Morphology: Crash Course Linguistics #2
Vložit
- čas přidán 17. 09. 2020
- What even is a word? Well… linguists don’t really know! But that’s ok! When linguists want to get super specific, we don’t even talk about words, we talk about morphemes instead. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’re diving into the topic of morphology and what makes up these things we call words.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: lingthusiasm.com/
Check out Self-Evident on PBS Voices: • How Musicians are Soun...
Acknowledgements: Daniela Diedrich, William Forshaw, Hannah Gibson, Diane Lillo-Martin
***
Watch our videos and review your learning with the Crash Course App!
Download here for Apple Devices: apple.co/3d4eyZo
Download here for Android Devices: bit.ly/2SrDulJ
Crash Course is on Patreon! You can support us directly by signing up at / crashcourse
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:
Catherine Conroy, Patty Laqua, Leonora Rossé Muñoz, Stephen Saar, John Lee, Phil Simmons, Alexander Thomson, Mark & Susan Billian, Junrong Eric Zhu, Alan Bridgeman, Jennifer Smith, Matt Curls, Tim Kwist, Ron Lin, Jonathan Zbikowski. Jennifer Killen, Sarah & Nathan Catchings, Brandon Westmoreland, team dorsey, Trevin Beattie, Eric Prestemon, Sam Ferguson, Yasenia Cruz, Eric Koslow, Indika Siriwardena, Khaled El Shalakany, Shawn Arnold, Tom Trval, Siobhán, Ken Penttinen, Nathan Taylor, William McGraw, Justin Zingsheim, Andrei Krishkevich, Jirat, Brian Thomas Gossett, SR Foxley, Ian Dundore, Jason A Saslow, Jessica Wode, Mark, Caleb Weeks, Sam Buck
--
Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook - / youtubecrashcourse
Twitter - / thecrashcourse
Tumblr - / thecrashcourse
Support Crash Course on Patreon: / crashcourse
CC Kids: / crashcoursekids
I'm rather whelmed. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just casually whelmed.
Whelmed and overwhelmed are synonyms.
I feel that.
@@andrew_ray Yep, was about to say, whether you're overwhelmed or just "whelmed" it still means your ship has lost the battle against the waves.
As the swedish might say, lagom whelmed
IONATVS I’m in a ship now? Dammit. I need to start paying more attention.
Video: What is a word?
Linguists: * starts sweating profusely *
I’m just...so happy this series now exists
Me too! My inner nerd is satisfied.
im so happy iv seen that hair
soundlyawake I stumbled upon this by accident. Now I’m stumbling into it with reckless abandon. It’s great.
Sign language often gets overlooked when talking about languages, so I really enjoy that this series talks about it :)
" _talking_ about languages"
@@ElfRulerr If a group of deaf people are writing facebook messsangers about linguistics to each other, are they "talking" about linguistics or "writing" about linguistics?
aren't sign language in group of artificial language? they aren't really useful in studying the nature of language in that sense
@@oldcowbb An artificial language is a language that was consciously created for a certain purpose. Sign language isn't like that. It emerged among groups of deaf people, has complex grammatical structures, and continuously evolves over time, just like spoken languages. They're useful in studying the nature of language because of that.
@@oldcowbb They appear without the influence of oral language and develop naturally. Sign languages are just as natural as spoken languages.
The majority of linguistics students must know just one triliteral root in Arabic: k-t-b. I swear this is the only example ever used in introductory materials.
Yep, that's what we had in syntax
I can't speak for Arabic, but I know that in Hebrew KTB is one of those rare roots that can be conjugated in every way possible. Most roots can be conjugated in most but not all of the "patterns" so KTB makes it easier to present the concept.
I think that's because it's a regular transitive verb, so you can show the passive and causative forms relatively easily.
One of our writers studied Arabic for a couple years, so we considered using a different root, but y'know, sometimes you might as well just familiarize people with a classic example
When she said Deutschewörterübersetzungsproblem without any problem. I honestly was super surprised! Well done, fellow linguist.
Greetings from Germany
Fun fact: I'm half German! but the only parts of the language I know is how to sing the song "silent night" in German, and the words my grandpa used to say after a tasty meal: "schmeckt gut!"
