Study of Words

What is Linguistics?

By Dr. Kim Johnson of The Lukeion Project

Linguistics is defined as “The study of language.” It might seem as though human beings are experts in language. In every human culture across the globe, people communicate using spoken or signed language. There are around 7,000 languages of various types and relationships around the globe. Human beings typically speak and listen to language for their entire lives.

How do we think of concepts and then use our mouths to create sounds that are then translated into similar concepts in the hearer’s brain? How do the mechanics of language work? Why is the plural of mouse “mice,” but the plural of house isn’t “hice”?  Even when we make the plural the same way for two words, why do we pronounce the s in “dogs” differently than the s in “cats?” 

To study language we break it down into its component parts, mimicking how children learn to speak. We can talk about how to turn sounds into words, how to give words meanings, and how to turn words into sentences. In each of these areas, sometimes linguists focus on parts that are specific to one language and sometimes focus on universal traits of language.

How language sounds: Phonetics

The basic building blocks of language are the sounds we make using the tools of our mouth, tongue, throat and nose. Linguists have attempted to categorize all the sounds humans could possibly make according to what shape our mouth is, how the air is flowing, whether we are vibrating our nasal tract, and so on. Once we have these bits, called phonemes, we can study how sounds in one language vary across regions (accents) and how different languages use different sounds.

What makes a word:  Morphology

In The Lukeion Project’s word roots program, Witty Wordsmith, students join Wilbur as he examines words and their classical Latin and Greek roots. Word roots are one part of the area of morphology, the study of how we use words in a language.

There are more parts to words than just the roots, though. If I say, “I really flugged yesterday during class,” you would probably guess that “flug” is a verb. On the other hand, if I talked about flugition, you would know that flugition was a noun (and you would know how to pronounce it!) even though you wouldn’t have any idea what the word meant. The suffixes -ed and -ition are examples of morphemes, the smallest units of words that have meaning. The “s” that I added to cats and dogs is also an example of a morpheme. Studying how languages create words gives insight into how they work.

How language works: Syntax

In Barbarian Diagrammarian, students, along with the Barbarian Leland and his faithful Lemur, break down English sentences into their component parts and visually chart their relationships.

Syntax is how languages express relationships between words. Some parts of syntax are specific to a particular language but linguists also consider what is common to all languages. All sentences can be analyzed by breaking them apart into pieces which make sense together. For example, “The Lukeion instructor ate the delicious peach” can be broken down like this: “[  [[the] [[Lukeion] [instructor]]] [[ate] [[the] [[delicious] [peach]]]]”. To cut down on brackets, we can use trees or other ways to show the relationships between words.

In English, the constituents are typically right next to each other. In Latin the adjective “delicious” would belong to “peach” by virtue of its gender and case. Every language studied so far has two parts of a sentence: the subject and the predicate. Everything can be broken down into its constituent parts in different ways depending on the grammar.

And beyond!

In addition to these main building blocks, there are dozens of other areas that are parts of the subject area of linguistics. Linguists study the history and development of language such as how languages change and combine to make new languages. They also study how language is used in different societies and cultures. Psycholinguistics is the study of what is going on in people’s brains as they use language. Linguists study signed languages as well as spoken language. Any aspect of human interaction involves language, and therefore can be studied by linguists.

Why might you need linguistics?

If you are planning on learning more than one language, studying linguistics can help you make connections and highlight differences between languages. Knowing the history of how Latin morphed into Spanish, Italian and French can make learning those languages easier. Another joy of linguistics is learning about obscure or extinct languages and how their structure can be completely unfamiliar.

For those of you who are writers, linguistics can help you to create bold new languages for your stories. J. R. R. Tolkien is the premier example of a writer using language in his creation of a literary world. There are many other examples from Klingon (which is a language you can actually learn to speak) to even Parseltongue from the Harry Potter books.

These days, there is a great interest in trying to help computers understand and create language. It turns out that human beings bring a lot of complex background to understanding even simple sentences that cause computers a lot of trouble. To understand how to “teach” a computer to be better at understanding language, we must understand it better ourselves.

Of course, one of the best reasons to learn something is for the joy of learning something interesting and new. As I study linguistics to advise the Lukeion Linguistic Club, I am constantly amazed by the variety and complexity of the ways human beings communicate. My eyes are being opened to things that have always confused me but turn out to have rational explanations. Linguistics puzzles resemble mathematics puzzles in many ways. However, where competition math puzzles seem to rely on tricks and advanced knowledge, linguistics puzzles often rely on our human instinct as a speaker of a language.

