Notes on Linguistics

This article summarizes some key points of the book "The Unfolding of Language", which I found was an excellent introduction to Linguistics for a layman. This article is not very fluid, and only captures very short and abrupt notes.

Tiny note on English language's history

English has a Germanic root, with infusion of French, both of which branch off from proto indo european or PIE

So we have old "simple" words (like foot) and then their "fancier" versions like pediatric.

Ferdinand Saussure's hypothesis

This section deals with Laryngeal theory put forward by Saussure

He postulates that PIE's original vowel was "e", but consider a word like bhewg. the "w" colours the "e" into the vowel "u". Similarly "ey" turned into "i".

What about "a"? how did the word "pas" (protect, as in pastor) form? He hypothesized, there is an unknown letter call it X. so pas staretd as PEXS, but the X coloured the e into an a

Later Hittite was translated by Bedrich Hrozny. Then Jerzy Kurylowisz, posited X="h". Thus "eh" became "a".

The three forces

Three forces drive language drift:

Economy: Trying to use shorter words, or easier sounds. Eg, gonna instead of going to, don't instead of do not
Expressiveness: Adding more words for emphasis, but gradually the effect of this emphasis or metaphors erode due to constant usage. For example we add "by all means" to a simple "yes" for emphasis. Similarly words like "awesome" lose their emphasis due to overuse.
Analogy: Irregularities bother us, and we try to iron them out. For example the plural of "cow" was kine, but not its regularized to "cows"

Economy

We try to shorten words, or use sounds that take less effort. In the example below the "k" sound weakens to an "h"

Other examples of weakening of pronunciation: note that f is easier to pronounce than p

in italian: maksimo -> massimo, septe->sette, nocte->notte

japanese: para kiri -> fara kiri -> hara kiri

Some more english examples: maked/made, ne-a-wiht -> not

In my mother tongue bengali I see this phenomenon in the kolkata vs bangladeshi dialects. Words like "khachhi" (eating) are pronounced as "khassi" by many. "S" is much easier to pronounce than "chh"

Returning to foot vs pediatric, the original "ped" from PIE weakened to "fed" in germanic languages. Latin languages however kept the "p". Hence english has both foot (from german) and pediatric (from french)

Metaphors

Moving trucks in greece have metaphores printed on them because it means "carry across". For example see this image. Metaphors become regular words, and even grammatical words from overuse.

Some examples: "ground-breaking, frosty" etc. There are many food related metaphors: brewing, regurgitate facts, resentment boiling, fermenting etc. Another fertile source of metaphors is: "more is up, less is down"

Now some examples of words, which are even more difficult to notice:
discover: remove the cover from
sarcastic: flesh tearing (sarcophagus, flesh eating)
decide: de-caedere latin for cut off

We use physical ideas to describe abstract ones
Like "have".. many languages dont have the word have, so they use closeness to describe "have"
eg bengali: "amar kache ache" it is close to me
or to hold is to have: eg in spanish: tenemos muchos libros
*kap (seize, capture)->haf .. so even "have" comes from "capture"

words to describe space, also describe time:
from london to paris <-> from monday to friday

Body parts are a big source of metaphors, but they usually have become grammatical elements now from overuse
In the Ewe language, here are 4 examples of back from concrete to abstract usages:
his back is cold
he is back of the house
he died back (=after) him
he remains backward (=retarted)

Examples form Hebrew using face, from concrete to abstract:
the face of the child
she stands to the face of (=in front of) the house
she fled to the face of(=prior to) the war
she fled from the face (=because) the war started

other body parts:
head: he is an hour a-head of us

The forces of creation:

Consider "going to" as future marker. It started as a physical word, involving actual going. But the going implies the action is happening in the future, so the word slowly morphed to a future marker. Now that "going to" occurs so often its shorted to "gonna". This is true in other languages too, like Spanish

Another example of creation of grammatical structures from shortening is:
English: i will love
Late latin: amare habeo
Possible middle: amar-ayo
Old French: aimerai
Modern French: emre

"i have to love" became the future tense form of "i love"

Writing evolves slower than speech, so some written spellings are misleading.
For example, if we transcribed french:
mwa jem (i love)
twa tem (you love)
but in written French it is:
moi, j'aime
toi, tu aimes
The pronoun has fused in spoken french, but not in written french

A common path of fusion:
noun + postposition -> noun case ending -> noun

If we complete the cycle of erosion and creation we get something like the example from French on the right, showing the forces of creation and erosion at play.

Overuse and economy forces words to fuse, but then we add emphasis by tagging on extra words, which can again be eroded down

Analogy

Analogy creates regularity in words, but in the process create interesting words and structures

We have: Noun + y = Adjective.

The word "greedy" was put in this template and a new word "greed" is derived from it in the seventeenth century

Verb + or = Noun.

This rule was applied to "editor" and "legislator" to get new words, edit and legislate. Maybe int he future we might "auth books" and medics might "doct patients"

Semitic verbs

The root is a consonant template. Adding verbs to the template creates different forms

For example, the consonant template slm means "be at peace". The vowel template _a_i_a, where _ denotes consonants is simple past, hence salima means "he was at peace". Similarly words like salam, islam, muslim are variations on the slm theme with different vowel templates.

Chapter 6 of "The Unfolding of Language" is dedicated to understanding how such a complex grammatical structure might have arose form the simple forces of erosion and creation discussed above.

The birth of language

The final tour de force of the book is to hypothesize about the development of language from a very primitive stage using the principles discussed above. This is too short a space to get into the details. I highly recommend checking out the book

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