960–1968). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
- Campbell, Lyle; & Muntzel, M. (1989). The structural consequences of language death. In N. C. Dorian (Ed.).
- Cantoni-Harvey, Gina (Ed.). (1997). Stabilizing indigenous languages. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, Center for Excellence in Education.
- Crystal, David. (2000). Language death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-65321-5.
- Crystal, David. (2004). Language revolution. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Cyr, Christine. (2008). "How Do You Learn a Dead Language?". Slate.
- Dalby, Andrew. (2003). Language in danger: The loss of linguistic diversity and the threat to our future. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-12900-9.
- Dixon, R. M. W. (1997). The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1973). Grammatical change in a dying dialect. Language, 49, 413–438.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1978). The fate of morphological complexity in language death: Evidence from East Sutherland Gaelic. Language, 54 (3), 590–609.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (1981). Language death: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- Dorian, Nancy C. (Ed.). (1989). Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language (No. 7). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-32405-X.
- Dressler, Wolfgand & Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth (eds.) (1977) Language death (International Journal of the Sociology of Language vol. 12). The Hague: Mouton.
- Fishman, Joshua A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
- Grenoble, Lenore A.; & Whaley, Lindsay J. (Eds.). (1998). Endangered languages: Current issues and future prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hagège, Claude. (1992). Le souffle de la langue. Paris: Odile Jacob.
- Hagège, Claude. (2000). Halte à la mort des langues. Paris: Editions Odille Jacob.
- Hale, Ken; Krauss, Michael; Watahomigie, Lucille J.; Yamamoto, Akira Y.; Craig, Colette; Jeanne, LaVerne M. et al. (1992). Endangered languages. Language, 68 (1), 1-42.
- Harmon, David. (2002). In light of our differences: How diversity in nature and culture makes us human. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Harrison, K. David. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-518192-1.
- Hazaël-Massieux, Marie-Christine. (1999). Les créoles: L'indispensable survie. Paris: Editions Entente.
- Hill, Jane. (1983). Language death in Uto-Aztecan. International Journal of American Linguistics, 49, 258–27.
- Janse, Mark; & Tol, Sijmen (Eds.). (2003). Language death and language maintenance: Theoretical, practical and descriptive approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. ISBN 90-272-4752-8; ISBN 1-58811-382-5.
- Joseph, Brian D. (Ed.). (2003). When languages collide: Perspectives on language conflict, language competition, and language coexistence. Columbus: Ohio State University.
- Maffi, Lusia (Ed.). (2001). On biocultural diversity: Linking language, knowledge, and the environment. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.
- Maurais, Jacques; & Morris, Michael A. (Eds.). (2003). Languages in a globalizing world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mohan, Peggy; & Zador, Paul. (1986). Discontinuity in a life cycle: The death of Trinidad Bhojpuri. Language, 62 (2), 291–319.
- Motamed, Fereydoon; (1974). La métrique diatemporelle: ou des accords de temps revolutifs dans les langues à flexions quantitatives. "[1]" Open Library OL25631615M.
- Mufwene, Salikoko S. (2001). The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mühlhäusler, Peter. (1996). Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge.
- Nettle, Daniel; & Romaine, Suzanne. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world's languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513624-1.
- Phillipson, Robert. (2003). English only?: Challenging language policy. London: Routledge.
- Reyhner, Jon (Ed.). (1999). Revitalizing indigenous languages. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, Center for Excellence in Education. ISBN 0-9670554-0-7.
- Robins, R. H.; & Uhlenbeck, E. M. (1991). Endangered languages. Oxford: Berg.
- Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. (1990). Theory of language death, and, language decay and contact-induced change: Similarities and differences. Arbeitspapier (No. 12). Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln.
- Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. (1992). Theory of language death. In M. Brenzinger (Ed.) (pp. 7–30).
- Schilling-Estes, Natalie; & Wolfram, Walt. (1999). Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language, 75 (3), 486–521.
- Skutnab-Kangas, Tove. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education—or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Slater, Julia. (2010). "Time Takes Its Toll on Old Swiss Language" SwissInfo.ch.
- de Swaan, Abram. (2001). Words of the world: The global language system. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
- Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language contact: An introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
- Zuckermann, Ghil'ad and Michael Walsh. (2011). 'Stop, Revive, Survive: Lessons from the Hebrew Revival Applicable to the Reclamation, Maintenance, and Empowerment of Aboriginal Languages and Cultures', Australian Journal of Linguistics Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 111–127.
External links
- Lost Tongues and the Politics of Language Endangerment
- Languages don't kill languages; speakers do
- Language endangerment: What have pride & prestige got to do with It? (pdf)
- Language birth & death (pdf)
- Globalization & the Myth of Killer Languages: What's Really Going on? (pdf)
- International Symposium on "Linguistic Rights in the World: The current situation", United Nations, Geneva, 24 April 2008
| Authority control: National |
|---|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_word_order
Lexical diffusion is the hypothesis that a sound change is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable.[1] It contrasts with the Neogrammarian view that a sound change results from phonetically-conditioned articulatory drift acting uniformly on all applicable words, which implies that sound changes are regular, with exceptions attributed to analogy and dialect borrowing.
Similar views were expressed by Romance dialectologists in the late 19th century but were reformulated and renamed by William Wang and coworkers studying varieties of Chinese in the 1960s and the 1970s. William Labov found evidence for both processes but argued that they operate at different levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion
Layering in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalisation can be detected while it is taking place. The others are divergence, specialisation, persistence, and de-categorialisation.
Layering refers to the phenomenon that a language can have and develop multiple expressions for the same function, that language, in the "lexical" as well as in the "grammatical" domain, tolerates and permanently creates multiple synonymy. "Within a broad functional domain, new layers are continually emerging. As this happens, the older layers are not necessarily discarded, but may remain to coexist with and interact with the newer layers."[1]
During the process of grammaticalisation, new layers are added to older ones whereby the functional domain is broadened: several items may fulfil the same linguistic function.
An example from English: 'I am going to study' / 'I will study' / 'I shall study'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layering_(linguistics)
In linguistics, a stratum (Latin for "layer") or strate is a language that influences or is influenced by another through contact. A substratum or substrate is a language that has lower power or prestige than another, while a superstratum or superstrate is the language that has higher power or prestige. Both substratum and superstratum languages influence each other, but in different ways. An adstratum or adstrate is a language that is in contact with another language in a neighbor population without having identifiably higher or lower prestige. The notion of "strata" was first developed by the Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907), and became known in the English-speaking world through the work of two different authors in 1932.[1]
Thus, both concepts apply to a situation where an intrusive language establishes itself in the territory of another, typically as the result of migration. Whether the superstratum case (the local language persists and the intrusive language disappears) or the substratum one (the local language disappears and the intrusive language persists) applies will normally only be evident after several generations, during which the intrusive language exists within a diaspora culture. In order for the intrusive language to persist (substratum case), the immigrant population will either need to take the position of a political elite or immigrate in significant numbers relative to the local population (i. e., the intrusion qualifies as an invasion or colonisation; an example would be the Roman Empire giving rise to Romance languages outside Italy, displacing Gaulish and many other Indo-European languages). The superstratum case refers to elite invading populations that eventually adopt the language of the native lower classes. An example would be the Burgundians and Franks in France, who eventually abandoned their Germanic dialects in favor of other Indo-European languages of the Romance branch, profoundly influencing the local speech in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratum_(linguistics)
In linguistics, the term specialization (as defined by Paul Hopper), refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four principles are: layering, divergence, persistence, and de-categorialization.
Specialization refers to the narrowing of choices that characterizes an emergent grammatical construction. The lexical meaning of a grammaticalizing feature decreases in scope, so that in time the feature conveys a generalized grammatical meaning.
"Within a functional domain, at one stage a variety of forms with different semantic nuances may be possible; as grammaticalization takes place, this variety of formal choices narrows and the smaller number of forms selected assume more general grammatical meanings." (Hopper 1991: 22)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specialization_(linguistics)
Soviet phraseology, or Sovietisms, i.e. the neologisms and cliches in the Russian language of the epoch of the Soviet Union, has a number of distinct traits that reflect the Soviet way of life and Soviet culture and politics. Most of these distinctions are ultimately traced (directly or indirectly, as a cause-effect chain) to the utopic goal of creating a new society, the ways of the implementation of this goal and what was actually implemented.
