World Languages Quiz 1

endangered languages

initial bilingualism - generational transmission breaks - limited to older speakers- final speakers remain

economic pressures - educational policies - migration patterns - social prestige

proto language

shared ancestor language

isolate language

Basque in France and Spain

comparative reconstruction

the basic method for establishing both the overall composition of a language family and its internal structure

comparison of languages presumed to be related , recontruction of their common ancestors, based on comparison , compare words or grammatical structures

lenition

sound that iss “harder to pronounce” - sound that is “easier to pronounce”

counting languages

lack of clear criteria for defining a language vs a dialect, number of languages is unstable

language diversity

extra-linguistic factors - migration , isolation, different social conditions, borrowing from neighbors

internal - balancing sound system (Great Vowel Shift)

indo european family

italic, celtic, germanic, balto-slavic, indo-iranian, armenian, hellenic albanian

steppe hypothesis (southern russia)

5-6 thousnad years, herders on the eurasian steppes expanded their range propelled by taming hourses and wheels, proto uralic

italic branch -romance family

classic and vulgar latin, frnech spanish italian, influence from germanic and slavic languages

celtic

semitic languages british ilse and nw france

germanic

lowland scotlanf, netherlands, belgium

balto-slavic

preserve many features of common ancestral language

indo-iranian

2 major subdivisions

indo aryan - romani and hindi

iranian - farsi/persian

albanian, hellenic, and armenian

do not have connections to eachother or to other indo european but have indo european cognates and grammatiocal traits: eac isolates

language endangerment

losing native speakers

endangerment

limits the range of languages we can study

iranian

persian/farsi two terms for same language 70 million central asia strunk due to turkish language

indo- aryan

hindi and urdu two distinct languages 322 million people

identical at colloquial level but unintelligible at formal and literacy levels india and pakistan

isolating

mandarin

agglutinative

tamil, grammatical relations are indicated by the addition of suffixes to roots, very long words, no prefixes

fusional

spanish

polysynthetic

mohawk

western linguistics borrow terms from ancient indian grammars

sandhi - ohonological processes that occur at morpheme boundaries

dvandva compounds

compund formed from two whole words without the aid of the conjenction and (chinese, korean) 85 languages telugu