Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction, by Peter Matthews
I started reading this book after I decided to do some linguistic modules, and
I finished it after the first week of the course, during which time I've been
reading a few other set books, so it's not altogether easy to remember which
facts came from which book. But on the whole I think this was pretty good,
with the exception of a section describing "regular patterns of 'vowel
harmony' in Turkish" which I struggled with a couple of times before giving up
as a bad job. Here are some of the things I highlighted from this book:
- No other living being has evolved a vocal structure like humans
- Spoken language has lots of built in redundancy: there are lots words that
could be pronounced which don't mean anything. For example, you can
have "sick" and "zip", but not "zick". This means that if you don't quite
hear someone's speech properly then you still have a chance of working out
what they said (assuming they're using proper words)
- when you speak, the words run together with no "spaces". Spaces in
written text are helpful, but not a necessity. Much ancient writing doesn't
use them, and the redundancy
meansthatyoucanstillreadstuffthatiswrittenwithoutanyspaces
- discusses Chomsky's theory that language ability is innate: there must "be
a set of abstract principles of language which are strictly not learned but
genetically inherited"
- A researcher called Labov came up with evidence to show that the accents
people use are not a simply a function of where they live, but depend also on
the social class that the person believes he's part of. A bit like affecting
a "telephone voice".
- Does a bit of linguistic history, and tries to draw a family tree of
languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese are in the "Romantic" group;
English is "Germanic")
- Different languages can have very different grammatical rules, often
influenced by cultural factors
- Talks a bit about the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), making the
point that different languages use different sounds, e.g. there's no English
equivalent to the vowel sound used in the French word "lune"
Completed : 09-Oct-2003
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