Week 2 Lab: TEDEd Language Videos

We are not completely sure whether there used to be one single language, but the thousands of languages used today can be traced back to a few original languages (protolanguage)
Groups of people ages ago lived in small communities and when groups of people split off from the community, they became isolated and started evolving different characteristics
Grammar and syntax used as guides for connecting languages to each other (words do not just have to sound like each other)
Two main problems that linguists face when connecting language family trees:

Around 400, humans migrated to the British Isles and began speaking what is now called Old English
Around 700, viking invasions began in the country, splitting it in half where one side lived Saxons and the other side lived Danes, who spoke Old Norse

In 1066, Norman vikings who adopted a French lifestyle placed their king on the English throne and brought Catholic clergymen, making the British royalty language French and Latin

British society was split into two, with one group considered the French-speaking aristocracy and the other group the Old English-speaking peasants
The English language expanded as more words became used

Noble and authoritative connotation still seen with words of French origin, and a connotation of peasantry has stuck with words of Saxon origin

Typically think of past, present, and future as the three tenses used in English, but each of those can split further into four categories

Japanese only uses tenses describing the past and non-past whereas Buli and Tukang Besi use tenses describing the future and non-future
Mandarin Chinese does not use tenses at all
Some languages split tense into what happened years, weeks, and days ago; other languages' tenses are intertwined with moods to convey urgency, necessity, or probability of events

"Conlang" is short for "constructed language" created by a person/people like in shows/movies
Even if you know all of the words in another language, you still have to know how to put them together to create a coherent sentence
Real languages evolve over time
Elvish is more of an outline for a language instead of an actual one
Klingon, Dothraki, and Na'vi can be considered real languages, as there is a Hamlet translation into Dothraki

About 1,000 new words are added to the Oxford English dictionary every year
When a word is not readily available to describe something in English as the world evolves, we come up with a new way to describe it

English commonly borrows from other languages that have a word to describe what we are trying to say
English words already used can be combined to represent characteristics of what we are trying to describe (like starfish or spork)
Old words that stopped being used can come back with a new definition (like villain, which used to mean peasant farmer)
Usefulness and catchiness can help determine if a new word will catch on and go mainstream

Unless they are being used in a list, they should only connect clauses that are related in some way
Rarely used immediately before coordinating conjunctions because it can replace them to shorten a sentence or give it variety

Prescriptivism: a given language should follow consistent rules
Descriptivism: see variation and adaptation as a natural and necessary part of language

As written language became common, spoken language became standardized to promote understanding of languages within an area

Those who learned a spoken language had to learn the new standardized version to avoid being seen as "less than"

More recently, speech and writing have been considered separate from each other as spoken language has a more flexible structure to convey mood, avoids complex clauses, makes changes to avoid awkward pronunciations, and removes sounds to make speech faster
Grammar is seen as a set of linguistic habits that are constantly being negotiated and reinvented by the entire group of language users

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