Languages In the World (61 page)

– system referring to the location of objects in space with respect to one another on the horizontal plane defined in relation to arbitrary fixed bearings, for example, cardinal directions, up/down hill, upriver/downriver.

– where the subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs are in the nominative (subject) case, while the object of a transitive verb is in the accusative (object) case; contrasts with ergative alignment.

– a word-formation process where morphemes are affixed to roots with no significant phonological changes to the root and where the morphemes are readily identifiable and easily segmented.

– alternate form of a gene or a group of genes in close proximity on a chromosome.

– one meaning per morpheme where all morphemes are free, that is, considered separate words.

– a verbal distinction that indicates the manner in which an action or event takes place, particularly with respect to its duration in time; see
Tense
.

– when a population's size is reduced for at least one generation, which has the effect of reducing the variation in the subsequent gene pool of a given population.

– word or phrase expression formed by the literal translation of each element comprising the word/phrase/expression from another language, for example, ‘quick silver' as a direct translation from the Latin
argentum vivum,
in the sense of
quick
, meaning ‘alive.'

– a process in phonology of interrelated sound changes in which sounds, often vowels, move and replace one another in orderly succession.

– an organized structure of DNA found in cells, specifically in the nucleus.

– consonants produced when air is drawn into the lungs rather than out of the lungs commonly present in Southern African languages.

– a morpheme that is unable to stand alone as an independent form for phonological reasons but has the syntactic characteristics of a word.

– changes in pitch within a single syllable to describe a voice that may rise, fall, fall–rise, stay flat, or break in the middle of a word, or any other kind of vocal sliding.

– traditionally defined as a language with native speakers whose sole input is a pidgin.

– the position of people, objects, and events with respect to a particular point of reference; categories include personal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, spatial adverbs, and temporal adverbs.

– when one syntactic category depends on the presence of another; in the phrase
the red house
, ‘red' is the dependent, meaning that its presence is dependent on the presence of
house
, whereas
house
could stand alone; see
Head
.

– a group of geographically contiguous language varieties where Variety A is mutually intelligible with Variety B, B and C are mutually intelligible, C and D are mutually intelligible, A and C are somewhat mutually intelligible, but A and D are not.

– a social situation where power (high status = H) and solidarity (low status = L) languages exist side by side and are two forms of the same (or similar enough) language but with sharply distinct domains of use; H may be used in school, government, and so on, while L may be used at home or more casual settings.

– characteristic ways of talking about and understanding both conscious and unconscious ideas, attitudes, thoughts, ideologies, and accepted sets of beliefs, all of which affect behaviors and have consequences.

– when an otherwise viable (adapted) organism does not reproduce, owing to chance and/or accident.

– a stop consonant produced with a double closure of the vocal tract, one forward and one back, where the back closure is maintained until after the forward closure is released.

– the development of an organism; all that occurs after the genetic moment of the DNA being transcribed to produce a protein.

– where the subjects of transitive verbs are in a particular case known as the ergative, while the subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs are in what is called the absolutive case; contrasts with accusative alignment.

– a group identifiable by an assemblage of markers including dress, diet, belief systems, rites and rituals, kinship organization, common ancestral or social history, and language; replaces the incoherent concept of race.

– the relationship between the grammar of a language and the culture/behavior of its speakers; can be called
cross-cultural pragmatics
.

– the original meaning of the root of a word; the etymology of the word
etymology
is from the Greek word
etymon
‘true'; linguists no longer think that
the so-called true meaning of a word is the meaning the root might have had hundreds or thousands of years ago.

– a group of languages exhibiting historical relatedness at a time-depth of 2500–4000 years.

– many meanings per morpheme; in Spanish, the ending on the verb
habl
o
‘I speak' means three things at once: first person, singular, present tense.

– basic unity of molecular inheritance; physically, the particular sequence of a combination of four organic molecules; functionally, the unit that codes for a particular protein.

– the entirety of an organism's basic physical hereditary material.

– an individual's genetic makeup.

– a person who is devoted to maintaining prescriptive rules.