The topic of this article is not limited to the Russian language, since this phraseology also permeated regional languages in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Russian was the official language of inter-nationality communication in the Soviet Union, and was declared official language of the state in 1990,[1] therefore it was the major source of Soviet phraseology.
Taxonomy
The following main types of Sovietism coinage may be recognized:[2]
- Semantic shift: for example, "to throw out" acquired the colloquial meaning of "to put goods for sale". In the circumstances of total consumer goods shortage, putting some goods on shelves had a character of certain suddenness, captured in the expression. "Ivan, grab your avoska, oranges have been thrown out down on the corner!" — it was not that someone jettisoned oranges; rather a makeshift stall was set up in the street to sell oranges.
- Intentional word coinage for new elements arisen in the Soviet/Eastern Bloc world, often as abbreviations and acronyms: Gosplan, KGB, gulag, kombed, agitprop, etc.
- Colloquial word coinage: khrushchovka, psikhushka.
- Stylistic cliches: "forever alive" (about Vladimir Lenin), "laboring intelligentsia", to distinguish "good" intelligentsia from "bad" intelligentsia of the past, etc.
- Political and ideological slogans Soviet people saw everyday everywhere. Often they were exploited in Russian political jokes. For example, the formula "The Party is Intelligence, Honor, and Conscience of our Epoch" was mathematically transformed into "Intelligence is party minus honor minus conscience of our epoch."
- Quite a few pejorative terms were standardized for numerous enemies of the people and other anti-Soviet subjects: "sharks of imperialism", "rootless cosmopolitans". "The whore of capitalism" was an epithet for genetics.
Beginnings
An initial surge of intentional word coinage appeared immediately after the October Revolution. The declared goal of the Bolsheviks was "to abolish the capitalist state with all its means of oppression". At the same time, the instruments of the state were objectively, necessary, and they did exist, only under new names. The most notable example is People's Commissar/People's Commissariat which corresponded to minister/ministry (and in fact the latter terms were restored in 1946).
Colloquial political humor
Ben Lewis wrote in his essay,[3] book,[4] and film[5] (all titled Hammer & Tickle) that "Communism was a humour-producing machine. Its economic theories and system of repression created inherently funny situations. There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism."
Soviet people coined irreverent definitions for their leaders. "Mineralny sekretar" was a nickname for General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (due to his anti-alcohol campaign). "Kukuruznik" (from kukuruza, maize) referred to Nikita Khrushchev (because of his botched introduction of maize from the United States).
See also
- New Soviet names
- Homo Sovieticus
- Thought reform in the People's Republic of China
- LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, a book that studies the way that Nazi propaganda altered the German language
References
Further reading
- "Soviet Language", BBC Russian Service, October 11, 2005 (in Russian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_phraseology
The Swadesh list (/ˈswɑːdɛʃ/) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list
Swedification refers to the spread and/or imposition of the Swedish language, people and culture or policies which introduced these changes. In the context of Swedish expansion within Scandinavia, Swedification can refer to both the integration of Scania, Jemtland and Bohuslen in the 1600s and governmental policies regarding Sámi and Finns in northern Sweden during the 1800s and 1900s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedification
Halland (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈhǎlːand] (
listen)) is one of the traditional provinces of Sweden (landskap), on the western coast of Götaland, southern Sweden. It borders Västergötland, Småland, Scania and the sea of Kattegat. Until 1645 and the Second Treaty of Brömsebro, it was part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Its name means Land of Rocky Slabs (Swedish: hällar) referring to the coastal cliffs of the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Empire
In historical (or diachronic) linguistics, subjectification (also known as subjectivization or subjectivisation) is a language change process in which a linguistic expression acquires meanings that convey the speaker's attitude or viewpoint. An English example is the word while, which, in Middle English, had only the sense of 'at the same time that'. It later acquired the meaning of 'although', indicating a concession on the part of the speaker ("While it could use a tune-up, it's a good bike.").[1]
This is a pragmatic-semantic process, which means that inherent as well as contextual meanings of the given expression are considered. Subjectification is realized in lexical and grammatical change. It is also of interest to cognitive linguistics and pragmatics.
Subjectivity in language
From a synchronic perspective, subjectivity can be expressed in language in many ways. First of all, the subject is implied in discourse through any speech act.[2] Subjectivity can also be expressed in many grammatical categories, such as person, valence, tense, aspect, mood, evidentials, and deictic expressions more generally.[3]
Subjectification and intersubjectification
The most prominent research on subjectification to date comes from linguists Elizabeth Traugott and Ronald Langacker.[4] In Traugott's view, subjectification is a semasiological process in which a linguistic element's "meanings tend to become increasingly based in the speaker's subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition".[4][1] From Langacker's standpoint, "an expression's meaning always comprises both subjectively and objectively construed elements, and it is individual conceptual elements within an expression's meaning that, over time, may come to be construed with a greater degree of subjectivity or objectivity".[4]
Traugott also discusses "intersubjectification", alternatively calling subjectivity "(inter)subjectivity" and subjectification "(inter)subjectification". She writes,
In my view, subjectification and intersubjectification are the mechanisms by which:
- a. meanings are recruited by the speaker to encode and regulate attitudes and beliefs (subjectification), and,
- b. once subjectified, may be recruited to encode meanings centred on the addressee (intersubjectification).[4]
Subjectification occurs in conversation (through speech acts) and has rhetorical aims, and thus implies some degree of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectification does so more blatantly through its "development of meanings that explicitly reveal incipient design: the designing of utterances for an intended audience...at the discourse level" and requires subjectification to occur in the first place.[5]
Traugott and Dasher schematize the process of subjectification elsewhere in the following cline:
non-subjective > subjective > intersubjective[5]
Grammaticalization
Grammaticalization is an associated process of language change in which "lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions".[6] The processes of subjectification and intersubjectification do not necessarily result in grammaticalization, but there is still a strong correlation between the two.[4] As shown in the cline above, subjectification is theorized to be a unidirectional process; in other words, meanings tend to follow the path from left to right and do not develop in the reverse direction. Grammaticalization is likewise suggested to be a unidirectional phenomenon.[6]
Example
Traugott proposes that the epistemic adverb evidently, which initially meant 'from evidence, clearly' and later developed into a subjective adverb, underwent subjectification:
- "1429 Will Braybroke in Ess.AST 5: 298 Yif thay finde euidently that i haue doon extorcion
- 'If they find from evidence that I have performed extortions' (MED)
- 1443 Pecock Rule 56: More euydently fals þan þis is, þer is no þing
- 'There is nothing more clearly false than this' (MED)
- 1690 Locke, Hum. Und. II. xxix: No Idea, therefore, can be undistinguishable from another ... for from all other, it is evidently different ('evident to all', weak subjective epistemic) (OED)
- 20th c.?: He is evidently right (in the meaning 'I conclude that he is right'; strong subjective epistemic inviting the inference of some concession or doubt on speaker's part)"[1]
References
- Hopper, Paul J.; Traugott, Elizabeth C. (2003). Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 99.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectification_(linguistics)
In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification[1] is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (i.e. change in a word's meaning). Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been described in terms of personal or sociopolitical empowerment.
