Category: General Language

Originally Answered: Is creole and patois the same thing? Why or why not? In a prescientific sense, of course. Patois is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that white people spoke in France, and Creole is what French people called the corrupted gibberish that brown people spoke in the colonies. Thank god for science, […]

They are the two relationships between linguistic elements that define how language works, according to structuralism. They are complementary. The syntagmatic relationship is how linguistic elements can be sequenced. It’s syntax. And morphology. And phonotactics. The paradigmatic relationship is which linguistic elements behave in the same way in syntagmatic relationships. It’s lexicon. And phonetics. And […]

I’m saying the same thing as JJ Hantsch, but with different emphasis. Is there a tendency for languages to gain or lose complex clusters over time? Both, but with different causes. Languages lose complex clusters through various processes of phonotactic simplification. Languages gain complex clusters through dropping vowels [EDIT: or adding consonants for ease of […]

No reference needed further than the Wikipedia definition: Deixis: words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information — in this case, the identity of the speaker (“me”) and the speaker’s location (“here”). Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies […]

I will assume that you’ve already been read the riot act about the impossibility of getting an academic position, the need to step on corpses and network, and the imperative to do something fashionable (which historical linguistics is not) in order to get hired. Why yes, I am jaundiced. Why do you ask? (Nick Nicholas’ […]

Yes. Not by the magic of the fact that it is in writing, but by the fact that it has helped immensely in establishing and propagating conservative versions of the language, based on written records, as the most prestigious versions, which are learned in education and emulated in formal registers. Given the time depth of […]

Originally Answered: Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects? The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix […]

What my betters have said, with both the pros and cons from Don Grushkin’s answer. Be aware of the following constraints: Don’t get too caught up in what language you work on. A friend of mine came to Australia to write a grammar of an Aboriginal language, any Aboriginal language. There’s 20 healthy languages left, […]

If you have to ask the question, it’s already doomed. Linguists can only record the language; only the language community can give up on it. If the  language community wants to hold on to it, linguists can give them tools. But it’s not easy. EDIT: OP also asks: Also, why should we teach our childs […]