Linguistics

Thinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investigate languages in fresh way, but against the background (and often on the basis) of a centuries-old tradition.

Could it be that these traditional and stereotypical ways of thinking sometimes get in the way of approaching our objects of study in a fair way? Few linguists would deny this possibility, so here I will list four ways in which this may have adversely affected morphosyntactic descriptions and general theories:

– the word stereotype (1)

– the grammar/dictionary stereotype (2)

– the building-block stereotype (3)

– the speaker directionality stereotype (4)

My really bad TLDR: words don't exist, grammar is like words and words are like grammar, language isn't done by putting things one after the other, and we study too much how we make language and not enough how we make sense of language. Bonus sub-point: we like to say A is made of B but we could also say B is made of A.

https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/524

Despite decades of scholarship on lexical borrowing in post-Conquest England, the vocabulary of the medieval countryside has remained largely outside the lens of contact linguistics — an oversight shaped by the long-standing assumption that French influence was confined to elite domains. At the same time, the multilingual reality of medieval England has made monolingual lexicography an increasingly inadequate tool: the Anglo-French, Medieval Latin, and Middle English lexicons of the period cannot be studied in isolation, yet no single trilingual resource has existed to study them together.

This book provides that resource. Drawing on the historical dictionaries of all three languages and grounded in cognitive semantics, it constructs an onomasiological thesaurus of the vocabulary associated with the medieval English manor — concepts and referents attested from 1100 to 1500, arranged in conceptual groupings modelled on the structure of the Historical Thesaurus of English and the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England.

The findings reframe received assumptions. Language contact shaped the rural lexicon far more deeply than the literature has claimed: French- and Latin-origin vocabulary dominates the terminology of manorial society, while native English holds its ground in the vocabulary of familiar locations. The asymmetry illuminates the social mechanics of borrowing in non-elite environments and carries implications for the history of English into the present day.

link to open access article..

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0346830

Which word would you use to refer to yourself? "I", presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? "We", of course, in the plural.

But how about you and one other person?

In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use "we" or "the two of us".

But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: "wit".

It's a bit of pop linguistics about the dual number in English, with a few inaccuracies, but it's interesting regardless. I'll provide here some further historical info.

Proto-Indo-European contrasted three grammatical numbers: singular, dual, and plural. With the dual being used mostly for things that come in pairs (like arms or a couple). By Proto-Germanic times, the dual only survived in the pronouns, as you can see in this table:

Note those forms are reconstructed (I didn't want to clutter the table with asterisks). That ⟨θ⟩ is to be read as in "think", ⟨j⟩ as in "yes", and the vowels as in Spanish or Polish, with a mācron making them lōnger (longcat is ~~looooong~~ lōng).

The dual pronouns would survive until Early Middle English (up to 1350), but were increasingly less used. I believe most of the other pronouns from that table survived.

An anniversery of a small victory for open knowledge:

Ten years ago, Glossa joined the Open Library of Humanities following the collective resignation of the entire editorial board of Lingua, then published by Elsevier. The editors stepped down in protest against the journal’s commercialisation, after Elsevier refused to adopt a fully open access model without high fees and maintained its claim of ownership over the journal.

Source

Babe, wake up, a new episode of Pirahã/Everett drama has dropped! In 2024 LangSciPress published a Festschrift for Daniel Everett, with an article by Geoff Pullum where he fiercely defended Everett's work and attacked Chomskyans, available here: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/434 (Daniel Everett on Pirahã syntax)

Now an American linguist who works in Brazil, Denny Moore, has published a response to the article: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009832

Geoffrey K. Pullum has repeatedly made severe accusations that the linguist Daniel L. Everett suffered mistreatment in Brazil because his research on the Pirahã people and their language threatened Chomskyan theory. The present article presents a large trove of previously unavailable evidence (official Brazilian government documents, citizen information requests, interviews, etc.) that are directly relevant for assessing the claims that Everett was slandered and unjustly blocked from field research. The evidence disproves these claims, which have circulated widely in what I am designating as the Persecution Hoax. The evolution of Everett’s problems with Brazil’s National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples (FUNAI) is traced and found to be due to his own behavior and not to the action of Noam Chomsky or his affiliated linguists, nor to envious linguists in Brazil. Some variants of the Persecution Hoax myth, which are incompatible with the evidence and with each other, are described, along with comments. This myth is unfavorable for the development of indigenous linguistics in Brazil, as are Pullum’s suggestions for fieldwork. This is discussed briefly and alternative suggestions are offered.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/51758910

Archived

In the name of promoting inter-ethnic harmony, China is to force dozens of ethnic minorities within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to assimilate into Han-dominated society by enacting a landmark law during the upcoming fourth session of the 14th National People’s Congress (NPC) which opens on Mar 5. The law will require ethnic minorities to use Mandarin Chinese as their main language of instruction, overturning decades-old policies that date back to the era of Mao Zedong, noted ft.com Mar 3.

[...]

The sweeping law marks the latest effort in a signature “Sinicization” campaign under Chinese leader Xi Jinping and prescribes legal action against anyone, inside or outside the country, who undermines “national unity” or provokes “separatism”.

The so-called Han majority accounts for more than 90% of the PRC’s population of 1.4 billion and the country’s constitution recognises 55 ethnic minorities, and a dozen languages — some with their own written scripts — and hundreds of dialects.

Under the new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, while minority languages may still be taught as a second language, groups such as Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians will no longer be entitled to use their native tongues for core subjects in schools and universities, the report noted.

[...]

The new law “overturns the multicultural promises upon which China was founded”, moving from “an idea of unity through difference or unity through pluralism, to one of unity through sameness, through the elimination of difference”, Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China, Tibet and Inner Asia at Carnegie Mellon University, has said.

“The conclusion that Xi Jinping and others seem to have come to is that diversity is dangerous.”

[...]

Worryingly, one clause in the new law is cited as saying only the state has the right to promote “a system of symbols of Chinese civilisation”, which can be used “in public facilities and architectural design, scenic area exhibitions, place naming and public activities”. Such policies, if enforced, meant there was “no way” that non-Han people would be able to safely express “any type of discontent without being accused of being essentially separatists or terrorists,” Weiner has said.

[...]

For more than sixty years, Charles Hockett’s ‘design features’ have been widely used as a framework for defining what distinguishes human language from other forms of communication. These features were long treated as a checklist of properties that set language apart.

However, a new study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that this traditional view is no longer sufficient. The researchers contend that language cannot be captured by a fixed inventory of traits, but is better understood as a flexible system shaped by social interaction, situational context, and human creativity.

In a new reassessment of Hockett’s classic “design features” of language—ideas such as arbitrariness, duality of patterning, and displacement—an international team of linguists and cognitive scientists argues that current research requires a fundamental rethink of what language is and how it evolved.

Their central claim is clear: language is not merely a spoken code. Instead, it is a dynamic, multimodal, socially grounded system shaped through interaction, culture, and shared meaning

Popular-level article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516606-stone-age-symbols-may-push-back-the-earliest-form-of-writing/

Archive link. It's a 40kyo figurine of a mammoth carved in ivory, marked with crosses and dots. The marks are as complex as proto-cuneiform acc. to the researchers.