Characteristics
A reclaimed or reappropriated word is a word that was at one time pejorative but has been brought back into acceptable usage, usually starting within its original target, i.e. the communities that were pejoratively described by that word, and later spreading to the general populace as well.[2][1][3] Some of the terms being reclaimed have originated as non-pejorative terms that over time became pejorative. Reclaiming them can be seen as restoring their original intent. This, however, does not apply to all such words as some were used in a derogatory fashion from the very beginning.[1]
In terms of linguistic theory, reappropriation can be seen as a specific case of a type of a semantic change, namely, of amelioration - a process through which a word's meaning becomes more positive over time.[4]
Brontsema suggested that there are at least three identifiable goals of reclamation:
- Value reversal
- Neutralization
- Stigma exploitation
The value reversal refers to changing the meaning from pejorative to neutral or positive. Neutralization refers to denying the term to those who want to use it, or words in general, to oppress and hurt another group. Stigma exploitation, finally, refers to the use of such terms as a reminder that a given group has been subject to unfair treatment. Those goals can be mutually exclusive; in particular, stigma exploitation is incompatible with the other two goals.[1]
Reclamation can be seen as both a psychological, individual process and as a sociological, society-wide process.[5][6] In terms of a personal process, it has been discussed in the context of empowerment that comes from "disarming the power of a dominant group to control one’s own and others’ views of oneself", and gaining control over the way one is described, and hence, one's self-image, self-control and self-understanding.[6][3] Brontsema wrote that "At the heart of linguistic reclamation is the right of self-definition, of forging and naming one’s own existence."[1] Other scholars have connected this concept to that of self-labelling.[3] The empowerment process, and the denial of language as a tool of oppression as abuse of power, has also been stressed by scholars such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, the latter who also referred to it as a "reverse discourse".[7]
In terms of the wider sociopolitical empowerment process, reclamation process has also been credited with promoting social justice,[8] and building group solidarity;[7] activists groups that engage in this process have been argued to be more likely to be seen as representative of their groups and see those groups as raising in power and status in their society.[3] Scholars have argued that those who use such terms to describe themselves in the act of reappropriation "will feel powerful and therefore see his or her group label as less stigmatizing. Observers will infer that the group has power and will therefore see the label as less saturated in negativity".[3]
Although those terms are most often used in the context of language, this concept has also been used in relation to other cultural concepts, for example in the discussion of reappropriation of stereotypes,[9] reappropriation of popular culture (e.g., the reappropriation of science fiction literature into elite, high literature[10]), or reappropriation of traditions.[11]
Controversy and objections
Reclaimed words often remain controversial for a time, due to their original pejorative nature. For some terms, even "reclaimed" usage by members of the community concerned is a subject of controversy.[1] Often, not all members of a given community support the idea that a particular slur should be reclaimed at all.[1] In other cases, a word can be seen as acceptable when used by the members of the community that has reclaimed it (in-group usage), but its use by outside parties (out-group usage) can still be seen as derogatory and thus controversial.[7] For example, Brontsema noted in 2003 in his discussion of the reclaimed terms that while "[the term nigger] may be acceptable for African Americans to use it freely, it is off-limits to whites, whose usage of nigger cannot be the same, given its history and the general history of racial oppression and racial relations in the United States."[1] A similar argument has been made in 2009 for words associated with the LGBT movement like queer or dyke.[12] A related discourse occurred with regards to the Washington Redskins name controversy, with the American Indians community was divided on whether the term has been reclaimed or not.[7]
Those opposed to the reclamation of terms have argued that such terms are irredeemable and are forever connected to their derogatory meaning, and their usage will continue to hurt those who remember its original intent[1] and even reinforce the existing stigma.[3] The supporters of reclamation argue, in turn, that many such words had non-derogatory meanings that are simply being restored and that in either case, reclaiming such a word denies it to those who would want to use it to oppress others and represents a form of moral victory for the group that reclaimed it.[1]
In 2017, the US Supreme Court, heard arguments for Matal v. Tam. In that case, the US Patent and Trademark Office refused a trademark registration for an Asian American band, The Slants, because it deemed the term disparaging. However, the court ruled unanimously in its favor. Washington University in St. Louis conducted an extensive study on reappropriation based on the band name and found that reclaimed words could be an effective tool for neutralizing disparaging words: "Reappropriation does seem to work in the sense of defusing insults, rendering them less disparaging and harmful."[13]
Examples
Sex and sexuality
There are many recent examples of linguistic reappropriation in the areas of human sexuality, gender roles, sexual orientation, etc. Among these are:
Politics
In England, Cavalier was a derogatory nickname reappropriated as self-identification,[19] in contrast to the term Roundhead which, despite being used by the Royalists for the supporters of the Parliamentary cause, remained a derisory word up to the point of it being a punishable offense if used to refer to a soldier of the New Model Army.[20] Tory (originally from the Middle Irish word for 'pursuer' tóraidhe), Whig (from whiggamore; see the Whiggamore Raid) and Suffragette are other British examples.
In the American colonies, British officers used Yankee, a term originated in reference to Dutch settlers, as a derogatory term against the colonists. British officers created the early versions of the song Yankee Doodle, as a criticism of the uncultured colonists, but during the Revolution, as the colonists began to reappropriate the label yankee as a point of pride, they likewise reappropriated the song, altering verses, and turning it into a patriotic anthem. The term is now widely used as an affectionate nickname for Americans in general.[21]
In the 1850s in the United States, a secretive political party was derisively dubbed the Know Nothing party, based on their penchant for saying "I know nothing" when asked for details by outsiders; this became the common name for the party. It eventually became a popular name, sufficiently so that consumer products like tea, candy, and even a freighter were branded with the name.[22]
During the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton referred to some Trump supporters as a "Basket of deplorables". Many Trump supporters endorsed the phrase.[23] Donald Trump also played the song "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from the musical Les Misérables as an introduction to one of his rallies, using a graphic captioned "Les Deplorables".[24][25] Subsequently, Trump called Clinton a "nasty woman" during the final presidential debate, resulting in that expression being described as a "rallying cry" for women.[26] It was soon featured on merchandise and used by Clinton's campaign surrogates.[27][28]
Religion
One of the older examples of successful reclaiming is the term Jesuit to refer to members of the Society of Jesus. This was originally a derogatory term referring to people who too readily invoked the name of Jesus in their politics, but which members of the Society adopted over time for themselves, so that the word came to refer exclusively to them, and generally in a positive or neutral sense,[29] even though the term "Jesuitical" is derived from the Society of Jesus and is used to mean things like: manipulative, conspiring, treacherous, capable of intellectually justifying anything by convoluted reasoning.[30][31][32][33]
Other examples can be found in the origins of Methodism; early members were originally mocked for their "methodical" and rule-driven religious devotion, founder John Wesley embraced the term for his movement.[34] Members of the Religious Society of Friends were termed Quakers as an epithet, but took up the term themselves. Similarly, the term Protestant was originally a derogatory term, and more recently the term pagan has been subject to a similar change in meaning.[7]
Race, ethnicity, and nationality
To a lesser extent, and more controversially among the groups referred to, many racial, ethnic, and class terms have been reappropriated:
- Baster, the name is derived from bastaard, the Dutch word for "bastard". They are a Southern African ethnic group descended from White European men and Black African women. The Basters reappropriated it as a "proud name", claiming their ancestry and history.[35]
- Black, negro, nigga, or nigger by African Americans[2][36]
- Curry, used a derogatory term for South Asians (often in conjunction with muncher or slurper), reappropriated by some members of the South Asian expatriate or American-Born Confused Desi community.[37]
- Jew by the Jewish people (the word used to be seen as pejorative in English).[38][39][40] That process is still not complete in some Slavic languages, where the word Zhyd can still be seen as pejorative.[41]
- Kugel, playful South African English slang for a materialistic young woman, originally was a derogatory term used by the elder generation of South African Jews for a young Jewish woman who forsook traditional Jewish dress values for those of the ostentatiously wealthy and became overly materialistic and overgroomed. The term was then reclaimed by those women.[42]
- Peckerwood, originally black slang in the Southern United States for poor whites, reclaimed by white prison gangs[43][44][45]
- Smoggie, originally a derogatory term for people from the North East England town of Middlesbrough, in reference to the town's notorious industrial pollution, now commonly used in self-identification.[46]
- White trash, a classist slur referring to poor white people, reappropriated by some in the Southern states of the United States of America as a cultural symbol and badge of pride [47][48] - however this reappropriation has not been as evident in mainstream British English syntax where it is used in a more condescending or sarcastic manner.
