Few Concerns of the Course

Few Concerns of the Course

Language is BIOLOGICAL We can talk to each other because our bodies and brains develop in ways that make language possible. Language comes from both the neural organization of the brain and the mechanical organization of the vocal cords and vocal tract.

Language is CULTURAL To a great extent language is culture and vice versa.

Language is ARBITRARY There is no relation between words and the things they represent. This claim is easily demonstrated by looking at very common words: English "dog" is Spanish "perro" is French "chien"; English "bed" is Spanish "cama" is French "lit" . . . there is no way a human can look at a dog or a bed and know what "the word" for the object is. Still less then, are there necessary signs for abstract and highly variable concepts like "liberty" or "love." Yet within language itself, many words make sense because they fit into a system of other words. The word "broom" is arbitrary. Yet in Ireland, a broom is called a "sweeping brush"--a combination of two arbitrary words that is in itself not arbitrary, because one can deduce the meaning of the phrase from the meanings of its components. Meaning in language is always a product of arbitrary and systematic factors.

Language is GENERATIVE We understand new sentences that we hear; and we constantly produce new sentences.

Language is UNIVERSAL All cognitively normal children acquire a language, early and without training.

Language tends to CHANGE This is a paradox: if communication is important, isn't consistency an absolute value?

Language is HISTORICAL We speak the way we speak today because of series of historical accidents and contingencies.

Language is VARIABLE at any given moment. Each of us speaks a different variety of a language (or languages). Each community speaks a different dialect, and people speak many different dialects depending on the social situation.

Languages LIVE and DIE--not exactly like organisms, but in an analogous way. Their extinction is like that of biological species:

The world is experiencing "language extinction on a massive scale," writes David Crystal, a professor of linguistics at the University of Wales at Bangor. Mr. Crystal reviews the statistics on the disappearance of languages, noting that most experts expect about half of the 6,000 languages in use today to die out within the next century. Many people view this trend as a natural consequence of modernization, but Mr. Crystal argues that they fail to understand what the world risks losing. "We should care about dying languages for the same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet," he writes. "In the case of language, we are talking about intellectual and cultural diversity, not biological, but the issues are the same." The diversity of languages -- with their practical, intellectual, and literary offerings -- helps humans survive, Mr. Crystal writes, by providing ideas and approaches that various cultures and societies have developed. He urges a greater effort to support the work of linguists, teachers, and native speakers who are trying to sustain threatened languages, but he notes the fragility of their work. Writes Mr. Crystal: "With every language that dies, another precious source of data about the nature of human language faculty is lost."

Languages are inexact and idiomatic media. Translation is not a simple decoding and re-encoding but an art that is sensitive both to general concepts and to particular expressions of those concepts in different languages. There are two principles at work here, and they are sometimes at odds.

One is the "principle of affability," which means that anything you can express in one language you can express in another. You might have to borrow some vocabulary and provide some context, but you can say anything in any world language.

Another is sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after its joint originators Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. This hypothesis posits that there are great differences in the way people think, depending on what language they acquire. Severe forms of this hypothesis would actually contradict the principle of affability, because there might be some concepts in some language that you really couldn't get across in another.

Even the simplest translation exercises point to the tension between these two linguistic ideas. Most languages have a simple phrase you say to someone when you will see them again soon. "Good bye," we say, which is a contraction of "God be with you," though most of us say instead "See you," "so long," "later." In French? "A bientot" literally means "To well soon." "Au revoir" is "To seeing-again." In Spanish, "hasta luego" or just "luego"--"till then," "till later." Nothing terribly remarkable here; it's all quite effable; but try saying "to seeing again" or even (think about it) "till later" to someone in English. It just sounds funny. "To well soon" or even "till soon" sound crazy. Are we all really saying "good-bye"?

And what about Italian, where "ciao" means "hello" or "good-bye" (and etymologically means "slave," though that's another story altogether).

Or try saying "his wife" and "her husband" in a gendered language like French. The usual phrases are, respectively, "sa femme" and "son mari". Where did the "his" and "her" go? A Frenchwoman calls her husband "mon mari" and her car "ma voiture." She uses two different words for "my," and she actually cannot say "his" or "her." Does the French language have a concept for "his or "her"? Are the ideas expressed in those two words "effable" in French? Or--more subtle--does French have the same idea for "my" as English has?

Reflect for a moment on the simplicity of those phrases we've just gone over, and you'll see how hard this issue becomes.

