Anthropology 350: Structure of Language
[Nancy McKee]: Okay, it’s episode three of Speech, Thought, and Culture, and we have some
audience participation events today. We’re going to be working at the beginning and it takes a
while to get used to it. We’re going to be working at writing things in the International Phonetic
Alphabet, the IPA. We got both words and sentences. In fact, here we have a list of everything
we’re going to be trying to get done today. We’ll see how fast we can get it done.
Okay, first we’re going to write some words and sentences and that’ll take a while. Then I’m
going to talk about the hardest thing I ever have to teach in any class—the phonemic principal.
It’s just one idea, but it’s hard to get it into your head. It was hard for me to get it into my head.
And then once it’s in there, it’ll never slide out again. Then we’ll talk a little about the other
aspects of the sound system of language. Then we’ll talk about how you put words together,
that’s call morphology. We’ll talk about how you put sentences together, that’s called syntax.
We’ll talk a tiny bit about semantics, what meaning is. And then we’ll talk a little bit about
nonverbal communication. All of this stuff is laid out in your textbook very, very clearly, but I
think it’s a good idea for us to spend a good bit of time on the sound system because, you know,
there’s no cassette that comes with your textbook.
Alright, now this is what we’re going to do. I’m going to say some words and you’re going to
write them down in the International Phonetic Alphabet. So race off and get your little cheat
sheets, your little vowel and consonant charts. You’ll never have to do this without your vowel
and consonant charts, not in this class. When I was learning this it was in a descriptive linguistics
class and the first test we were going to have to write it without our cheat sheets, and I was
hysterical—terrified. And in fact, I still have my original MA graduate school phonetic alphabet
in case I ever forget. I’m scared to go anywhere without it. Alright, now, this is the goal: I’m
going to be saying the words. You should not only listen, but watch my lips because it will be
important for you to look at things like lip rounding, especially when it comes to the issue of
open o verses ah, the sound ah, which is a low central vowel, okay. If you don’t make a
distinction between those sounds, then it will be very hard for you to hear them, so it’ll help if
you look at me.
Now, if you have—if you have this on tape, if you have a VCR, you can stop it and—and let it
go again, and that’ll be really helpful, probably easier for you than it is for my students on
campus. But I’ve never taught this over television before. Alright, I’m going to give you a list of
five words and I’ll say them three times each, and you write them down in the International
Phonetic Alphabet. At first, it’ll be very hard. At first, you’ll think, “Oh, I’ll never be able to do
this.” But by the time we get to the end of this today, you’ll be a whole lot better. Not only that,
every day, for a while, at the beginning of each lecture, I’m going to give you five words and—
no, I guess—I think what I’ll do is at the end of every lecture I’ll give you five words and then
the next lecture, we’ll write them down. So you’ll have until the next lecture comes to stew about
them. Alright, here come your first five words: feather, feather, feather. There’s a fricative in the
middle, that “th” sound, and if you just say that “th,” put your hands on your throat here. You
can feel your vocal cords vibrate. That’s telling you that you better write this as a voiced
interdental fricative, right? Not voiceless, but voiced. Say it one more time: feather.
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Okay, now we’re moving right along. We take no prisoners on the IPA here. Soldier, soldier,
soldier. Now, the real pitfall, I think, in soldier is that you know how it’s spelled. Well, you
know how it’s spelled if you’re not my brother the Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University
who spelled soldier on his conscientious objector application with a “j.” But, that tells you
something about the International Phonetic Alphabet—don’t get seduced by standard
orthography. Don’t put a “d” in it, okay? I’ll say it one more time: soldier.
Okay, next word: context, context. Now the—what’s the pitfall here? Look at your little list of
consonants and you don’t see an “x.” There is an “x” in the IPA, but it doesn’t appear in English.
It’s the German sound hechchch. The uvular fricative, and we don’t have it, so you’re not going
to be using an “x.” It’s not in your box of phonetic crayons. Think about that sound: context.
You can spell it with the symbols you have. Don’t use an “x”.
Okay, next word. This is easy—no it’s not—this is hard: fight, fight, fight. Well, the problem
here is how you are going to make that “I” sound? You look at your vowels and you don’t see it
anywhere. You see an “I.” In fact, you see two “I”s, but those are the sound “ee” and “ih.” So
how are you going to produce fight, the sound “I”? Well, you’re going to build it out of two
other vowels. Fight: “i,” “i.” Use a low central vowel plus a high front vowel and you can build
the sound “I.” It’s a diphthong, “I.” Fight.