For the example in Arabic, this is how the words change:
Kataba (he wrote) كَتَبَ
Katabat (she wrote) كَتَبَتْ
Kotoob (books) كُتُب
Kitaab (book) كِتاب
Kaatib (male-writer) كاتِب
Kaatiba (female-writer) كاتِبة
Kottaab (writers) كُتَّاب
Kitaaba (writing) كِتابَة
Mektoob (written) مَكْتوب
Mektaba (library) مَكْتبة
Maktabi (librarian) مَكْتبيّ
All of this from 3 letters ktb ك ت ب or كتب + vowels that sometimes work as normal letters ا و ي and El harakat tashkiliya (i don't know the translation) which are like short vowels and are added on top(or below) a letter: َ short a ا, ِ short i ي, ُ short o ْضمّة damma, ْ stop sokoon.
Then there is a small laying three (3):
ّ shedda or stress.
El hemza, this little ء that is like a glotal stop which is added only to the letter ا to make a َأ or e إِ...
I can go on but my comment will turn into a grammar book. Just to show how Arabic is cool (in a complicated) way.
Ayyy arabic speakers represent! I love the root system we have, it’s ingenious. Might be a little confusing for new learners, but it’s so useful for picking up new vocabulary!
@Language and Programming Channel ليست صعبة أحيانًا؟ 😹 ما زلت أحاول أن اتعلمها بشكل كامل حتى و انا درستها في صغري. و لكنني فعلاً احب اللغة
NONCONCATENATIVE MOR0HOLOGY FOR THE WIN!
It always fascinates me how similar Arabic and Hebrew are! We also use KTB(v) consonants for “write” but they look like: כתב
These letters combined with various vowels, prefixes, & suffixes make up
He writes: כותב
She writes: כותבת
To write: לכתוב
Writing (noun): כתב
Holy parchment (used only for Torah and other specific religious writings): כתב סת״ם
Even something like marriage contract: כתובה
I didn’t bother with the vowels but as an example “he writes” would look like ”כּוֹתֵב” with nikud (dots and dashes used to show vowels - I think they’re called diacritics?)
I think that the English word for ( El Harakat Attashkiliya ) is " DIACRITIC " but I beg to differ and say that the explanation you provided sounds unfounded :
The vowels have no true effect to change the meaning of a word as you mentioned above . In Arabic language , words may be changed or rather derived through MODELS التفعلة = قوالب and this leads to what is so called AL ISHTI9A9 , الإشتقاق
(فعل . فاعل .مفعول . .فعول .فعيل .فعلان . مستفعل إلى أخره )
An arabic word forms according to those MODELS قوالب . Sometimes comprising prefixes , infixes or sufixes , حروف الزيادة or to pronouns الضمائر
Ambiguity is one of my favorite features of language, it’s what leads to music, art, and poetry.
I love love LOVE that you include signed languages in your teaching. It's so important.
Yes it’s great. A subset of that greatness is that I just learned that the ASL sign for “learning” is miming an open book with one hand, grabbing its contents with the other, and smushing them into your brain :D
One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way. I wish everybody good luck with opening new doors in their life 🍀
how many do you speak? (and which)
@@FlamingBasketballClub Thank you for such a wishing . All the same !
@Star Star What do you mean by "artificial"?
Yeah, which is probably why Karens refuse to listen to anyone else.
(edit) I forgot the copula. Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker.
My mind was blown just from the untwistable (not twistable) vs untwistable (able to be untwisted).
I'm loving the series so far! Excited to see more. Thanks!
+ yeah me too! Not a word that often so I don’t think about it. But I think you’d differentiate the two meanings with emphasis on pronunciation. Or maybe just wouldn’t use it to mean “able to be untwisted”. I would just use the phrase.
@@trace_tomorrow i have never seen untwistable used as "able to be untwisted" tho, which really confused me
this happens because the prefix happens to be the opposite of the suffix. i wonder how many more such words there are... also, i could imagine this becoming a sorta psychological experiment where words with conflicting affixes are used to test linguistic cognition in some way.
@@alveolate but is it a real word if no one uses that way? language isn't just adding prefixes and getting words, not all of them are used so they arent words
Oh, thanks i got it because of your comment
Merriam-Webster has three requirements to add a word to the dictionary:
1) Part of speech (noun, verb, etc.)
2) Clear definition
3) Widespread, sustained use
'Hangry' meets all those requirements, so although it's listed as 'informal', it *is* in there.
