History of the English Language Part 1

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  1. What does it mean for two languages to be related?
    • They are descended from a common linguistic ancestor
    • they share common basic traist such as lexicon, morphology, syntax, and are mutually understandable to some degree.
    • similar words for siilar meanings
  2. Types of evidence that languages are related
    • grammatical structure (syntax or word order)
    • core vocabulary
  3. What type of language is English?
    A Germainic language (even though there are many French loanwords)
  4. List the stages of the English language (include the dates)
    • Old English: 450-1100
    • Middle English: 1100-1500
    • Early Modern English: 1500-1800
    • Present Day English: 1800- present
  5. core vocabulary
    necessary vocabulary of a language that applies to the basic needs of life
  6. borrowed words
    • word taken from another language.
    • Same as a loanword
    • ex. crawl is from Old Norse
  7. phonetics
    study of the speech of sounds
  8. phonology
    system of speech of sounds (pronounciation)
  9. phonotactics
    branch of phonolgy that deals with the restrictions of possible phoneme combinations
  10. morphology
    study of a combination of stems and affixes to form words
  11. morpheme
    smallest meaningful unit of a language
  12. root
    a word or element from which other words are formed
  13. affix
    a bound form such as a prefix or suffix added to a base stem or root
  14. compound word
    • a word made up of two words
    • ex. cupcake
  15. content morpheme (lexical)
    • morphemes that carry meaning
    • ex. cat
  16. function morpheme (grammatical)
    • morphemes with less meaning
    • primary purpose is to serve grammatical functions
    • ex. "the"
  17. inflectional affixes
    • doesn't change the meaning or part of speech of root
    • ex. I walk. He walked.
  18. derivational affixes
    • change meaning or part of speech of root
    • ex. reform, reformer
  19. lexicon
    • vocabulary of a language
    • linking sounds and meanings
  20. syntax
    sentence structure of a language
  21. semantics
    meaning of linguistic structures
  22. graphics
    In linguistics, the study of writing systems

Card Set Information

Author:
 fluffy8voldy
ID:
 16687
Filename:
 History of the English Language Part 1
Updated:
2010-04-28 22:56:46
Tags:
history english language part
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Description:
introduction and basic concepts
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