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Category: General Language
Why are there languages which are spoken the same but written in different script or alphabets?
Traditionally in Europe: religion. As a more general answer than religion, which covers the other answers here: culture. Scripts comes from a particular culture, and adherents of that culture adopt that script. If speakers of the same language belong to different cultures, they use different scripts. If there is a massive cultural shift in the […]
What are the differences between linguistics and philology?
Philology is what linguists think they are above doing, and they are boneheads for doing so. Philology was the study of language in its literary context; so it was confined to written language, and historical linguistics, both of which have become decidedly old fashioned. So when the Old Man of Modern Greek Linguistics, Georgios Chatzidakis, […]
In linguistics, are there views other than the primacy of speech over writing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diglossia The default thinking in linguistics is indeed that spoken language has primacy over written, and Brian has outlined the arguments for it. But coming from another culture with the burden of diglossia and veneration for old forms of the language, I get where OP is coming from. Written language is never anterior to spoken, […]
What is language?
Originally Answered: Hah. Having lectured Intro To Linguistics, I should be able to come up with a definition without going to Wikipedia. Ok: a language is a system of signs that are associated with meaning, and which can be combined to express more complex meanings. That doesn’t limit language to spoken languages, hearing languages, or […]
Is Greece more West or East?
Greece was an Eastern country in 1832, and has been telling itself ever since that it’s a Western country. (That’s what the Westerners were telling her too. At least, to her face.) By the 1990s, Greece was a Western country. But the Eastern roots are still there. When the switchover between East and West happened […]
Are memes a novel linguistic category of proverbs?
Hm. In this subculture, sure. Adage at least, if not proverb. The fragmentation of culture in the Anglosphere, and the lack of common cultural reference points as a result, is a strange thing. It feels unprecedented. You can’t fall back on common literary references any more. The Anglosphere thinks traditional wisdom is old hat and […]
Is degrammaticalization real?
Well. Grammaticalisation theory posits that there is a regular process in language of content words becoming function words and then bound morphemes. Opponents of grammaticalisation theory (e.g. Lyle Campbell, Brian Joseph) posit that grammaticalisation theory is not particularly meaningful if there are counterexamples (degrammaticalisation), whereby function words or bound morphemes become content words. Their ultimate […]
Is an accent sufficient in forming a dialect?
If the accent deviates only in intonation, probably not: intonations are difficult to capture schematically; and by the time you have a different intonation, typically there’ll be a whole lot of other differences anyway. If (as your question posits) you have only phonetic differences, but not phonological (so the same spelling system does just fine […]
Do I need a good understanding of mathematics in order to excel at linguistics?
IMHO: for most disciplines no. Steve Rapaport has spoken on Applied Linguistics; but Applied Linguistics is a very different discipline to Theoretical/General. Phonetics is an experimental science, so you’ll need statistics there. Reconstructing in historical linguistics requires a degree of rigour and thinking in terms of rules which is a bit like maths, but only […]
What are the difference between illocutionary acts and implicature given the sense that both suggest implied meaning or are they just the same?
Implicature is a kind of implied meaning. It’s a default assumption underlying what you are saying, though it can be cancelled out. An illocutionary act is what kind of change in the world you are trying to realise through what you are saying. The implied meaning is not really part of it; it’s more about […]