John McWhorter welcomes us to his course on linguistics, and the fact of the matter is, it's not all that unusual to not know what linguistics is. Yet by the time we're finished with this course, we'll very much know what it is. Just to start us off, we should realize something we'll see again and again. The fundamental thing that linguistics is about, is that language is more than just a big bunch of words. It's easy to think that what we're doing when we speak, is producing words that we learned as kinds. So now we know them, and we string them together in some sort of way, though maybe there are some wrong ways to string them together that we learn in school and get our knuckles wrapped for. So basically that what we're doing is using a big bunch of words.

Now if you really think about it, words alone can't be even most of what would be interesting about what using a language is. That's because if you think about it, imagine if you inhaled a Russian dictionary. Let's say that for all intents and purposes, we knew every single word in the language. If you think about it really, even then, we would be unable to have any kind of meaningful conversation in the language, and 3 and 4 year-olds would be light years ahead of us. That's because obviously there is also the issue of how you put the words together in order to convey meaning.

There's also a sense that if a language is more than just a big bucket of words, then as far as grammar is concerned, it's a matter of deciding whether words fit into one of 8 parts of speech. So the idea is that once you got thee parts of speech, than you got what there is besides just this big collection of words! Yet actually the parts of speech that we learn in school, constitute a very approximate sense of what a language's actual structural system is.

For example, take a sentence like this one:

"She kept on popping in and out of the office all afternoon."

Now that's a perfectly ordinary sentence, with nothing strange about it. First of all, if it's really all just about the parts of speech, what's the verb in that sentence? Is it kept? Because you know, popping is a verb. What's the verb? We learned each sentence has a verb, and how to parse that. So is it kept or popping?

Or you may have learned that have or be, are used as auxiliary verbs often. Well is "kept on" an auxiliary here? Were we ever taught that keep is an auxiliary? It seems like one. We didn't learn about that in grammar school.

Or we talked out the pat of speech for the word "on," in this case. Is it a preposition, where something is kept on the table? Obviously this is a different kind of "on," so that clearly the parts of speech, the wonderful schoolhouse rock segments on tv, if you're of a certain age like John, and remember, those things will only take us so far. Linguistics shows that there is more than that.

Namely, linguistics is a scientific analysis of language, as opposed to the more impressionistic analysis of language that all of us spontaneously make, because we all use language, all of the time. The idea there is to find system in what appears to be either chaos, or just randomness in the fact that, the big bucket of words is a part of what a language is.

So what do we mean by scientific? One example is the science of how words work in languages. We can say singin' or singing. Now we're often told that singin' is shorter than singing, that a "g" has been dropped. Yet if you think about it, and we're always thing that, because these things become obvious if you just pause for a second and smell some roses. So if you just think about it, there is actually nothing dropped at all in singin'. Nothing has been left off, because the final sound of singing, is not two sounds, even though it's written that way with the "-ing." It's really just one sound, with no single letter in the English alphabet.

Here's how you know. Here are two words. One is singer, and we know how that's spelled. Then there is finger. Notice that those two words only differ in terms of the initial consonants, one with s and the other with f. You do not say "fin-er," which doesn't work, and you don't say "sing-ger."

John once knew a gouty, rather aged professor, giving a course on music. He kept on talking about "sing-gers." John didn't know why, and felt like someone jabbing his eyes every time he said it. That's not the way it's pronounced. You have a "singer" and a "fing-ger."

Now the difference is that in one of those cases, you are actually enunciating an "n" and a "g," so it's "fing-ger." Both sounds are right there. Yet with singer, you don't say "sing-ger." It's really just "sing-er." In other words, if you isolate what's in the middle, it's this "ng," not "ng-guh."

So this "ng," is a separate sound in English (in Latin it's engma ŋ), and that's the sound at the end of singing. It's sing-ng, nor "sing-ng-guh," which is not something anyone would say. So there's a sound system of language which is very different from the way language happens to be spelled.

One thing we'll learn again and again, is that we have to get past letters, and realize that language is about sound. In fact, the way that language is represented on the page, is very similar how people are drawn on "the Simpsons." So for example, if Stephen J. Gould guests on the Simpsons, you know he'll have big eyes in a blobby sort of drawing style, the way everybody looks like on that show. There could be no homo sapiens that actually look like that. We're just used to that kind of refraction in what people look like as a Simpsons cartoon.

