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Language and usage: Sample articles
alphabet
Set of conventional symbols used for writing, based on a correlation between individual symbols and spoken sounds, so called from alpha (a) and beta (b), the names of the first two letters of the classical Greek alphabet. The earliest known alphabet is from Palestine, about 1700 BC. Alphabetic writing now takes many forms – for example, the Hebrew aleph-beth and the Arabic script, both written from right to left; the Devanagari script of the Hindus, in which the symbols 'hang' from a line common to all the symbols; and the Greek alphabet, with the first clearly delineated vowel symbols.
Each letter of the alphabets descended from Greek represents a particular sound or sounds, usually grouped into vowels (a, e, i, o, u, in the English version of the Roman alphabet), consonants (b, p, d, t, and so on), and semivowels (w, y). Letters may be combined to produce distinct sounds (for example, a and e in words like tale and take, or o and i together to produce a 'wa' sound in the French loi), or may have no sound whatsoever (for example, the silent letters gh in high and through).
History
Practically all existing alphabets are believed to be commonly descended from a Semitic alphabet used by the Syro-Palestinian Semitic peoples in the last centuries of the second millennium BC and during the first millennium. It consisted of 22 letters, which correspond roughly to the first 22 letters of the Greek alphabet, but all the Semitic letters expressed consonants only. The order, the names, and the phonetic values of the early Semitic letters are preserved in the modern Hebrew alphabet. At the end of the second millennium BC or at the beginning of the first millennium, with the decay of the great nations of the Bronze Age (the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, and the Cretans), The Israelites, the Phoenicians, the Aram, the Greeks, and the South Arabians became increasingly important. This favoured the development of four main branches of the alphabet: the Canaanite, the Aramaic, the South Semitic, and the Greek.
Canaanite branch
The Canaanite main branch may be subdivided into two branches: (1) Pre-exilic or Early Hebrew (employed in ancient Israel in the first half of the first millennium BC), with its three secondary branches, the Moabite, the Edomite, and the Ammonite, and its two offshoots, the Samaritan and the script of the Jewish coins; (2) the Phoenician, which can be distinguished into Early Phoenician, Phoenician proper, and Colonial Phoenician, from the latter of which Punic or Carthaginian, neo-Punic, and probably also the Libyan and Iberian scripts, developed. All the alphabetic scripts west of Syria seem to have derived from the Canaanite branch, whereas nearly all the hundreds of alphabets of the east apparently sprang from the Aramaic branch.
Aramaic branch
The Aramaic alphabet probably originated in the 10th century BC but the earliest Aramaic inscriptions belong to the 9th to 7th centuries BC. In the second half of the first millennium BC, Aramaic became by far the most important and widespread script of the whole Near East. The direct and indirect descendants of the Aramaic alphabet can be divided into two groups: (1) the scripts employed for Semitic languages, of which six separate centres of development may be discerned: Hebrew, Nabataean-Sinaitic-Arabic, Palmyrene, Syrian-Nestorian, Mandaean, and Manichaean, the most important of them being Hebrew and the Arabic alphabet; (2) the scripts adapted to non-Semitic languages of central, South, and Southeast Asia, which can be divided into eight main groups: Kharoshthi, Persian or Iranian (including the Avesta alphabet), Sogdian, Kok Turki and Early Hungarian, Uighur, Mongolian (including Kalmuck, Buriat, and the allied Manchu alphabet), Armenian-Georgian-Alban, as well as Brahmi, the mother alphabet of the Indian and Further Indian main branches.
South Semitic branch
The South Semitic group of alphabets remained mainly confined within Arabia, although a secondary branch spread westwards and became the progenitor of the Ethiopic alphabet which through its offshoot, the Amharic script, is the only South Semitic script still in use, and the only one in which a literature has been produced.
Greek branch
The earliest existing Greek records in alphabetic writing go back to the 8th century BC but the alphabet was probably introduced into Greece in the 10th or 11th century BC. The Greeks had many local alphabets and only by the mid-4th century BC had they all disappeared in favour of the Ionic, which thus became the common, classical Greek alphabet of 24 letters. The Greeks made a few important changes, the most remarkable of them being: (1) the introduction of vowel representation, allocating certain Semitic consonants to Greek vowel sounds; (2) the addition of certain letters for the representation of Greek consonant sounds not catered for by the Semitic letters, namely ph, th, kh, and for the combinations ps and ks (x); and (3) the different arrangements of the sibilants.
