Innehållsförteckning för Issue 77 från Silly Linguistics

Imagine a classroom full of 9th graders, say 27 of them. The teacher takes attendance and announces, “Good. Everyone’s here.” Having said this, a bewildered looking student in the back looks around the classroom and raises his hand. “Yes, Stanton?” asked the teacher. “Well, not everyone’s here. For example, I don’t see the President, the Spice Girls, or my dad,” replied Stanton, non-ironically. We can stop here a moment. The sentence “Everybody’s here” is on the face of it ambiguous. Indeed, we could extend Stanton’s claim and say that everybody means everybody and most of the billions of people on this planet are not in that classroom. However, this is not how the vast majority of language users would interpret the teacher. Most of us would assume that the teacher…

I’ve heard arguments like this far too many times on the Internet: • Indigenous Americans were “undeveloped” before Europeans came because their languages had no writing system. • Indigenous Siberians were “undeveloped” before the Soviets because their languages had no writing system. • Japanese and Koreans were “undeveloped” before the Chinese came and introduced a writing system. What if I told you whether one language has a written form while another does not is merely a matter of coincidence? Or that writing has independently emerged only five times throughout human history? To respond to the points above: Most Chinese people before the Cultural Revolution, most Russians before their October Revolution, and most Western Europeans before recent history were illiterate. (And ironically, pro-literacy movements during the Cultural Revolution and October Revolution…

Part 1 - What is linguistics? Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It looks at all parts of the phenomenon of language including how sounds are made, how they are processed and decoded, how words are put together and how they are used to create meaning. Language has fascinated humanity since it was invented and it is a fundamental part of the human existence. In this series of lessons we will cover all the different aspects of linguistics to give you an expansive overview of the subject that will provide a solid foundation for future studies. What are the different subjects in linguistics? PhoneticsPhonologySyntaxMorphologyHistoricalPragmaticsSemanticsSociolinguistics History of linguistics At first the field was called Philology but eventually that term got replaced with the term Linguistics. The term “linguist” used to…

There’s a lot of things that we can do with words. And I’m not only talking about making someone feel good or bad, manipulating, or saying things that come with consequences. I’m also definitely not talking about any kind of spell casting! There is a category of expressions that we use not only to describe reality and actions in it; but to act through uttering them. They are called performatives. We can say „I am writing“ and not be actually writing, and no amount of repeating what we said is going to make it true unless we grab a pen or start typing on our keyboard. However, if we say „I promise“, the situation is different: there is no act that makes this utterance true other than the act of…

I grew up in the UK with a Spanish mother and an English father. From a young age, my mother spoke to me in Spanish. I understood everything. I watched television, I read books, I sang songs – all in Spanish. It wasn’t just with my mother, either. It was with my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and my cousins. I was being spoken to in Spanish all the time. So why, when I opened my mouth to respond, did English usually come out? I understood everything that was said to me, I knew every word, I could translate each one if you had asked me to, but I had a hard time putting sentences together and saying exactly what I wanted to say. Very frustrating for a little girl…