Okay, here’s our last word. This is a fake word. This is a word that was invented by Lewis
Carroll and I can’t—he called it a portmanteau word. It’s—it’s—a portmanteau is a suitcase, and
he called words—portmanteau words, if they collapsed two words into one. But, I don’t know
what these two words were. One of them is chuckle and I can’t remember the rest.
Okay, chortle, chortle, chortle. What’s the pitfall here? Remember to have a whole syllable there
at the end, “tul.” Make it into a whole syllable, that means it will have to have a vowel. Ch, ch,
chch. Is it voiced? Nope, it’s voiceless. Chch. Okay, chortle.
Now, I’d like to take a look, put the overhead on this and show you how these words look when
they’re written in the phonetic alphabet. Okay, here we have feather. I think what presents the
biggest problem is right here and right here. Right here, we have to make sure that we have a
voiced fricative. If you had this, that would be voiceless and it would be fether, fether, but we
don’t say that, so international no sign on that voiceless fricative. The other thing that might
present a little problem is this schwa. The—remember I told you that schwa, those mid-central
vowels, they’re just a real big mess, that’s the problem with them. They take on the coloration of
whatever is around them. Especially if it’s an “err” or an “ul” and they kind of sound like the
“err” or the “ul.” So actually there are a number of ways of writing this last syllable, this “err.”
But, the easiest way is for us just to remember that whenever we have the syllable “err,” feather,
doer, mover, shaker, singer, it’s always going to be “schwa” “r.” And even though it doesn’t too
much like a “schwa,” it doesn’t sound more like anything else. And the reason that it’s going to
be a “schwa” and not that upside-down v is that this is not a stressed syllable, okay, it’s an
unstressed syllable. It’s a very common one in English too, very common and every time you
hear it, just remember it’ll be “shwa” “r.”
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Okay, now we need to go back to our sheet of—ah, here we are. Soldier, okay. Here’s another
one of those “err” sounds and you see it’s just the same— “schwa” “r.” This “j” sound, you just
need to remember that it’s the sound in judge. What’s our type word there? Jar, right? If you’d
had—if you had this, it would be solcher—international no sign, alright. Now, let’s go to
context. Well, you might have had a little trouble with this ah, but if you look on your chart,
you’ll see that the type word is hot. And it’s just the same sound as in context, okay? And this
little mess here, that’s the sound “ks” of x in most English words.
Okay so whenever you have an English—well not whenever you have one with an x, but
whenever you have one that sounds “ks,” and it’ll usually have an x in it, then think to yourself,
“What are the real sounds I’m hearing, not what’s the letter that I would write, you know in an
essay, but what are the sounds?” And they’ll be “ks,” ks in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Alright, let’s look at our next word here: fight. When you have it written out like this, it looks
like the French word fait, but it isn’t ‘cause this is ah ee, fight. Sometimes people like to put Ys
in here, but that—that’s more like “fyat,” “fyat.” This has a more kind of consonant quality, so
international no sign. Make this the English word eye is spelled in the IPA “a” plus, okay. Maybe
if you wrote that down on your little chart of vowels, it would help you keep it in mind. And
now, here’s chortle. You want to make sure that you have “c” wedge. If you didn’t have “c”
wedge, what might you have? Well, I suppose you might have thought this. Oh no, that would be
“jortle” and “jortle” is not a word. What if you had an “o” here? Sometimes people think of this
as having an “o” chortle. But I tell you I’m not southern and I’m unlikely to say chortle, so don’t
do it. Just use that open “o” chortle, chortle. If you have a closed “o” there, eh, I can live with it.
I wouldn’t go around with my giant red pen marking you wrong, but I think this open “o” is a
little more accurate. Remember that a semi-vowel, this “arr” is going to change the quality of the
vowels around it. So does the lateral “ul.” They—they really modify it, so nothing will be exact
here, but personally I think an open “o” is better than a closed “o.” And the last thing is this last
syllable chortle. Sometimes people like to forget the “schwa.” Put it in there because you got to
have a little vowel every time that you have a syllable. Remember that this is another syllable
that ends a lot of English words, and so just get it in your mind that “ul” is going to be “schwa”
“l” every time you got it.
