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What is functional grammar?
Vote #1 Trevor Sullivan: Trevor Sullivan’s answer to What is functional grammar?
It’s the correct answer, but not defensive enough for my liking. 🙂 So treat this answer as a restatement of his.
There are several ways of explaining why language is the way it is. Originally, the split was between diachronic and synchronic explanations. The diachronic account, which is historical linguistics, explains language in terms of earlier stages of the same language, and change processes. The synchronic account, which took over as the mainstream with Saussure, explains language as a system in its own right, rather than seeking to explain it in terms of process.
Since maybe the 70s in some quarters, but the 50s in others, there is a related split.
- The formalist account of language explains language as a system in itself, without appealing to extralinguistic causes. An explanation in formalism is the formulation of rules that explain the distribution of phonemes and words and phrases. Generative grammar is the major class of formalist accounts. It ultimately appeals to a language device in the brain: language is the way it is, because that’s how the rules for linguistic structure in the brain work.
- The functionalist account of language explains language as a means of communicating meaning. So giving the rules by itself is not enough in functionalism: functionalism want to know why those rules, and not others, are best suited to communication. The rules end up having a lot to do with pragmatics and semantics and discourse structure, as Trevor says; and ultimately functionalism concludes that language is the way it is because of cognitive patterns in general, and not a part of the brain specific to language. If you think about it, that also means functionalism is a lot friendlier to diachrony.
They’re incommensurate approaches; *shrug*. To a functionalist, formalist accounts don’t really explain anything, and are circular. To a formalist, functionalist accounts are specious Just-So speculation, and are unscientific.
(I’ll only disagree with Trevor in one detail: functionalists in my experience love typology—it gives them more things to explain in their terms.)
The home turf of functionalism is the West Coast of the US, and it was also big in Australia when I was going through the system. Systemic functional linguistics is an earlier branch of the theory, developed in the UK and Australia (though restricted to Sydney Uni there), and which other functionalists don’t like. It is very popular in applied linguistics, as it gives paedagogically satisfying accounts of language variety.
Would Greek Cypriots accept the return of the north of Cyprus if the Turkish Cypriots were expelled?
I’ll second Spyros Theodoritsis. Yes, Greek Cypriots killed Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus in intercommunity violence. Yes, there was de facto partition of the island since 1963. Yes, if you talk to at least some Greek Cypriots for long enough (as I did with my uncle there), you’ll work out that despite their professed desire for a reunified Cyprus (as long as the mainland Turks go away), they don’t necessarily have a lot of respect for Turkish Cypriots.
But no, making Cyprus Türkenrein has never been a talking point for Greek Cypriots. They do want their homes back, as you’ve clarified the question, OP, but they do actually want reunification and peace as well. I don’t think they’d trust any population exchange solution to resolve anything anyway: it’s a cause of Turkish resentment just waiting to happen.
Although it has to be said, the newer generation of Greek Cypriots has gotten quite used to living with partition; and reunification is no longer for Greek Cypriots an existential question, the way it has been for Turkish Cypriots.
Why did the Ancient Greeks refer to Ancient Blacks (the Ethiopians) as ‘blameless’ and ‘favored by the gods’? Also, what does it mean?
(Oh, God, not Afrocentric history, anything but that.)
Afrocentric pages online say Diodorus Siculus said:
“The Aethiopians (Ethiopians) are high favored with the gods, they were the first of all men created by the gods and were the founders of the Egyptian Civilization.”
Diodorus Siculus actually says this:
LacusCurtius • Diodorus Siculus
Now the Ethiopians, as historians relate, were the first of all men and the proofs of this statement, they say, are manifest. […] furthermore, that those who dwell beneath the noon-day sun were, in all likelihood, the first to be generated by the earth, is clear to all; since, inasmuch as it was the warmth of the sun which, at the generation of the universe, dried up the earth when it was still wet and impregnated it with life, it is reasonable to suppose that the region which was nearest the sun was the first to bring forth living creatures.
OK. That’s not saying Greeks thought black people were better than them. That’s just a Just-So story that the equator originated all life because Heat, somehow. And it has nothing to do with the Olduwai Gorge!
And they say that they were the first to be taught to honour the gods and to hold sacrifices and processions and festivals and the other rites by which men honour the deity; and that in consequence their piety has been published abroad among all men, and it is generally held that the sacrifices practised among the Ethiopians are those which are the most pleasing to heaven. As witness to this they call upon the poet who is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most venerated among the Greeks; for in the Iliad he represents both Zeus and the rest of the gods with him as absent on a visit to Ethiopia to share in the sacrifices and the banquet which were given annually by the Ethiopians for all the gods together:
For Zeus had yesterday to Ocean’s bounds
Set forth to feast with Ethiop’s faultless men,
And he was followed there by all the gods.