It’s interesting how English has so many negative prefixes (anti-, dis-, mis-, just to name a few) and only one commonly used positive prefix, pro-.
6:15 reminded me of Robin from Young Justice, "You're overwhelmed. Freeze was underwhelmed. Why isn't anyone just whelmed?"
My favorite bound root is the one in underwhelmed and overwhelmed. I found it funny that you can find something overwhelming (too much to handle) or underwhelming (unimpressive) which work quite well as opposites. But you can't be merely "whelmed".
@Jule I went to the comment hoping to find this, and you did not disappoint! :)
But here's the thing. It kind of is its own word. It's not useful, and it's not in the dictionary. But you could say you're feeling "whelmed," and you have a good chance of being understood.
although, whelmed is actually a word. to whelm means "to engulf, submerge, or bury". it's not commonly used, i had to look it up to see if it was a word, but it turns out it is
My favorite one is "-bot" because although it was originally just a syllable in a word, people now use it like a derivational suffix.
"-ceive" is an example of my favourite kind of bound morphemes, i.e. a cranberry morpheme, where the bound morpheme (in this case "-ceive") doesn't have any independent meaning but is still used in word-formation. Same thing with "-mit", as in "permit", "transmit", etc. where the "-mit" now no longer has any independent meaning, or, the titular "cran-" in "cranberry".
Typically these did used to be morphemes with independent meaning (like "cob" in "cobweb", although some English dialects do still use "cob" to mean spider, but not the "standard" language), but because the independent roots now only survive in compound roots, or because they only came into the language as part of compound root, they lost their independent meaning.
In both of these cases, the bound morpheme was a free one in Latin but got borrowed into English already in compound forms.
@@varana True, and I did mention that later on as a condition for the rise of a cranberry morpheme. The "cob" in "cobweb", though, is an example of the first condition (native free morpheme that fell out of use)
@@varana I think it's rather later and from a French variety: 'permit' and 'transmit' exist exactly as such in a third person singular of 'permettre' and 'transmettre' with the root being {mett-} and the infinitive indicator {-re} So: «Le servant transmit la lettre.» "(The) servant (has) transmitt(ed) (the) letter." Note how there are no germanic/Old English roots in this sentence. ('Have' as an auxiliary only to indicate past tense.) It is likely that the French words where adopted in this 3rd person form, since it is more common to speak about something in a foreign language (especially with a French lord) than about oneself or to a second person.
Why cranberry though? Is this another new modern way of trying to make something memorable by creating a silly comparison (similarly like acronim creation is now the new best thing?)
@@JinJinDoe The "cran" in "cranberry" is a cranberry morpheme, that's all really
Very cool that you're including sign language in your list of examples! Really interested to see how it ties into the different fields!
Wait until you start breaking apart the lexemes of highly agglutinating languages like Finnish lol they get pretty wild
For example: aasiankeisarikalastaja = aasia "Asia" + n (genitive marker) + keisari "kaiser" + kala "fish" + staa (forms verbs meaning "to catch") + ja (forms agent nouns) = Asian king fish catch er = crested kingfisher (bird from Asia). It gets even more complicated with some of the Native American languages that exhibit full polysynthetic constructions where packs of morphemes and lexemes are stacked onto either end of the verb and you end up with entire sentences that are one word. That's actually the part of linguistics I find most interesting.
It's interesting that you find agglutinativity interesting, because as a native speaker of an agglutinative language, I found fusional languages like Latin to be interesting.
If you only ever heard French and never saw it written down, you'd swear it was highly agglutinative. All these words get pronounced together, influencing each other!
I didnt get it 😶
5:11 just blew my mind!
Same! I paused the video and just sat with it for a bit. Letting the ambiguity tease my mind!
