LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Homo Erectus, Language Death, Phoneme

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Hendrikus Van Der Hulst

Document Summary

Ling 1010 lecture 27 - language change and the evolution of. Why systematic: aspects of language are affected in a methodical way, word order can change: ov (old. Changes do not make languages better or worse . Improve pronounceability: make languages clearer, make languages easier to learn. However: these motivations for change can restrain each other: easier articulation more dif cult perceptibility or learnability, etc. (sort of like checks and balances ) Changes can come from interactions between languages: phoneme can. When do languages change? change: voiced voiceless (/b/ (cid:15482) / p/). Why unpredictable: no way of predicting which changes at what time. Good: language emergence: creoles, new sign languages. Languages are always liable to change over time. Change does not mean decay or improvement. It is unseen before that languages change into things other than languages. This may be due to the unchangeable universal. Change in lexicon and relatedness to other languages.