It seems easy to claim that one language is different form another, so that it should be labelled differently. Linguist tried to devise different criteria for labelling one language as unique, including mutual intelligibility.
Max Weinreich wrote that “a language is a dialect which has an army and a navy” and after this quotation Campbell (193) explained how the definition of language is not entirely a linguistic matter. For example, although Norwegians and Swedes understand each other, their languages have different names. Even more strikingly, in China there are many dialects and understanding between their speakers varies significantly. In accordance with the mutual intelligibility criterion, a linguist would categorize them as separate languages, but all those dialects are by recognized by the Chinese government as the single Chinese language. The mutual intelligibility is not reliable even to distinguish a dialect from a language. The criterion states that “[e]ntities which are totally incomprehensible to speakers of other entities clearly are mutually unintelligible, and for linguists they therefore belong to separate languages” (ibid). Campbell illustrated the problem by explaining that Portuguese speakers understand Spanish very well, which does not apply to the extent to which Spanish speakers understand Portuguese. In Europe during nineties, the naming of new languages, such as Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, came after the disintegration of the former Serbo-Croatian language.
However, dialectology plays an important role in historical linguistics. One of the attempts to explain change was given by Johannes Schmidt, who in 1872 published the improved version of the “Wave Theory”, a model:
[W]here changes were said to emanate from a centre as waves on a pond do when a stone is thrown into it, where waves from one centre … can cross or intersect … waves coming from other … centres. Changes due to language contact (borrowing) were seen as analogous to successive waves crossing one another …. (Campbell 189)
To discuss which definition of language can be used in the synchronic empirical study, we must mention Chomsky, who distinguished “externalized” and “internalized” language, or E-language and I-language, respectively – in the synchronic language states. To Chomsky, E-Language is “normative”, which is his term for the sociopolitical language, it is “the construct … understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain”; conversely, I-Language is “some element of the mind of the person who knows the language, acquired by the learner, and used by the speaker-hearer”.
In the context of historical linguistics it is significant that I-Language consists of elements that create a generative system of language. This idea is important, because linguistic competence in humans is not a mere transfer of sets of utterances (“normative” language), “but rather … the coming into being in the mind of the acquirer of a system for generating linguistic representations” (ibid). Put in another way, it is possible to contrast “aspects of the output conditioned by features of the grammar and those … conditioned by extragrammatical factors” (ibid). By including this into the study of historical linguistics, the discipline improved form the stage of deciphering dead languages to modern theories and significant relationships between language, mind, reality and society.
Previous: Historical Linguistics: “Language” – Synchrony and Diachrony,
Next: Language Acquisition and Historical Linguistics (soon)
Synchrony, as introduced and contrasted to diachrony by Saussure, is “the absence of a time element in linguistic description” and consequently “more directly evidential” than the diachronic study (Trask 287). In the nineteenth century, as described by Hale (8), when scholars had at their disposal only few sets of dead languages, it was assumed that language is corpora. However, living languages have many properties that dead do not, and vice versa. Corpora have limited vocabulary and restricted number of utterances, and dead languages cannot be described and provide phonetic data (ibid). This limited evidence of languages from the past is only partial evidence of how languages once looked, or as Hale puts it, they are “accidentally preserved records” (9). This is why historical linguistics cannot achieve empirically valid conclusions, if the scholars assume language is a corpus: “we must not confuse the nature of the attestation of a language with what that language was when alive” (ibid). Linguists should focus on both synchronic and the diachronic aspect of the languages.
Saussure claimed, in citation given by Hale (6), that to examine language in a synchronic view means to focus on “reality of speakers”, while diachronic study implies not examining language, but “a series of events that modify it”. Put in another way, in synchronic examination linguists observe the snapshots of languages, i.e. the states of languages at a particular moment in history. Once this is accomplished, scholars are usually speaking about contemporary language. The diachronic examination then includes finding answers about what happens between two or more stages of a language during the time.
However, do we know what a synchronic definition of language is? It appears that throughout literature there has been a “clear mixing … between an empirically useful conception of ‘language’ (as the object of study of linguistics) and more everyday uses of this term” (Hale 6). Hale further informs us that he is going to use the word “language” as a predominantly sociopolitical term, while “grammar” will mean “the object of study of linguistics as a discipline” (ibid). He did this in order to focus on the linguistic domain of language and to reject the possible misinterpretation due to an overlap of sociopolitical meaning of the word “language”, with that of the linguistic meaning.
Previous: Historical Linguistics: Trubetzkoy and Chomsky,
Next: Mutual intelligibility, Wave Theory
Jonas Beskow at the Centre for Speech Technology KTH Stockholm wrote free Formant Synthesis Demo computer programme that runs on Windows and Linux (and on any other OS for which the application can be compiled from the open source code the author kindly uploaded).
The programme synthesises F1, F2, F3 and F4 formants from several sources (rectangle, triangle, sine, sampled and noise). It “demonstrates formant-based synthesis of vowels in real time, in the spirit of Gunnar Fant’s Orator Verbis Electris (OVE-1) synthesiser of 1953” (from the About window).
„Formants are defined by Fant as ‘the spectral peaks of the sound spectrum |P(f)|’ of the voice. Formant is also used to mean an acoustic resonance,[2] and, in speech science and phonetics, a resonance of the human vocal tract. It is often measured as an amplitude peak in the frequency spectrum of the sound, using a spectrogram (in the figure) or a spectrum analyzer, though in vowels spoken with a high fundamental frequency, as in a female or child voice, the frequency of the resonance may lie between the widely-spread harmonics and hence no peak is visible. In acoustics, it refers to a peak in the sound envelope and/or to a resonance in sound sources, notably musical instruments, as well as that of sound chambers” — Wikipedia.
The window of the Formant Synthesis Demo
The download link is on the Formant Synthesis Demo site.