6:18 I am very whelmed by this statement
*- My notes -* (Sorry if they're confusing, I probably have a weird way of taking notes-)
- Just because a word isn't in a divinatory doesn't mean it isn't a word (stupid me)
- Dictionary-makers define one entry/unit as the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning
- They call these units lexemes/lexical items; they're the parts of a lexicon (another word for dictionary)
- Rabbit and -s are examples of the smallest unpredictable combinations of form + meaning
- Linguists call these units morphemes; study of them is morphology
- Morph = Metamorphosis, Animorphs
- Morph is from a Greek word meaning shape/form
- Morphemes can stick together to change the meaning of a word
- A free morpheme is a morpheme that can stand by itself
- A compound is two or more morphemes together
- A bound morpheme is something that doesn't have its own independent meaning
- A bound root is a bound morpheme which is a root word
- If something is after the root word, it's a suffix
- If something is before the root word, it's a prefix
- If something is in a root word, it's an infix
- Circumfixes is information at both the beginning and end of a word
- An affix holding more than one piece of information is fusional morphology
This is GREAT. I hope you do this for every upcoming episode... please :)
I would say that the "s" in "rabbits" has a meaning (plural marker); it just can't stand alone as a lexeme, just like the "ceive" and unlike "rabbit," which can stand alone.
great, thanks for doing this.
"A bound morpheme is something that doesn't have its own independent meaning" it does have a meaning, but can't be used alone?
@@sei531 the -s in rabbits conveys meaning, but it must be connected to the noun it makes plural. This -s is different from the -s in eats, but again, this -s, as well as -ing and -ed, must be bound to the verb it is modifying.
Wow ! Thanks.
I'm studying English and I just failed a Linguistics exam that included topics like morphology, so this video helps a lot to understand it!! ☺️
good luck in studying!
@@shatandv thank you!! 🙈
I don't like how unrabbity this video is.
Love that you include sign languages. I just want to let you know, your point about nouns and verbs was valid, but your handshape for chair and sit was incorrect. It should be two H handshapes (or the first two fingers). I noticed the non dominant hand only contained the index and NOT the middle finger.
it might be a regional thing. My deaf friend back in high school pointed out several signs that he used and knew that differed from the official ASL.
Joel Feila regional signs exist for things like strawberry and birthday, but sit is not known to have regional sign variants.
Also the palm direction is incorrect! It should face down on the non-dominant hand, not in. I noticed this as well
"Can you just ceive?", I think you can in Europe.
Yes, more specifically in latin where the english translation is 'get'
Or, for that matter, "procieve"?
@@Jimbo40000 The verb is "capere" (principle parts capio, capere, cepi, & captus), which is better translated as "to take" than simply "to get". It's a little harder to recognize in English because the 'a' turned into 'i' or 'e' in its compound derivatives in Latin, becoming prefix + -cipio/-cipere/-cepi/-ceptus, and then going through the medieval Norman French dialect before it made it to English, further disguising its connection. It also has more transparent non-"-ceive/-cept" derivatives in English as well, such as "captive" and "capture," but they came into English later through direct borrowing from Latin, and are not transparently related, so while they would count "-cept" and "capt-" would count as variants of the same morpheme in their native Latin, they are different morphemes for all useful intents and purposes in English.
@@MichaelHopcroft It's not an accepted lexeme, and certainly wasn't one the Romans used, from the morphemes involved you can deduce that it would literally mean "to take for/on behalf of" so I could see it being used to mean "to take [something bad] on behalf of [someone else]" (ie "to protect/shield [an ally/patron/client/etc]"). Or just as a nice euphemism for stealing.
If it's not an awesome 10 things I hate about you reference, then I know nothing
I'm glad you decided to make this series.This episode has already exceeded my expectations.
Thank you for starting this series! It's awesome to see people talk about language in a more scientific way!
You are right that a lexeme (or a lemma) is a word viewed as an item in a list. In your words, a word viewed as a dictionary entry. However, "the United States" and "the European Union" are not a lexeme in that sense. They are more like word sequences viewed as items in a list of geo names. Movie titles often falls into this category: "The Sound of Music" is a movie title and it names a particular movie in Amazon's movie catalog. This fact is very relevant for speech recognizers since lists of lexical items ("domains") must be known by speech recognizers for them to properly guess which word comes after "play the trailer of the sound of...". Language analysers (parsers and interpreters) also need to take these word sequences as a single lexical unit, otherwise they cannot determine which video to play. Here we should separate the notion of lexical words (the name of some phenomenon realized in a wording) from the notion of grammatical words (a unit composed of morphemes in a standard way). Outside of NLP, it is useful to recognize "the sound of music" as a movie title, and it is also useful to recognise the individual words to get a feeling of what the movie is about. Both ways of viewing the same wording are fine.
"Deutschwörterübersetzungsproblem" is a beautiful word.
