Languages & Cultures of East Asia

Languages & Cultures of East Asia

Relationships Between Languages

Test your knowledge – Quiz

1. Chinese and Japanese are related languages.

2. There are five vowel sounds in English

3. Educated people speak more grammatically than do uneducated people.

4. Linguists are people who speak many languages.

5. The languages of ‘primitive’ people have simpler grammars than do languages such as English.


1. All languages in the world have nouns and verbs.

2. We should say ‘It’s I’ rather than ‘It’s me.’

3. A language which has never been written is not really a language.

4. As a language is passed on from one generation to the next, it tends to get corrupted.


1. English is a simpler language than Latin or Greek.

2. Spoken language is a degenerate form of language; real language is what is written.

3. It’s easier to learn Cantonese if your ethnic roots are in Hong Kong.

4. It’s natural to start a sentence with the subject and follow it with the verb.


1. How many languages are there in the world?

a. 100

b. 500

c. 1000

d. more than 2000

– Atlas 6000

– Comrie 4000

Why is this question impossible to answer?

Why is this impossible to answer?

1. Many parts of the world are not well studied

– Papua New Guinea

only recently studied

•contains 1/5th of the

world’s languages

World Map


� Many parts of the world are still not studied

– there are still other remote areas


2. Difficult to distinguish between a dialect and a language

– decision is often made on social-political

grounds

• European language divisions based on social factors

•German/Dutch

•Which country is dominant?


Difficult to distinguish between a dialect and a language

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

what does this mean?


� Linguistic criterion:

– mutual intelligibility

– if they are mutually intelligible � dialects

of the same language

– if they are not � different languages


� (Dis)advantages

1. Chinese ‘languages’ rather than Chinese

dialects

– Cantonese and Mandarin are not mutually

intelligible

2. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish...?

•turn out to be

dialects

Swedish, Norwegian and Danish

Difficult to distinguish between

language and dialects

contradictory results:

– dialect chain

A � B � C � D

but

A ≠ D





Notion of mutual intelligibility is

also a matter of degree

• Intelligibility increases with

familiarity

• Easier to understand when you

want to understand

Why is this question impossible to

answer?

Language change

– Where do we draw the line?

– Latin � French, Italian

• considered different languages

– Ancient Greek � Modern Greek

• considered stages of the same language

– Old English � Modern English vs.

– Anglo-Saxon � English

Why is this question impossible to

answer?

3. Many languages are on the verge of extinction

� there are only a handful of these

speakers, in old age

� Ainu

� ½ the world’s languages will become

extinct in the next 100 years

Which languages have the

most speakers?

� Chinese 1000 (in millions)

� English 350

� Spanish 250

� Hindi 200

� Japanese 120

� Korean 60

What does it mean to say

that two languages belong

to the same language family?

Same Language Family

� English and German vs.

� English and Russian

� http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017

Same Language Family

� Share a set of features

– Attributed to a common ancestor

• English man man’s

• German Mann Manns

– hypothesis:

• had a common ancestor

Germanic Language Family

English German Icelandic

Germanic

If two languages share some similarities, is it necessarily true

that they belong to the same language family?

No.

Explanations for similarities among languages

1. Genetic relationship

Indo-European

English (Germanic)Latin-base (Romance)

1. foot pedometer, pedal, podiatrist

2. father petrineal

3. three triangle, tripod

4. tooth dental, orthodontist

5. heart cardiac, cardiology

2. Chance

(similarities btwn languages just by chance)

English Mbabaram (Australian)

dog dog

German Zuni

nass nas 'wet'

Sanskrit Malay

dva dua 'two'

3. Language Universals

� The sound ma in ‘mother’

– English ‘mother’ Chinese ‘ma’ Sanskrit ‘mata’

– Onomatopoeia

English: English:

cock-a-doodle-doo tik-tock ding-dong

German: Malay:

kikariki tik, tuk ting, tong

Japanese:

kokekokko

3. Language Universals

� Certain language features frequently co-occur

– if a language is SOV, postpositions rather than prepositions

• ‘the table on’

� Word order typology

S = Subject, O= Object, V = Verb

1. SOV (Japanese, Korean) most frequent

2. SVO (English, Chinese) next most frequent

3. VSO (Welsh, Samoan) less frequent

Other orders are less common.

4. Borrowing

� English

French period � William the Conqueror 1066 AD (Norman French) for almost 300 years. (1362, English reestablished as language of courts)

1. Government

2. Law

3. Military

4. Religion

5. Meat on the table

4. Borrowing

� Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese

– shared features:

• tones

• mono-syllabic

• simple syllable structure

• lexical items

– result of Chinese cultural influence

– not because they are genetically related

Documents

Languages & Cultures of East Asia