That just means that Homer found the Ethiopians exotic. And again, in all likelihood the reason for that was simply the Ancient Greeks, in Homer’s time, thinking Gods = Sun = Equator = Black people.
And they state that, by reason of their piety towards the deity, they manifestly enjoy the favour of the gods, inasmuch as they have never experienced the rule of an invader from abroad; for from all time they have enjoyed a state of freedom and of peace one with another, and although many and powerful rulers have made war upon them, not one of these has succeeded in his undertaking.
We actually know very little of the History of Ethiopia before the Kingdom of Aksum. Diodorus knew very little too. And that’s hardly a strong argument for anything.
They say also that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians, Osiris having been the leader of the colony. For, speaking generally, what is now Egypt, they maintain, was not land but sea when in the beginning the universe was being formed; afterwards, however, as the Nile during the times of its inundation carried down the mud from Ethiopia, land was gradually built up from the deposit.
Yeah. More Just-So stories, I fear. You can read more at the link.
As far as I can tell, everything is just exoticisation of a people who lived near the equator, and that Greeks had very little contact with. (And Diodorus wrote in the Roman era anyway.)
Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?
René Alix has basically covered it in his answer (Vote #1 René Alix’s answer to Why can’t we perceive onomatopoeia in other languages as easily as in our native language?)
But there’s something that’s only implicit in René’s answer, that I’ll make explicit:
No actual dogs really sound like that. And so you get the transcription of a facsimile of a sound representing entire microcosms of sounds, and end up with varying, though often vaguely similar words. Oh, and then somebody goes and transliterates them from another language with a different writing system, so we find out that Mandarin Chinese use ”wong wong” for their dog bark, and Arabic speakers use “nabah”.
To make it explicit: onomatopoeias in language are still somewhat arbitrary mappings of sound to meaning. There is a somewhat arbitrary choice of a particular rendering of a bark or a splash into sound, and that choice becomes conventionalised as a word of a particular language.
Because the choice is somewhat arbitrary and conventionalised, it will make sense to you once someone has pointed it out to you, and you are already familiar with it. But without forewarning, you may be surprised. As English speakers are indeed surprised at wong wong or nabah—and as Arabic or Chinese speakers are surprised at woof woof or arf arf or bow wow.
You aren’t surprised at Chinese onomatopoeia because you learned those words, just as you learned any word in Chinese. You can recognise the limited degree of non-arbitrariness of the words, their Iconicity. You are surprised at English onomatopoeia, because you expect onomatopoeia not to be conventionalised, but purely transparent in its iconicity. And that’s what I’m saying: onomatopoeia is not as iconic as you expect, and our native language knowledge of onomatopoeia blinds us to that.
What is the twenty-third letter of the Latin alphabet?
I see what you did there, OP.
Yes, the 23rd letter of the Latin alphabet depends on which version of the Latin alphabet you’re using: there’s no universal 23rd letter, because there’s no universal repertoire of Latin letters. Some languages have fewer letters than English. Some have more letters than English. Some languages count letters with diacritics as distinct letters. Some languages count digraphs as distinct letters as well.
In English, it’s W. In Latin, it’s Z. In Turkish, it’s Ş. In Spanish up to 2010 (which counted <ll> and <ch> as separate letters), it was T. In Albanian, it’s Q.
What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it?
Vote #1 Sam Ahmed: Sam Ahmed’s answer to What does a linguist think of Albanian as he first starts to study it?
As someone who’s both Greek and who was looking for things about the Balkan Sprachbund, I had the same reactions. With the added component of “… God, this is just like Greek” a lot of the time.
(That can be superficial. I know that Macedonian and Greek both use clitics redundantly as topicalisation—”I know it, the answer.” If you look at the fine print though, the pragmatic nuances are rather different. Still, superficialities are what a typologist deals with.)
What else? Lots of moods and cases and inflections: it looks very old-school Indo-European morphologically. Lots of Latin in the vocabulary, but it’s very well hidden through sound change. Interesting sociolinguistics, with the defeat of southern Geg by southern Tosk. (But then, I read Martin Camaj’s grammar, and Camaj never got over Hoxha imposing Gjirokastër Albanian as the norm.) Fair bit of dialectal diversity, with some quite noticeable deviations in Arvanitika, and to a lesser extent (I think) Arbëresh.
I think for a Greek the bit that’s hardest to accept is that ll and l, gj and g, q and k, are really distinct phonemes: we have the phones for <l, gj, q> in Standard Greek as palatalised allophones of <ll, g, k>, so we just assume they’re allophones everywhere.
