CLAS022 Key Terms and Concepts
Terms
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- Grimm's Law
- (Refering to Sound Shifts from PIE to Proto-Germanic) Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered in linguistics; its formulation was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historical linguistic research.
- Pinyin
- system is the current official way to represent Chinese in Roman letters
- etymons
- a direct ancestor of a word
- Root morphemes/ free morphemes
- can occur as independent words
- Modern English
- 1800-now
- Phrasal lexemes
- multi-word lexemes which have a unitary meaning that is not derivable from the independent meanings of their components
- homonyms
- Lexemes with the same spelling and pronunciation
- Prescriptive
- When something (like a dictionary) attempts to tell the users of the language what is "correct" or "incorrect" usage
- diphthong
- when two vowels are pronounced as one
- Doublets
- A group of at least two words that have the same or similar etymologies, but different meanings: Latin discus gave rise to: dish, dais, and discus.
- Loanwords
- A loanword is a word that is adopted as English and retains the same shape as the foreign term from which it originated
- bound root morphemes
- roots that do not occur as independent words and yet are not affixes
- elision
- the loss of a vowel when one word ends in a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel. (I am = i'm)
- "blend" word formation
- "spork" from "fork" and "spoon"
- Metathesis
- Metathesis occurs when an order is switched (aks instead of ask).
- intermediate language
- a language through which a word is transferred from one language to another
- cognates
- related but not from a direct lineage (cousin)
- What languages were borrowed from to make new words in Modern English?
- Any language it can get it's hands on!
- syncope
- "mid-clipping" - 'flu'
- transliteration
- writing words from one language in another language's alphabet
- Hindi
- has significant lexical influence in English
- Old English
- mid-5c. CE-1066, Arrival of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in Britain until the Norman Conquest
- affix
- a prefix, suffix, or infix
- The agglutinative-fusional-analytic continuum
- This continuum has to do with how relationships between morphemes/words are expressed
- Indo-European
- the language that is ancestral to all Indo-European languages
- "eggcorns"
- idiosyncratic deformations of phrases (aka "corruptions," but these apparently usually involve phrases, not single words, and are often funny or cute) --- eggcorn instead of acorn
- bound morphemes
- they do not occur as independent words
- Analytic Languages
- Analytic languages are languages which convey the relationships between words by syntax rather than by forming new words that combine bound and unbound morphemes. (Word order matters, There is little inflection = Chinese)
- "syllabic abbreviations"
- first syllable of each word (or part of first syllable) ---interpol: international police
- Agglutination
- Agglutination is a linguistic process which takes a base word, such as "harm" and adds affixes to it to make larger words: harmS, harmLESS, harmLESSNESS
- infix
- attaches in the middle of a word
- phonemes
- smallest sound that is capable of carrying meaning
- "acronyms"
- first letter of each word
- ablaut
- change of quality of the vowel of a stem
- Middle English
- 1066-late 15c., Norman Conquest until the Renaissance and the arrival of printing press in England
- Three types of multiple-word lexemes
- compounds, Phrasal lexemes, and Idioms
- Early Modern English
- late 15c.-1800, period of advancing technology and science, British empire begins
- euphony
- good sound, altering a word to make it pronounceable
- Algonquian
- spoken from Carolina to Labrador, and from the Atlantic to the Great Plains
- The isolating-synthetic continuum
- This continuum has to do with the number of morphemes per word.
- Tupi
- lingua franca of the Amazon
- al, or el
- many Arabic-derived English words begin with it, means 'the'
- "corruption"
- not generally used, because it is judgemental: it comes from prescriptivist linguistics: it is probably still worth keeping around as a term for changes occurring originally or exclusively in a move from a prestige language to another language (i.e., cajun from acadian).
- "mondegreens"
- the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song, due to near homophony, in a way that yields a new meaning to the phrase. (i.e., "Excuse me while i kiss this guy" - Jimi Hendrix).