Now, I have another list of five words. This is like, you know, no pain, no gain. Think of this as
linguistic aerobics—or I’m bigger on the linguistic aerobics than I am on the physical ones.
Alright, I’m going to give you a set of—oh, I have six words on my list here, okay. Now
remember, your goal is to say them as I—I mean, sorry, your goal is to write them as I say them,
not as you would say them, but as I actually do say them. Not ‘cause I’m saying them in any
particularly wonderful, hot way, but because that’s the goal of phonetics, to report on what other
people are saying, not on what you would say. It helps to train your ear. What you’ll actually
have to do on your exam would be to write a piece of a poem—I haven’t decided what to pick
yet—in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then of course you’ll have to use your own
pronunciation. But this is good practice, like running with weights or something, okay? Now,
I’m going to say these words and you write them down. And you’ll notice, by the way, that you
don’t have a “c,” nope. You don’t have a “c” in your inventory of your IPA symbols, so don’t get
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fooled by this. Now, I’m going to give you the word for the bed that soldiers sleep on: cot, cot,
cot. You’re watching my lips and they’re staying open. They’re not being rounded at all. Cot.
Now, the next word that you want to write down is the word for the past tense of the verb to
catch. And again, watch my lips. Caught, caught, caught. There’s a difference between those two
words as I say them. Maybe as you say them, or maybe not. The first word is cot, the second
word is caught. And actually they don’t seem like words to me anymore, just weird sounds. Cot
is the first, caught is the second.
Okay. You’ve probably got the moral message contained in that. Next word: comb, comb, comb.
Fourth word: singer, singer, singer. And the next word—the next word will have one more
symbol in it. Don’t forget to put it in. One more symbol than the spelling for singer. So the next
word is: finger, finger, finger, finger. If you—if you came from New York, many dialects of
New York English would—would make singer rhyme with finger. Many of—many people from
New York say “singer,” but that isn’t what I said so that isn’t what you’ll write down. And the
last word is: leisure, leisure, leisure—“jj,” remember that symbol? It’s a voiced “jj” fricative that
I told you comes from French and shows up only in the middle of English words.
Alright, now let’s take a look at the hot spellings of these. We need to zoom on in, here we go.
Cot, okay? We got a low central—that’s a low central vowel, and so it’s unrounded because
central vowels in English are all unrounded. And here, in my dialect, is quite a different
pronunciation. Quite a different word. Caught, okay. It’s a mid-back vowel, so it’s rounded,
because in English all back vowels are rounded. The way I talk, cot that soldiers sleep on, or if
you’re British, cot that babies sleep in. That is what they call cribs because cribs are where you
put corn and corn is grain. Anyway, in American English, in my dialect, cot is what a soldier
sleeps in and caught is the past tense of catch. There’s nothing particularly wonderful about my
dialect. It’s just one of millions. I just want to make the point that these are two different sounds
in my dialect. I have got a guy you can’t even see. He’s standing behind the camera that’s
filming this and we were talking about these two sounds the other day and he says he didn’t hear
them. He didn’t have this in his dialect. He just has this. It’s real common in his part of the
world. So it’s not time to flip out and go buy yourself a new phoneme if you don’t have it. It’s
just time to recognize that they’re two different sounds. Alright, comb. That’s pretty boring, isn’t
it? Singer is much more interesting. “I,” this is the sound “I,” small capital I. Make sure you
didn’t use a capital—I mean, a lower case “i.” That would be “seenger.” And native speakers of
English don’t say that. Chch.
“Nn,” this is the sound “nn,” okay, and here is that “er,” “schwa,” “r” again. Now let’s look at
finger and compare it. We got “fin,” that’s the first syllable, but then we got “ger,” so don’t
forget to put the “g” in there, otherwise it would be “finner,” which is something that German—
native speakers of German sometimes say when they’re speaking English.
Okay, and the last word that we got in here is leisure. Remember it ends in that classic American
“schwa” “r” and it’s got that “jj,” that palatal voiced “jj,” palatal fricative, z-wedge, okay? Well,
I don’t know what your tolerance is. ‘Course, the nice thing is you can always just zap me, can’t
you? You can always just turn me right straight off and try this again when you have a little more
energy. But I’m going to go right ahead and do one more list, and then we’ll do a sentence.
