In this week’s Theory Thursday we covered the IPA chart, the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis and Optimality Theory. I learnt about how modern linguistics analyses language.

  1. Meaning (Content)

    • Discourse
    • Pragmatics
    • Semantics

  2. Form

    1. Syntax (Sentence Level)
    2. Morphology (Word Level)
    3. Orthography (Written)
    4. Phonetics and Phonology (Spoken)
    5. Typology (= Language genetics basically)
  • The different parts of the IPA chart on the top correspond to going progressively down the human vocal tract. (alveolar is a ridge behind your teeth, velar was also something new, bilabial = lips together)
  • The parts on the left correspond to how the sound is actually being made (e.g. fricative is with friction, plosive explosively releases air)
  • Learnt how the Devanagari alphabet has been arranged very similarly to the IPA. Pāṇini had formally constructed it in terms of phonology and the rules of grammar. His sheer genius for this is underappreciated (~2500 years before western linguistics found this).
  • Relations to Feldenkrais — The more you hear languages which have different sounds the more possible it becomes to see subtle differences. Tones and vowels are technically continuums but in practice they are discretized.
  • IPA is essentially a chart of all sounds that are seen in any human languages. Why certain sounds remain is because of optimality evolutionarily — if sounds did not correspond to some natural sounds, they would stand out too much which would be evolutionarily disadvantageous.
  • Are words sort of like Huffman encodings for evolutionarily most necessary signals? What is most necessary evolutionarily should be able to be conveyed with the least effort expended.