NOTA de Miracles of Human Language: An introduction to Linguistics (updating)
Tool website: https://www.ethnologue.com/
Main entry on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/human-language
Wk 1
Language families
French & Italian(Romance Language) Enlish & German (Germanic Language) share the same grandmother language- Indo-European Language.
Supplimentary reading: http://www.guokr.com/question/16545/
Out of Ethnologue’s 6,909, for instance, only 230 are spoken in Europe, while 2,197 are spoken in Asia.
One area of particularly high linguistic diversity is Papua-New Guinea, where there are an estimated 832 languages spoken by a population of around 3.9 million. That makes the averagenumber of speakers around 4,500, possibly the lowest of any area of the world. These languages belong to between 40 and 50 distinct families. Of course, the number of families may change as scholarship improves, but there is little reason to believe that these figures are radically off the mark.
whatmakes languages distinct from one another turns out to be much more a social and political issue than a linguistic one, and most of the cited numbers are matters of opinion rather than science.
The late Max Weinreich used to say that“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”He was talking about the status of Yiddish, long considered a “dialect” because it was not identified with any politically significant entity. The distinction is still often implicit in talk about European “languages” vs. African “dialects.” What counts as a language rather than a “mere” dialect typically involves issues of statehood, economics, literary traditions and writing systems, and other trappings of power, authority and culture — with purely linguistic considerations playing a less significant role.
For instance, Chinese “dialects” such as Cantonese, Hakka, Shanghainese, etc. are just as different from one another (and from the dominant Mandarin) as Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian. They are not mutually intelligible, but their status derives from their association with a single nation and a shared writing system, as well as from explicit government policy.
In contrast, Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same system (referred to in earlier times as “Hindustani”), but associated with different countries (India and Pakistan), different writing systems, and different religious orientations. Although varieties in use in India and Pakistan by well-educated speakers are somewhat more distinct than the local vernaculars, the differences are still minimal—far less significant than those separating Mandarin from Cantonese, for example.
For an extreme example of this phenomenon, consider the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, spoken over much of the territory of the former Yugoslavia and generally considered a single language with different local dialects and writing systems. Within this territory, Serbs (who are largely Orthodox) use a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croats (largely Roman Catholic) use the Latin alphabet. Within a period of only a few years after the breakup of Yugoslavia as a political entity, at least three new languages (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) had emerged, although the actual linguistic facts had not changed a bit.
不同语言的相似用语，同一语言内不同用法：
If we try to distinguish languages from one another simply in terms of their words and the patterns we can observe in sentences, problems arise. Very different languages can share words (through borrowing) while different speakers of the “same” language may vary widely in their vocabulary due to factors of education or speaking style. Different languages may display the same sentence patterns, while a single language may display a great variety of patterns.
