All Things Linguistic

superlinguo:

In Canada, the Nunavut Official Languages Act came into force this month. This means the Inuit language will be given equal status to English and French, as official languages.

You can read more about this excellent recognition of Indigenous language here, at Language Magazine: 

“All three official languages will enjoy equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in territorial institutions — namely in the Legislative Assembly, the courts, and the departments of the government of Nunavut — and public agencies.”

In the previous piece of relevant legislation (now superceded), the Inuit language was considered secondary (alongside six other Aboriginal languages) to French and English.

Down here in Australia, I think it would be fantastic to see us move towards recognition of Aboriginal languages. A few months ago our friends over at Crikey.com’s Fully(Sic) blog talked about the current political climate of constitutional recognition of Australia’s first peoples and their languages. It’s interesting to note their take on Aboriginal languages being considered official (or “national”) languages - blog post here.

I mean, it’s great to see the Inuit language being recognized, but the language has been spoken in the area for thousands of years before Nunavut became a territory in 1999, as well as in the Northwest Territories and elsewhere in Northern Canada, so I can’t help but think this is a bit late. Not to mention all of the other Aboriginal languages that are spoken in Canada. Hopefully this is the first step of a broader trend.

The writing system in the stop sign above is Inuktitut syllabics, which is related to Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, used to write Cree, Oji-Cree, and Ojibwe. The basic principle is rotating a consonant symbol to reflect which vowel comes after it, as can be seen in the table below. 

wuglife:

markedbysunspots:

Grice’s conversational maxims.

aka, conversational rules that we all break.

The best way to think about Grice’s Maxims that I’ve ever encountered is that

• They are NOT RULES.
• They are baseline conventions
• Flouting them is adding a layer of meaning, not “breaking a rule”

This means that you aren’t “doing something wrong” when you respond to “How are you doing today?” with “It’s raining.” It means you are actually giving an even more meaningful statement.

Let’s break this down a tad:

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This is a great explanation. I like to think of Grice’s Maxims as rules for the hearer, more than rules for the speaker. So whenever you hear someone saying something, you assume that they are following the maxims and you interpret their speech as if they are. So if something looks like it violates a particular maxim, you assume that the speaker had some good reason to do so and try to figure out what additional meaning they were trying to add. 

For example, if you ask someone what’s for dinner, they might reply “food”, which violates the maxim of quantity (it’s not as informative as the answer you’re looking for). But because they didn’t give a more specific answer, you can interpret that to mean that they don’t know or they don’t want to tell you, so you’ve still gotten a relevant answer. Flouting a Gricean Maxim is the first step to inferring a layer of additional meaning, not a sign of bad speech! 

The Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny Theory of Language Origin

Ontology Recapitulates Phylogeny (also known as Recapitulation Theory) is a theory of evolution that suggests that as an organism develops (ontology) it follows the same developmental steps as its whole species followed in evolution (phylogeny). For example, a cluster of cells becomes a fish-like organism becomes a mammal.

This theory is not generally accepted anymore for animal evolution, but some people still propose it for the origin of language. By this account, children’s gradual development of more and more complex expressions mirrors how human language as a whole grew gradually more complex, so studying child language acquisition might provide insight into how early humans began speaking.  

However, not everyone agrees that language complexity happened gradually, since modern examples of new languages formation are creoles, which are made fully complex by the first generation of child speakers. This being said, circumstances like brain development and linguistic input are definitely different between modern children in a creole situation versus the earliest humans, so this might also account for some differences. It’s still an open question. 

A really inaccurate way to use ontology recapitulates phylogeny in language development is to assume that every speaker of a language must know everything about the language’s history in order to speak it. Reasoning along this line is often used to argue that the etymology of a word is its only meaning (which can, incidentally be used to prove that black is white), or that inflectional processes from one language must be used when its words are borrowed into another (see cactus, cacti).