Spoken language is different from writing. Speech and writing involve different parts of the brain.

For most of linguistic history, we know only the history of written language. Spoken language predates written language historically. In fact, writing systems developed--probably--only three times spontaneously (in China, Sumeria, and in Mayan culture). Spoken language predates written language in individual development--no developmentally normal child fails to acquire language, but people must be taught to read and write.

Written language is much more stable than spoken, especially in societies that have technologies of printing but have not yet developed technologies of mass aural media. So our written language became standardized quickly after the introduction of printing into Britain after 1470. To a great extent, our standard spellings today reflect pronunciations that were still in use in before 1470, like the initial consonants of knee, knight, knave . . .

And in spellings like:

--night, ought, fought, caught

where the gh digraph represents a once-spoken sound.

Written language can be heavily standardized. Huge industries of linguistic prescription grow up around the written language. People can attempt to prescribe a standard in spoken language as well, but it is very hard to do so. Speakers who have many different accents may all be able to write a single standard language, a fact that has great importance for education and for politics.

Etymology

Etymology is a powerful tool; it's often used as a rhetorical tool to help win arguments. We feel we have power over words if we know how they used to be used--though in practice one rarely has access to a lot of etymological information, and there are "dead" meanings buried in every word. "Assassin" and "hashish" have the same root. "Manure" means to work with one's hands. "Toilet," a hundred years ago, meant a woman's dress. "Person" means mask. "Glamour" and "grammar" are in origin the same word.

"Dilemma" means not merely a problem but an impossible choice between two alternatives. "Disinterested" means impartial in judgment. . . . or at least, in each case, they used to mean those things, sometimes in languages that predate English.

Etymology can help us see past cultures frozen in present words. One of the best-known examples is Walter Scott (coiner of "glamour")'s comment, in Ivanhoe, that we can tell what Normans and Saxons ate, and how that reflected power in Norman England, by looking at words for food:

Food:                                                                                                                                             

Mutton                                                                                                                                             

Beef                                                                                                                                             

Pork                                                                                                                                             

Venison                                                                                                                                             

Poultry

French:                                                                                                                                             

Mouton                                                                                                                                             

Boeuf                                                                                                                                             

Porc                                                                                                                                             

Venysoun                                                                                                                                             

Poulet

English:                                                                                                                                             

Sheep                                                                                                                                             

Cow                                                                                                                                             

Pig                                                                                                                                             

Deer                                                                                                                                             

Birds

You can see here Scott's basic point: that the English natives of Norman England cared for animals, but rarely got to eat them. When a large animal was turned into food, it was turned into French, because a Norman person was going to eat it.

Grammaticalization

Words and phrases that once had a certain kind of dictionary meaning can, over time, acquire a function that has little to do with their original meaning; in effect, they trade in meaning for function. Take the word "very." The first English dictionary meaning for "very" is "really and truly," from the French "verrai" (Modern French vrai, "true"). In Middle English, the word meant "really and truly." When Chaucer says of one of his pilgrims

He was a very perfect gentle knight

He does not mean that the knight was really really perfect, or even that he was perfectly gentle. He is using a string of three adjectives of about equal force to describe the knightliness of the knight--he was a very knight, a real knight of a knight.

But the use of "very," over and over and over, in strings of adjectives where it came first, turned it into a special class of adverb called a "degree word" (like "so," "much," "many," &c.) The word was grammaticalized.

One more example, from French. Standard modern French for "I don't know" is je ne sais pas. That pas is the same word as in the phrase pas de deux, which means a dance step; it's the English word "pace." Literally, French people say "I don't know step." And probably at one point they really meant it. It's just that they kept saying it so often that it became a grammaticalized "negative particle." So that "I don't know" may be more common today in the less-standard form "sais pas, moi" . . . where did the negative "ne" go? For that matter, where did it come from to begin with?

So what is the future in English of "totally," "incredibly," "squat," "alot," and "moreso"?

History

Both cultural and linguistic history help us to specify how the language changed in the past and in what context. We'll study some cultural history as background to study of linguistic issues--and remember from above, that language and culture are often synonymous. You will need to draw from coursework in British history, or absorb some British history as you go. English people have had constant contact with speakers of other languages for the past 1,500 years; they have been colonized and they have been colonizers; their language has spread around the world. We'll learn something of the history of "English-speaking peoples" along the way of learning the history of English.

