Ling 001: Linguistic Typology

Differences

• This is just the arbitrariness of sound/meaning connections viewed across languages
• It may be that languages have different vocabularies for different things
• This has caused some to think that the language that we speak fundamentally affects how we think about or categorize reality
• This is the so-called Whorfian Hypothesis: language determines thought
• This hypothesis has been largely discredited, as discussed in various places

Interpreting this

• Given that languages are simply going to vary in terms of their set of sound/meaning connections; some further questions
• What other types of variation are there?
• Variation in inventories
• Variation in e.g. word-order requirements
• How much variation is there when we are looking at rules rather than inventories?

Inventory Differences

• Another way in which languages differ is in terms of their inventories of elements
• Recall that we discussed this in our unit on phonology:
• English: 30 something phonemes
• Abkhaz: A language spoken in the Caucasus; one dialect has c. 67 consonant phonemes
• Hawaiian: smaller phoneme inventory