No one actually knows how many languages there are in the world. Linguists generally estimate a number in the range of 5,000 to 10,000. What people generally do agree about is this: by the end of this century, half of them will be gone. Extinct. No longer spoken.
When you teach linguistics, you often find yourself saying things like this:
All human languages have the property of ambiguity.
No language has a voiced stop without having the corresponding unvoiced stop.
Well: we actually know almost nothing, relatively speaking, about most languages. Whether there are 5,000 languages today, or 10,000, most of them are what linguists call “undescribed:” that is, we know that they exist, but not much else about them. “We” in the sense of linguists–that is, people who study language as a system. (Obviously, the speakers know something about them.)
Consequently, I always find myself needing to give a disclaimer: of the 1,000 or so languages about which we know something, out of the 5,000-10,000 languages in the world, all of them have the property of ambiguity… Clunky, but more plausible than all or none. As a scientist, I don’t really like “universal quantifiers,” anyway–always, never, all, none… They just aren’t true that often. No language has a voiced stop without having the corresponding unvoiced stop: a well-known fact, which turns out not to be true: Kukú (a language of the Eastern Nilotic family, with 30,000 or so speakers, mostly in the town of Kajo-Kaji (several other possible spellings) in South Sudan) has a voiced palatal stop, but no voiceless one. Ambiguity, though: yep, as far as I know, every human language is ambiguous.
The article was written by Mary Haas, one of the most prolific producers of linguistics PhDs ever (including Marc Okrand, who would go on to create the Klingon language for the Star Trek movies–one of my colleagues used to use it as a source for exam questions). Haas spent a decade researching some of the indigenous languages of the southeast United States (and an island off the coast of British Columbia), and then was recruited by the War Department to develop a methodology for teaching Thai. She did so; my anthropological linguistics professor told me that after the war, her approach was abandoned on the theory that she had been teaching her American students to speak a tone language and that for an American to learn to speak a tone language is impossible–clearly Haas was right, and it is not impossible for an American to speak a tone language. My professor chalked this folly up to the sexism of the time, and she was probably right. Haas worked with the last living speakers of a number of languages; this paper describes her work on one of them. Read it and weep.
English notes
The Americas: North, Central, and South America. Some examples from the Sketch Engine web site:
- From the local ports it was shipped to Liverpool and thence into larger vessels overseas, including West Africa where it became a key component in the triangular trade involving slaves to the Americas.
- Her work explores contemporary cultural production in the Americas to analyze how artists and activists use a variety of media, the Internet, Closed Circuit TV, the street, and theatre, to challenge traditional notions of politics in relation to location, simulation, and embodiment.
- The members represent not only the various disciplines (such as history, anthropology, archaeology, sociology and law) but also the various regions of the world (Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, the Indian Ocean, the Arab states and Asia).
How I used it in the post: No, “American linguistics” does not mean linguistics done by Americans, or done in America: it means the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas.
poignancy: from the adjective poignant, meaning
- The Schubert in particular was very affecting: in the second movement, the poignancy of an old man now 87 playing the searing music of a young man facing early death was almost too much to take.
- The threshold between life and death imparts poignancy to the utterances of the dying.
- If we don’t survive, we can imagine the same faint chance the Voyagers have of being detected and studied by some other intelligence, a thought that adds an almost unbearable poignancy to some of these images.
- But a second viewing reveals that what he has witnessed is his own funeral, the final scene of the film, adding an unbearable poignancy to a very potent image of tragic inevitability.
- It was meant to be a romantic comedy, and it definitely has those elements, but it ended up having a bittersweet poignancy as well, as Paisley deals with the death, bequests and scandals of her great-aunt.
How I used it in the post: “For poignancy, it’s hard to beat articles like this one from IJAL, the International Journal of American Linguistics.”
When in doubt, always chalk Trump’s motives up to “my dick is bigger than Obama’s, believe me.’ https://t.co/MXcb5ipOVl
— Brandon David Wilson (@Geniusbastard) February 13, 2018
And I decided to chalk my insecurity up to my own jealousy. Jealous of people who go for it despite being worried
— bridget boltz (@BridgetKBoltz) September 20, 2017
i would love to chalk this up to outlandish stupidity, but the facts show that this is a really a sinister implementation of trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. https://t.co/voq3xWpmvY
— bardlar flankinson (@BFlankinson) February 27, 2018
I’ll cut Rahjaun some slack .. he been getting teased all his life .. so we’ll chalk his bullying up to having a rough childhood
— Jasmine. #Her (@jazzlovesyu) July 19, 2012
and every time you chalk his bullshit up to mental health, you are actually letting him and his cronies off the hook for the damage they’re doing so maybe think about that
— what that D[ata] do (@meadowlion) January 6, 2018
I’m gonna chalk all this bullshit up to my hormones.
— Gabrielle Voutsinas (@gabbyvoutsinas) July 22, 2016
ThinK Trump’s gonna chalk this one up to his policies? https://t.co/oiGJkqndrz
— Magdalene Visaggio (@MagsVisaggs) February 2, 2018
I chalk 50% of the bullshit up to misunderstandings and the other up to folk’s need to be liked.
— God Modified Original (@DocMouseBish2U) March 15, 2016
You can chalk this one up to Trump’s isolationism doctrine. A few more of these kind of happenings, and the US won’t be trading with ANYBODY around the globe.
— WhobbaBobba (@WhobbaBobba) January 23, 2018
Zipf's Law 