IMPORTANT:

You must keep the following generalized chart in mind and know it well by the end of the semester--if nothing else stays with you from this course for the rest of your life, a knowledge of the basic historical periods of the English language must stay. :-)

Old English (600-1100) is a purely Germanic, highly inflected language with several literary standards: West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish.

Early Middle English (1100-1300) is a radically simplified English, losing most of its inflectional endings, but as yet keeping a mostly Germanic vocabulary. It retains many different dialectal forms and has little standardization in spelling and other orthography.

Later Middle English (1300-1450) is heavily influenced by French vocabulary and has two major literary dialects: Midlands/Northern and London. Particularly in the London dialect, we begin to see standardization, under the influence of the Chancery clerks.

Early Modern English (1450-1650) moves sharply toward standardization, with the invention of printing being the major factor here; London standard tends to become a national standard, with consciousness that other dialect regions are sub-standard or non-literary. The impact of the English translation of the Bible is very strong in this standardizing of the written language.

Modern English (since 1650) is characterized by relatively rigid standardization (compared to other English periods, though not to Modern French) and by the increasing role of travel and electronic media in establishing a spoken as well as a literary standard. At the same time, the worldwide spread of English has resulted in new dialect areas well beyond Britain. In particular, American English becomes a competing standard with British "received" or "BBC" English.

In broad theoretical terms, what we see in the development of the English language is the intersection of "organic" or "natural" language processes (which however one should always see as political, not unconscious or biological) with technological forces.

Source: http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/courses/4301w00/ov.html

From Language to Linguistics

From Language to Linguistics

What is linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of language � not just particular languages, but the system of human communication. Some of the basic issues of this field are?

What is language? How is it organized?

How is it analyzed? How are its units discovered and tested?

Where is language stored and processed in the brain? How is it learned?

What do all languages—including nonvocal systems of communication (e.g. writing and sign languages)—have in common? What do these properties show us about human cognition?

How did language originate? What does it have in common with animal communication? How is it different?

How many distinct families or stocks of languages are there in the 6000 or so known languages today? What original languages did they come from? How have they changed over time?

What does dialectal and social variation show us about the use of language? How has this diversity affected issues of social, political, and educational policy?

What is the relationship between language and culture? Language and thought?

What are some of the branches of linguistics?

applied linguistics: application to areas such as speech pathology, reading, social work, missionary work, translation, dictionary compilation, language teaching, error analysis, computer language processing.

Dialectology: investigation of regional variation in language.

Ethnolinguistics (anthropological linguistics): investigation of the relation between a people's language and culture.

Historical (diachronic) linguistics: study of language change and evolution.

Morphology: study of word formation and inflection.

Neurolinguistics: research into the specific location of language in the brain.

Paralinguistics: study of nonverbal (auxiliary) human communication.

Philology: study of how language has been used in literature, especially in older manuscripts.

Phonetics: description of how speech sounds are articulated and heard.

Phonology: study of how languages organize the units of speech into systems.

Pragmatics: study of the strategies people use to carry out communicative business in specific contexts.

Psycholinguistics: investigation of language as cognitively-based behavior; how it is acquired and processed.

Second language acquisition (SLA): study of how older learners acquire language, and of ways to improve it.

Sociolinguistics: study of social variation in language: the relation between social structure and language usage, and of social issues involving language.

Semantics: study of word and sentence meaning.

Syntax: study of the structure of sentences and of underlying principles for generating and processing them.

How is linguistics applied?

Many students find linguistics useful because it broadens and deepens their understanding of related fields: languages and literature (English and foreign), social sciences (especially anthropology, sociology, and psychology), education, philosophy, communication... Those who obtain degrees in linguistics often proceed to careers in:

·       foreign language teaching

·       instructional technology

·       ESL (teaching English as a second language)

·       teaching and research in general linguistics (phonology, syntax...)

·       translation (human and machine-assisted)

·       speech pathology and audiology.

Source: http://linguistics.wfu.edu/Some_basics.html

Differences between American and British English British English vs. American English

Differences between American and British English

British English vs. American English

American English is the form of English used in the United States.

British English is the form of English used in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Isles. It includes all English dialects used within the British Isles.

