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# Linguistics

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Linguistics is the study of Language with a capital "L." Linguistics views Language as a means of communication and studies how particular languages accomplish this. On the other hand, a linguist may either be a person trained in Linguistics or a person proficient in many Languages. This is a source of a lot of confusion and a strange feature of English usage.

In Europe through the nineteenth century, linguistics centered on the comparative history of European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots. In the United States, the concentration was on recording the hundreds of native languages that had been encountered.

In either case, the initial job of the linguist was to make a thorough description of the language. The difficulties of this task have led to a habit of viewing a language as consisting of several layers.

One records the sounds of the language thoroughly, without regard for the sense. This is its phonetics, and the unit of study is called a "phoneme," a sound that can be distinguished from another sound within the language. There are several hundred different phonemes recognized by the International Phonetic Association(IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. Of all the speech sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that they use. Languages can contain from 3 to 30 vowels and 5 to over 100 consonants (roughly, anyone know exact numbers?). The English language is pretty close to average, using 13 vowels and over 30 consonants. This differs from the lay definition based on the English writing system, where there are 21 consonants and 5 vowels (sometimes y). Different phonemes can be spelled the same way (good and food have different vowels), so one should stick to the IPA when thinking about phonetics. Much of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is.

Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, the definition of a phoneme in a particular language is a set of phonetic sounds that all get translated into the same sound in the brain. The production of these different sounds is completely determined by context rules. If there are two different words that differ in only one sound (a minimal pair), then those two sounds constitute separate phonemes, otherwise they are called allomorphs of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (p,t,k) can be aspirated. In english, word initial voiceless stops are aspirated, whereas non word-initial voiceless stops aren't aspirated (put your fingers right in front of your lips and notice the difference as you say 'pin' and 'spin'). There is no english word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p (i apologize for any confusion, it's hard to do transcriptions in ascii text). therefore in english, aspirated [p^h] (the ^h means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allomorphs of an underlying phoneme /p/. This is not true of all languages however - both cantonese and thai make the distinction between [p] and [p^h], so in those languages, each is it's own phoneme /p/ and /p^h/.

Another example... in english, the glides, /l/ and /r/ are two separate phonemes (minimal pair 'lead', 'read'), however in many asian languages the two glides are allomorphs, and the general rule is that [r] comes before a vowel, and [l] doesn't (e.g. Seoul, Korea). If you ask someone who is a native speaker of korean, they will tell you that the [l] in Seoul and the [r] in Korea are in fact the same letter. What happens is that a native korean speaker's brain uses the underlying phoneme /l/, and depending on the phonetic context (before a vowel or not) this phoneme gets expressed as either the [r] sound or the [l] sound. Another korean speaker will hear both sounds as the underlying phoneme and think of them as the same sound. This is how different languages can have varying numbers of sounds in their inventory, even though there are a constant number of distinct phonetic sounds that humans can make.

The particular sounds that a language decides to make distinctions between can change over time as new children learn the language. At one point, [f] and [p] were allophones in english, and these changed later into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics (another being fast change resulting from influence by another language, e.g. french influence on english after 1066).

One separately analyzes the units from which words are assembled, the "morphemes." These are the smallest units of sound that a native speaker recognizes as significant and can often be determined by a series of substitutions. A speaker of English recognizes that "Make" is a different word from "Makes," so the s-sound is a distinct morpheme.

Patterns in the use of language are known as syntax or grammar. Again, the first job is to make a thorough record of the patterns encountered in the field.

The most important modern linguist was Ferdinand Saussure, a Swiss student of Sanskrit whose lectures, published posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic analysis from the 1920's on; his approach been widely adopted in other fields under the broad term "structuralism."

In the United States, there was an interest in statistical analysis and abstract modelling. Leonard Bloomfield was the founder of this approach.

[Noam Chomsky]?'s general model of language, transformational grammar, has been the dominant one from the 1960's on.

See structuralism

One speaks also of philology.

- pragmatics? and [speech act]?s
- [cognitive linguistics]?

Other areas within linguistics:

- etymology
- computational linguistics

Linguistics is also studied with other disciplines, thus:

- [historical linguistics]? Especially historical linguistics, but also other areas often deal with Orthography. Writing Systems in general are of interest to linguistics, since language itself has to be transcribed.
- [comparative linguistics]?
- sociolinguistics?
- psycholinguistics?
- [childs aquisition of language]?
- evolutionary linguistics
- anthropology
- cognitive science

For transcription used by some authors, check out http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm

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