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Alright, I’m going to give you one, two—four words this time. One of them is really long. And
you are going to—you’re going to write them down again. Okay, I’m going to kind of exaggerate
and—the pronunciation of this next word. I wouldn’t normally pronounce it quite like this, but
it’s easier for us to write if I do. Butter, butter, butter. Of course, what would I normally say:
butter, butter. Well, you could write it either way and we’ll talk about it. Then the next word:
voices, voices, voices. I know what’s—I know what’s—might be tough with that one. That
vowel in the middle “oi.” Again, you don’t have a single vowel with that sound, but you can
build it: “oi.” What is “o” open o plus “ee,” that high front vowel? Voices.
And the last word: sewing, sewing, sewing. Oh no, it is not the last, it’s the third. Sewing. Now
here’s the blockbuster: transmigration, transmigration, transmigration. It’s not particularly hard,
it’s just long. Transmigration, okay? I know you can hardly wait to see what these suckers look
like in the IPA, so let’s hit the overhead. There we go. Ugh, I want to hide transmigration from
you. There’s butter—well, as I first pronounced it, butter, it had a “t.” The actual pronunciation
that I would probably use in everyday speech is butter, in which case we’d spell it with that.
There actually are little additional symbols that I’m not giving you that allow you to indicate
more precise pronunciations, but let’s not worry about them because it is not our goal in this
class to become first rate phoneticians, just to get a quick and dirty working knowledge of how—
of how the IPA operates.
Alright, voices, okay. Here, see, you can build that “oi” sound pretty nicely. Don’t forget to put a
“z” here instead of and “s.” I’ll tell you, I wrote this stuff at home before I came in because we’re
in—we’re on video time and I do not want to make a mistake that goes out all over the fifty
states, but I’ll tell you, when I do this stuff in a classroom on the blackboard, this would be just
the kind of thing that I would screw up. And what would I do? Well, I would write it as an “s.”
And why would I write it as an s? Because that’s how you write it in normal English spelling. So
if you’re making that kind of mistake, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t mean you’re a dolt, it just
means that it’s so seductive to go to—to real spelling. But try to—try to correct yourself.
Here’s sewing. What if you didn’t have that w, what if you had “soing?” Well, I wouldn’t get
tremendously tense if I were grading something that had that, but it—there is a kind of
consonant-y quality: sewo-wo-wo-wing instead of so-ing. So-ing is something that you might
say if you weren’t a native speaker of English, so I think that the “w” really belongs there. Now
let’s hit transmigration. You know what transmigration refers to? It usually refers to the souls or
the spirits of living entities going from one body to another to another through many, many
rebirths. There we go, transmigration. Isn’t that a beautiful word? Alright, “trans” that shouldn’t
be too hard, right? “Mai,” remember we had this sound before and we built it ourselves out of an
“ah” and an “ee,” “Trans-migrai,” remember you would put that “shhh” because it is voiceless as
opposed to jj—you might have been tempted to do that, but no. “Un,” why would you have
“schwa” “n” instead of upside-down “v” “n,” because it’s not a stressed syllable. Transmigration.
See now, you ought to be getting a little greater sense of security. You ought to be feeling a little
more secure in your ability to write this stuff.
Now, the next thing that I’m going to give you is—oh, how about a piece of the Gettysburg
Address, that sounds good, because you’ll—you’ll see how words, when they’re used in
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sentences, sometimes take on a little different quality. So, this is the Gettysburg—this is a piece
of the Gettysburg Address. Once I gave a piece of the Gettysburg Address and misquoted it and
my brother, the Lincoln freak, called me up and complained. Okay, this just a tiny piece. Four
score and seven years ago. It’s harder to write it when it’s a sentence. Four score and seven years
ago, our fathers set forth. Our fathers set forth upon this—that’s as far as this page took me, so
that’s where we’re going to stop. I’ll read it a couple of more times. Four score and seven years
ago, our fathers set forth upon this. It’s hard not to have the object or the preposition on there—
continent—but it wouldn’t fit on. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers set forth upon this.
I’ll do it one more time and then we’ll see what it looks like. Four score and seven years ago, our
fathers set forth upon this.
Alright, let’s see what this looks like! Let’s see how many mistakes I made and didn’t catch.
