Bakovic All Languages Are Odd

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All languages are oddEric Baković — Linguistics







In what region of the world arethe most languages spoken?



• “Languages are very un-evenly distributed amongthe countries of the world.The map tries to capture this

fact by rendering each coun-try in a size corresponding tothe number of languagesspoken in it. (Because of the

inherent problems in accom-plishing this, sizes are ratherapproximate). The ten sha-ded countries are those in

which more than 200 lan-guages are in use.”

— Limits of Language

, byMikael Parkvall



• ‘Run-of-the-mill’ (Western) languages

• English, Spanish, French, German,Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, …

• ‘Exotic’ languages

• Most languages of Africa, NativeAmerica, aboriginal Australia, lesser-

known East Asian nations, …• Somewhere in between

• Slavic languages, Chinese, Japanese,Korean, Arabic, Turkish, …

Language exoticism



The exoticism continuum

less exotic more exotic

English WalpiriRussian Turkish Quechua



Linguistic basis?

• There is absolutely no linguistic basisfor the exoticism continuum!

• Our judgments about the relativeexoticism of languages is most closelycorrelated with our judgments aboutthe relative exoticism of the languages’

speakers (≈ people from those places).• Also: the more familiar a language (or

its people), the less exotic we think it is.



Language families?

• “But aren’t language families wildly

different from each other?” — you ask.

• After all, western/European languages

tend to be closely related (Romance

languages, Germanic languages, etc.)

• Perhaps these language families happen

to be boring in ways that others aren’t.



One goal of this talk• I have a handful of examples of what

appear to be exotic features of more exotic

languages to show you.

• (You may be familiar with some of them.)

• In each case, I’ll show you how less exotic

languages (English and others) have acorresponding exoticizable feature.

• (Though you probably didn’t think of thesefeatures in this way before.)



Another, similar goal

• ‘Dialects’ are often thought to be failedattempts by the uneducated to speak the standard language of the educated.

• But derided dialect features are in manycases distinguished features of other standard languages.

• The basis for both the derision and thedistinction is similarly non-linguistic:the attitudes are really about people.



• Does thought

determine language,

or does language

determine thought?

• (And what does that

even mean?)

Example 1: words & thoughts

Steven Pinker




• Benjamin Lee Whorf

• “We dissect nature along lines laid

down by our native languages. [T]heworld is presented in a kaleidoscopic

flux of impressions which has to be

organized by our minds—and thismeans largely by the linguistic

systems in our minds.”



Eskimo words for snow

• “Eskimos have x words for snow.”

• x = 9, 48, 200, 400, … ?

• ‘Eskimos’ = exotic. (Right?)

• ‘Eskimo languages’: Yupik, Inuit

• Synonymous words meaning snow , or

words for different types of snow?



English words for snow

• English has plenty of words to describe

different types of snow.

• snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche,

hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, dusting

• … “snizzling”




• Geoffrey K. Pullum

• “The alleged lexical extravagance of theEskimos comports so well with the many

other facets of their polysynthetic perversity:rubbing noses; lending their wives tostrangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwingGrandma out to be eaten by polar bears.”

• Pinker: “[T]he supposedly mind-broadeninganecdotes owe their appeal to a patronizingwillingness to treat other cultures’ psychologiesas weird and exotic compared to our own.”




• “Among the many depressing things

about this credulous transmission and

elaboration of a false claim is that evenif there were a large number of roots for

different snow types in some Arctic

language, this would not , objectively, beintellectually interesting; it would be a

most mundane and unremarkable fact.”




• “Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists

have names for leaf shapes; interiordecorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different

names for fonts […]. Would anyone think

of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in

bad linguistics textbooks?”




• “[From a textbook:] ‘It is quite obvious

that in the culture of the Eskimos … snowis of great enough importance to split up

the conceptual sphere that corresponds to

one word and one thought in English intoseveral distinct classes …’”




• “Imagine reading: ‘It is quite obvious

that in the culture of printers … fonts

are of great enough importance to split

up the conceptual sphere that

corresponds to one word and one

thought among non-printers intoseveral distinct classes …’”




• “Utterly boring, even if true. Only the

link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-knawing hunters of the ice-

packs could permit something this trite

to be presented to us forcontemplation.”



Example 2: word classes

• Some languages group nouns into classes.

• Most typical (= least exotic!): gender

• masculine, feminine; maybe neuter

• Romance languages, German

• Some more exotic languages use moreexotic noun classification systems.

• (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)



Dyirbal noun classes• Dyirbal is an Australian aboriginal language

with four noun classes:

I. animate objects, menII. women, water, fire, violenceIII. edible fruit and vegetablesIV. miscellaneous (includes things not

classifiable in the first three)• Class II inspired the title of George Lakoff’s

1987 book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.



Other Australian languages

• Ngangikurrunggurr has noun classes

reserved for canines, and hunting

weapons, and Anindilyakwa has a

noun class for things that reflect light.

Diyari distinguishes only between

female and other objects. Perhaps the

most noun classes in any Australianlanguage are found in Yanyuwa, which

has 16 noun classes.



Other Australian languages• Yanyula has 15 noun classes, including

nouns associated with food, trees andabstractions, in addition to separate

classes for men and masculine things,women and feminine things. In themen’s dialect, the classes for men and

for masculine things have simplified toa single class, marked the same way asthe women’s dialect marker reservedexclusively for men.



