Introduction
I absolutely love languages. This includes, but is not at all limited to, my native language of English. There are many languages that have taken hold of my interest over the years. Below are some specific pages dedicated to some that have grabbed my attention recently. If you do not see your own language, please let me know—if you send me an email with a few words of your native language, it would really make my day!
Things language learners should know
There are many branches of linguistics that you should know about, and linguistics is a very rich and fascinating field of study. I am by no means an expert, but I aspire to be a knowledgeable outsider. However, if you are interested in other languages, as I am, there are a few key branches you should know about, in no particular order: semantics; phonology; orthography; accidence; syntax. Roughly speaking, we can consider the following correspondences: semantics is about meaning; phonology is about pronunciation; orthography is about spelling; accidence and syntax are about grammar.
Orthography
The word orthography comes from Greek “orthos” (correct) and “graphein” (writing). It refers to various things, including: the form of individual letters; the means by which individual letter are combined to form words (viz. this is what is normally referred to as spelling); which letters are capitalized; and which additional symbols are used to convey additional meaning (e.g. punctuation).
Accidence
Accidence refers to the way words change their form depending on the role the play in a given context. In English, accidence plays a minor role because the vast majority of words don’t change form at all. This is the case for not only English, which may be either a West Germanic language (the majority view) or a North Germanic language (a strong minority view), but also for Romance languages and others across the world. These languages are said to be “weakly inflected”, meaning forms change very little. On the other hand, other languages, for example the many Slavic languages, are highly inflected, meaning the words may change form significantly depending on their role.
Consider the words Ron, Luba, dog, and ball. Let’s focus on Luba in a
few sentences.
| Sentence | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Luba is a dog. | Luba is the subject. |
| Ron loves Luba. | Luba is the direct object. (Ron is the subject, loves is the verb.) |
| Ron gives the ball to Luba. | Luba is the indirect object. (Ron is the subject, gives is the verb, ball is the direct object.) |
Now, let’s translate these sentences into Russian.
| Sentence | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Люба собака. | Люба is in the nominative case. |
| Рон любит Любу. | Любу is in the accusative case. |
| Рон дает мяч Любе. | Любе is in the dative case. |
Notice how the form of Luba (e.g. Люба/Любу/Любе) changes in Russian depending on the role of the word in the
sentence (highly inflected), whereas in English it’s always just Luba (weakly inflected).
I’m using ‘English-style’ word order in Russian to make the parallels clearer—in general,
Russian word order is extremely flexible, but some orderings are more common than others.
In English, on the other hand, the word order is very rigid (more on that later).
It’s worth pointing out that in addition to Ron gives the ball to Luba it is equally
valid in English to say Ron gives Luba the ball. In both cases, Luba is the indirect
object and ball is the direct object.
Now let’s go out a little further to talk about possession, and we’ll inadvertently
encounter a bit about prepositions as well. Possession and plurality are the only
accidence markings on most English words, e.g. dog (singular), dog's (singular possessive),
dogs (plural), dogs' (plural possessive).
In Romance languages, possession is not indicated by changing the word (accidence) but rather
by adding a preposition (syntax).
I’ll use Spanish as an example:
la perra (singular), de la perra (singular possessive), las perras (plural), de las perras (plural possessive).
You may protest that the Spanish word for dog is el perro, not la perra.
It’s quite common for words referring to living creatures to change based on the
gender of the thing in question. This goes for human professions (e.g. el profesor, la profesora)
and animals (e.g. el perro, la perra). And Luba is a girl. A very good girl.
Now let’s look at a sentence that indicates possession.
Here’s pictorial explanation as a visual aid:
| Sentence | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Luba’s ball is on the floor. | Luba's indicates possession. (The subject is ball or Luba's ball, on the floor is a prepositional phrase.) |
| Любы мяч на поле. | Любы is in the genitive case. (The Russian word for floor is пол, поле is in the prepositional case.) |
| La pelota de Luba está en el piso. | The preposition de indicates possession. |
Syntax
Syntax refers to the way words are combined to convey meaning. Individual words have their own meaning, and combinations of words have a meaning that may or may not be the trivial combination of their individual meanings.
There are many aspects of syntax, but a key one is word order. In highly inflected languages, the word order is flexible. In weakly inflected languages, the word order is rigid, and slight changes in word order can change the meaning (or render the statement meaningless).
Consider the English sentence Ron loves Luba. If we change the word order to
Luba loves Ron we get a different meaning. If we change it to Loves Luba Ron,
Loves Ron Luba, Luba Ron loves, or Ron Luba loves, we get ungrammatical and meaningless sentences.