- Wog by Australians of Greek, Arab or Turkish descent.[49]
Disability
- cripple, crip, gimp by people with disabilities.[50]
- mad by people with mental disorders
Art movements
- Impressionists In 1874 during their first independent art show, critic Louis Leroy penned a hostile review of the show in Le Charivari newspaper under the title "The Exhibition of the Impression-ists". In particular he used the painting Impression, soleil levant by Claude Monet to ridicule the painters for their lack of seriousness preferring to paint "fleeting impressions of the moment" rather than allegorical or ultra-realist themes.[51][52]
- Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999; its members produce figurative art. Tracey Emin, one of the Young British Artists known for their conceptual art, accused her then-boyfriend of lack of imagination or reach, of being "stuck". He took on the term.[53]
Feminism
Words some feminist activists have argued should be reclaimed include:
See also
- Détournement, a similar strategy used for images.
- Dysphemism treadmill, the process by which offensive terms can become acceptable without deliberate intervention.
- Gaysper, reappropriated LGBT symbol
References
Linguistic reclamation, also known as linguistic resignification or reappropriation, refers to the appropriation of a pejorative epithet by its target(s).
...that slurs are in certain cases felicitously used to mean something non-derogatory (e.g. in an appropriative manner) is now a well documented linguistic phenomenon.. For instance Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, reports from the perspective of hip-hop culture that "When we say 'nigger' now, it's very positive. Now all white kids who buy into hip-hop culture call each other 'nigger' because they have no history with the word other than something positive..."
reappropriation, the process of taking possession of a slur previously used exclusively by dominant groups to reinforce a stigmatized group's lesser status
Jesuitical.
...to be a 'Methodist' was originally a term of ridicule because of the zeal and rigour with which they pursued a life of holiness and sought to be the best disciples of Christ they could.
In a movie (8 Mile), Eminem declares, 'I'm a piece of white trash; I say it proudly.'
- Reid Boyd, Elizabeth (2012). "Lady: A Feminist Four Letter Word?". Women and Language. 35 (2): 35–52.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
The recency illusion is the belief or impression that a word or language usage is of recent origin when it is long-established. The term was coined by Arnold Zwicky, a linguist at Stanford University primarily interested in examples involving words, meanings, phrases, and grammatical constructions.[1] However, use of the term is not restricted to linguistic phenomena: Zwicky has defined it simply as, "the belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent".[2]
According to Zwicky, the illusion is caused by selective attention.[2]
Examples
Linguistic items prone to the recency illusion include:
- "Singular they": the use of "they," "them," or "their" to reference a singular antecedent without specific gender, as in "If George or Sally come by, give them the package." Although this usage is often cited as a modern invention,[3] it is quite old,[4][A] going back to the 14th century.[5][6]
- The phrase "between you and I" (rather than "between you and me"), often viewed today as a hypercorrection, which could also be found occasionally in Early Modern English.[4]
- The intensifier "really," as in "it was a really wonderful experience," and the moderating adverb "pretty," as in "it was a pretty exciting experience." Many people have the impression that these usages are somewhat slang-like, and have developed relatively recently.[citation needed] They go back to at least the 18th century, and are commonly found in the works and letters of such writers as Benjamin Franklin.
- "Literally" being used figuratively as an intensifier is often viewed as a recent change, but in fact usage dates back to the 1760s.[7]
- "Aks" as a production of African American English only.[citation needed] Use of "aks" in place of "ask" dates back to the works of Chaucer in Middle English, though typically in this context spelled "ax".[8]
- The word "recency" itself. It is commonly used in consumer marketing ("analyze the recency of customer visits")[9] and many think it was coined for that purpose,[citation needed] but its first known use was in 1612.[10]
See also
Notes
A. Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage noted, "Although the lack of a common-gender third person pronoun has received much attention in recent years from those concerned with women's issues, the problem, as felt by writers, is much older" (1989, page 901).
References
Admittedly, using the singular they in a formal context may still cause some raised eyebrows, so be careful if you're submitting a paper to a particularly traditional teacher or professor. But the tides are turning, and English will soon be more efficient
... our pronoun they was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family ... and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as singular they
Further reading
- Zwicky, Arnold (17 November 2007). "The word: Recency illusion". New Scientist. 196 (2630): 60. doi:10.1016/S0262-4079(07)62923-6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_illusion
A relict is a surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon.
Biology
A relict (or relic) is an organism that at an earlier time was abundant in a large area but now occurs at only one or a few small areas.
Geology and geomorphology
In geology, a relict is a structure or mineral from a parent rock that did not undergo metamorphosis when the surrounding rock did, or a rock that survived a destructive geologic process.
In geomorphology, a relict landform is a landform formed by either erosive or constructive surficial processes that are no longer active as they were in the past.
A glacial relict is a cold-adapted organism that is a remnant of a larger distribution that existed in the ice ages.
Human populations
As revealed by DNA testing, a relict population is an ancient people in an area, who have been largely supplanted by a later group of migrants and their descendants.
In various places around the world, minority ethnic groups represent lineages of ancient human migrations in places now occupied by more populous ethnic groups, whose ancestors arrived later. For example, the first human groups to inhabit the Caribbean islands were hunter-gatherer tribes from South and Central America. Genetic testing of natives of Cuba show that, in late pre-Columbian times, the island was home to agriculturalists of Taino ethnicity. In addition, a relict population of the original hunter-gatherers remained in western Cuba as the Ciboney people.[1]
Other uses
- In ecology, an ecosystem which originally ranged over a large expanse, but is now narrowly confined, may be termed a relict.[2]
- In agronomy, a relict crop is a crop which was previously grown extensively, but is now only used in one limited region, or a small number of isolated regions.
- In real estate law, reliction is the gradual recession of water from its usual high-water mark so that the newly uncovered land becomes the property of the adjoining riparian property owner.[3]
- "Relict" was an ancient term still used in colonial (British) America, and in England of that era, now archaic, for a widow; it has come to be a generic or collective term for widows and widowers.
- In historical linguistics, a relict is a word that is a survivor of a form or forms that are otherwise archaic.
See also
The dictionary definition of relict at Wiktionary- Endemism
- Hysteresis
- Living fossil
- Refugium (population biology)
- Relic
- Palaeochannel
References
- Lear, P.W. 1991, Accretion, reliction, erosion, and avulsion: a survey of riparian and littoral title problems. Journal of Energy, Natural Resources & Environmental Law. vol. 11, pp. 265-285.
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered by consonant loss may be considered an extreme form of fusion (Crowley 1997:46). Both types may arise from speakers' attempts to preserve a word's moraic count.[1]
Examples
English
An example from the history of English is the lengthening of vowels that happened when the voiceless velar fricative /x/ and its palatal allophone [ç][2] were lost from the language. For example, in the Middle English of Chaucer's time the word night was phonemically /nixt/; later the /x/ was lost, but the /i/ was lengthened to /iː/ to compensate, causing the word to be pronounced /niːt/. (Later the /iː/ became /aɪ/ by the Great Vowel Shift.)
Both the Germanic spirant law and the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law show vowel lengthening compensating for the loss of a nasal.
Non-rhotic forms of English have a lengthened vowel before a historical post-vocalic */r/: in Scottish English, girl has a short /ɪ/ followed by a light alveolar /r/, as presumably it did in Middle English; in Southern British English, the */r/ has dropped out of the spoken form and the vowel has become a "long schwa" [əː].
Classical Hebrew and Aramaic
 | This section may be too technical for most readers to understand. (September 2021) |
Compensatory lengthening in Classical Hebrew and Aramaic is dependent on the class of consonant which follows the prefix (definite article in Hebrew and prefix waw-hahipukh in both languages).
E.g. (using the Hebrew definite article [hey with pataḥ plus dagesh in following consonant]):[3]
- Before ע and א it is usually [hey with qametz].
- Before ח and ה it is usually [hey with pataḥ]. If it is pretonic it may be [hey with qametz].
- But when it is propretonic, whatever the guttural, it will usually be [hey with segol].