Four score, I think that’s pretty normal. Remember, I didn’t say “four-score,” so I think that this
open “o” is pretty good. Now, when I’m on a role, I don’t pronounce that “d” and “and.” We
know it’s there, but if you don’t hear it, you don’t write it. Four score and seven, seven, years
ago. You know what? I think that would be better. I think a “schwa” would be a better thing in
there. Four score and seven years—I don’t think that I say “ah-go,” I think that I say “uh.” Our—
now you might have something else. You might have this, and I’d let that go, but I was trying to
say our, I was trying to add that “wu” quality in there. Fath—voiced fricative there, fathers set
forth upon this. Okay? I think that’s pretty neat.
Alright, now, right now, let me give you five words. You write them down the best you can. If
you can’t get them all written in IPA, then write them in regular spelling and then work on them
after this video is over, okay, and then when we come back on the next video, the next segment,
I’ll give you the IPA spelling, but we need to move right along to the phonemic principle and
several other things. Alright, here we go, here are the words. Portion. Portion. Regulate.
Regulate. Jugular. Jugular. Methane. Methane. Picture. Picture. Okay?
Now, let’s move along. I want to talk about the phonemic principle. It is the toughest thing that I
ever, ever teach. Alright, now on your chart of vowels and consonants, it says phonemes of
standard American English, so what are phonemes? Well, a phoneme is a sound that makes a
difference in meaning in a particular language and every language has a different set of
phonemes. English is about in the middle. Okay, now listen to these two words: pit and lipstick.
Pit and lipstick. And then, let me give you a third one: “lip,” “lip.” Each one of those words has a
“p” sound in it. The first one—put your hand in front of your mouth and say “pit,” “pit,” “pit.”
You can feel a puff of air hitting your hand. Say “lipstick,” “lipstick.” You might feel a tiny puff
of air, but no big deal, nothing big. Now say “lip,” “lip.” Not only can you not feel a puff of air
from that “p” sound, but you can hardly even hear the “p” sound. What that tells us is that there
are at least three ways of making “p” sounds in English. The first one—we need to look at our
overhead here—the first one has a little puff of air. It’s called an aspirated “p.” So we—if you
care about marking, then you can mark them like that. The second one, lipstick, is just kind of
nowhere, it’s just a regular “p”, so we just leave it by itself. The last one, lip, lip, is what’s called
suppressed or checked and it has a little symbol like that, and in your study guide, I couldn’t find
a little symbol like that in my entire inventory of fonts, so it looks a little weird. But anyway, you
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can mark them this way. Now, suppose we didn’t aspirate the “p” when we pronounced pit: pit,
pit, pit. So you sound weird, but it’s like no big deal. Suppose we didn’t suppress the “p” when
we said “lip,” “lip.” Would we still be able to make ourselves understood? Yeah, sure. We’d
sound weird, but no big deal. Okay, what that tells us is that these varieties of pronouncing a
bilabial stop are insignificant in English. They show up in certain phonological environments.
They show up in certain parts of words like the beginning or the end or the middle. And that is
what conditions them to be aspirated or suppressed, but it’s like no big deal. So these varieties
are called allophones, or other varieties of the basic phoneme “p.” And we write phonemes in
slashes like this, okay. Now, what about the difference between the words “pit” and “bit?” Are
they two different words? Yes. Then we know that “p” and “b” are two different phonemes.
They’re just the same except you vibrate you vocal cords on one. “B.” So that tells us that “p”
and “b” are different phonemes in English because they make a difference in what a word means.
Now, suppose we were speaking one of the languages—one of the many languages of India. In
many Indian languages—and we’re talking now of languages of India—whether you aspirate a
stop or do not aspirate is not insignificant at all—it makes a difference in meaning. So let’s say—
now, I don’t speak any of the languages of India, unfortunately—but let’s say that this word
would be quite a different word from that. One might mean mosquito and one might mean
elephant, because in these languages “b” and aspirated “b” are two different phonemes.
Similarly, in many of the languages of Asia including, as far as I know, all Chinese languages—
they are sometimes called dialects, but they’re really separate languages—and other languages as
well. These two sounds, which in English are two different phonemes, right, you’ve got rip and
lip, and they’re not the same thing in English, are they? And the only reason that they’re
different is because of these things and that tells us that you have two different phonemes. In
Chinese languages, “l” and “r” are not two different phonemes at all. They’re just different ways
of pronouncing the same basic sound depending on where it shows up in a sentence—in a word.