In the course of its long history the Greek alphabet produced the following offshoots: the Asianic alphabet (Lycian, Phrygian,
Pamphylian, Lydian, and Carian); the Coptic alphabet, with its Nubian derivative, the Messapian alphabet (in southern Italy); the Gothic alphabet, invented in the 4th century by the Gothic bishop Ulfilas; the two early Slavonic alphabets (Cyrillic and Glagolitic), with their descendants (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Ukrainian, White Russian, and Old Romanian), later adapted to numerous non-Slavonic languages; and the three Albanian alphabets, which had little, and only local, importance. The main
significance of the Greek alphabet is that through its chief descendants, the Etruscan and Latin alphabets and the Cyrillic alphabet, it has become the prototype of most European alphabets.
clause
Part of a sentence that contains a subject and a verb, and is joined to the rest of the sentence by a conjunction. In English, two 'main' clauses are joined by the conjunctions and, but, or, and are said to be coordinated, as in 'I love cherries but I hate apples'. Main clauses can always stand as independent sentences. Use of any other conjunction indicates a subordinate clause, which depends on the main clause for its meaning, as in 'She wept, after she went to the funeral.' It should be noted that English word order can transpose subordinating conjunctions to the beginning of the whole
sentence, as in 'After she went to the funeral, she wept.'
grammar
Greek grammatike tekhne 'art of letters'
The rules for combining words into phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. The standardizing impact of print has meant that spoken or colloquial language is often perceived as less grammatical than written language, but all forms of a language, standard or otherwise, have their own grammatical systems. People often acquire several overlapping grammatical systems within one language; for example, a formal system for writing and standard communication and a less formal system for everyday and peer-group communication.
Originally 'grammar' was an analytical approach to writing, intended to improve the understanding and the skills of scribes, philosophers, and writers. When compared with Latin, English has been widely regarded as having a simpler grammar; it would be truer, however, to say that English and Latin have different grammars, each complex in its own way. In linguistics (the contemporary study of language) grammar, or syntax, refers to the arrangement of the elements in a language for the purposes of acceptable communication in speech, writing, and print.
Not even the most comprehensive grammar book (or grammar) of a language like English, French, Arabic, or Japanese completely covers or fixes the implicit grammatical system that people use in their daily lives. The rules and tendencies of natural grammar operate largely in nonconscious ways but can, for many social and professional purposes, be studied and developed for conscious as well as inherent skills. In addition to the parts of speech, other terms are used to assist with describing the way sentences are constructed for the purpose of sentence analysis.
Recent theories of the way language functions include phrase structure grammar, transformational grammar, and case grammar.
noun
Grammatical part of speech that names a person, animal, object, quality, idea, or time. Nouns can refer to objects such as house, tree (concrete nouns); specific persons and places such as John Alden, the White House (proper nouns); ideas such as love, anger (abstract nouns). In English many simple words are both noun and verb (jump, reign, rain). Adjectives are sometimes used as nouns ('a local man', 'one of the locals').
A common noun does not begin with a capital letter (child, cat), whereas a proper noun does, because it is the name of a particular person, animal, or place (Jane, Rover, Norfolk). A concrete noun refers to things that can be sensed (dog, box), whereas an abstract noun relates to generalizations abstracted from life as we observe it (fear, condition, truth). A countable noun can have a plural form (book: books), while an uncountable noun or mass noun cannot (dough). Many English nouns can be used both countably and uncountably (wine: 'Have some wine; it's one of our best wines'). A collective noun is singular in form but refers to a group (flock, group, committee), and a compound noun is made up of two or more nouns (teapot, baseball team, car-factory strike committee). A verbal noun is formed from a verb as a gerund or otherwise (build: building; regulate: regulation).
pathetic fallacy
In the arts, the presentation of natural events and objects as controlled by human emotions, so that in some way they express human sorrow or joy ('a brave little snowdrop'; 'the heavens smiled on our enterprise'). The phrase was coined by the English critic John Ruskin in Modern Painters (1843–60), to describe the ascription of human feelings to the outside world.
semantics
Branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words and sentences. Semantics asks how we can use language to express things about the real world and how the meanings of linguistic expressions can reflect people's thoughts. Semantic knowledge is compositional; the meaning of a sentence is based on the meanings of the words it contains and the order they appear in. For example, the sentences 'Teachers love children' and 'Children love teachers' both involve people loving other people but because of the different order of words they mean different things.
