LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Mutual Intelligibility, General American, Reduplication
24
LING 1010 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
24 documents
Document Summary
Four critical properties of a human language: own phonology, own morphology, own syntax, acquired using known mechanisms of language learning. This is the beginning of a scientific definition of language. This may not be the final definition that linguists settle on, but it is a good first theory for this course. Obviously it does not make sense to count languages if every person speaks a different language. Instead use an informal definition: rely on intuitions about how normal people talk about language, most linguists agree there are about 7,000. Linguists have divided the approximate 7,000 languages into 141 language families. Languages are assigned to the same family if linguists have determined that they evolve from a common ancestor: multiple standardized tests do determine if there is common ancestry. In the 19th century, linguists developed the comparative method for judging relationships between languages. Family relationships are only one way of looking at diversity in the worlds languages.