(Which is why I kept mispronouncing the Spanish for Los Angeles as [los ançeles]. Very hard for a Greek to say [anxeles].)
What are the distorsions in the various (French, German, etc.) versions of the Erasmian Ancient Greek pronunciation?
Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching – Wikipedia
Wikipedia enumerates English, French, German, Italian. I’ll list the pronunciations that I would deem wrong from the currently accepted reconstruction of Ancient Greek.
I’m not even going to list the traditional distortions of Erasmian in English courtesy of the Great English Vowel Shift, and some bizarre notions of how accentuation worked. If you’ve ever heard a Classical Greek word borrowed into English, you know what ended up happening.
The situation got bad enough that it was utterly abandoned in the teaching of Greek in the Anglosphere at the end of the 19th century; Athenaze for English (from Comparison of Greek Pronunciation Systems), as a popular modern textbook, sticks pretty much to the modern reconstruction.
For the other three languages:
- No pitch accent. Italian, French, German
- No vowel length. French.
- No geminate consonants. French, German.
- No distinction between genuine and spurious diphthongs. Italian, French.
- αυ as [o]. French
- ευ as [œ]. French.
- ευ, ηυ, οι as [ɔʏ]. German.
- ει as [ai]. German.
- Zeta as [dz]. Italian, French.
- Zeta as [ts]. German.
- Sigma prevocalically as [z]. German.
- Theta as [θ]. Italian.
- Theta as [t]. French, German (Italian in practice)
- Phi as [f]. Italian, German, French.
- Chi as [x]. Italian, German.
- Chi as [k]. French (Italian in practice)
- Ignoring rough breathing. French.
Italian is the closest to reconstructed Classical Greek (and indeed to Erasmus’ Erasmian), with only a few distortions. German is punctiliously correct in some aspects, annoyingly wrongheaded in others. French is… wow. Just wow.
What are some strategies of anaphor binding/coindexation in languages and other strategies to resolve or compensate referent ambiguity?
I should know a good answer to this, as part of my apprenticeship (being a research assistant) was tracking referents in Acehnese discourse for Mark Durie.
The obvious answers I think have already been given. Gender in all its manifold forms, extending to noun classes. Deixis. Politeness strategies and social deixis. Reflexives, including long-distance reflexives and logophors, where a special pronoun refers out from an embedded clause back out to the top clause subject. (Logophoricity). English really struggles with this—
After being acquitted of Veseth’s murder, Red Dog testified at Lilly’s retrial that he, Red Dog, was responsible for shooting Veseth, and that he, Red Dog, had previously lied under oath. Red Dog v. State
I was actually googling for an instance in Red Dog (film), where it was even more awkward.
One thing worth pointing out, which came out of the Acehnese work and the work by Thomas Givon that had inspired it: topicality helps too. Discourse establishes what referents are the main topics being talked about. They tend to be referred to by pronoun rather than full noun phrase, and in fact the use of pronouns confirms that they are the main topics. So pronouns pragmatically are their own disambiguation.
Lojban, as you might well expect, has some whackadoodle strategies, which probably shouldn’t count. It’s an artificial language with an artificial language’s obsession about ambiguity, but it’s taken that a lot further than many. Letters as anaphors is one, which it gets from algebra. I wrote up the perverse motivation there for defaulting to long-distance reflexivity in Folk Functionalism in Artificial Languages: The Long Distance Reflexive vo’a in Lojban.
Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary?
Vote #1 Michael Minnich: Michael Minnich’s answer to Linguistically speaking, why is the relationship between the signifier and signified mostly arbitrary? It brings up several pertinent reasons.
My answer’s simpler: restricting ourselves to lexicon, non-arbitrary signifier–signified relations in a spoken language are going to be limited to referents that make a sound. Most verbs and adjectives and abstract nouns defy onomatopoeia. Even with concrete nouns, what’s the onomatopoeia for “hair”? “sun”? “fish”?
Even if we broaden things to include indexical signs and sound symbolism, there are real limits to how much can be signified by a non-arbitrtary signifier in a sound-based language. The limits will be enough to prevent you having a real communicative language—even if you don’t move up from lexicon to syntax.
If the word “homo religiosus” used by scholars mean a ‘religious human,’ what would be an equivalent Latin term for a “meaning seeking human”?
Homo significans, “human who makes meaning”, is already a well established expression. So is homo interpres, “interpreting human”, human who makes sense of things.
You’re doing something more subtle: “seeking meaning in the universe, anticipating that there will be meaning”. It’s very close to homo interpres. But if you want to be more explicit: homo signa quaerens, or homo significationem quaerens.
No single word for “meaning-seeking”. You asked for Latin, not Greek.