One might occur between two vowels and the other everywhere else. That’s why you have all of
those horrible racist jokes about Chinese people or Japanese people who can’t distinguish
between “r” and “l” because for them, those sounds are no more different than aspirated “p” and
un-aspirated “p” are for English speakers. When I teach linguistics, especially descriptive
linguistics, to Japanese students, and I do that a lot, they have real serious trouble with these two
sounds. And of course they do because to their ear, they’re not two different sounds at all, just
insignificantly different.
Alright, I should mention one other thing about the sound system. There are—we’re talking
about the basic building blocks of words here—other aspects of sound that your book describes
in great detail—I just want to—or adequate detail, anyway. I just want to make sure that you’re
aware of them because they might be important for the kind of work that we’re going to be doing
in sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics. There are other qualities of sound that don’t alter the
meanings of words, but they alter the emotional quality of a sentence or a word. And those are
things like pitch. Like this, are you talking like this—are you are really at the end of your rope?
Or loudness. Well I just don’t have the energy to scream, but you know, some people say that
you really command a lot of attention if you talk in a very low voice. So, loudness, pitch, speed,
breathiness—all of these things are qualities of sounds that don’t affect the explicit meaning of a
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word, but can have an effect on the overall meaning of what somebody’s trying to say, and these
things are called suprasegmentals, and your book talks about them.
Now, I think it’s time to move off of individual sounds, don’t you, and move on to whole words.
Let’s take a look at morphology, at least in a pretty rapid way. Let me give you a word, okay?
Let me give you this word. Dogs. How many morphemes are in dogs? Or what that really means
is, how many different chunks of meaning are in dogs? Well, the way I look at it, there are two.
This one, which means a four-legged critter that sometimes lives in houses and has a name, and
this one which means plural, okay. So there are two morphemes or two little chunks of meaning
in this word. That’s what a morpheme is. And in fact, the word morpheme is built, kind of spun
off the word phoneme. If a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that has—that alters meaning,
then a morpheme is the smallest piece of a word that has a specific meaning. This can mean
something else, can’t it? Dogs still has two morphemes if it’s a verb. You know the verb to dog
means to kind of follow after somebody. I just can’t get rid of that little kid next door. He dogs
my every footstep, okay, in that case, we still have two morphemes. We have this one, dog, and
it means to follow around. And then what does this mean? This is a little morpheme that means
third person present active indicative. It gives you grammatical information about the word. It
gives you grammatical information about this verb. And that’s basically the deal with
morphemes and, of course, it’s really more complicated than that. If we wanted to know what the
plural morpheme was in English, well, there isn’t just one is there? There are a lot of them. There
are some that are only trivially different like—there’s the plural morpheme for cat. Looks the
same, but it doesn’t sound the same at all, does it? Cat “ss,” dog “zz.” And what about this:
foxes. Here we have the sound “schwa.” They look like this, don’t they? And it gets—it just gets
worse from there. How about cattle, what’s the plural morpheme there? Well there isn’t a single
plural morpheme, is there? Gone around and changed the whole word. Or what about deer? I saw
a deer. Well, I saw four deer. What’s the plural morpheme there? There isn’t one. But you get the
basic message, at least, about what morphemes are.