Well letters are to spoken language, as the Simpsons cartoons are to real life and the way it actually looks. So there's a science of sound, which is very different from the alphabet that we diligently learned and now think as something sacrosanct.

Or there is a science, a scientific perspective, on what concepts are core to language, as opposed to ones that are incidental frills. The latter are often ones that seem vary meat and potatoes, central and vital to us, within the particular language that we speak. For example, in the vast majority of the world's languages, there are no words for "the" and "a." We sort of think it's necessary to distinguish "the soap" that we slipped in this morning, from "a turtle" that mysteriously popped up in the living room and we're mentioning right now.

This is actually a very fine shade of meaning that many languages completely do without in any fashion, and it's not something that is typical of a language to have two words with those meanings. English is odd in that way. Most languages in the world also do not have a verb for "to have." We think of it as the most ordinary thing in the world, to say, "I have a cat." Yet why would you put it that way? It's interesting.

If you talk about verbs, it could be "I own a cat," and then there's this financial arrangement. John thinks of his costing $100, and how it's funny we forget those things! Or it can be, "I grasp a cat," of "I possess a cat," but to say "I have a cat?" What are we really doing? Are we specifying a kind of relationship between me and my cat, rather than something that we actually do. We don't walk around having, but it's really a kind of state. So actually in a great many languages, the way to say that we have something, is to say that the thing is to you.

Those of us who know Russian, will be familiar with this, as it is around the world. To say "have" is kind of a European fetish, for the most part. Most other languages in the world have some other way of dealing with have, when using neutral sentences.

Or this business of "do" in English. We use "do" funny. So you say I do not walk quickly. What's the "do?" Can't you just say, "I walk quickly?" If you learn any other language, then you'll notice that's the way it's said. You say "I walk quickly" or "I not walk quickly." So what's the I "do" not walk quickly? We just get kind of used to it, but it's not there.

Or when you ask the question, "Do you walk quickly?" "Do" what? What's the "do" doing? If you're an English speaker, that just seems like the most natural thing. Yet notice you don't find that in pretty much any other language that you may happen to have learned? Why don't you just say, "Walk you?" That's the way it would be in many languages. What's the "do" doing there?

In fact, if you look at the languages of the whole world, really getting in a little plane and flying all around the globe, like in an old black and white movie, and actually look everywhere, then as far as this kind of little "do" usage, that is in:

1) English
2) some Celtic languages, Welsh and Breton

Then as far as John knows, though he hasn't yet checked every language in the world, and he's not going to, but has reason to believe that one of the only other places where "do" is used in that way, is up in some far off mountains of Italian villages with like six and a half people live. There are a few of these dialects where they use "do" of that kind, only in questions. That's only way up there, and God knows what may happen way up there! In this case it's just a few dialects of Italian that use it in that way.

3) some mountainous Italian villages

So linguists have actually found that a lot of the aspects of language, that might feel essential to the speaker of one of them, are actually incidentals. These tend to appear in languages only if other ones do, and in certain orders. These orders of appearance might just have something to so with how our brains are configures to learn language, when we are infants.

So when it comes to language, the proper analogy could be seen to be food preparation. So there are all sorts of ways of preparing food around the world. Yet when you really think about it, all food preparation is based on certain basic principles involving temperature, whether or not, and how, you age the food in question. There is no such thing as a cuisine that's not based on those fundamental elements.

Now of course, in some regions, some items are more easily available than in others. There are traditions that have set in, as to what you eat or not. Yet all cooking is ultimately based on certain, fundamental, chemical principles. A martian could be taught those, and come up with a kind of food that would make a certain, basic sense, almost anywhere in the world.

So we're looking for, in a way, as linguists, what the universals of say "cooking mechanisms" are, as they apply to language. So Thai food is great, but you wouldn't want to say that the essentials of cooking are lime juice, chili, and the particular things that they use. Those are variations on something much more general. In linguistics, we are looking for the general!