(It is left as an exercise for the interested reader to verify that there are 3! = 6
possible orderings of a sentence with 3 distinct words.)
Now let’s translate the original sentence into Russian: Рон любит Любу.
The word Рон is in the nominative case, indicating it’s the subject, and the word Любу
is in the accusative case (the nominative is Люба), indicating it’s the direct object.
If we reverse the names, as we did in our first alternate sentence, we get Любу любит Рон,
which has the same meaning as the original. We can also do Любит Любу Рон,
Любит Рон Любу, Любу Рон любит, and Рон Любу любит, and we get a grammatical sentence with the same meaning as the original.
If we want to reverse the meaning, we have to change individual words themselves, rather
than the order, to obtain Люба любит Рона. As before, we can use any word order we like,
and the meaning is the same.
Spelling and Grammar
What is meant by spelling is usually clear to the casual reader. But it is hopefully clear that orthography is not only spelling. Moreover, there is some overlap between orthography and accidence, in the sense that the form of words is part of orthography, regardless of their role in conveying meaning.
What is meant by grammar is also usually clear to the casual reader. It consists primarily of accidence and syntax, and occasionally of orthography as well (e.g. a mistakenly added or omitted apostrophe is a mistake of orthography, or of both orthography and accidence).
Sometimes, these things can be blended in highly non-trivial ways.
Consider the highly (grammatically) treacherous sentence they're walking towards their car over there.
The words they're, their, and there are phonologically identical (viz. they sound the same)
but semantically distinct (viz. they all mean different things).
A sentence like theyre walking towards their car over there has only a trivial orthographic
mistake, viz. the contraction should be they + are = they're, not theyre.
A sentence like their walking towards their care over there, on the other hand, has a mistake
that is both orthographical and accidental, in that it is both a misspelling and a use of the
wrong form of the word they.
A sentence like the preceding or there walking towards there car over there
is the kind of thing that will make
a high school English teacher cry tears of blood, since it contains mistakes of accidence, syntax,
and semantics, since the word there is not supposed to be used that way, which leads to a sentence
that is semantically meaningless. In English, it’s a very easy mistake to make (and indeed
mergers and swaps
of they’re, their, and there are quite common) because they sound the same.
But the way in
which this is obviously gibberish becomes quite clear upon translation into other languages
in which those words are not homonyms.
| English | Russian | Spanish |
|---|---|---|
| They’re walking towards their car over there. | Они ходят к своей машине там. | Ellos caminan hacia su carro allá. |
| There walking towards there car over there. (This is wrong but intelligible.) | Там ходят к там машине там. (This is complete gibberish.) | Allá caminan hacia allá carro allá. (This is complete gibberish.) |
| Their walking towards their car over their. (This is wrong but intelligible.) | Их ходят к их машине их. (This is complete gibberish.) | Su caminan hacia su carro su. (This is complete gibberish.) |
The astute reader will observe two different words for their in Russian:
их = their and свой = their (own), with the further complication that
as it appears in context, свой takes the form своей because the preposition к takes the dative case.
If you read the above and saw the prepositional case and are now wondering how it is that some prepositions take the prepositional case and others take different cases, you are experiencing something that many students of Russian go through. No naturally evolved language in the world is purely logical. In a way, that’s what makes them human and, as frustrating as it may be to try to learn such irregularities, that’s what makes them special and beautiful and worth learning.
Back to the original point, both English and Spanish have a built-in ambiguity about who ‘they’
are. In English, this sentence is almost always interpreted in such a way that the they ‘they’ referred
to by their is the same ‘they’ referred to by they're. Occasionally, we will reinforce this by
adding the word own to get the sentence they're walking towards their own car, their own as
distinguished from somebody else’s. There’s no way in English to specify a different they.
In Russian, one always uses various forms of свой or себя/себе/собой when referring to the
same person as the subject.
So oни ходят к своей машине там more specifically means they're walking towards their own car,
while oни ходят к их машине там would mean they're walking towards some other group of people's car;
it is a rather odd construction that would probably be phrased in a different way.
Descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics
Generally speaking, linguistics is a descriptive field, meaning it describes how languages work, in contradistinction to how one might believe that languages should work. In some cases, individual countries have national academies that actively prescribe the best practices for the language(s) indigenous to that country. In other cases, there is no governing body, and the language evolves freely on its own.
English, for example, is not regulated by any governing body. There are some widely acknowledged “style guides”, e.g. The Associated Press Stylebook, that make recommendations about grammar and usage. Most English language dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, are purely descriptive. For example, use of the word literally as an intensifier rather than to indicate something in actuality is now listed in most dictionaries.