Ancient Greek
Compensatory lengthening is very common in Ancient Greek. It is particularly notable in forms where n or nt comes together with s, y (= ι̯), or i. The development of nt + y was perhaps thus:
- *mont-yă → montsa (palatalization ty → ts) → mõtsa (nasalization and vowel lengthening) → mõssa → mõsa (shortening ss → s) → mōsa (denasalization, retention of long vowel) = μοῦσα "muse"
Forms with this type of compensatory lengthening include the nominative singular and dative plural of many participles, adjectives, and nouns, the 3rd person plural ending for present and future active of all verbs, and the 3rd person singular present of athematic verbs:
- *πάντ-ς → πᾶς "every, whole" (masculine nominative singular)[4]
- *πάντ-ι̯ᾰ → *πάντσα → πᾶσα (feminine)
- *πάντ-σι → πᾶσι (masculine/neuter dative plural)
- compare παντ-ός (m./n. genitive singular)
- *όντ-ι̯ᾰ → *όντσα → οὖσα participle "being" (feminine nominative singular)[5]
- *οντ-ίᾱ → *ονσία → οὐσία "property, essence"
- compare ὀντ-ός (m./n. genitive singular, from participle ὤν "being",)
- Doric ἄγ-ο-ντι → ἄγοντσι → Attic/Ionic ἄγουσι "they drive"
- Doric φα-ντί → *φαντσί → Attic/Ionic φᾱσί "they say"[6]
Indo-Aryan languages
In the evolution of the modern Indo-Aryan languages, there is a first stage in which consonant clusters with dissimilar consonants preceded by a short vowel undergo assimilation resulting in consonant clusters with similar consonants. In the second stage, the first consonant of the cluster or geminate was lost, which was accompanied by the lengthening of that vowel and sometimes additional nasalization. In Punjabi, only the first stage occurred, while most of the other modern Indo-Aryan languages underwent the second stage as well.
| Sanskrit | Punjabi | Hindi | Translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| हस्तः (hastaḥ) | ਹੱਥ (hatth) | हाथ (hāth) | hand |
| सप्त (sapta) | ਸੱਤ (satt) | सात (sāt) | seven |
| अष्ट (aṣṭa) | ਅੱਠ (aṭṭh) | आठ (āṭh) | eight |
| कर्तनम् (kartanaṃ) | ਕੱਟਨਾ (kaṭṭanā) | काटना (kāṭanā) | cutting |
| कर्म (karma) | ਕੰਮ (kamm) | काम (kām) | work |
| अर्धम् (ardhaṃ) | ਅੱਧਾ (addhā) | आधा (ādhā) | half |
| अद्य (adya) | ਅੱਜ (ajj) | आज (āj) | today |
| सर्पः (sarpaḥ) | ਸੱਪ (sapp) | साँप (sā(n)p) | snake |
| अक्षि (akṣi) | ਅੱਖ (akkh) | आँख (ā(n)kh) | eye |
| दुग्धम् (dugdhaṃ) | ਦੁੱਧ (duddh) | दूध (dūdh) | milk |
| पुत्रः (putraḥ) | ਪੁੱਤ (putt) | पूत (pūt) | son |
Maltese
The phonemes /ɣ/, /ʕ/, and /h/ were all vowelised in Maltese during a period spanning from the 18th to 20th centuries (except in word-final position where they were generally merged with /ħ/). In the spelling they are still represented, however, as għ for historic /ɣ/ and /ʕ/, and h for historic /h/. These vowelised consonants lengthen adjacent short vowels, i.e. both preceding and following ones. For example, jagħmel ("he does"), formerly [ˈjaʕ.mɛl], now pronounced [ˈjaː.mɛl], and jitgħallem ("he learns"), formerly [jɪtˈʕal.lɛm], now pronounced [jɪˈtaːl.lɛm].[7]
Turkish
The voiced velar fricative (/ɣ/), has undergone a sound change in Turkish by which the consonant was completely lost and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel occurred. Even though the sound has been completely lost in standard Turkish, the sound change is not yet complete in some Turkish dialects and the corresponding velar fricative found in cognate words in the closely related Azerbaijani language and the Turkish-influenced Crimean Tatar language. The previous consonantal nature of the sound is evinced by earlier English loanwords from Turkish, such as yogurt/yoghurt (modern Turkish yoğurt, Turkish pronunciation: [joˈurt]) and agha (modern Turkish ağa, Turkish pronunciation: [a'a]).
The letter Ğ in Turkish alphabet and its counterpart ⟨غ⟩ in Ottoman Turkish were once pronounced as /ɣ/. In modern Turkish, Ğ is used either as a silent letter indicating a syllable break or as a vowel lengthener for the preceding sound. It can also indicate the /j/ sound, if the preceding vowel is an /e/.
See also
Notes
- Puech, Gilbert: Loss of emphatic and guttural consonants: From medieval to contemporary Maltese, in P. Paggio & A. Gatt (ed.): The languages of Malta, Language Science Press, Berlin, 2018.
References
- Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
- Smyth, Greek Grammar on CCEL.
| Authority control: National |
|---|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensatory_lengthening
In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well.[1] The sounds involved in a chain shift can be ordered into a "chain" in such a way that after the change is complete, each phoneme ends up sounding like what the phoneme before it in the chain sounded like before the change.[specify] The changes making up a chain shift, interpreted as rules of phonology, are in what is termed counterfeeding order.[clarification needed]
A well-known example is the Great Vowel Shift, which was a chain shift that affected all of the long vowels in Middle English.[2] The changes to the front vowels may be summarized as follows:
- aː → eː → iː → aɪ
A drag chain or pull chain is a chain shift in which the phoneme at the "leading" edge of the chain changes first.[3] In the example above, the chain shift would be a pull chain if /i:/ changed to /aɪ/ first, opening up a space at the position of [i], which /e:/ then moved to fill. A push chain is a chain shift in which the phoneme at the "end" of the chain moves first: in this example, if /aː/ moved toward [eː], a "crowding" effect would be created and /e:/ would thus move toward [i], and so forth.[3] It is not known which phonemes changed first during the Great Vowel Shift; many scholars believe the high vowels such as /i:/ started the shift, but some suggest that the low vowels, such as /aː/, may have shifted first.[4]
Examples
During the Great Vowel Shift in the 15th and 16th centuries, all of the long vowels of Middle English, which correspond to tense vowels in Modern English, shifted pronunciation. The changes can be summarized as follows:[1][2]
| Front vowels | eː → i: → əɪ
|
|---|---|
| ɛ: → i: or eː
| |
| Back vowels | ɔː → oː → uː → əʊ
|
| aː → eː
|
Most vowels shifted to a higher place of articulation, so that the pronunciation of geese changed from /ge:s/ to /giːs/ and broken from /brɔːken/ to /broːkən/. The high vowels /iː/ and /uː/ became diphthongs (for example, mice changed from /miːs/ to /maɪs/), and the low back vowel /aː/ was fronted, causing name to change from /naːmə/ to /neːm/.[2]
The Great Vowel Shift occurred over centuries, and not all varieties of English were affected in the same ways. For example, some speakers in Scotland still pronounce house similarly to its sound in Middle English before the shift, as [hu(ː)s].[4]
A chain shift may affect only one regional dialect of a language, or it may begin in a particular regional dialect and then expand beyond the region in which it originated. A number of recent regional chain shifts have occurred in English. Perhaps the most well-known is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which is largely confined to the "Inland North" region of the United States. Other examples in North America are the Pittsburgh vowel shift, Southern vowel shift (in the Southern United States), the California vowel shift and the Canadian Shift (though the last two may be the same). In England, the Cockney vowel shift among working-class Londoners is familiar from its prominence in plays such as George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (and the related musical My Fair Lady):[citation needed]
- iː → eɪ → aɪ → ɔɪ → oɪ
Many chain shifts are vowel shifts, because many sets of vowels are naturally arranged on a multi-value scale (e.g. vowel height or frontness). However, chain shifts can also occur in consonants. A famous example of such a shift is the well-known First Germanic Sound Shift or Grimm's Law, in which the Proto-Indo-European voiceless stop consonants became fricatives, the plain voiced stops became voiceless, and the breathy voiced stops became plain voiced:
- bʱ → b → p → f
- dʱ → d → t → θ
- ɡʱ → ɡ → k → h, x
Another is the High German consonant shift which separated Old High German from other West Germanic dialects such as Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon:
The Romance languages to the north and west of central Italy (e.g. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and various northern Italian languages) are known for a set of chain shifts collectively termed lenition, which affected stop consonants between vowels:[citation needed]
In this case, each sound became weaker (or more "lenited").