– a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor having the same single nucleotide; commonly referred to as deep ancestry.

– a collection of specific alleles in a cluster of tightly linked genes on a chromosome that are likely to be inherited together.

– when one syntactic category determines the presence or absence of another; in the phrase
the red house
, ‘house' is the head, because it is required for something to be attributed to it, namely its redness; see
Dependent
.

– a culturally conventional word-picture of a thing, action, and concept rather than specific sequences of sounds, for example, ‘thumbs up' may express “Good job.”

– a set of unquestioned, inherited beliefs that represents the interests of particular individuals, groups, or institutions.

– an aspectual distinction denoting incomplete actions common in Slavic languages.

– a language where changes in the tonal contour of an entire utterance affect interpretation of that utterance as a statement, question, expression of surprise, and so on.

– system referring to the location of objects in space with respect to one another on the horizontal place defined in relationship to a part intrinsic to a particular object, say, in relationship to its side, front, or back.

– a language with no known language relative; the single example of a language stock.

– one morpheme, one word; in English, the phrase
I see the boy
counts as four morphemes and four words; see
Polysynthetic morphology
.

– language providing the majority of the vocabulary and structural base of a creole or pidgin language.

– a cover term for any language grouping of any age.

– a term coined by French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, referring to the market values different languages have in accord with the perceived socioeconomic status and the prestige of the social groups who speak them.

– retrospective activity whereby historical records of a language are compared in order to hypothesize what the protolanguage might have been like.

– an abstract symbol uniformly interpreted as particular sequences of sounds.

– interactions of the articulators (tongue, teeth, palate, velum) when making a speech sound; the kinds of closures and interactions that produce stops, fricatives, affricates, trills, etc.

– typically prefixes, infixes, or suffixes that show grammatical relationships.

– the smallest meaningful component part of a word; the word
unbuckle
is composed of two morphemes,
un-
(a bound morpheme) and
buckle
(a free morpheme).

– mitochondrial DNA, found outside the nucleus in a cellular organelle called the mitochondrion; it does not recombine, and it is passed from the mother to all offspring.

– an imagined community that aligns with a sociopolitical structure and that also presupposes a willingness on the part of the members of the community to cohere culturally; often comes with a belief that the nation should be monolingual.

– class of sounds that share one or more common features, such as voiceless stops in English, which include [b, d, g].

– the individual development of an organism; see
Phylogeny
.

– an aspectual distinction denoting completed actions common in Slavic languages.

– the particular set of characteristics of an organism, many of which are observable; see
Genotype
.

– the practice of taking language out of context in order to study it; traditionally understood as the study of language and its development, and, more specifically, the study of European languages for the purpose of reconstructing their history.

– the smallest unit of sounds that can make a meaning contrast; [b] and [p] are both phonemes in English because the words
bit
and
pit
have a meaning contrast.

– the historical development of a species; see
Ontogeny
.

– a language group with a possible relationship that dates back 15,000–40,000 years or more.

– a contact language with no native speakers whose domain of use is highly limited, usually only to trading transactions or on places of enforced labor, such as plantations.

– the points of contact at which the airstream is modified, and an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract to produce phones; these include bilabial, alveolar, palatal, and velar, among others.

– many morphemes, one word; also called
synthetic
or
incorporating
; see
Isolating morphology
.

– the study of how context affects the interpretation of meaning.

– rhythm, prominence, or intonation, often used to separate parts of a sentence, emphasize selected elements, or communicate other important information.

– a common ancestor language to a family or a stock; Latin, more specifically Vulgar Latin, is the protolanguage of the Romance languages; the reconstruction language known as Proto-Indo-European is the protolanguage of the Indo-European stock.

– a socially constructed and biologically incoherent category that has structured and continues to structure our society by attempting to categorize human groups in terms of a combination of variable factors such as national affiliation/origin, physical characteristics, ethnicity, and so on.

– a semantic marker in Chinese writing, which provides clues about the logogram's meaning.

– a process in comparative linguistics that puts together a picture of a protolanguage from examining the changes that have taken place among related languages to have developed from that proposed protolanguage.