ANT253H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Phoneme, Relative Pitch, Power (Social And Political)
27 Feb 2017
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Panini showed that it is necessary to study the structure of words and languages to understand their meanings and aesthetic words, Dionysus also studied the structure of words and languages and realized that sentences can be composed of nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc. In the old days, the quality of someone"s language can be used to judge whether the person is of high class or lower class. A group of french scholars (port-royal circle) carried out surveys to see which parts of grammar are similar amongst all languages (the idea of universal grammar ) and which are specific to certain languages. Wilhelm von humboldt said that the structure of a certain language is a representation of how its users view reality (think of slang and rebelliousness). Therefore, language and the thought of people are inseparable. We can usually associate certain words with certain languages (i. e. spaghetti-italian, junk food-american).
