WWW - Universitat de València
Página de SILVIA MORELL INIESTA .
URL: http://mural.uv.es/silmoi
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
WOMAN: Radio Sunrise serves a West London community of mixed races, Pujabi speakers and the midst of an English suburb.
What could these two languages: Punjabi and English, have in common?. In fact, English and Punjabi as well as other languages of Northern India like Hindi and Gujurati are related. Something discovered by chance 200 years ago by a multilingual English lawyer, Sir William Jones.
MAN 1: He was a judge who went out to India in 1783. But he’d studied languages, oriental languages, before he went. And when he got to India, he became very interested and learnt Sanscrit which is the language of ancient India, which was first written about 500 A. D., and then he realised he made this great discovery, the Sanskrit resembles in some way, has relationships with Greek and Latin and other languages. And he gave a very famous discourse in which he said that these were sprng from some common source.
WOMAN: It’s surprising that no one spotted the resemblances earlier. Take the numbers again, for example, the Sanscrit, on the right, bears a strong resemblance to Latin and Greek, on the left. While one, two and three are obvious, four and five need a closer look to spot the connection. Linguists have discovered rules that govern how sounds in different languages are related. Look at the words for “four”. This is one of many examples where a word beginning with “Q” in Latin say, is similar to a Greek word beginning with “T”, and a Sanscrit word beginning with “K”. These sound correspondences can reveal how apparently unrelated languages are members of the same family.
MAN 2: The question is how can you tell that the languages that you are looking at reflect a single original language and therefore form a family. The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar: similarities in sounds, similarities in their inflexions, similarities in the syntax of a language, and so forth, and the similarities have to be very precise and they have to be interlocking for the assertion that these languages form a family to be believable. if we look at an English word like “tooth” and see that in Hindi it’s “dant” and that by itself that doesn’t mean that much. But you take a look at English “ten” which shows up in Hindi “das” and the same pattern emerging you’ve got initial “T” in English and an initial “D” in Hindi. When you find that the word “two” though, the numeral, in English shows up in Hindi as “do”, once again an initial “T” in English and an initial “D” in Hindi. You begin to think that perhaps this is not an accident.
WOMAN: Linguistics have now established that a whole range of languages, stretching from Iceland to India, form one family called Indoeuropean. They can even reconstruct an earlier ancestor of these languages: Proto – Indoeuropean.
-
MILROY QUESTIONS
1. What is more common in language uniformity or variability?
Variability.
2. What kinds of variability exists?
Languages can be observed to vary geographically and socially.
3. How do we decide if a particular group of speakers belong to a particular dialect or language?
-----
4. Saussure emphasized the importance of synchronic descriptions of languages rather than diachronic. He and his disciples (structuralists) focused on language at different periods as finite entities. Is this reasonable?
No, because the history of language is a continuous process.
5. The unattested states of language were seen as transitional stages in which the structure of a language was, as it were, disturbed. This made linguistic change look abnormal. Is this abnormal?
No, because no real language state is a perfectly balanced and stable structure, linguistic change is always in progress and all dialects are transitional dialects.
6. Can you think of any example of non-professional attitudes to your own language?
----
7. Why does Milroy use “scare quotes” around non-standard and errors?
Because it is not proved.
8. Are non-standard dialects “incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical and deviant.”?
Yes, they are.
9. Which of these systems is more irregular? Why?
Myself
Yourself
Himself
Herself
Ourselves
Themselves
10. ..... Why do you think this is so?
Because investigators did not have the technology to study spoken discourse in extenso.
11. Any description of a language involves norms? Think of the descriptions of your own language. Why is this so? For example: HE ATE THE PIE ALREADY is considered to be non-standard in which variety of English and perfectly acceptable in which other?
Yes, it does. / HE ATE THE PIE ALREADY is considered non-standard in American, Irish and Scottish English but it is perfectly acceptable in southern English varieties.
12. What is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars?
---
13. What do you think the “prestige motivation for change” and the “solidarity constraint” mean? How are they opposed?