#language universals

[linguisticalities]

All Human Languages Mysteriously Obey Zipf's Law Of Abbreviation. It Applies To Bird Songs Too.

Who knew a tweet tweet could be so fascinating?

[linguisticalities]

This is the word that exists in all human languages, according to research.

Our languages are incredibly diverse and it is highly unlikely to find a word or a handful of words that sound the same in all languages. Except that there is a word that is shared

[linguisticalities]

The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus

In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.Photograph…

[linguistness]

Basic Colour Terms

-> by Berlin and Kay (1969) 

Colour categories are a great example for language universals, as well as for prototypes. 

First off, each language has independently developed different words for colours and is therefore an example for universals in all languages. However, do all languages identify the same colours? 

This is where prototype categories come into play. Usually, there is one optimal example for each colour category (a ‘prototype’), e.g. the reddest red, the greenest green, etc. However, the boundaries of these colour categories are quite blurred.

Take the chart below. Which of these colours would you sort into the category ‘blue’ and which into the category ‘green’? Are there colours where you’re unsure? Where do you draw the line?

That is basically what Berlin and Kay did in their experiment / research. They compared the colour term vocabulary of 98 different languages (they focused on the typical elements of a category, not just on the category boundaries). The participants were asked to name the basic colour terms of their native language and to identify the focal points and boundaries of each of these words on a Munsell chart like the one above.

The colour terms had to be monoleximic (not ‘lemon-colored’, ‘blue-green’, etc.), no extensions (e.g. ‘crimson’ and ‘scarlet’ are both included in ‘red’), they must not be restricted to a narrow class of objects (e.g. not ‘blond’), and they have to be psychologically salient for informants (e.g. not ‘bluish’). 

Results 

-> from 1969

the test persons were very consistent in the identification of prototypes, but not so much in the identification of category boundaries 

the number of basic colour terms is between 2 and 11/12

if a language has 11 basic colour terms, then the categories are: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and grey

examples for languages with 11 or 12 basic colour terms: Arabic, English, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian (12), Hungarian (12), Zuni, Korean, etc.

if a language has less than 11 basic colour terms, then there are clear limitations on which categories it may encode -> these can be described by 7 implicative universals: 

all languages have words for ‘white’ and ‘black’

if a language has 3 colour terms, then it has a word for ‘red’

if a language has 4 colour terms, then it either has a word for ‘green’ or for ‘yellow’

.....

All languages follow this similar 7 stage pattern / development for colour terms: 

Evolution of colour vocabulary:

all languages start with two colour terms

new colour terms are added over time

11 colour terms are the maximum

Later revisions:

grey can emerge earlier than at stage 7, sometimes already at stage 3 (e.g. Mandarin, Hopi, Tsonga)

some languages don’t distinguish ‘green’ and ‘blue’, but have words for later colours like ‘brown’ (e.g. Bantu languages)

only 6 salient perceptual landmarks (rather than 11): black, white, red, green, blue, yellow (vast majority of basic color terms in all languages denote one or several of these six primary colors) 

the terms in the two-color systems do not simply denote ‘black’ and ‘white’, but they partition the entire color space (e.g. Dani (language from Papua/New Guinea): partition of the color space into ”warm” and “cool” colors)

next to the six primary colors there are derived color categories (so-called fuzzy intersection) and composite basic categories (like “warm colors”): e.g. orange = red ∩ yellow, warm = red ∪ yellow

every color category system partitions the entire color space -> evolutionary sequences move from coarser to finer partitions

.

Sources: 

http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/lehre/ws0910/languagesOfTheWorld/colors.pdf

https://grahamshawcross.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/colourprecedence.jpg

http://www.academicstar.us/UploadFile/Picture/2014-3/201432003913704.pdf

[plusvoice]

“First, I take the position that all language universals are implicational universals. Only under that assumption can one avoid arbitrary decisions as to what will count as a language. Most work on language universals has systematically ignored child language, written language, sign language, non-native language (Roman Jakobson’s English, etc.), and the language of aphasics and schizophrenics. For example, linguists happily accept the claim that all languages have nasal consonants even though they are perfectly aware of languages that do not, for example, American Sign Language. It is of course reasonable for linguists to ignore ASL here: the universal relates to the vocal medium of spoken languages. However, the irrelevance of ASL to some language universals does not make it irrelevant to all discussion of language universals – it clearly is relevant to discussions of universals of constituent order or of semantic distinctions in the lexicon. If ‘language’ is understood broadly and universals are taken to be implicational, exclusion of any types of language from the domains of universals must be for cause: the antecedent of the implicational universal must give the grounds on which the particular varieties of language are to be excluded (for example, ‘If the medium of expression of a language is vocal, it will have nasal consonants’, excludes ASL by virtue of its medium of expression being nonvocal), and the linguist must attempt to state universals in their greatest generality, that is by specifying as narrowly as possible the conditions that would remove a variety of language from the applicability of the putative universal.

Second, I wish to dissociate myself from an assumption that is so popular among linguists that it is difficult to find anyone who disputes it, namely the assumption that people who talk the same have the same linguistic competence. I have recently been advocating (McCawley 1976a; 1977a) a conception of language acquisition in which many details of acquisition are random or are influenced by ephemeral details of linguistic experience. Such a scheme for language acquisition need not lead to gross inhomogeneity in a linguistic community, since there is ample opportunity for revision of learning that has made the speaker grossly divergent from his neighbors. Moreover, it is easy to think of alternative linguistic rules and underlying forms that yield exactly the same well-formedness data and exactly the same pairings of meaning and expression; indeed, linguists are perpetually arguing about such alternative analyses, for example, the analysis in which the English regular plural ending is /iz/ and a rule deletes its vowel under one set of circumstances, versus the analysis in which the ending is /z/ and a rule inserts a vowel under other circumstances. Maybe for some people plurals work the one way and for other people the other way. The assumption that all normal adult members of a linguistic community have the same internalized analysis in such cases is gratuitous. In the rare cases where linguists have looked for interpersonal variation in language, they have generally found it. For example, Haber (1975) reports that speakers who ostensibly form English plurals the same way give a broad range of responses on tasks requiring the formation of plurals of novel words, with each speaker having his own ways of dealing with novel plurals. There is also considerable individual variation in the morphemic relations that speakers of English perceive, as one can readily verify by asking one’s friends whether pulley is related to pull or tinsel to tin.

Third, and closely related to the last point, I claim conscientious objector status in the ongoing war against ‘excessive power’ of grammatical devices. We have all been taught to limit our descriptive devices as tightly as possible, preferably to those that were good enough for our scientific forefathers, since seemingly innocuous devices may turn out to harbor within them the dread Turing machine. It has accordingly become common for linguists to attempt to resolve disputes among competing analyses by drafting sweeping restrictions on grammars so as to give one of the competing analyses a legal monopoly. I will argue below that many proposed language universals have served only to allow linguists to construct cheap arguments for their favorite analyses and that those arguments have given the illusion of significance only because their alleged role in the war effort against ‘excessive power’ has obscured important respects in which they are extremely implausible."

McCawley 1982. "Language universals in linguistic argumentation." from Thirty Million Theories of Grammar.

[linguisticalities]

(via Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists )

[linguisten]

the olfactory modality of communication