Ein herzliches Dankeschön an die Internetvideoproduzenten von Crash Course für die tollen Weiterbildungsgrundkursvideoserien, dank euch kann ich immer meinen Allgemeinbildungserweiterungswissensdurst stillen!
Bitte nichts
That's not Geeko, is it?
I'm super excited for when they make more! I love linguistics and this is doing really well to teach me the terminology, and learn a couple things in ASL :)
Ooh Malay! Many of those on the list are pretty similar in function - "per" refers to the person/noun whose job is to Do The Thing (e.g. "main" - play, "permainan" - game), "ber" is the general action of Doing The Thing (without any attention to temporality, i.e. we don't care when this is happening), "se" is often a singular, "ke" is turning a verb into a noun. The suffix tends to be dependent on the root word's spelling (though sometimes the prefix changes spelling depending on the root too).
Here's a good explainer of "mer" (which wasn't in that list and tends to refer to "this specific instance of Doing The Thing that we're discussing right now as opposed to the general action of Doing The Thing): www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-between-the-Indonesian-circumfixes-me-kan-and-me-i-and-how-do-they-differ-from-the-prefix-me
True, but also 'pe-' that refers to the person who's Doing The Thing; 'Pe-main'.
This is amazing thank you so much 😍
When i was in school i always wanted to do a language-related major but i ended up in nursing school. Now I’m sitting in the ER bored with no incoming cases and I’m watching this for entertainment.
Looking forward for the next lessons
I've been so hyped for this episode! I already understand morphology, but this breaks down morphology so well
knowing what counts as a word is important in transliterating languages which don't usually notate word divisions. i transliterate japanese song lyrics in romaji to make it easier for non-speakers to follow along, but there are lots of places where people have different practices on word division. to make matters worse, japanese has, in addition to compound words, many "rengo", words that frequently occur together whose meaning is usually determinable from the parts but are important enough to be listed in the dictionary. some transliterators write rengo as separate words, some people write them like compounds, and others do it inconsistently.
I have an old friend who learned Japanese specifically so they could translate a particular manga called "Bokuro no Mint" -- "We are Mint". It sounded to me like "We're Minty!", which annoyed them no end. As an anime fan watching raw tapes in the 1990s when there was a thriving trade in the things, some of the ads were hilarious when the words were misheard, like "I love the Koala Machine!"
I’ve been waiting forever for you to make a crash course on this topic. Would love to see more in other languages
keep em coming!!
im taking a rhetorical theory class right now and its nice to hear about the more technical side of language
This series is EVERYTHING. Thank you.
This video is fantastic. Informative, easy to follow, and extremely fun.
So far two great episodes. I am loving this.
There is an abundance of information available on the internet (huge understatement)...These videos are well written, informative, and entertaining...Thanks, Crash Course!...Keep up the good work...
In Croatian there is a sentence “Gore gore gore gore gore” which means when translated to english “uphills are burning worse.
1st gore means: Up
2nd gore means:worse
3rd gore means: are burning
4th gore means: hills or a top of a mounatin
5th gore means the same as the 2nd gore
llama! llama la llama
A ship-shipping ship ships shipping-ships.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Police police Police police police police Police police.
Can-can can-can can can can can can-can.
Will, will Will will Will Will's will?
Rose rose to put rose roes on her rows of roses.
That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.
i. la .lojban. claxu ti poi nonselsmu
In Finnish a whole discussion can basically be written with the words "kokko" and "koko"
Kokoa kokoon koko kokko.
Koko kokkoko?
Koko kokko.
Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach.
Oh! Thank you so much
I was waiting for this episode
Great video! Thank you so much for creating this! Looking forward to seeing even more videos on Linguistics! Would love to see a series on the history of languages, like writing for example, and Latin :-)
FINALLY! I am so glad you started a linguistics series. Thank you! *happy tears*
I'm living for this series!!!
Thanks for this!
A small point regarding Semitic roots - they are not composed only from consonants, they may include sonants as well (consider B.Y.T which is the root for *house* which has that Y in it's middle).
The main difference is that roots in Semitic languages hold a broader semantic meaning than stems and that the "afix" for Semitic languages is the Form (although they utilize other affixes as well).