American English in its written form is standardized across the U.S. (and in schools abroad specializing in American English). Though not devoid of regional variations, particularly in pronunciation and vernacular vocabulary, American speech is somewhat uniform throughout the country, largely due to the influence of mass communication and geographical and social mobility in the United States. After the American Civil War, the settlement of the western territories by migrants from the Eastern U.S. led to dialect mixing and leveling, so that regional dialects are most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard. The General American accent and dialect (sometimes called 'Standard Midwestern'), often used by newscasters, is traditionally regarded as the unofficial standard for American English.

British English has a reasonable degree of uniformity in its formal written form, which, as taught in schools, is largely the same as in the rest of the English-speaking world (except North America). On the other hand, the forms of spoken English - dialects, accents and vocabulary - used across the British Isles vary considerably more than in most other English-speaking areas of the world, even more so than in the United States, due to a much longer history of dialect development in the English speaking areas of Great Britain and Ireland. Dialects and accents vary, not only between England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (which constitute the United Kingdom), plus the Republic of Ireland, but also within these individual countries. There are also differences in the English spoken by different socio-economic groups in any particular region. Received Pronunciation (RP) (also referred to as BBC English or Queen's English) has traditionally been regarded as 'proper English' - 'the educated spoken English of south-east England'. The BBC and other broadcasters now intentionally use a mix of presenters with a variety of British accents and dialects, and the concept of 'proper English' is now far less prevalent.

British and American English are the reference norms for English as spoken, written, and taught in the rest of the world; for instance, the English-speaking members of the Commonwealth of Nations often (if not usually) closely follow British orthography, and many new Americanisms quickly become familiar outside of the United States. Although the dialects of English used in the former British Empire are often, to various extents, fairly close to standard British English, most of the countries concerned have developed their own unique dialects, particularly with respect to pronunciation, idioms, and vocabulary; chief among them are, at least for number of speakers, Australian English and Canadian English.

Idioms

A number of English idioms that have essentially the same meaning show lexical differences between the British and the American version; for instance:

British - American

not touch something with a bargepole - not touch something with a ten-foot pole

sweep under the carpet - sweep under the rug

touch wood - knock on wood

throw a spanner -throw a (monkey) wrench

tuppence worth also two pennies' worth, two pence worth or two pennyworth) - two cents' worth

skeleton in the cupboard - skeleton in the closet

a home from home -a home away from home

blow one's trumpet - blow (or toot) one's horn

storm in a teacup - tempest in a teapot

a drop in the ocean - a drop in the bucket

flogging a dead horse - beating a dead horse

In some cases the "American" variant is also used in British English, or vice versa.

Vocabulary

British - American

autumn - fall

aerial - antenna

bank note - bill

barrister - lawyer

bill (restaurant) -check

biscuit - cookie

bonnet (car) - hood

boot (car) - truck

chips - French fries

cooker - stove

crossroad - intersection

curtains - drapes

dustbin - garbage can

engine - motor

film -movie

flat - apartment

football - soccer

garden - yard

handbag - purse

holiday - vacation

jumper - sweater

lift - elevator

to let - to rent

lorry - truck

metro, underground, tube - subway

nappy - diaper

pavement - sidewalk

petrol - gas, gasoline

post - mail

postcode - zip code

queue - line

railway - railroad

solicitor - attorney

tap - faucet

taxi - cab

trousers - pants

wardrobe - closet

windscreen - windshield

Spelling

British - American

colour - color

favourite - favorite

honour - honor

analyse - analyze

criticise - criticize

memorise - memorize

enrolment - enrollment

fulfil - fulfill

skilful - skillful

centre - center

metre - meter

theatre - theater

analogue - analog

catalogue - catalog

dialogue - dialog

jewellery - jewelry

draught - draft

pyjamas - pajamas

plough - plow

programme - program

tyre - tire

cheque - check

mediaeval - medieval

defence - defense

licence - license

Implications for Translators

If you translate into Spanish from English, it shouldn’t be difficult for you to work from a document in either American or British English regardless of your country of origin.  However, some clients request that a document be translated from Spanish into either British or American English.  Because of the very subtle grammatical differences, it wouldn’t be wise to translate into an English dialect that you are not intimately familiar with.

If you are a client who needs to have your document translated into a specific dialect of English, make sure that your translator is a native of the country which you will target with your translation.  If this isn’t possible, then make sure that the translator you entrust with your document is either currently living in the country (i.e. an American translator residing in England) or has lived in the country for a substantial amount of time (i.e. a Brit who went to college and worked in the U.S. for several years).

Source: http://www.transpanish.biz/en/english-language.html