LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Metalanguage, Language Documentation, Voiceless Alveolar Fricative
Document Summary
Linguistic field work: collecting linguistic data from native speakers of a language. Why do we want to collect information in the field works: enrich linguistic theory, collect data on under-documented, or potentially endangered languages. Eg. syntax: english is an svo language: subject, verb, and object. But other languages can have very different basic word orders. Sov is the most common word order in the world: 43. 3%, such as japanese. It was due to field work that people realized the ovs / osv order: only 0. 7% / 0. 3%! In warlpiri (australia), there is no dominant word order. American english: 33 phonemes (24 consonants and 9 vowels, not including the combination of vowels). Ubykh: no longer spoken, used to be spoken in russia; it has the largest phoneme numbers, with 86 phonemes but only 2 vowels. Not just the range, some phonemes are very rare and hard to produce. Eg. a rare voiceless alveolar bilabially trilled affricate.