Now another example of "science versus" impression. There is a natural sense that anybody has when they are speaking a language, that some things are wrong, or they're not as right as other things, in terms of how you would put things. As a result, we and most all fairly reasonable people, have a sense that for example, English is a language where people are walking around, making mistakes in it all the time. There is a way of speaking it that is pristine and proper, and we learned that in school. Then there are all these people, running around making errors!

John knew a wonderful person, who was not a man, and she talked about how she had had to end a liaison with a fellow, one reason being that he just walked around making too many grammatical errors! That just seems so sad!

Yet the fact of the matter is that looked at in a broader view, in terms of a perspective of language as something that happens, and it's fine that way it is, we see that a lot, most, or even all of the thing that are considered wrong, or errors, are really just issues of aesthetics. We're really dealing with a kind of fashion that changes, very much like clothes do.

For example, it used to be that if we wanted to talk about where we were born, we might say we were "born at" Philadelphia, (using an upper class English accent). At least that's the line John was supposed to use here. Yet this is not if he were a person who was pretentious enough to talk like that. Just ordinary people would phrase it like that. So he wasn't "born in" Philadelphia, but "born at" Philadelphia. If he said he was "born in" Philadelphia, well that would have sounded a little declasse.

Now this seems utterly arbitrary to us now, yet the fact of the matter is that the things that bother us now, seem just as silly to people later. It used to be you could talk about how you lighted something. You would never have lit it. "I lit the candle?" Oh, how vulgar! That's like Oliver Twist running around in the street, untutored or something. You have to say lighted, people were told. Now days if you said lighted, someone would probably take you to the hospital, or dump you for making a grammatical error! That's because these things change in a very arbitrary way.

Others would have been "all the time," washtub, standpoint, "have a look at," "the first two," or "the house is being built." One also was supposed to say that they had "stack-ed," instead of "stacked" some books. It was considered a little vulgar to "leave out that e," so to speak.

These things change and are not based on a scientific perspective of language. It's not that we aren't all human. There are things John doesn't like too, such one that he has to hear probably once each day. "Can I get a...?" Many people still say this in a restaurant. Yet what do you mean, can you get a? It's not about, can you get it, but about whether their going to give it to you. So you should say, "May I have a...," or "I would like a...." But "Can I get a hamburger?" This just rubs John the wrong way for all sorts of reasons that are purely aesthetic. He also doesn't like the color scarlet and thinks that almonds are overrated. He just happens not to like it! Same thing with a lot of the things we are taught are wrong, which are really just there.

So linguistics is not about translation, that is not something they do. The word linguist is occasionally used to indicate a translator, but that's not what an academic linguist is. They're also neither language police, so although the view of language that Henry Higgins has in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion is very amusing, and even more so when set to music, that is not something that any linguist would agree with. So they study language, rather than teaching it or fixing it, and John will show us how to do [the] same!

So first, we'll look at how linguists analyze the building blocks of language. We'll start with the study of sounds. Then we'll go onto how words are formed, which is quite counterintuitively different in many languages to the way we do it here in English. There are many Native American languages for instance, where many of the sentences we've said in this lecture, are all actually just one word! So "What is a word," is a richer question than one might think!

Then we'll talk about the structure of sentences, which is more than the grand old parsing diagrams. In fact, the person who has really set the tune in terms of how that kind of sentence analysis is done in linguistics today, has been Noam Chomsky b.1928, who has been known to most people as a political thinker. Yet he is also the grandfather of how modern linguists analyze sentence structure as well.

Then of course we also express meaning. There is a different sense of meaning, than just what happens when you put a sentence together. There is many a lip between sentence construction and what we mean. How a language does that is something that can be seen as universal across all languages. Yet then there are the peculiarities, so we'll look at the basic building blocks of how you go from seeing something and wanting to say something about it, seeing something and wanting to talk about it, and how it will actually come out! In other words, we'll look at semantics and pragmatics. We'll see what those things mean when we get to them.

Then we'll look at how these basic tools are used by people in various sub-fields in linguistics. So we'll look at how language changes over time. So for example, Latin is not a dead language. It's spoken today, all over Europe. Latin is being spoken in a tiny little village, up on top of a mountain in Italy. Those dialects are Latin. There was no time when everyone woke up in the morning and said "My God, are we speaking Italian?" Yet really Latin just kind of gradually morphed into the romance languages, including those Italian dialects. They are speaking today's version, up in those mountains, of the language that Julius Caesar spoke. There's no difference, just that all languages are changing, all the time. So we'll study historical linguistics, as it is called.

