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Category: General Language
Can you say anything using a vocabulary of 100 words?
The claim of Natural semantic metalanguage is that you can with around 60. It was a party trick of Australian linguistics undergrads to speak in NSM; it becomes very stilted very quickly, but in principle you can define a lot of notions with a limited vocabulary, as the asker alludes to. NSM is of course […]
What is the most minimal language?
Artificial languages are where you’d look of course, and there are much simpler languages than Esperanto. Basic English was renowned for having a small vocab. My own favourite, with a comparably small vocab and a much tighter grammar, is Interglossa (as opposed to its revival Glosa). Natural semantic metalanguage has an extremely small number of […]
Are there any short expletives that sound the same in different languages?
Nick Enfield [Page on sydney.edu.au] (who I did linguistics with, and boy does he look different twenty years on) just got an Ig Noble [Improbable Research] for claiming the universality of Huh? (The Syllable Everyone Recognizes, Is ‘Huh?’ a universal word?) Of course the realisation of Huh? does differ by language; in the Mediterranean, for […]
What is an ergative-absolutive language?
Ergative languages are a very hard thing to wrap your head around, if you don’t speak one. A *very* crude way to explain it is: verbs look like they’re passive by default: I am slept.I am killed by the enemy. If you’re just sitting there, including having something done to you, you’re the subject. (Absolutive […]
With TV, radio, film and other forms of mass media will accents and dialects slowly die out or transform until there is just one national/non-regional dialect?
Certainly the trend in many countries is for dialects to die out, particularly countries with a strong centralising tendency in culture and education. Greece and France are very good examples of this. Even in England, what survives is more accents with some variant vocabulary than the full-fledged dialects of two centuries ago. Countries that have […]
Metonymy and Metaphor in Language Change
When language changes, the innovation rarely comes out of nowhere. The typical pattern is that an existing expression is interpreted in a novel way (reanalysis); and that novelty spreads through the language (extension). For example, within my lifetime, fun switched from being just a noun to also being an adjective. That reanalysis happened in people’s […]