Form decides the phonetic organization of the root in order to create a meaning or "word" (rather than the abstract notion which is a root). Combine the root B.Y.T. with the form XaXiX which creates the word "house" as in BaYiT.
This means that Forms also carry a semantic meaning of their own like in XaXiX may mean "a thing of the infused root" like in BaYiT and ZaYiT (olive) and SHaYiT (cruise) and so on.
I know this may seem like a side note, but I think it's important as it creates a unique net of connections between roots in Semitic languages which I'm not familiar with in other languages and in turn may suggest that this connectivity exist in out language processing however is buried deeper for all the non-Semitic languages
This is an amazing series and I am loving it
Love, love linguistics. So happy CC is finally doing a linguistics course!
Have you studied much Linguistics before? :)
I really really love this series and I'm so looking forward to the next one (and he next one, and the next...)! If I may give one bit of feedback, it would be that it's too fast - I'm completely new to linguistics and I just can't process everything quick enough!
That's great! Wonderfully condensed video. I've studied French, English and Italian linguistics. (I am German... we love our long combined nouns.)
Of course, it's also useful to know that there are linguists who consider morphemes a myth, a wrongheaded idea that seemed like it should work and therefore caught on in the field but which begins to strain under even slight scrutiny (null morphemes and heavy reanalysis being obvious). I like to think of it as being analogous to the beginning of the quantum era in physics, where a problem with the standard model is known but it's taking a lot of effort to fix it (with Construction Grammar being the best candidate at the moment) and in the mean time it remains extraordinarily useful.
0:34 I'm form the future and the word hangry is official now thanks to oxford.
This video was abso-hecking-lutely entertaining to watch!
"for the completionists out there" aha! i knew this series was made explicitly for me!
HELL YEAH ANIMORPHS REFERENCE 💜✨
Definitely using this to supplement my morphology lecture 😄
5:35 I have a new entry into the list of favorite autocontranyms
Thank you, this actually helped a bunch!
I loooove this videeeooo 🤩🤩 I'm so happy for this series 😎👏🏽🎉
Thank you! So helpful
It's Morpheme Time!
nice
This series is SICK, and so rabbity
Great episode very instructive.👍
"rabb doesn't mean anything"
Rabb: *sad noises
But oddly, rabbi does.
Well depending on how you interpret the pronunciation it could mean "God" in Punjabi
VERY educational. Thanks
I always thought it was go going gone/went. The conjugation of ir in Spanish makes more sense to me 😂 thank you crash course, for reigniting my love of language structure!
I’m studying danish at Uni and this is what we are studying atm. It’s very interesting
I can't believe how complex all of this is how did we even learn this to begin with OMG!
The example for "chair" vs. "sit" in ASL went by almost too fast for me to notice the difference between the gestures. Maybe explicitly point out the difference the next time you do something like that.
Holy crap, I love this series.
I love this!!! Linguistics is amazing
Agreed! :D
I like adding “ically” to “antidisestablishmentarianism”.
It's strange, because as a german, I'm pretty used to put loads of words into one big word. But it only really works with Nouns. The "ically" makes it an addictive. If I try to put the german counterpart of "ically" behind it, it toatally breaks down the rest. I can build "Antidisestablishmentismus" without a problem but making it an addictive really only works by changing the word establishment.
@@melonlord1414 *adjective ;)
@@solar0wind that was auto correct 😅
@@melonlord1414 Yeah, I figured, but it made your comment hard to understand, so I wanted to point it out😊
I didnt get it. 😶
As a native Malay speaker I should've seen the circumfixes coming. Malay has so many affixes it drives me crazy.
Currently watching this two days before my state exams in linguistics. Wish me luck!
This is such an important thing when learning some other languages, like Japanese. In Japanese verbs are very agglutinative, meaning that they string together a bunch of morphemes to make potentially long but specific meanings. For example, "taberu" ("to eat") can become the negative past progressive "tabete imasen deshita" ("I did not eat"). Different sources will insert or remove spaces, so "tabete imasendeshita" is equally valid. I spent a long time early on learning trying to figure out where words actually end, and it's something I've noticed from other English speaking learners too. Being able to let go of the idea of sorting these elements into words and instead sorting them into morphemes really makes things a lot, lot easier.