Synchronic shifts
It is also possible for chain shifts to occur synchronically, within the phonology of a language as it exists at a single point in time.[5]
Nzebi (or Njebi), a Bantu language of Gabon, has the following chain shift, triggered morphophonologically by certain tense/aspect suffixes:
| a | → | ɛ | → | e | → | i |
| ə | → | i | ||||
| ɔ | → | o | → | u |
Examples follow:[6]
Underlying form Chain-shifted form sal "to work" sal-i → sɛli βɛɛd "to give" βɛɛd-i → βeedi bet "to carry" bet-i → biti bis "to refuse" bis-i → bisi kolən "to go down" kolən-i → kulini tɔɔd "to arrive" tɔɔd-i → toodi suɛm "to hide oneself" suɛm-i → suemi
Another example of a chain from Bedouin Hijazi Arabic involves vowel raising and deletion:[5]
| a | → | i | → | deletion |
In nonfinal open syllables, /a/ raises to /i/ while /i/ in the same position is deleted.
Synchronic chain shifts may be circular. An example of this is Xiamen tone or Taiwanese tone sandhi:[5]: fn 348 [better source needed]
| 53 | → | 44 | → | 22 | → | 21 | → | 53 |
The contour tones are lowered to a lower tone, and the lowest tone (21) circles back to the highest tone (53).
Synchronic chain shifts are an example of the theoretical problem of phonological opacity. Although easily accounted for in a derivational rule-based phonology, its analysis in standard parallel Optimality Theory is problematic.[5]
See also
References
- Guthrie, Malcolm. (1968). Notes on Nzebi (Gabon). Journal of African Languages, 7,101-129.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift
In linguistics, a chronolect or temporal dialect is a specific speech variety whose characteristics are in particular determined by time-related factors. As such, it can be contrasted with a sociolect, an ethnolect or a geolect.[1] In historical linguistics, a chronolect is set more or less equal to a specific language stage.[2] Many chronolects are extinct or endangered.[citation needed]
See also
References
- Københavns universitet. Institut for almen og anvendt sprogvidenskab; Lieth, Lars von der (1 December 1996). Copenhagen Working Papers in Linguistics. Museum Tusculanum Press. p. 108. ISBN 978-87-7289-385-3. Retrieved 29 July 2013.
 | This article about historical linguistics is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronolect
Change from below is linguistic change that occurs from below the level of consciousness. It is language change that occurs from social, cognitive, or physiological pressures from within the system. This is in opposition to change from above, wherein language change is a result of elements imported from other systems.[1][2]
Change from below first enters the language from below the level of consciousness; that is, speakers are generally unaware of the linguistic change.[2] These linguistic changes enter language primarily through the vernacular and spread throughout the community without speakers' conscious awareness. Since change from below is initially non-salient, the changing features are not marked characteristics and are difficult for speakers or linguists to perceive. As the changes occur, they will ultimately become stable changes that are stigmatized.
Curvilinear Principle
New linguistic changes that enter the language from below are most commonly used by the interior socioeconomic classes, as displayed by William Labov's curvilinear principle. Change from below is seen in Labov's Philadelphia study, where a series of new vowel changes was most often used by the interior classes.[1][2] Age and gender similarly affect the way changes occur, where younger or female individuals are more likely to exhibit the change than older or male individuals in the community.[3] However, gender, age, and social class act independently in transmission.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_from_below
In linguistics, change from above refers to conscious change to a language. That is, speakers are generally aware of the linguistic change and use it to sound more dominant, as a result of social pressure.[1] It stands in contrast to change from below.
Change from above usually enters the speech of educated people, not the vernacular dialects.[2] This change usually begins with speakers in higher social classes and diffuses down into the lower classes. Upper classes use these new linguistic forms to differentiate themselves from the lower classes, while lower classes use these forms to sound more educated and similar to the upper class. However, the concepts of change from above and below refer to consciousness and not social class.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_from_above
Provection (from Latin: provectio "advancement") is a technical term of linguistics with two main senses.
(1) The carrying over of the final consonant of a word to the beginning of the following word. Examples in English include Middle English an evete becoming a newt and Middle English an eke-name becoming nickname. The term is obsolete in this sense; in modern terminology the process is usually called metanalysis or rebracketing, which also cover transposition in the reverse direction, as with Middle English a noumpere to Modern English an umpire.
(2) In Insular Celtic languages, the devoicing of a consonant, specifically the change of voiced consonants to the corresponding voiceless consonants, e.g. of [g], [d], [b], [v] to [k], [t], [p], [f] respectively, under the influence of an adjacent voiceless consonant. Examples in Welsh include [g] > [k], as with teg "fair", which before a superlative suffix with the earlier form -haf (with voiceless [h]), gives tecaf "fairest". This term is also used for a grammatically triggered process with a similar effect as in, for example, Breton bro "land" but ho pro "your (plural) land".
The term provection has also been used for a variety of other processes in Celtic with similar effects, such as when two successive voiced plosives were replaced by a single voiceless plosive (Welsh *meid-din from Latin matutinum "morning" becoming Welsh (ers) meitin "a while ago"), or when a voiced plosive was devoiced before a voiceless one and merged with it (Welsh pob "every" + peth "thing" becoming popeth "everything"). A further process for which the term has been used is for the change of a voiced fricative to a voiced stop after a resonant consonant, as in the case of Proto-Welsh *benðixt from Latin benedictio "blessing" becoming Welsh bendith. A catalogue of such effects is given in the historical linguistic text A Welsh grammar by J. Morris Jones,[1] and in A concise comparative Celtic grammar by Henry Lewis and Holger Pedersen.[2] (For a brief account see also Ball (1993: 309)[3].).
The term is used by linguists both for the historical processes which give rise to a change of pronunciation, and for their legacy, the processes which occur when words or morphemes of the appropriate form are brought together in continuous speech or writing. In the earlier history of the Goidelic languages, some changes of pronunciation comparable to those in British Celtic occurred, and the term is also used to label them, but those processes have no counterparts in the grammars of the surviving modern Goidelic languages, Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
See also
References
- M.J. Ball, with J. Fife, eds, The Celtic languages. London: Routledge (1993), pp. 308–309 and 359
 | This grammar-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
| This article about historical linguistics is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provection
Ancient text corpora is the entire collection of texts from the period of ancient history, defined in this article as the period from the beginning of writing up to 300 AD. These corpora are important for the study of literature, history, linguistics, and other fields, and are a fundamental component of the world's cultural heritage.
Chinese, Latin, and Greek are examples of ancient languages with significant text corpora, although much of these corpora are known to us via transmission (frequently via medieval manuscript copies) rather than in their original form. These texts - both transmitted and original - provide valuable insights into the history and culture of different regions of the world, and have been studied for centuries by scholars and researchers.
Through advances in technology and digitization, ancient text corpuses are more accessible than ever before. Tools such as the Perseus Digital Library and the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit have made it easier for researchers to access and analyze these texts.
