A:If it happens it will be a short multiple-choice quiz, but at the moment we are not sure if we will have one. Anyway it won't be on March 20th.
A: Good idea - you can almost predict that from the circumstances in which contact languages arise. The problem is that the Silk Road "closed" a long time ago, so if there was a trade pidgin associated with the silk trade, it would probably have become extinct (like the Mediterranean Lingua Franca). However, there are some contact languages in central Asia, including a few varieties of Chinese which has been massively influenced by the surrounding Turkic languages that they might best be seen as mixed languages. One such language is Wutun, spoken in the Qinghai region, which combines elements from Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian.
A: In most of the cases we have looked at, the contact language is not intelligible to speakers of either of the "input" languages. For example, Gifrants' Haitian love songs do not make much sense to French speakers without the aid of a translation, though they may recognise odd words. Take the line:
w-ap glise nan mwen-we
Here a French speaker may recognize the word glise (French glisser, "to slip") but will not realize that the line means "You're slipping away from me" because the grammar of the sentence is so different from French. This lack of intelligibility would lead us to consider contact varieties as distinct languages rather than dialects of their lexifiers. However the case is complicated in the case of the post-creole continuum as in e.g. Belize or Jamaica: the basilect (the most coloquial and informal variety of the contact language) may be largely unintelligible to speakers of the lexifier (English in this case) while the mesolectal and acrolectal varieties would be partially intelligible. And "standard" English may be intelligible to a creole speaker who has a command of the whole continuum, from basilect to acrolect. In such cases, linguists tend to focus on the basilect as the "authentic" creole.
(2) Besides, is "mixed language" a kind of contact languages? A pidgin
or a creole? Or neither but a new branch? Sometimes, the terms make me
quite
>confused.
"Mixed language" used to be a general term for various contact varieties.
Now it is a defined as a variety which has elements from two sources x
and y
(to the extent that one cannot say the language is a form of x or y)
but without the morphological reducton characteristic of pidgins and creoles.
A: I take it you mean the code-mixing typical of university students (what John Gibbons called "U-gay-wa"). Let's apply the definitions from the Valentine's Day class:
A: We are not trying to teach you what it is, but to make you question and examine everyday "common-sense" ideas about language. The notion "a language" is a popular one and not a well-defined notion (Chomsky even calls it "obscure"). When boundaries exist they are usually social and political in nature, rather than anything definable in linguistic terms.
>as mentioned in the first lecture and as many many linguists suggested,
"mutual intelligibility" is the best way to identify a language. However,
>I think that "mutual intelligibility" is already a vague concept.
What do you mean by intelligible then? Fully intelligible? 80% or above?
50% or above?
Right, it's a matter of degree, but difficult to measure. Speakers can often give you a judgement such as "I can understand a little/some/most of this language". We don't know much about the reasons underlying these judgements -- it could involve similarities at various levels, or just some familiarity with the variety concerned.
> Indeed, it is an abstract concept, isn't it? Besides, there are zones
of transition. If the speakers of X Language and the ones of Y
>Language are said to be mutually intelligible while the speakers of
Y Language and the ones of Z Language are said to be mutually intelligible,
>according to the turth of "if A=B and B=C, then A=C", Language X and
Language Z should be in one language family?
Not really, because mutually intelligible does not mean "=". All it
means is that a certain (mathematically "fuzzy") proportion of the lexicon
and other systems are
sufficiently similar for people to (feel that they) understand each
other.
>if then, almost all the languages in the world can be said to be in one "Uni-Language Family"!
Not quite. There are often dialect continua within, say, Romance and Sinitic, but none between Romance and Germanic or between the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches of Sino-Tibetan. It's like speciation in biology (the process by which new species develop): separation in time and/or space introduces clean breaks between the evolutionary branches.
On the other hand, recall that some linguists believe that all the world's languages are in fact genetically related.
>2) Without solving the questions of "definition of language family", it is hard to define "pidgins" and "creoles"! Then, what should we do then?
We haven't solved the problem of "a language" but "language family"
is better-defined - a set of speech varieties which can be shown to have
derived
by regular and principled steps from a common ancestor. With this definition,
p & c languages appear as *not* members of a language family because
they exhibit elements derived from more than one family tree.
>3) What do we expect to learn after finishing this course? To understand what the "contact languages" are? What are their features?
Yes, hopefully: also to distinguish various types of contact language and to see what they can tell us about languages in general, e.g. how grammar develops.
>Is the way of studying this course is the same as the course of "The
Languages of the World"? We are expected to analyse the different languages'
data into a
>systematic way and try to find the explanations for the features?
Basically the plan is similar, but there is still time to change that and suggestions will be welcome!