We're going to look at how children learn to speak, what is called language acquisition. There are things there that are worth noticing, other than, "Oh look, Justin learned a new word today." Just as language is more than about words, there's also the same for grammar. This can be quite keen as well.

Then we'll look at what's called sociolinguistics. That is about how language varies, not just in terms of the vocabulary you use, but the structure of the language varies in systematic ways, according to race, class, gender, and education level. Some of those things involve dealing with subjects that Americans can be a little ticklish about dealing with, especially class. Yet these things have been shown to have interesting interactions with people's speech, and these patters hold worldwide. So we're going to look at that.

Then we'll pull the camera back and look at what we call the philosophy of language. That is looking at the nature of human language. What it is in terms of psychology and philosophy. What it is that is different in us as opposed to the way language is used by other beings. So we'll take a look at some of the theories along those lines.

Then we'll take a brief look at the evolution of writing, and then in the two lectures near the end, John will let us be the linguist in a way. We'll look at two languages we are vanishingly unlikely to have grown up speaking if we are taking this course. One of them is going to be a language spoken in the rainforest of Suriname, which is only a few hundred years old, and is a hybrid of English, Portuguese, Dutch, and two African languages.

Then we'll look at a very different language, spoken in the Caucuses mountains. If any of us have been around as long as John, or longer, we might remember those Dannon yogurt commercials where the idea was that Dannon had something in it that made people live for a long time. They went to a village in the Caucuses mountains and had a person 500 years old being patted on the back by his mother. The guy literally was about 100, and you could tell. Yet he couldn't have been, since there's his mother, who was like 105! Anyway, the Caucuses mountains is where we'll look at a language called Karbardian. We'll just pretend we're flying into "yogurt village" or something, and trying to figure out the language from the ground up. Then we'll end by looking at current theories about how language evolved in us as a species in the first place.

Now in any case, you may remember my course from 2004, The Story of human Language. That was just a very sad attempt to imitate Troy McClure from the Simpsons! John promises not to try that again. Yet that course was a very different course from this one. It was based in a sense on a subset of what we'll look at in this more general treatment of linguistics. The Story of Human Language was about how one original language, became several, and how they all overgrew with incidentals, deliriously mixed together, and how too many of them are now dieing. That was a story that fit into roughly what was being treated as historical linguistics with a little bit of sociolinguistics mixed in.

This new course is a more scientific approach, one that the perspectives from that first course was based on. This course shows how we identify the system that is the chaos and randomness of language on the surface. This scientific way of looking at language has really only existed since the early 19th century. before that, there was a rather rich tradition of the study of language, but not in the sense of what we call linguistics today. So Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, did examine the relationship between speech and thoughts that it communicated. They had a terms for the language, logos (reason or plan).

All of this was very interesting, but it was more the kind of thing that today classifies as philosophy of language. It wasn't about the intricacies of grammar per se. That sort of thing, such as grammatical descriptions of languages, that's something that goes back about 2 millenia, where someone sits down and describes the rules of their language. Not exactly the most intuitive thing to do. There aren't a whole bunch of other ones as models. Just why would you sit down and write the rules of a language that you speak, and everyone you know speaks it, so it doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Nevertheless, when people started writing grammars like these, was about 2000 years ago. One of the earliest masterpieces is by an Indian grammarian named Panini 520-460 BCE. Nothing is really known about him, except that he wrote a magisterial description of Sanskrit. Then there is the Techne Grammatike, by Dionysus the Thracian, a description of Greek.

Yet the problem, for example, with the latter, is that if you are a Greek person in the ancient world, since travel was so difficult and in many cases impossible, there was a sense among Greek thinkers that Greek was the quintessence of language, and that other languages were just something else and often just variants on Greek. For example, many Greek thinkers thought that Latin was just a strange kind of Greek, because since the languages were related, they had a lot of words in common. So their idea was that, well here's a Greek dialect that sure has a lot of funny stuff in it.