In some languages, these little grammatical morphemes, little suffixes, or prefixes, or sometimes
in some languages like Tagalog, which is a language of the Philippines, there are infixes. There
are little morphemes that you slot right into the middle of words. Pretty exciting stuff. Some of
these little things contain grammatical information. This contains mostly lexicaler word – real
word information, what a thing is, what an action is. These kinds of things and in English they’re
very likely to be suffixes. They contain grammatical information. If you have a language that has
lots of these little morphemes, wherever they show up, the beginning, the middle, the end, that
contain grammatical information that can tell you something about who’s doing a verb, what
time a verb was done, how a verb was done, whether you’ve got singulars or plurals. This kind
of grammatical information, if it shows up in morphemes, results in languages that are called
inflected languages. That is, they have morphemes attached to words that contain lots of
grammatical information, alright. In fact, they’re called inflexional morphemes. English is not a
very highly inflected language at all. English has very, very few grammatical morphemes hitched
onto words, very few. Other languages like Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, even German, and many other
languages that are not part of the Indo-European family that English belongs to. Many other
languages are much more highly inflected. And whether or not your—the language is highly
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inflected or not very inflected at all has a big impact on how you put these words together to
make sentences, okay. So that leads us to thinking about how you make sentences, and I got
some little examples to show you. Your book talks in more detail about morphology, also about
syntax – that is how you put words together. But I want to show you some things that your book
is—doesn’t show you quite so clearly. Just because they’re really neat and they show you
something about grammatical morphemes and also something about syntax. So we have some
beautiful graphics that have some Latin sentences on them, and if we—here we have a beautiful
one. See, I could write this in hand writing, but isn’t this more impressive? And don’t you
believe it? Okay, the first sentence says “the daughter,” the second word is “mother,” and the
third word is “loves.” The sentence reads, “the daughter loves the mother.” The thing about Latin
is—in fact, I was just reading an article about Latin talking about Latin word order. It said Latin
is the language in the word that has the freest word order. You can take that sentence—we need
to look at the sentence more than we need to look at me. You can take that first sentence and you
can put those three words “filia matrem amat” in any order you want and the sentence still means
the same thing. If you said “matrem filia amat” or “amat filia matrem” or any arrangement you
want, that sentence still means the same thing. What if you have the English sentence, “the
daughter loves her mother,” or “the daughter loves the mother.” Latin doesn’t use articles at all,
doesn’t have any articles. If you said “the daughter loves the mother” or “the mother loves the
daughter,” you have two different meanings, completely different meanings. If you said “loves
the daughter, the mother,” unless you’ve got a line of poetry, you’re in deep trouble. It doesn’t
mean anything at all. But in Latin, you can move those three words into any order and the
sentence still means the same thing. Now why is that? I’ll tell you: because Latin is a highly
inflected language and it has little morphemes, little grammatical morphemes that indicate what
role in the sentence each word is playing. That “ah” in “filia,” that means it’s the subject. That
“em,” “matrem,” on mother, “matrem” “em,” that means direct object. And the “at” ending, that
means third person singular present active indicative. Now, look at the next sentence: mater
filiam amat—that means the mother loves the daughter. And again, you can screw that sentence
around any way you want and you’re going to get exactly the same meaning.
Let’s move onto our next little Latin lesson. Look at this one. “Filiae,” that “ae” in classical Latin
you pronounce “eye.” Filiae matres amat, that means the daughters love the mothers. And again,
you can move those words around any way you want, but it’s still going to mean the same thing.
You have an “es” ending, that means either direct object or subject. Well, you say, but don’t you
still need then, but wouldn’t it make a difference. No because we’ve got “ae” on the subject, on
the daughters, and that means it’s the subject and it’s always going to be the subject. Next
sentence says matres filias amant, and again, by the morphological change on these nouns you
can tell which role in the sentence the words play. English is a language that is not highly
infected, we have very little grammatical information contained in most words, especially most
nouns. So, what do we have to rely on when we’re forming sentences? We have to rely on word
order. If we don’t, if we mess with the word order, we mess with the meaning. In highly inflected
languages, that’s not true.
We got another sentence—I can’t exactly remember what it was I was looking for here, but let’s
say our next—I just like this sentence and it is a lot and it actually comes, I think, from a song
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and it’s also a hymn in many Christian sects. Haec est dies quam fecit dominus—that means this
is the day which made the Lord. What we got here is a Latin sentence, and this is a pretty late
Latin sentence, in which we have the subject and the verb in an order that is uncommon, even in
Latin, not weird, but not terribly common. But, it doesn’t make any difference. We know what
the subject of fecit made is because of the “us” ending, because of that “us” morpheme on the
end of “dominus,” tells us that’s the subject of the subordinate clause. “Quam,” that “am”
ending, which—or that—tells us it’s got to be the direct object, and not only that, but it’s a
feminine thing. What feminine thing is there in this sentence? “Dies,” day. Actually dies is either
masculine or feminine depending on how you feel about it in Latin, but most Latin words don’t
work that way.
So in these kinds of inflected languages, so much grammatical information is contained in little
morphological endings that the syntax is very free. Where you have little grammatical
information in the morphemes, then you’re going to have to rely very, very heavily on word
order. And I have one more Latin sentence that just came to me as I was collecting these suckers.
