ANT102H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Polysynthetic Language, Fusional Language, Nonpast Tense
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ANT102H5 Full Course Notes
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Linguistic diversity: how different are the world"s language? . Distinguishes human language from everything else duality of probability. How different are all they languages and how can we specify that they are different. We will consider the range of variation within four categories: Spoken languages makes morphemes/words out of sound units. The minimal unit that can make meaningful differences is called a phoneme. The number of phonemes varies from language to language. Difference of consonants and vowels; different dialect has different phonemes. Differ in the distinctive phonemes they use to form words. Allofone: two sounds may be separate phonemes in one language but variants of the same phoneme. Need to sort the sound being produced into their discrete categories allophonic variation. Minimal pairs; collecting words that are exactly the same except for one sound. Clark kent and superman are like allophones of the same phoneme- in complementary distribution. They can never be in the same place at the same time.