Bantu noun classes

• Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun

classes called nominal classes. While no

single language is known to express all

of them, most of them have at least 10

noun classes. For example, Shona has

20 classes, Swahili has 15 , Sesotho has

18 and Luganda has 17.

• Noun Classification in Swahili , by Ellen Contini-Morava; http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/swahili/





• What if I told you that

the everyday English

verbs hit , cut , break ,and touch belong to

different verb classes?

• (And what does that

even mean?)

English verb classes



Pinker 2007, p. 106



Pinker 2007, p. 103



Pinker 2007, p. 103-104



Pinker 2007, p. 104-105



Pinker 2007, p. 105



Pinker 2007, p. 105



Pinker 2007, p. 106



Example 3: sounds

• Some languages on the more exotic end

of the continuum have sounds knownas clicks (like tsk, tsk or tut, tut).

• Clicks are common in Bantu languages

like Zulu, but also in other languages of South Africa, such as !Xóõ and Nama.



How to make a click



X-ray of a click

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter13/movie.html



Voiceless aspirated stops

labial coronal dorsal• Closure: the articulators are brought together in such a way that a

complete constriction is formed. The air from the lungs cannot escape.• Release: the articulators are pulled apart abruptly, and the pressurized

air escapes in a sudden puff, referred to as the noise burst.

• Voice onset time: a non-negligible amount of time passes between the

noise burst and the onset of vowel voicing (= vocal fold vibration).



voiced

voicelessunaspirated

voiceless

aspirated

Voice onset time …

… in English!



Example 4: sound patterns• A language’s sounds are not distributed

randomly in words — there are restrictions

on what sounds can co-occur.

• (This is what I study most: phonology.)

• For example, in English:

• brick shows that br can begin a word.• *bnick shows that bn cannot begin a word.

• Because blue exists, blick is a possible word!



Turkish vowels

i

ü

e a

ö o

u

ı

front back

high

low

spread

round



Some Turkish nouns(nominative singular)



Turkish genitive suffix

• The genitive suffix is a high vowel.

• It copies the front/back and round/

spread quality from the previous vowel.



Turkish plural suffix

• The plural suffix is a low spread vowel.

• It copies only the front/back quality

from the previous vowel.



Turkish genitive plural

• The genitive suffix seems to be a high spread vowel.

• It’s because the previous vowel is the plural suffix,

which is never round.



Some English consonants



Past tenses of verbs

• The past tense suffix is a stop consonant.

• It copies voicing from the previous consonant.



Plurals of nouns

• The past tense suffix is a fricative consonant.

• It copies voicing from the previous consonant.



More English consonants



Negatives of adjectives

• The negative prefix ends in a nasal consonant.

• It copies place of articulation from the following consonant.



Example 5: dialect forms

• Everyone speaks a dialect of a language.

• The ‘standard language’ is just another

dialect, like any other.

• The ‘standard’ vs. ‘non-standard’

distinction has no linguistic basis.

• “A language is a dialect with an army

and a navy.” — Max Weinreich



Double negatives

• “Two negatives make a positive.”

• A good rule of thumb for math and

logic, but not really for language.

• I don’t like nobody.

• Standard English: “I like somebody.”

• Nonstandard: “I don’t like anybody.”



Double negatives

• Ain’t nobody done nothin’.

• If the math/logic analysis was right,this would come out negative!

• But it’s still supposed to be “wrong”

for the same reasons as the lastexample: too many negatives.



Double negatives

• Multiple negatives are standard in other

languages — take Romance, for example.

• Spanish:

• No hice nada. = “I didn’t do anything.”

• French:

• Je ne sais rien. = “I don’t know anything.”



Double negatives• While learning Turkish, I was getting in

trouble with some friends. A mother asked:

• Ne oldu? = “What happened?”• Trying to cover my own butt, I replied:

• Hiç bir șey oldu. = “not one thing happened”

• But I should have said:

• Hiç bir șey olmadı. = “Nothing happened.”



Tag questions

• Most dialects of English (including the

standard) form tag questions thusly:

• That’s a nice car, isn’t it ?

• You would like to go, wouldn’t you?

• I’m at work, aren’t I ?

• She can take the subway, can’t she?



Tag questions

• Some non-standard British dialects of

English form tag questions with innit .

• That’s a nice car, innit ?

• You would like to go, innit ?

• I’m at work, innit ?

• She can take the tube, innit ?



Tag questions

• Standard French is not too different.

• C’est une jolie voiture, n’est-ce pas?• “It’s a nice car, is it not?”

• Tu voudrais aller, n’est-ce pas?• “You would like to go, is it not?”

• Je suis au travail, n’est-ce pas?

• “I’m at work, is it not?”

• Elle peut prendre le metro, n’est-ce pas?• “She can take the metro, is it not?”



Tag questions

• Spanish is similar.

• Es un lindo auto, no/no ve/verdad?• “It’s a nice car, no/don’t you see/truth?”

• Quisieras ir, no/no ve/verdad?• “You’d like to go, no/don’t you see/truth?”

• Estoy en el trabajo, no/no ve/verdad?

• “I’m at work, no/don’t you see/truth?”• Puede tomar el tren, no/no ve/verdad?

• “She can take the train, no/don’t you see/truth?”



No language is odd

• Reconciling this with the talk’s title:

• No language is really any more or lessodd (or exotic) than any other.

• Close scrutiny of a language — any language — reveals extraordinarycomplexity (and systematicity).



Thank you.

Contact me: [email protected]

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