Language and Linguistics Durrenberger and Erem

5 Characteristics of Human Language Displacement Open Discrete duality of patterning arbitrary, learned, traditional

Etic From linguistics—sounds people really make top pot

What English speakers hear: The “t” of “pot” and “top” are the same The “p” of “pot” and “top” are the same

The real sounds are: Thop Phot For many langauges, Th is a separate sound from T and has a different letter of the alphabet Same for Ph and P

phonetic Means the sounds we actually make—they may be different, but sound the same to us Click Languages Text-to-Speech translator

Phonemic Is the sounds we hear as being the same, whether they really are the same or not Examples?

Emic/Etic Etic=the things we can know scientifically, without reference to anyone’s culture—color wheel Emic=the categories people recognize and use in their culture—categories of color

Are there any limits on cultural variation?

Brent Berlin & Paul Kay Do people from different cultures see different colors? Or do we all see the same colors because of our evolutionary history?

People can see and name a lot of colors, but of these, 11 are focal points of the system of naming colors.

11 basic color terms in 3 groups  

brown, orange, purple, pink achromatic black, gray, white primary red, green, blue, yellow secondary brown, orange, purple, pink

Paul Kay (linguistics, University of California at Berkeley) Terry Regier (psychology, University of Chicago) Richard Cook (linguistics, University of California at Berkeley) John O'Leary (computer science, University of Chicago)

Sometimes there’s a lot of variation among cultures—e. g Sometimes there’s a lot of variation among cultures—e.g. sounds for language Sometimes there’s not much variation—e.g. focal color terms

Focal colors in 110 languages Black dots represent English categories

Etic=what’s really there E.g. color chart, phonetic sounds Emic=the categories people recognize and use E.g. in English Th = T Ph =P

Sociolinguistics Gendered speech