That's the best you could do, with the limited purview that these very brilliant people had. Now as Europeans started encountering other people in the world, and messing things up and bothering them! They started noticing, especially the missionaries among them, that there were all of these other languages, and that they were quite different from what one might think language is, if you spend your entire life around the Mediterranean Sea! There's a language-head in every crowd, so often there was someone, a missionary, who would write a description of the local language that was encountered.

Yet in this era still, people were hampered by it, an understandable assumption, that basically the way language was supposed to go was a European language. So you find what are now rather quaint mistakes. So for example there was a bishop in England of the 1600s, John Wilkins 1614-1672. He made a very noble effort to devise a writing system that would express human thought, irrespective of the differences between the languages. So he had developed this code to do this.

Yet his problem was that he didn't understand how different languages can be. So for example, in Japanese, to say a sentence such as, "I like Pam." What you say, the ordinary thing you'd say, is "Pam ga suki." What that means is "Pam likableness." That's what's in it. That's how they indicate that. Now you could get the "I" part in, you could say "as for me" Pam likableness. Yet in Japanese you can leave that "I" to context.

So that's how different languages get. We say "I like Pam," and a Japanese person will say "Pam likableness." That's just ordinary Japanese. Now Wilkins didn't know things like this. So his version of, for example, the Lord's Prayer, was pretty much like the English sentence, written word by word, in pictures! Now that, of course, is something more likely of someone in the 1600s, than of today. Wilkins did not have the linguists mindset in the modern sense.

So for example, from a modern linguists perspective, "I like Pam," has three concepts. There's the "I" who is speaking, the issue of the liking, and then there's Pam. Now it is a core feature of language to have a subject. So you're going to have a subject. Yet in some languages, the subject of the concept you're expressing when you say "I like Pam," will be "I." Yet then notice that in Japanese, the subject of "Pam ga suki," is Pam. So we're talking about the fact that we have this affection for Pamela, but the way that sentence comes out, may not have "me" as the subject at all!

Then as far as liking, we think that of course like is going to be a verb. Yet no, not necessarily! As we see in Japanese, it's a noun. You talk about likability, and of course that gets in the concept just as well. It doesn't have to be a verb. A language might have a prefix or suffix, or little bit of stuff to show that something is the subject, to keep the traffic going nice and smoothly. Japanese has that with "ga" in this example, yet English does not.

Then even the "I" can be left to context, like in Japanese, because if you're sitting there saying it, chances are you are talking about yourself. Who else would you be talking about? Someone else on the other side of the world or the room? Probably it's you, and you don't have to fill that in, especially if you're tired! So we have to say I, but Japanese can just leave it out, and that's not uncommon. Languages differ in terms of what they have to put in, and what they can leave out, and what they have to leave out. Some people have even hypothesized that this channels the way people think about the world, and we will look at that in a few of our lectures.

In any case, we're hoping that when we're finished, we find ourselves looking at and listening to language in ways that never occurred to us before. Most importantly, we might come away understanding that the conception of a language as words and the way they're spelled, and little things that you shouldn't do with the words in terms of putting them in order, on the pain of getting your knuckles rapped. We hope that conception of a language will then play less of a role in how we think about languages.

Really, for John, linguistics in all of its facets, to be perfectly frank, is neat. This stuff turns him on, and turns a whole lot of other people on. For him, the kind of "bucket of words" conception of language, is sort of like the first 15 minutes of the film Wizard of Oz. He assumes we've all seen it. Starting out in black and white, we have scenes with a tornado, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. The actress who played the latter, Clara Blandick, killed herself, which is something he always thinks about when watching those first 15 minutes!

It's just gray, and we wouldn't like the movie if it stayed that way. Then Dorothy walks into Oz, and there's this big beautiful set with the painting in the back of it. There's all of this color, and some effect in the orchestra. So we're happy that in the rest of the movie, we get to be in this color part.

That is where linguistics is. For John, that is the journey of just thinking of it as a bunch of words and persnickety grammar rules we learned on the blackboard a long time ago, and the wonder of what human language really is, and the way it works. So come down the yellow brick road with us, and lets learn about linguistics!

This course looks interesting to me. My wife wants to get a degree in English & Linguistics.