- suffix
- attaches to the ending of a word
- apocope
- "fore-clipping" - 'doc'
- Etymological Fallacy
- The etymon of any particular English word often means something quite different from the English word. Also The meaning of a term's etymon is completely separable from the meaning of the term. the idea that the meaning of a term's etymon is the "true" or "underlying" or "basic" or "mystical" meaning of a word. It is not. An etymon is a separate word with an independent but usually related meaning.
- Nonce Words
- Words made up ad hoc to be used at the time (UVM-ification)
- Devanagari script
- alphabetic script of Hindi usually used for Sanskrit as well
- What are two languages borrowed from to make new words in Old English?
- An old variety of Celtic (resulting from movement of people) and Latin (resulting from Christianization)
- synthetic language,
- there are many morphemes per word.
- "Cranberry" morphemes
- A useful term to describe combining forms whose original meaning is lost/not apparent.
- headword/lemma
- the form of a word chosen by convention to be listed in the dictionary (lemma)
- Spoonerisms
- between-word metathesis (Mardon me padam)
- prefix
- attaches to the beginning of a word
- Phonological word
- a sequence of sounds
- word "clipping"
- result of clipping off part of a word
- one fact and one hypothesis of comparative linguistics (Hypothesis)
- Some of those similarities are only or best explained by descent from a common ancestor language
- morpheme
- smallest carrier of meaning
- "Unpaired words"
- "uncouth: couth exists as a word, but is rare"
- Idioms
- phrases or whole sentences: they are typically metaphorical or figurative
- Calque
- A calque is a word that translates a foreign word or phrase: i.e., The word "loanword" is a calque on German lehnwort ("loan-word")
- aphaeresis
- "back-clipping" - 'varsity'
- hyphenated compounds
- lexemes that consist of two words with a hyphen
- homographs
- Lexemes with the same spelling but different pronunciations
- Lexeme
- any meaningful speech form in the vocabulary of a language
- Antonyms
- a word opposite in meaning to another
- proto-language
- a reconstructed pre-historic language that is the ancestor to historic languages
- Descriptive
- When something (like a dictionary) attempts to describe language as it is commonly used
- Quechua
- language of the Inca
- explanandum
- the thing that you look up in the dictionary and the dictionary's task is to explain
- "backronyms"
- start with an existing word and explain it as an acronym in spite of the fact that historically it is not an acronym
- Nahuatl
- southern Mexico and Central America
- Reduplication
- The repetition of a word-element within the same word (Complete reduplication, Rhyme-reduplication, Alliterative reduplication, Ablaut reduplication, Productive forms)
- open compounds
- lexemes that consist of two words without a hyphen
- homophones
- Lexemes with different spellings but the same pronunciation
- rough breathing
- the way greek signifies the "h" before a vowel sound or after a rho
- lexicon, lexical
- vocabulary
- asterisk
- the symbol that indicates that a form is not historically attested, but rather is reconstructed from historically attested forms
- inflection
- change of the form of words depending on function in use
- Orthographic word
- a sequence of letters bounded by spaces
- "back-formation"
- deriving a simpler form from a longer form that already exists: "resurrection" is earlier than "resurrect"
- Defining Vocabulary
- the list of words that can be used for definitions in a dictionary.
- What are two languages borrowed from to make new words in Middle English?
- French (Norman Conquest) and Latin (Church and Education)
- one fact and one hypothesis of comparative linguistics (Fact)
- there are extensive similarities between certain languages
- ideograms
- "characters" or graphic symbol that represents an idea, rather than a group of letters
- compounds
- lexemes that consist of two words
- isolating language
- there is one morpheme per word. Chinese is a good example.
- Fusion
- Fusion occurs when affixes blend together with each other or the base word they are attached to in such a way that it is difficult to separate them.
- Borrowings
- When one language adopts or adapts vocabulary from another language, that creates a similarity between the two that is not explicable by descent