LING 165 Midterm

According to Mufwene, it is accurate to say that... (select all that apply): A. English is a global language. B. a global English with uniform structural features will spread around the world. C. various Englishes with different structural features will emerge in various locations around the world. D. the spread of English is exactly parallel to the spread of Latin.

(A & C) Mufwene argues that English is definitely a global language, but that each region has its own variety, with its own grammatical rules and other unique properties. He makes the point that a uniform English is not going to take over the world because local varieties will always pop up. He goes on to argue that the spread of English is different from the spread of Latin in several important ways.

The Old English period is generally identified as lasting up to the year ___ , followed by the Middle English period which lasted up to the year ___ before transitioning to Modern English.

1150; 1500

Which of the following is a typical estimate for the number of languages in the world? There is only one correct answer.

6,000

In South Africa, Afrikaans (select all that apply): A. is used primarily by white South Africans. B. is almost never taught in South African schools. C. is an official language. D. was not an official language during apartheid. E. was protested against in 1976. F. is a native language of South Africa.

A, C, E

!

Alveolar click

words meaning a, an, the, these, those, and so on; usually have different forms depending on the gender of the noun they refer to

Articles

refers to the autonym (self-name) for Indo-Iranian peoples since ancient times. The word itself, meaning 'noble,' is the source of the modern place-name Iran.

Aryan

This occurs when speakers of one variety can understand speakers of another, but not the other way around.

Asymmetric intelligibility

Which of the following descriptions best matches the label Khoisan? A. a group of languages with a common ancestor B. a group of languages with a common linguistic property C. a single language spoken in southern Africa D. a branch of the Niger-Congo language family

B. a group of languages with a common linguistic property

A series of migrations that occurred over thousands of years starting around 2000 BCE, during which groups of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples moved south from the middle parts of the continent.

Bantu expansion

linguists specializing in the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo language family.

Bantuists

one of the few non-Indo-European languages in Europe.

Basque

In which country does Basque hold official status?

Basque is one of the official languages of Spain, but not of France.

ʘ

Bilabial click

a script from Central and South Asia from about 1,000 BCE

Brahmi

Select the labels that are not extant branches of Afro-Asiatic. Select all that apply. A.Semitic B.Cushitic C.Egyptian D.Persian E. Amazigh F. Bantu G. Chadic H. Mali

C, D, F, H

morphemes indicating the function of a noun in a sentence, like whether it is doing an action or an action is being done to it.

Case endings

a system of conjugating nouns based on their role or function in a sentence

Case system

Arabic is considered to be diglossic because:

Classical Arabic is widely used and understood for liturgical purposes, while regional varieties are used for everyday situations.

or simply clicks, are speech sounds in Khoisan languages, which means they make up part of the inventory of sounds used for everyday speech.

Click consonants

an unfiltered mixing of two languages, freely drawing words from either language without conscious thought or effort

Code-switching

a new word or term in a language.

Coinage

the two genders in Dutch

Common and neuter

describes a language that has retained a large number of traits from an earlier ancestor language

Conservative

a language arising out of heavy contact between groups who do not otherwise have a common language.

Creole

a new type of language that has evolved from a pidgin over several generations

Creole

Linguists who specialize in creoles

Creolists

ǀ

Dental click

a stretch of geographic space in which there is very small variation in speech between regions (usually small towns or villages) that are right next to each other, but much greater variation (and lower intelligibility) between regions farther away.

Dialect chain

the process by which words, phrases, speech sounds, and even grammatical morphemes are transferred from one language to another (or to several others).

Diffusion

True or false: Niger-Congo contains more languages but has fewer speakers than the Khoisan group.

False. Niger-Congo contains more languages and has more speakers than the Khoisan group.

True of false: Some efforts are underway in South Africa to bring Zulu back from the brink of extinction.

False. Zulu is not on the brink of extinction. Efforts are underway to modernize and simplify it.

Which political figure is responsible for forbidding the use of Basque and leading to its severe repression?

Francisco Franco

find def. later

Gaeltachtaí

Which branch of Indo-European has the widest modern geographic range?

Germanic, due to the spread of English.

a blend-word of globalization and localization. It refers to the modification of international products or industries to suit local preferences. An example is that McDonald's in India offers a Shahi Chicken McCurry, not available at other McDonald'ses.

Glocalization

are produced by constricting or closing the glottis, which is the opening between the vocal folds

Glottal speech sounds

the traditional name for the Indo-European noun categorization system

Grammatical gender

usually refers to the variety of Hindi-Urdu spoken in India

Hindi

a form of a language unique to an individual person, rather than an entire speech community.

Idiolect

How can you tell if excerpts are most likely from a pidgin or a creole?

If it is from a creole, there will be the presence of morphemes affixed to words indicating grammatical categories; this is not characteristic of a pidgin.