To show you a just an interesting about Latin that we’ll talk about more when we start talking
about Black English, oddly enough. This is the motto of Oxford University, I believe. Dominus
illuminatio mea, which comes, I think, from the 23rd psalm. What it says is the Lord light my. It
is a sentence. The Lord is my light. Where’s the verb to be? It is not there. Does this mean that
Romans had a serious problem with logic? No, Julius Caesar had a good grip on it. Same as
Tolstoy, a Russian leaves out those verb to be—verbs to be all the time. Well, just keep that in
your head, okay. Now, the last thing that I want to talk about here, and we’re coming down to the
wire, is a little something, I promise to say a little something, about Semantics, and then a fast
run through in nonverbal communication. Mostly what I want to tell you about semantics,
because you’re book talks about it adequately, is that more and more people are looking for
general principles of meaning that are contained in all human languages. And we find that there
are a lot. Pretty nearly all groups of people have the idea that some things are living and that
some things are dead, or at least not alive. They have the idea that—of singular and plural. They
have the idea of masculine and feminine. But, what’s interesting, and sometimes just kind of
scrambles our brains, is the ways in which different languages reflect these things. One of my
favorite examples is the idea of what’s alive and what’s not alive. We have very specific ideas
and we can pretty clearly tell you what’s alive and what’s not alive and we assume that
everybody in the world will feel the same way, but that’s not true. Some people, for example,
feel that stones are alive. Some people feel that—these are mostly tribal people these days—
objects made by human beings, that are significant and have absorbed important history or have
absorbed lots and lots of human energy, they may feel that a throne, for example, is alive. Or that
the knife that belongs to a king is alive. So, we do more and more look for general principles of
meaning, but we need to remember that although the principles may be the same, the way
different languages work them out may be extremely, extremely different. In fact, we’ll talk
about living stones in a forthcoming video, because one of your articles, The Baso: Giving Up on
Words, is a pretty interesting article that talks about different assumptions of life and inertness.
Alright, and the last thing that I just want to whip through rapidly is the idea of nonverbal
communication among humans. We all know that non-humans do it and we know that humans
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do it too. Do we need nonverbal communication? Of course we don’t, because if we didn’t need
it, then telephones—no, if we did need nonverbal communication, telephones would not work
would they? If you had to watch people’s body language, if you had to watch their hand gestures
and look at how they focus in on somebody, it wouldn’t work. And we know that phones work,
but we also know that sometimes telephone conversations are less—very often—are less
rewarding and less meaningful and you can misunderstand people more on a telephone than if
you’re face-to-face. And that tells us, if you didn’t know it from other means, is that nonverbal
communication can be important. Usually, people classify nonverbal communication into two
big chunks: kinesics, which means basically moving around, and proxemics, which means how
you use the space around you. There is a stereotype that probably has a perfectly reasonable
basis, in fact, that Northern Europeans want a big bubble of space around them and they feel
uncomfortable when people get too close. My ancestors are Northern European and I feel very
tense if people are right up close to me, especially if they touch me. Southern Europeans and any
Mediterranean peoples are supposed to be more tolerant of close communication. People talking
so close you can feel their breath on you, could reach out and touch them any time and in fact,
you might want to do that. And they feel that Northern Europeans are cold and weird and they
try to get closer and closer. Look at—be great to see a German and a Southern Italian talking to
each other. I’ve actually seen videotapes of stuff like this. The Northern Italian’s trying to close
in, he wants to make a human connection. And the German is backing off, he wants to keep his
private bubble of space. That’s me, I like bubbles of space. It’s not that crude, of course, and not
everyone works according to those ethnic stereotypes, but you get the basic meaning. Also, there
are, if you’re thinking about kinesics, you think about gestures, hand gestures, you know, those
jokes about how do you keep an Italian quiet, tie his hands down. Some ethnic groups are much
more likely to gesture. I almost never—or I think—don’t think of myself, anyway, as gesturing.
So that’ll be something that when you’re doing your observations for your term project to pay
attention to. And your book discusses them in some detail and it’s worth thinking about, it’s
worth practicing looking for and looking at. And the last thing that we want to mention before
we sign off for another day is facial expressions. Some facial expressions are very easily decoded
cross-culturally and others are very specific to a given culture. So, I think we’ve pretty well
wound up the basics of how humans communicate. Don’t forget to write your IPA spellings for
the words I gave you and we’ll begin with that in the next video, okay?
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