What is the Lukeion Linguistics Club about?

Lukeion’s Linguistics Club serves a couple of purposes. First off, and importantly, it offers a space for students of Lukeion to get together in a less formal space and have some fun!  But that’s not all we do.

We talk some each week about various aspects of linguistics. So far, we have explored the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), some ambiguous sentences, and how to build meaning from words and suffixes. We plan on talking about constructed languages, language acquisition, and some of the history of English.

We also spend some time solving puzzles from the International Linguistics Olympiad. These are logical-language puzzles that highlight aspects of language like word order, declensions, affixes, and so on. Homeschool students can sign up to compete in these national and international linguistics competitions. The puzzles are fun for their own sake---they involve languages from across the globe and many interesting constructions.

If any of this strikes your fancy, all current Lukeion students are invited to join us for linguistics club. We meet on Fridays from 1-2 PM (Eastern time). Email me to join the mailing list, class web page, and address for our Adobe Connect meeting room.

 

 

 

HOPE

Reboxing Pandora

By Dr. Sue Fisher with The Lukeion Project

Have you ever seen an unboxing? These are videos in which people will open boxes to showcase and discuss products, removing them one by one. They are generally calm, measured productions, designed to let you examine and consider each item as it comes out.

Well, the first unboxing from the ancient world was not nearly so peaceful or controlled. The story of Pandora, found first in Hesiod, Works and Days 53-105, is one known to many. She was the first female, created by the gods, who let all the evils into the world. Having been given a jar from the gods (yes, the original was a jar not a box) and an unhealthy dose of curiosity to go along with it, she was expressly told not to open it. As one might expect, she didn’t last too long and soon she had pried the lid off and out flew all manner of evils into the world. The story serves as an explanation (etiology) for how hardship, devastation, and disease came into the world. But the most interesting part of the story is the end, where Pandora slams the lid back on and manages to keep hope inside.

Was it a good thing that hope was kept inside, not lost into the world? Or do we need hope out there flying around with the evils to combat them? Moreover, what was hope doing in a jar of evils in the first place?

The 5th c. B.C. Athenian playwright Aeschylus might have answered this question when he had his Prometheus, chained to a rock in the Caucasus mountains, list hope as the first thing he gave to humans, even before the fire he stole for them and for which he was paying the penalty. Prometheus’ conversation with the daughters of Ocean (chorus), who came to visit him, is very enlightening: 

Prometheus: I allowed mankind to stop foreseeing doom.
Chorus: What medicine did you find for that disease?
Prometheus: I planted in them hopes that would obscure it.
Chorus: That was a worthy gift you gave to mortals.

(Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 250-253)

Taken together, in these passages the ancient Greeks explain the plight of humankind but also offer a remedy. “What medicine did you find for that disease?” the chorus asks. The remedy is hope.

So how do you foster hope when the evils of the world are flying around? You can’t just stuff them back in the jar, after all. But you can fill a jar with all manner of good things. You make a good-things jar.

It’s so easy. Get a jar (or a box), and each week write down one good thing on a slip of paper or piece of index card and plop it in there. This can be anything. You heard a funny story – write that down and put it in there. You got a new puppy. That’s a super good thing. You saw a cool bird, or went mountain biking, or got to hold a newborn baby, or hung out with a friend. Perhaps you finally learned that concept or vocabulary word or measure of music that has been elusive up until now. It may be big, like you got your braces off or got the part you wanted in the play. Or it could be small, like you found a fantastic acorn. (I love a good acorn.) It doesn’t matter. If it’s good, it’s fair game. Put the date on it if you want; it’s kind of fun later when you go back and read them to see what date it was. But if you don’t want to, no matter – it’s YOUR good-things jar. If you want to do it every day, that’s great. But do it at least once a week, so they start to build up. 

As your jar starts to fill with good things, your heart will start to fill with gratitude and your hope will grow. And as your hope gets larger, the evils will diminish. This is the remedy. 

American poet Emily Dickinson knew the power of hope and described it like a bird that rests in the jars of our souls. Hope is the gentle but relentless and powerful force that asks nothing of us but holds up firm in any storm. No matter the evils, hope is still the remedy.

HOPE
Emily Dickinson

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the Gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I 've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.