Status Updates From An Introduction to Language

اول تابستون فکر می‌کردم بتونم هفته‌ای یه فصل بخونم ولی ماشالا حجمش یه مقدار بیشتر از تصوراتمه. دارم لذت می‌برم از مسیر ولی.

هم تخصصی‌تر و مفصل‌تره از یول و هم روون و خوش‌خون‌تر.

The colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Disobvious? Unobvious? Exobvious? Antiobvious? Inobvious? Subobvious? Nonobvious?

Not clear!

As Juliet says in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:
What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

What an absolute banger, I absolutely love this book 10/10, may Fromkin rest in peace🙏

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found this copy in a used bookstore in Bab Doukala, Marrakech. I've read somewhere before that it is used as a coursebook to teach linguistics in most universities abroad, so i grabbed it right away.

It's just a hopm skip and jump to the end.
"كلها فركة كعب"، وأُنهي الكتاب.

A dialect is not an inferior or degraded form of a language, and logically could not be so because a language is a collection of dialects.

In 1888 members of the International Phonetic Association developed a phonetic alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all languages.

Maxims

An implicature is a great example of extra-truth-conditional meaning.

The best-known lexical relations are synonyms.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This is a very interesting sentence, because it shows that syntax can be separated from semantics - that form can be separated from meaning.

Back-formations
"Some word creation comes from deliberately miscast back-formations. The word bikini comes from the Bikini atoll of the Marshall Islands. Because the first syllable bi- is a morpheme meaning ‘two’ in words like bicycle, some clever person called a topless bathing suit a monokini and a tank top with a bikini bottom a tankini."

Birds cannot tell us their story, however beautifully they sing.

Displacement and discreteness are two fundamental properties that distinguish human language from the communication systems of birds and other animals.

In 1762 Bishop Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar with Critical Notes. Lowth prescribed a number of new rules for English, many of them influenced by his personal taste. Lowth, decided that “two negatives make a positive” and therefore one should say I don’t have any; and that even when you is singular it should be followed by the plural were.

Creativity is a universal property of human language.

just finished the core parts of grammar: morphology, syntax, semantics and phonetics and phonology, and going into PART 3.

Peoples’ thoughts and perceptions are not determined by the words and structures of their language. We are not prisoners of our linguistic systems. If speakers were unable to think about something for which their language had no specific word, translations would be impossible, as would learning a second language.

In a society where “linguistic profiling” is used to discriminate against speakers of a minority dialect, it may behoove those speakers to learn the prestige dialect rather than wait for social change. But linguistically, prestige and standard dialects do not have superior grammars.

To understand our humanity, one must understand the nature of language that makes us human.

i love linguistics and documenting that i’m doing my ling101 readings regularly. sue me. it’s the single thing that brings me joy!!! and makes me consider changing my major so what.big deal.

finished the chapter on syntax, delving into semantics

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A little progress in a big while.
This part was on the brain and language or about neurolinguistics.

Loved this chapter. But time to jump to another book.

«The ancient philosophers asked whether a sound is produced if a tree falls in the middle of the forest with no one to hear it. This question has been answered by the science of acoustics. Objectively, a sound is produced; subjectively, no sound is heard.»

IPA, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Semantics, Pragmatics, Implicatures, Presuppositions, and many others! I loved revisiting these concepts again!