scholarly journals Variation in Onko Dialect of Yoruba

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (13) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Gbenga Fakuade ◽  
◽  
Lawal Tope Aminat ◽  
Adewale Rafiu ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Descriptive Statistics ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Theoretical Tool ◽  
The Family

This paper examined variation in Onko dialect using the family tree model and the corresponding comparative method as the theoretical tool. A wordlist of basic items and a designed frame technique were used to gather data for this study. The data were presented in tables and the analyses were done through descriptive statistics. The data were analyzed to determine variation at the phonological, syntactic and lexical levels. The study revealed differences between Standard Yoruba and Onko dialect as well as the variation therein. Two basic factors discovered to be responsible for variations in Onko are geography (distribution of Onko communities) and language contact. The paper established that Onko exhibits variations, which are however not significant enough to disrupt mutual intelligibility among the speakers, and thus all the varieties remain a single dialect.

The Arabic Origins of English and Indo-European “Definite Articles”: A Radical Linguistic Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 26
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Method ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
General Level ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Definite Articles

This paper traces the Arabic origins or cognates of the “definite articles” in English and Indo-European languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. The data comprises the definite articles in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Latin, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Polish, Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian, and Arabic. The results clearly indicate that five different types of such articles emerged in the data, all of which have true Arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change, especially lexical, semantic, or morphological shift. Therefore, the results support the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which, unlike the Family Tree Model or Comparative Method, Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit not only belong to the same language family, renamed Eurabian or Urban family, but also are dialects of the same language, with Arabic being their origin all because only it shares the whole cognates with them all and because it has a huge phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and lexical variety. They also manifest fundamental flaws and grave drawbacks which plague English and Indo-European lexicography for ignoring Arabic as an ultimate ancestor and progenitor not only in the treatment of the topic at hand but in all others in general. On a more general level, they also show that there is a radical language from which all human languages stemmed and which has been preserved almost intact in Arabic, thus being the most conservative and productive language

Subgrouping of Coahuitlán Totonac

2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-117
Author(s):  
Devin Moore
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Computational Methods ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
The Other ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
The Family ◽  
Northern Branch

AbstractCoahuitlán Totonac is spoken in Veracruz, Mexico, and has been variously ascribed to two different branches of the Totonacan family tree. While recent work has begun to bring empirical evidence to the internal structure of this family tree, there remain several important areas of disagreement, in addition to the disputed affiliation of Coahuitlán. This article informs the family tree and demonstrates that Coahuitlán belongs to the Northern branch using shared innovations and two computational methods. The comparative method seeks sets of shared innovations for evidence of subgrouping. This article presents proposed shared innovations in phonology, morphology, and lexicon, which fall into two sets, one belonging to the Sierra and Lowland branches, and the other belonging to the Northern. Coahuitlán Totonac overwhelmingly shares innovations found in Northern languages and lacks innovations found in Sierra. Two quantitative methods are also used to show that Coahuitlán groups groups closely with other Northern languages.

scholarly journals Phylogenetic and areal models of Indo-European relatedness: The role of contact in reconstruction

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Drinka
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
External Influence ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Considerable Evidence ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Family ◽  
Linguistic Innovation ◽  
European Family

The Indo-European family has traditionally been viewed as a textbook example of genetically related languages, easily fit onto a family tree model. What is less often recognized, however, is that IE also provides considerable evidence for the operation of contact among these related languages, discernable in the layers of innovation that certain varieties share. In this paper, I claim that the family tree model as it is usually depicted, discretely divided and unaffected by external influence, may be a useful representation of language relatedness, but is inadequate as a model of change, especially in its inability to represent the crucial role of contact in linguistic innovation. The recognition of contact among Indo-European languages has implications not only for the geographical positioning of IE languages on the map of Eurasia, but also for general theoretical characterizations of change: the horizontal, areal nature of change implies a stratification of data, a layered distribution of archaic and innovative features, which can help us grasp where contact, and innovation, has or has not occurred.

scholarly journals THE ARABIC ORIGINS OF ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN "PLACE NAMES": A CONSONANTAL RADICAL THEORY APPROACH

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
Zaidan Ali Jassem
Keyword(s):  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Genetic Relationships ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Tree Model ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
European Languages

This paper examines the Arabic origins of some common place names in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit from a consonantal radical or lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of the names of around 60 key cities like Birmingham, Brighton, Cambridge, Chester, Derby, Essex, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Queensville, York, etc. The results clearly show that all such names have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings whose different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. Furthermore, they show that place names play an important role in both near and distant genetic relationships. As a consequence, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method and Family-Tree Model claims (e.g. Campbell 2013; Harper 2012-18),� that Arabic, English, and all Indo-European languages� belong to the same language, let alone the same family. Therefore, they prove the adequacy of the consonantal radical theory in relating English, German, French, Latin, and Greek to Arabic as their origin all because, unlike any other language in the group, it shares cognates with all of them in addition to its huge linguistic repertoire phonetically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically.Keywords: Place names, Arabic, English, German, French, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, historical linguistics, consonantal radical/lexical root theory

scholarly journals The classification of the Transeurasian languages

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-39
Author(s):  
Martine Robbeets
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Phylogenetic Methods ◽  
The Family ◽  
Quantitative Basis ◽  
Competing Hypotheses ◽  
Historical Comparative