Quantifying the corpuses
Two types of ancient texts are known to modern scholars – those that have only survived in younger manuscripts, but whose great age is undisputed (this applies to the bulk of the Chinese, Brahmi, Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Avestan tradition), and those known from original inscriptions, papyri and other manuscripts.[1]
Counting of the words in each corpus presents significant methodological challenges – in principle, every single occurrence of a word in the text is counted separately, but in the case of parallel transmission of literary texts, only a single transmission is taken into account. Just as the Book of the Dead and the coffin texts are only included in the number given for the Egyptian, the Greek and Latin literary works should only be counted according to one manuscript. If, on the other hand, tombs, royal inscriptions or economic documents of certain ancient languages often show a more or less identical form, this is not evaluated as a purely "parallel tradition". The definite article incorporated in languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek has no equivalent in most languages, so its frequency would significantly affect the comparability of numbers - this is excluded in the estimates below.[1]
Languages with known size estimates
| Script | Language | Dates used | Number of texts | Number of Words | Ref. | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archaeological | Transmission | Total | |||||
| Egyptian hieroglyphs / Hieratic | Egyptian | 5,000,000 | none | 5,000,000 | [2][3] | ||
| Demotic | 1,000,000 | none | 1,000,000 | [4] | |||
| Greek (Ancient Greek literature, New Testament, Church Fathers, etc.) | 57,000,000 | [5][6] | |||||
| Latin | 10,000,000 | [7][6] | |||||
| Cuneiform | Akkadian | 144,000[8] | 9,900,000[8] | none | 9,900,000 | [9] | |
| Sumerian | 102,300[10] | 3,076,000[10] | none | 3,076,000 | [11] | ||
| Hurrian | 12,500 | none | 12,500 | [12] | |||
| Urartian | 400 | 10,000 | none | 10,000 |
| ||
| Hittite | 700,000 | none | 700,000 | [13] | |||
| Hattic | 500 | none | 500 | [14] | |||
| Cuneiform Luwian | 3000 | none | 3000 | [15] | |||
| Elamite | 2,087 | 100,000 | none | 100,000 | [16] | ||
| Protoelamic | 1,435 | 20,000 | none | 20,000 | [17] | ||
| Eblaite | 16,000 | 300,000 | none | 300,000 | [18] | ||
| Amorite | 7,000 | 11,600 | none | 11,600 | [19] | ||
| Ugaritic | 40,000 | none | 40,000 | [20] | |||
| Old Persian | 7,000 | 100,000 | 107,000 | [21] | |||
| Canaanite and Aramaic | Ancient Hebrew (inc. Hebrew Bible) | 35,000 | 265,000 | 300,000 | [22][23] | ||
| Aramaic (ancient, imperial, biblical, Hasmonean, Nabataean, Palmyrenean) | 100,000 | [24] | |||||
| Phoenician/Punic | 10,000 | 68[25] | [26][27] [28] | ||||
| Old south Arabian | 10,500 | 112,500 | none | 112,500 | [29][30] | ||
| Etruscan | 25,000 | 25,000 | [31][32] | ||||
South Asian
- Indus script (3,800 items, c.20,000 characters)[33]
- Brahmi script
- Old Tamil
- Early Indian epigraphy and Indian epic poetry
- Kharosthi[34]
- Pali literature[35]
- List of historic Indian texts
Mesoamerican
East Asian
- Old Chinese
- Chinese classics
- The pre-Qin corpus: a collection of ancient Chinese texts written before the Qin dynasty (221 BCE). The corpus includes texts from Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and other schools of thought.
- The pre-Han corpus: a collection of ancient Chinese texts written before the Qin dynasty (221 BCE). The corpus includes texts from Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and other schools of thought.
- See the Chinese Text Project
- Chinese bronze inscriptions, Oracle bone script, Seal script, Clerical script
Central Iranian languages
- Prior to 300AD, the Central Iranian languages are mainly in the form of Sassanid stone inscriptions in the two closely related idioms Middle Persian (Pahlavi scripts and Inscriptional Parthian),[36] there are 5000 for the corpus of Middle Persian (mostly 3rd, but also 4th/5th centuries) and for the corpus of Parthian (3rd century) 3000 words. To what extent some of the Manichaean Middle Persian literary texts may date back to the 3rd century is difficult to estimate; Mani is said to have personally written the Shabuhragan[37] totaling about 5000 words. In any case, if we combine Middle Persian and Parthian, we come to over 10,000 words.[38]
Proto-Sinaitic
- Proto-Sinaitic script has no more than about 400 letters (number of words in unknown since the script has not been fully interpreted).[39] To a similar extent, there are probably approximately contemporaneous Proto-Canaanite inscriptions (ibid.).[40]
Anatolian
- Luwian cuneiform,[41] approx. 3000 words[42]
- the Palaic language[43] few hundred words.[42]
- Hieroglyphic Luwian[44][42]
- the Lycian alphabet (the best attested Anatolian successor language written in alphabetic script)[45] with about 5000 words[42]
- The Lydian alphabet[46] 109 inscriptions comprising about 1500 words[42]
- The Phrygian alphabet, the in tomb inscriptions from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD[47] (approx. 1000 words) and in the so-called "old Phrygian" inscriptions[48] less than 300 words[42]
- The Carian alphabets[49] whose texts, mainly from Egypt, contain around 600 words.[42]
Old Italic
- the Umbrian language[50] attested essentially by the sacrificial instructions of the Iguvinian Tables with 5000 words[51]
- the Oscan language (ibid.) with 2000 words[51]
- the Messapic language[52] with probably a good 1000 words (the estimate is difficult because most texts in this hardly understandable language do not use word separators)[51]
- the Venetic language[53] a few hundred words[51]
- the Faliscan language[54] a few hundred words[51]
- Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions amount to approximately 2000 words, to which are added a number of glosses by classical authors[55][51]
Iberia
- Iberian scripts, more rarely written in Greek or Latin script, approx. 2500 words[51][56]
- Celtiberian script, which refers to Celtic language testimonies in Iberian, but also in Latin script from Spain (approx. 1000 words)[51][56]
- Southwest Paleohispanic script, 78 inscriptions, a few hundred words[51][56]
- Lusitanian language, three monuments in Latin script, approx. 60 words[51][56]
Germanic Northern Europe
- runic inscriptions dated before the 4th century amount to about 30 pieces, which contain no more than 50 words in total[57][58]
Africa
- Geʽez script comparatively sparse inscriptions with a total of around 1000 words are documented from earlier times[59] before then with Christianization in the 4th century, more extensive texts were used. There are also two old African languages that have hardly been explored.[58]
- There are over 1000 Libyco-Berber alphabet inscriptions from the Maghreb,[60] which are dated to Roman times. Most texts do not use a word separator; the total number of words could be around 5000[58]
- About 900 texts are known to the Meroitic script used as a written language by Nubians, which together may contain approximately 10,000 words (considerable uncertainty also results here from the fact that the word separator is not used consistently in the Meroitic script).[61][58]
Aegean
- The Cretan Linear A inscriptions that have not yet been deciphered[62] are available in about 2500 texts, which contain a total of around 20,000 characters. The total number of words can hardly be determined; Peust tentatively put it in the same order of magnitude as in Meroitic.[58]
- In addition to the Linear A texts, there are also inscriptions Cretan hieroglyphs of a few hundred characters[63] and texts written in the Greek alphabet, but not in Greek, with a few dozen words[64][58]
- Cypriot syllabary in the first millennium BC, in which mostly Greek texts were recorded.[65] The relevant texts comprise around 100 to 200 words.[58]
Micro corpuses
There are significant number of ancient micro-corpus languages. Estimating the total number of attested ancient languages may be as difficult as estimating their corpus size. For example, Greek and Latin sources hand down an enormous amount of foreign-language glosses, the seriousness of which is not always certain.[58]
Preservation and curation
Historic preservation and maintaining ancient text corpuses presents several challenges, including issues with preservation, translation, and digitization. Many ancient texts have been lost over time, and those that survive may be damaged or fragmented. Translating ancient languages and scripts requires specialized expertise, and digitizing texts can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Corpus Linguistics
The field of corpus linguistics studies language as expressed in text corpora. This includes the analysis of word frequency, collocations, grammar, and semantics. Ancient text corpuses provide a valuable resource for corpus linguistics research, enabling scholars to explore the evolution of language and culture over time.
See also
- List of languages by first written account
- List of text corpora
- List of oldest documents
- Ancient literature
References
All those frequency counts are drawn from a much wider variety of subjects and styles than exist for classical or medieval Latin, and because the volume of printed and spoken matter in any modern language is staggeringly huge, their authors take great pains to select "representative" corpora, seeking statistically meaningful data. Things are quite different in Latin, where there is, for the classical period, a surviving mass of literature estimated at no more than 9,000,000 words, whereas the corpus of classical Greek literature is usually estimated at "only" ten times that much.'