Which of the following are reasons for the failure of the Irish language revitalization movement according to Carnie? Mark all that apply. A. Irish has not yet received "official" status by the government of Ireland. B. A substantial number of Irish speakers have emigrated out of the gaeltachtaí. C. A substantial number of English speakers have immigrated into the gaeltachtaí. D. The grammatical complexity of Irish makes it difficult for first-language English speakers to learn. E. There have been persistently bad pedagogical methods for teaching Irish within the education system.

In the assigned reading for Lesson 4, Carnie argues that Irish speakers are moving out of traditionally Irish-speaking regions and that English speakers are moving into them. He also lambasts the educational system for using horrible methods in teaching language, resulting in dismissal of the language among learners. Carnie notes that Irish has indeed received official status in Ireland, but that this hasn't affected its revitalization. Irish is not particularly more "complex" than any other language grammatically speaking.

the term many linguists opt for, rather than Indo-Aryan, to refer to these languages.

Indic

refers to the early Sanskrit-speaking peoples who inhabited northern south Asia, who likewise used the term as an autonym; it also refers to a sub-branch of languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European.

Indo-Aryan

a language with no established relatives.

Isolate

a common language used among people who otherwise speak different languages.

Koine

a standard variety of a language used for communication between groups speaking mutually intelligible varieties of the language. The London dialect of English is an example of a koine in the UK.

Koine

Konkani and Marathi are two language varieties spoken on the west coast of India. The two varieties are quite similar to each other, but not identical. Assume that speakers of Konkani report being able to understand about 85% of the speech of Marathi speakers, and that speakers of Marathi report being able to understand about 85% of the speech of Konkani speakers. Which of the following labels best characterizes the relationship between these two varieties? There is only one correct answer.

Konkani and Marathi are partially intelligible.

similar to a language family, except there is no established ancestor language

Language group

ǁ

Lateral click

a shared or common language used for communication by different groups within a society or region.

Lingua franca

a technical term meaning that unrelated (or distantly related) languages in a single geographic space share linguistic features because those features had diffused between languages, but not because all those languages inherited the features from a common ancestor.

Linguistic area

a language used exclusively for religious purposes— there are no native speakers of Coptic.

Liturgical language

What is the name for the historical stage of Hebrew that was exclusively written but not spoken?

Medieval Hebrew

stable communication systems arising from the mixing of two distinct languages.

Mixed language

Which of the following scenarios is most likely to give rise to a mixed language? There is only one correct answer. A. People who do not speak a common language take bits and pieces of each other's language and over time, the use of both languages together becomes stabilized. B. People who are bilingual begin intertwining two languages and over time, the switch from one language to another becomes stabilized. C. Governments and educational institutions enact policies to enforce one language being used in some social contexts and another language to be used in different contexts. D. People from different regions occasionally come together for the purpose of trade and over time, their two languages are blended together into a stable variety.

Mixed languages are the result of bilingual speakers code-switching between two (or more) languages. When this happens in an entire speech community, the switches may eventually become stable and regular.

If speakers of different varieties can understand each other, then those varieties are said to be mutually intelligible and therefore dialects of the same language.

Mutual intelligibility

another name for Devanagari, and is a script that developed from Brahmi.

Nagari

Bangime is a language isolate spoken by about 2000 people in Mali. Which of the following languages is probably genealogically related to Bangime? There is only one correct answer. Please provide one sentence of rationale.

None of the above; This problem states that Bangime is a language isolate. By definition, language isolates do not have genealogical relatives. The only answer is "None of the above."

grammatical systems for organizing and categorizing nouns

Noun classes

Which of the following labels represents a European member of the Indo-European language family? Mark all that apply. A. Greek B. Basque C. Hungarian D. Swedish E. Gaelic F. Armenian G. Lithuanian H. Afrikaans I. Farsi J. Romanian K. Polish L. Finnish M. Hindi N. Yiddish O. Hebrew P. Georgian

Of the options given, Greek, Swedish, Gaelic, Armenian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Polish, and Yiddish are Indo-European languages from Europe. Afrikaans, Farsi, and Hindi are Indo-European languages, but they are not from Europe. Basque, Hungarian, Finnish, Hebrew, and Georgian are not Indo-European.

refer to historical stages of the Indic branch of Indo-European.

Old Indo-Aryan (OIA), Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA), and New Indo-Aryan (NIA)

ǂ

Palatal click

If two people can understand some but not all of each other's speech

Partial intelligibility

are made either by constricting the pharynx itself, or by causing movement of the epiglottis, which is inside the pharynx.

Pharyngeal speech sounds

a highly simplified form of communication; have a severely reduced grammatical structure, tend to rely on a rather small vocabulary, and are purposed for a very limited range of conversational topics. They also make modifications to speech sounds and the pronunciations of words.