Linguistic meaning has been studied for thousands of years. Plato believed that words or phrases related directly to the actual objects they pick out. Aristotle suggested that relationships between words and the world are indirect, mediated by social convention. More recently, the conceptualist view of linguistic meaning has held that there is an indirect relationship between words and things, mediated by thoughts in the mind.
The philosopher Gottlob Frege drew a distinction between the sense of a linguistic expression and its reference (the thing in the world that it picks out). So the meaning of a natural language expression is equivalent to both sense and reference; for example, the phrases 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' have different senses, but both have the same reference – namely, the planet Venus. Some linguistic expressions can have a reference but no sense (such as the name 'Fred'), and some may have sense but no reference (such as 'the present King of France').
Recent work in semantics has been examining the semantic underdeterminacy thesis, which holds that natural language sentences usually leave a lot to the imagination – they do not provide all the information needed for their meaning to be understood, and further processing is necessary for an interpretation to be reached. For instance, the phrase 'Stop it!' may have a clear meaning if the person who hears it has information about the context in which it is said, but as a sentence on its own it is not clear what should be stopped and who should stop it.
simile
Latin 'likeness'
Figure of speech that in English uses the conjunctions like and as to express the comparison between two different things ('run like the devil'; 'as deaf as a post'). It is sometimes confused with metaphor. The simile makes an explicit comparison (suggesting that something is like something else), while a metaphor's comparison is implicit (suggesting that something is something else).
Not all comparisons using the words like or as are similes; for example, 'the city of Bristol is like Boston' literally compares two cities. However, in 'the city of Bristol is like a fine old ship' or 'the city of Boston is like a fine old
lady', more imaginative comparisons are made, not city with city, but city with ship or lady. These analogical links between less obvious contexts are similes.
W
23rd letter of the English alphabet, representing either a labiovelar semivowel, as in 'war' and 'wine', or part of a vowel diagraph, as in 'law'and 'few'. It is essentially a u in consonantal function. It is not pronounced before r, as in 'write' and 'wren', or in cases like 'two' and 'sword'.
It is called double u because it was written uu or vv, which in ligature resulted in w.
It appeared in the 11th century to differentiate from v. The North Semitic waw, and its descendant the Greek digamma probably had a similar sound to the English /w/. Some scholars think that the Latin v, representing the consonant v and the vowel u, was pronounced like the modern English /w/. In Welsh names w is generally a vowel, as in Betws-y-Coed and Braich-y-pwll.
written communication
Form of communication using a set of symbols. Written English has its own techniques and conventions. The content, structure, and style of a piece of writing are guided by its purpose. Where a piece of writing is narration and is intended to entertain it will often take the form of a story, make use of direct speech, and build up to a climax. Traditionally, narrative is carefully structured and there is likely to be a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. An explanation or an analysis in writing is factual and straightforward. Headings and subdivisions may be used for the sake of clarity. Writing intended as persuasion to move the reader to a point of view will often use an emotive style, present lists of points, and include devices of rhetoric (or figures of speech).
The style of a piece of writing varies according to the knowledge of the intended audience, so that text for young children includes simple sentences and basic words, whereas that intended for inclusion in an academic journal is sophisticated in style and
vocabulary.
Early writing
See alphabet. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing used ideographs (picture writing) and phonetic word symbols side by side, as does modern Chinese. Syllabic writing, as in Japanese, develops from the continued use of a symbol to represent the sound of a short word. Some 8,000-year-old inscriptions, thought to be pictographs, were found on animal bones and tortoise shells in Henan province, China, at a Neolithic site at Jiahu. They are thought to predate by 2,500 years the oldest known writing (Mesopotamian cuneiform of 3500 BC and Egyptian hieroglyphics of c. 3300–3200 BC).
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