[Table: Biblical: BHS 305500; Non-biblica: Ben Sire 7020, Qumran 38349, Inscr 2528; Total 353396] The foregoing statistics of the size of the various corpora of Hebrew texts have ben derived in the following way. From the totals in the table, Words Beginning with Aleph in Order of Frequency, it can be seen that we have identified 61,883 occurrences of words in the Hebrew Bible (Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia) beginning with Aleph. Knowing that there are some 305,500 words in the Hebrew Bible (the figure comes from Francis I. Andersen and A. Dean Forbes, The Vocabulary of the Old Testament [Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1989], p. 23), we can assume that, roughly speaking, the 1,422 occurrences of Aleph words in ben Sira imply a text of c. 7,020 words (i.e. 1422, divided by 61833 and multiplied by 305500). Similarly, the total of 7,768 occurrences in the Qumran and related materials implies a corpus of c. 38,300 words (in the non-biblical texts already published, that is).
Most estimates place it at around ten thousand texts. Texts that are either formulaic or extremely short constitute the vast majority of the evidence.
Mais les données principales sont fournies par plus de 8000 inscriptions monumentales , au texte soigneusement gravé dans la pierre ou coulé dans le bronze
The early Buddhist canon written in Pali comprises some 4 million words of text written across several centuries in early India. As such, it is of interest not only to scholars of Buddhism but also linguists and historians for the insight it gives into the social, linguistic, and religious culture of the time.
- Masson, O. (1961). Les inscriptions chypriotes syllabiques: recueil critique et commenté. École français d'Athènes: Études chypriotes (in French). E. de Boccard.
Bibliography
- Peust, Carsten (2000). "Über ägyptische Lexikographie. 1: Zum Ptolemaic Lexikon von Penelope Wilson; 2: Versuch eines quantitativen Vergleichs der Textkorpora antiker Sprachen". Lingua Aegyptia 7 (PDF). pp. 245–260.
- Streck, Michael P. (2010). "Großes Fach Altorientalistik. Der Umfang des keilschriftlichen Textkorpus". Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orientgesellschaft 142 (PDF). pp. 35–58.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_text_corpora
In language change, analogical change occurs when one linguistic sign is changed in either form or meaning to reflect another item in the language system on the basis of analogy or perceived similarity. In contrast to regular sound change, analogy is driven by idiosyncratic cognitive factors and applies irregularly across a language system. This leads to what is known as Sturtevant's paradox: sound change is regular, but produces irregularity; analogy is irregular, but produces regularity.[1]
Analogy in child language acquisition
Analogy plays an important role in child language acquisition. The relationship between language acquisition and language change is well established,[2] and while both adult speakers and children can be innovators of morphophonetic and morphosyntactic change,[3] analogy used in child language acquisition likely forms one major source of analogical change.
During the acquisition of grammatical change, children are prone to overregularization, in which the children extends a particular grammatical rule to apply to irregular forms by analogy, such as created forms such as mans and mouses for the plural of man and mouse on the basis of the regular English plural. If this overregularization becomes established in the child's grammar and is adopted by many speakers, it would lead to analogical change in the form of leveling.[4]
Types of analogical change
Analogical change does not represent a single process, but rather a family of different language change processes which all follow the general principle of irregularly changing one form to 'match' another form or a pattern observed among several other forms.
Proportional analogy
Proportional analogy or four-part analogy is the simplest form of analogical change, representing the change or introduction of a form on the basis of analogy with a pattern that can be expressed by a single form. This type of analogical change is often diagrammatized with a proportion, in which rows represent paradigms while columns represent dimensions of similarity.[1] Thus, for example, the analogy which generated flammable from inflammable on the basis of the pattern of in- prefixes could summarised as a proportional analogy with the following proportion:
where the <?> represents the new, albeit overregularized form, flammable, with both inflammable and flammable having the same meaning.
Creation, maintenance and restoration
Analogical creation refers to cases when analogy creates a new word or form of a word.[1] The example of flammable, having the same meaning as inflammable, is an example of analogical creation, as the word flammable has been created and added to the language system.
Analogical maintenance occurs when a regular sound change is prevented from occurring on the basis of analogy. In completed changes, this is indiscernible from analogical restoration, in which a regular sound change is reversed on the basis of analogy.[1] An example of analogical maintenance would be the perseverance of /w/ in swollen by analogy with the present tense swell (contrast with sword, where the /w/ is lost by regular sound change).
Leveling
Levelling involves the elimination of alternations within a paradigm.[5] This typically occurs when a particular variation no longer signals an important morphological distinction. For example, Old English (OE) distinguished past singular and past plural forms of the verb ceosan, ceas and curon respectively, but these were leveled to give a single Modern English (LME) past, chose.
Contamination
Contamination refers to analogical change wherein a particular form influences the pronunciation of a semantically related form, without bringing about any change in the meaning of that form.[5] An example of contamination may be seen in the change from Middle English (ME) male/femelle > LME male/female.[1]
Recomposition, folk etymology, and hypercorrection
Recomposition and folk etymology are related processes that assign transparent compound structure to previously simple words.[5] The two kinds of change are differentiated by the fact that the former accurately reconstructs some previous form of complex structure of the word, while the latter imposes an analysis of the word which was never accurate. An example of recomposition is the change from OE hūs-wīf 'house-wife' > hussif (> 'hussy') > LME house-wife.
Hypercorrections may also become established in a language, leading to a further kind of analogical change. An example of a change resulting from hypercorrection would be the change of ME autor > LME author on the basis of perceived similarity to ME trone > LME throne, the latter in turn being an analogical change on the basis of the Greek thronos.[1]
Examples of analogical change
Phonology
Levelling analogical change can occur in sound change when some forms in a given paradigm provide a correct environment for a change, and with forms which do not provide the correct environment for the sound change being modified to exemplify the same changes. This kind of change may be exemplified from vowel changes in Old English, where forms such as whale (from OE hwæl) take a long vowel rather than the short vowel expected by regular sound change due to the vowel being lengthened in other forms in the same paradigm (in this case, the plural whales, cf. staff/staves).[6]
Morphology
Analogical change in morphology involves changing the items in one inflectional paradigm to fit with the pattern observed in another on the basis of phonological similarities. This may be exemplified in English by the plural of octopus. This is a Greek borrowed word, and so should take a plural form octopodes. However, English has many nouns of Latin origin with singular forms ending -us and plural forms ending -i, such as cactus/cacti, radius/radii, etc. Thus, an analogical proportion can be established:
On the basis of this analogy, the plural octopi is established.[1] (Some varieties may have octopuses instead, which is instead derived from the productive plural rule of English morphology.)
See also
References
- Dresher, B. Elan. (2000). 'Analogical leveling of vowel length in West Germanic', in Lahiri, Aditi (ed.), Analogy, Levelling, Markedness : Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Inc. p.50.
Bibliography
- Barber, C. (2009). The English Language: A Historical Introduction, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Joseph, Brian D., and Richard D. Janda. (2003). The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
- Lahiri, Aditi. (2000). Analogy, Levelling, Markedness: Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Inc.
- McMahon, April M. S. (1999). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Millar, Robert McColl, and Trask, Larry. (2015). Trask's Historical Linguistics. London: Routledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogical_change
The Armenian hypothesis, also known as the Near Eastern model,[1] is a theory of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, initially proposed by linguists Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, which suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 5th–4th millennia BC in "eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia".[2]
Recent ancient DNA research has led to renewed suggestions of a Caucasian homeland for a 'pre-proto-Indo-European'.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Particularly, an admixture between the Khvalynsk and Caucasian Copper Age burials gave rise to the ancestry that later became known as a typical marker (WSH - Western Steppe Herders) of the Yamnaya pastoralists.[9] It also lends support to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, according to which both proto-Anatolian and proto-Indo-European split-off from a common mother language "no later than the 4th millennium BCE."[10] These suggestions have been disputed in other recent research, which still locates the origin of the ancestor of proto-Indo-European in the Eastern European/Eurasian steppe[11][12][13] or from a hybridization of both steppe and Northwest-Caucasian languages.[13][note 1] The origin of the Anatolian languages according to the Near Eastern model has also been challenged because "[a]mong comparative linguists, a Balkan route for the introduction of Anatolian IE is generally considered more likely than a passage through the Caucasus, due, for example, to greater Anatolian IE presence and language diversity in the west."[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Extinct_languages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proper_names_of_stars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_motion
No comments:
Post a Comment