Pidgin

Which of the following types of contact varieties has no native speakers? There is only one correct answer. A. sign language B. mixed language C. creole D. pidgin

Pidgins are results of language contact that are abbreviated or pared-down versions of other languages in combination. They are created by adults in contact with one another. Children who are exposed to pidgins as their language input do not acquire the pidgin; rather, they adapt its grammatical complexity and vocabulary, effectively creating a creole. Pidgins, therefore, do not have native speakers.

when migrant workers and/or slaves speaking different languages worked in the same physical location, forcibly or at will. In order to communicate with the overseers and with one another, they used main vocabulary from the socially dominant language, as well as bits and pieces from their respective native languages.

Plantation pidgin

refers to the addition of vowel symbols to an otherwise consonantal script.

Pointing

the many local varieties (vernaculars) that Sanskirt co-existed with which were not standardized, but which all originated from earlier forms of Sanskrit.

Prakrits

a grammatical particle that is attached to the front of a word.

Prefix

the adjective form of pronoun. So we can talk about properties of pronouns as pronominal properties.

Pronominal

the ancestor language for Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

the ancestor language of the descendant languages

Proto-language

property of Semitic languages in which the core meaning of a word is provided by its root and the formula for a given affix can be applied in a patterned and systematic manner to create full words

Root-and-pattern morphology

Arabic and Hebrew

Semitic languages

the branch of linguistics that attempts to describe and explain the interaction of language with any aspect of a society, such as age, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, religion, economic status, power status, caste, occupation, and so on.

Sociolinguistics

Match the type of English with its geographic location. A. native English B. creole English C. nativized English 1. New Zealand 2. Caribbean Islands 3. India

The English spoken in New Zealand is descendant from native speakers of English. The English spoken in the Caribbean is a creolized variety of English that was used on slave plantations. The English spoken in India has been adapted by people of Indian (non-English) origin and made their own through a process of nativization.

drew essential vocabulary from the languages of both (or all, in the case of multiple trading groups) parties, though the language of the dominant or more powerful trading partner was favored in this regard. Trade pidgins were not used for any purpose other than trade, and they were only used during the short and periodic spurts in which the trading occurred.

Trade pidgin

True or false: Both Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages.

True. Hebrew and Arabic are in the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.

refers to the variety of Hindi-Urdu spoken in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Urdu

produced when the back of the tongue contacts the uvula.

Uvular speech sounds

refers to the typical sequence of words in a sentence: verb-subject-object. Very few other languages standardly put the verb first.

VSO syntax

a speech variety without standardization or official status. African American English is an example of a vernacular.

Vernacular language

How do you find the word with the largest number of morphemes?

We only need to find the word with the most dashes because this will mean that the word contains the most morphemes.

Part of the audio content in Lesson 4 was a podcast excerpt in which linguist Luisa Miceli discusses several hypotheses about the homeland of the PIE language. She goes on to elaborate on new research that applies ancestry constraints to phylogenetic models. Mark which of the following would be correct under the assumption that ancestry-constrained phylogenetic models produce the most accurate depiction of a PIE homeland. Mark all that apply. A. The steppe hypothesis is favored. B. The Turkish farmer hypothesis is favored. C. PIE orginated about 5000 years ago. D. PIE originated about 9000 years ago. E. Without ancestry constraints, a phylogenetic model could produce trees with languages appearing on the same level as their daughter languages. F. Without ancestry constraints, the time-depth of the Indo-European language family was falsely inflated, making it appear older than it really is

Within a phylogenetic model (a model of historical relationships), ancestry constraints are basically restrictions in the ways that languages that can be related to each other. Since we know with near certainty that some languages are more closely related to each other than others, this knowledge can be programmed into the model in the form of an ancestry constraint. Doing so (1) favors the steppe hypothesis rather than Turkish farmer hypothesis for the homeland of PIE; (2) places the origin of PIE around 5000 years ago rather than 9000; (3) eliminates family trees with impossible relationships (e.g. where languages descend from their children languages); and (4) reduces the likelihood of a falsely inflated time-depth.

additional morphemes besides the root

affixes

The most recent ____ ____ of a set of languages is established by looking for the first node (moving up from the languages in question) shared by all of them.

common ancestor

a method for establishing whether languages are related and members of the same language family in which linguists compare words with similar or identical meanings from different languages.

comparative method

Morphemes within are separated by _____. Words without multiple morphemes count as one morpheme.

dashes

The most _____ relation is established by determining, for any given language, which language is a descendant of the top-most node shared by both languages.

distant

Epiglottal sounds are produced at the _____.

epiglottis

Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Austronesian are all examples of

language families

a group of languages that all descended from a single common ancestor language.

language family

all the meaningful units

morpheme

The historically ____ language is whichever one forms the first node in the tree.

oldest

when an affix is placed at the beginning of the root

prefix

Words are separated by ____.

spaces

when an affix is placed at the end of the root

suffix

text-based deconstructions or delimitations of words and sentences in the language under discussion (the object language), revealing morphemes, the meanings/grammatical functions of the morphemes, and an English translation.

three-line gloss