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Topic Review
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition involves structures, rules and representation. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination. There are two main guiding principles in first-language acquisition: speech perception always precedes speech production and the gradually evolving system by which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time, beginning with the distinction between individual phonemes. Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition for many years question how language is acquired, Lidz et al. states "The question of how these structures are acquired, then, is more properly understood as the question of how a learner takes the surface forms in the input and converts them into abstract linguistic rules and representations." Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whether that be spoken language or signed language as a result of prelingual deafness, though it can also refer to bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), which refers to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. In addition to speech, reading and writing a language with an entirely different script compounds the complexities of true foreign language literacy. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language.
  • 32.3K
  • 18 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gender Fair Language
Gender fair language (GFL) is language used with the intention of reducing gender bias in one's mental representation, or mental understanding of an idea. Gender fair language includes gender-neutral (English singular they) and gender-inclusive language (English he or she). Feminization strategies of gender fair language use gender-inclusive language. Neutralization strategies of gender fair language use gender-neutral language. Some languages however are genderless rendering such strategies superfluous. Gender fair language focuses on grammatical gender, where gender is marked grammatically in the language. Gender fair language does not interact with gender noun classes, in which some languages categorize nouns. Gender fair language concerns grammatical gender marking on nouns that reference humans, where the gender marking is in accordance with the gender of the human. Gender marking occurs the most in gendered languages, like German, Spanish, and French, where all nouns are grammatically gendered. In these languages, gender fair language generally applies to nouns, pronouns, role nouns (e.g. German der Lehrer "teacher; m."), and possessive pronouns. Grammatical gender is also marked to a lesser extent in natural gender languages, like English and Swedish, in which animate referents are grammatically gendered according to their intrinsic gender. In these languages, gender fair language generally applies only to pronouns and possessive pronouns. Every language has its own method for grammatical gender marking, and thus gender fair language applies differently to each language to match its need.
  • 15.1K
  • 09 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Subject–Verb–Object
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis). English is included in this group. An example is "Sam ate oranges." The label often includes ergative languages that do not have subjects, but have an agent–verb–object (AVO) order. SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV. Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 75% of the world's languages. It is also the most common order developed in Creole languages, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially "obvious" to human psychology. Languages regarded as SVO include: All Bantu languages, Albanian, Arabic dialects, Assyrian, Bosnian, Bulgarian,[a 1] Chinese, English, Estonian, Finnish (but see below), French, Greek, Hausa, Icelandic (with the V2 restriction), Igbo, Italian, Javanese, Khmer, Latvian, Macedonian, Malay (Indonesian, Malaysian), Modern Hebrew, Norwegian (with the V2 restriction), Polish, Portuguese, Quiché, Reo Rapa, Romanian, Russian (but see below), Slovene, Spanish, Swedish (with the V2 restriction), Thai and Lao, Ukrainian (but see below), Vietnamese and Yoruba. Ancient Greek has free syntactic order, though Classical Greeks tended to favor SOV. Many famous phrases are SVO, however.
  • 9.8K
  • 29 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Second Language Acquisition
Second language acquisition, or SLA, is the process by which people learn languages in addition to their native tongue(s). The term second language is used to describe any language whose acquisition starts after early childhood (including what may be the third or subsequent language learned). The language to be learned is often referred to as the "target language" or "L2"; SLA is sometimes called L2A, for "L2 acquisition". The term "language acquisition" became commonly used after Stephen Krashen contrasted it with formal and non-constructive "learning." Today, most scholars use "language learning" and "language acquisition" interchangeably, unless they are directly addressing Krashen's work. However, "second language acquisition" or "SLA" has become established as the preferred term for this academic discipline. The study of SLA is usually viewed as part of applied linguistics.
  • 8.0K
  • 04 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Subject–object–verb
In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam oranges ate" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam ate oranges" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects.
  • 7.9K
  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Linguistic Universal
A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all natural languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language. The field was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who from a set of some thirty languages derived a set of basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax.
  • 7.3K
  • 15 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Indigenous Aryans
Indigenous Aryans, also known as the Out of India theory (OIT), is the idea that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. Reflecting traditional Indian views based on the Puranic chronology, the indigenist view proposes an older date than is generally accepted for the Vedic period, and argues that the Indus Valley Civilization was a Vedic civilization. In this view, "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati (or Indus) tradition (7000 or 8000 BCE)." It is presented as an alternative to the established migration model, which proposes the Pontic steppe as the area of origin of the Indo-European languages. The proposal is based on traditional and religious views on Indian history and identity, and plays a signifcant role in Hindutva politics. Support for this idea mostly exists among Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India, and has no support in mainstream scholarship.
  • 5.6K
  • 13 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Old Aramaic Language
Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, considered to give way to Middle Aramaic by the 3rd century (a conventional date is the rise of the Sasanian Empire in 224 AD). Emerging as the language of the city-states of the Arameans in the Levant in the Early Iron Age, Old Aramaic was adopted as a lingua franca, and in this role was inherited for official use by the Achaemenid Empire during classical antiquity. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards.
  • 4.8K
  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Ge'ez
Ge'ez (/ˈɡiːɛz/; ግዕዝ, Gəʿəz Template:IPA-gez; also transliterated Gi'iz) is an ancient South Semitic language of the Ethiosemitic branch. The language originates from the region encompassing northern Ethiopia and southern Eritrea in the Horn of Africa. Today, Ge'ez is used only as the main language of liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Catholic churches, and the Beta Israel Jewish community. However, in Ethiopia, Amharic or other local languages, and in Eritrea and Ethiopia's Tigray Region, Tigrinya may be used for sermons. Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre are closely related to Ge'ez. The closest living languages to Ge'ez are Tigre and Tigrinya with lexical similarity at 71% and 68%, respectively. Some linguists do not believe that Ge'ez constitutes a common ancestor of modern Ethiosemitic languages, but that Ge'ez became a separate language early on from another hypothetical unattested language, which can be seen as an extinct sister language of Amharic, Tigre and Tigrinya. The foremost Ethiopian experts such as Amsalu Aklilu point to the vast proportion of inherited nouns that are unchanged, and even spelled identically in both Ge'ez and Amharic (and to a lesser degree, Tigrinya).
  • 4.7K
  • 17 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Gaulish Language
Gaulish was an ancient Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul (modern-day France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland, Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the west bank of the Rhine). In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe ("Noric"), parts of the Balkans, and Anatolia ("Galatian"), which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish. Together with Lepontic and the Celtiberian language spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, Gaulish helps form the geographic group of Continental Celtic languages. The precise linguistic relationships among them, as well as between them and the modern Insular Celtic languages, are uncertain and a matter of ongoing debate because of their sparse attestation. Gaulish is found in some 800 (often fragmentary) inscriptions including calendars, pottery accounts, funeral monuments, short dedications to gods, coin inscriptions, statements of ownership, and other texts, possibly curse tablets. Gaulish texts were first written in the Greek alphabet in southern France and in a variety of the Old Italic script in northern Italy. After the Roman conquest of those regions, writing shifted to the use of the Latin alphabet. During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar reported that the Helvetii were in possession of documents in the Greek script, and all Gaulish coins used the Greek script until about 50 BC. Gaulish in Western Europe was supplanted by Vulgar Latin and various Germanic languages from around the 5th century AD onwards. It is thought to have gone extinct some time around the late 6th century.
  • 3.5K
  • 01 Dec 2022
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