Subscribe to Blog via Email
January 2025 M T W T F S S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Category: General Language
What might future languages look like?
One of the foundational assumptions of Historical Linguistics is Uniformitarianism. We assume that, after the initial period of the evolution of language, Language is going to look the same as a structure, no matter if it’s 5000 years ago or 5000 years from now—because language is determined as a human faculty, and humans have not […]
Are linguists more likely to have a musical background?
Zeibura S. Kathau has a rather more perceptive and fine breakdown on this than I’d hope for; vote #1 Zeibura S. Kathau’s answer to Are linguists more likely to have a musical background? I’ll just add two observations. Of my fellow PhD students in linguistics, one was a composer and pianist, one a bassist, one […]
Identify how linguistic is related with historical linguistics?
Well, linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is language. Historical linguistics is the scholarly discipline whose subject matter is the development of language through time. It explains language in terms of how it historically developed to get to this point (its diachrony). Up until the 1920s, historical linguistics was the mainstream of linguistics. […]
Would you give up your mother tongue for a common world language, if you knew that it would unite all people?
Thx4A2A, Irene. I’d say that in Armenian, but my wife doesn’t speak it. 🙁 This is a painful question for me, as I was an Esperantist for a fair while. But even before the Espereantists split about whether the “final victory” was worth messianically waiting for, they were very careful not to convey a message […]
Do creole languages have one “base language” or two “parent languages”?
It’s a very good question. Normally, creoles and pidgins are put in the too hard basket of linguistic family trees for precisely that reason. It’s very hard to argue for a single parent language, as pidgins, and the creoles that arise from them, really are mixed languages, with grammar from the one, vocabulary from the […]
What is your opinion on the inclusion of emojis in Unicode?
Ah, Philip my old friend. I know why you’re asking, and you know where this is going. What does Nick Nicholas’ Quora Bio on emoji say? Emoji: Blot on the purity of Unicode What does Nick Nicholas think about the inclusion of emojis in Unicode? CLEANSE THEM WITH FIRE! ⛐⛏⛔⛑✘☹☠ Why does Nick Nicholas think […]
Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA?
Thanks, Khateeb! When I was in second year phonetics in university, our exam was to do just that. Our lecturer would say some sounds, we had to write them down in IPA. With some provisos. Most diacritics would count, but some of them, such as the forward/backward, raised/lowered diacritics for vowels, would not: too subtle. […]
Will we one day communicate with pictures instead of words?
If i ever met someone from the Unicode technical committee again, I’m showing them this question, and yelling THIS! YOU MADE THIS HAPPEN! Rebuses do not make an international language. This is not the first attempt at an international symbolic language. Not by a very long shot. For a look at this kind of thing […]
Is there any function of swearing?
Terry Casalou has the answer here I like the most. (Vote #1: Terry Casalou’s answer to Is there any function of swearing?) Swearing is a form of communication that includes our passion level. I’d like to dig a little deeper. Why does swearing do that? Breaking taboos is one mechanism of indicating passion. Not the […]
How does IPA keep up with the constant change of sounds in the languages?
Several ways to tackle this question. And it’s a very good question. Both consonants and vowels in the IPA are defined, not against a word of a language (they can indeed change), but against an articulatory gesture. Because people’s oral cavities are pretty much the same, that works. [ç] is defined as a Voiceless palatal […]