Even if the hypothesis of Transeurasian affiliation is gradually gaining acceptance, supporters do not coincide on the internal structure of the family. Over the last century, a range of different classifications has been proposed. While these proposals show some remarkable overlap, the position of the Tungusic branch in the family tree remains a recurrent issue. Here the best supportable tree for the Transeurasian family is inferred, notably a binary topology with a Japano-Koreanic and an Altaic branch, in which Tungusic is the first to split off from the Altaic branch. To this end, the power of classical historical-comparative linguistics is combined with computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods. In this way, a quantitative basis is introduced to test various competing hypotheses with regard to the internal structure of the Transeurasian family and to solve uncertainties associated with the application of the classical historical-comparative method.

Historical Linguistics: Classification

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constanze Weise
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Data Acquisition ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Family Tree ◽  
Language Family ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family

Many societies in pre-1800 Africa depended on orality both for communication and for record keeping. Historians of Africa, among other ways of dealing with this issue, treat languages as archives and apply what is sometimes called the “words and things” approach. Every language is an archive, in the sense that its words and their meanings have histories. The presence and use of particular words in the vocabulary of the language can often be traced back many centuries into the past. They are, in other words, historical artifacts. Their presence in the language in the past and their meanings in those earlier times tell us about the things that people knew, made use of, and talked about in past ages. They provide us complex insights into the world in which people of past societies lived and operated. But in order to reconstruct word histories, historians first need to determine the relationships and evolution of the languages that possessed those words. The techniques of comparative historical linguistics and language classification allow one to establish a linguistic stratigraphy: to show how the periods can be established in which meaning changes in existing words or changes in the words used for particular meanings took place, to assess what these word histories reveal about changes in a society and its culture, and to identify whether internal innovation or encounters with other societies mediated such changes. The comparative method on its own cannot establish absolute dates of language divergence. The method does allow scholars, however, to reconstruct the lexicons of material culture used at each earlier period in the language family tree. These data identify the particular cultural features to look for in the archaeology of people who spoke languages of the family in earlier times, and that evidence in turn enables scholars to propose datable archaeological correlations for the nodes of the family tree. A second approach to dating a language family tree has been a lexicostatistical technique, often called glottochronology, which seeks to estimate how long ago sister languages began to diverge out of their common ancestor language by using calculations based on the proportion of words in the most basic parts of the vocabulary that the languages still retain in common. Recent work in computational linguistic phylogenetics makes use of elements of lexicostatistics, and there have been efforts to automate the comparative method as well. In order to compare languages historically, two important issues first have to be confronted, namely data acquisition and data analysis. Linguistic field collection of vocabularies from native speakers and linguistic archive work, especially with dictionaries, are principal means of data acquisition. The comparative historical linguistic approach and methods provide the tools for analyzing these linguistic data, both diachronically and synchronically. Nearly all African languages have been classified into four language families, namely: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afroasiatic, and Khoisan. The Malagasy language of Madagascar is an exception, in that it was brought west across the Indian Ocean to that island from the East Indies early in the first millennium ce. Malagasy as well as several languages with an Indo-European origin, such as Afrikaans, Krio, and Nigerian Pidgin English, are not part of this discussion.

Eight Drives and the Family Tree

1967 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-8
Author(s):  
SUSAN DERI
Keyword(s):  
Family Tree ◽  
The Family

The family tree

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Landy
Keyword(s):  
Family Tree ◽  
The Family

CULTIVATING THE FAMILY

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 639-639
Author(s):  
Lewis Mumford
Keyword(s):  
Family Tree ◽  
Family Histories ◽  
The Family

The culture of the family requires time, patience, and fuller participation by all its members; and for its personal sustenance, interest must be awakened on its spiritual side: its history and biography. The antiquarian search for a family tree is too often the lowest snobbism; but the actual planting and cultivating of the family tree is a different matter. That is worthy of everyone's highest skill and immediate attention. . . . So for us the widespread keeping of family records is at least mechanically an easy job: spiritually it will require immense effort, before we pour into the work all the love and skill that it demands. The writing of journals, psychological records, and family histories beginning with the here and now should be one of the most grateful tasks for parents: the gathering of souvenirs, memorabilia, drawings, the recording of anecdotes and stories—all these things will build up that past which will form a bridge, over the most turbid autumnal torrent, to a firmer, finer future.

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