Hebrew is interesting as well because sometimes these root consonants can change! For example, the word for _request_ is ביקש, or [biˈkeʃ] in IPA. Specifically, that means "he requested". If I want to say "I requested", I'll say ביקשתי /biˈkaʃti/. But if I want to say "I _will_ request", I'll say אבקש [avaˈkeʃ].
Remember Hebrew is written right-to-left, and (usually) only writes the consonants. So, literally, these are spelled B-Y-K-Sh, B-Y-K-Sh-T-Y, and ʔ-B-K-Sh.
The letter ב has two pronunciations, [b] and [v], depending on context! You have to know Hebrew grammar to predict it. For example, 'thing' דבר is [daˈvar], but 'he spoke' דיבר is [diˈber]. As we've already seen, it can change even within conjugations of the same word.
(The dictionary form of Hebrew verbs, by convention, is past tense masculine. This is because it's the simplest conjugation.)
In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the letter ח is [χ], the letter ק is [k], and the letter כ is sometimes [k] and sometimes [χ]. This leads to weird situations where 'I will sell' is [emˈkoʁ], 'I will stab' is [edˈkoʁ], and 'I will choose' is [evˈχaʁ], but in the past tense 'he sold' is [maˈχaʁ], 'he stabbed' is [daˈkaʁ], and 'he chose' is [baˈχaʁ]. One verb has the "mutatable" consonant, and the other two don't. (Sorry for the word choice! Couldn't think of a better example.)
EDIT: This is a bad font. It makes the Greek letter χ look like the Latin letter x. All of the above should be the Greek one, which represents the voiceless uvular fricative!
EDIT EDIT: [evˈχaʁ] doesn't rhyme with the rest of them because the letter ח changes the vowels surrounding it
EDIT EDIT EDIT: The historical reason for this is that ח used to be [ħ], ק used to be [q], and כ used to be [k] which weakens to [χ] allophonically between vowels except when gemminated. Over time, gemmination disappeared (and consequently weakening became less predictable) and lots of consonants merged. (There are dialects that still maintain these distinctions.)
On the subject of the ambiguity of "untwistable", would it be clearer to define "untwistable" as "able to be untwisted" and "nontwistable" as "not able to be twisted"? 🤔
Bro this video just blew my mind 🤯
I love this, just one suggestion though: please say the word while you’re signing, so I don’t have to try to read the word on screen and look at your sign at the same time.
this is not television; you can read the word, loop back a few seconds, and look at the gesture...
(edit: that is, because lip movement is part of gestures in many sign lanugages, and those do not necessarily correlate to the lip movement needed to form words in the corresponding spoken language)
@@LupinoArts how does one simcom (sign and speak at the same time), then? Perhaps this isn't that big of a problem in PSE?
@@LupinoArts it wouldn't necessarily need to be at the same time. she could say it in english after, like she did for arabic in this episode. looping back to read it might not be doable or practical for everyone
@@NijiRanger That's a great idea, as it wouldn't interfere with correctly signing the word but it would let people who are partially sighted or blind know what word she was talking about.
Awesome! So happy to see this, it was excellently done and very pretty! A+ from me on the fonts and colours!
So happy this series is a thing.
Me too! :D
Enters the Tagalog Language of the Philippines with its very complex morphology and verb conjugations.
Like what do you mean? Tagalog sounds interesting :)
Thank you for this series! 📖 my notebook is filling up quickly. I press rewind and pause at least ten times per video 😂
Yes, linguistics! I love it!
I LOVE THIS SO MUCH I couldn't go to college to study linguistics because of covid, so its nice to have a little something. For anyone else desperately missing it, check out Stephen Pinker's lectures
Great video.
I'm very surprised you didn't mention any turkic languages since they're notorious for morphology to the point that there's no way to even get past very basic Turkish (or another turkic language) without understanding morphology. Nonetheless, good video!
@Language and Programming Channel German mostly packs whole words (lexemes) together to form long compound words, while languages like Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish do the same thing but also include distinct functional morphemes.
For example, in German "Wörterbuch" means dictionary, it's a compound of "Wörter" words and "Buch" book. To say "My dictionary," the "my" part is an independent word "Mein Wörterbuch." In Finnish, dictionary is "sanakirja," and it means "word book," just like in German, but to say "my dictionary," you add an additional suffix, -"ni," to form "sanakirjani" The same goes for the Turkish word "sözlüğüm" which means "my dictionary," from "sözlük" + "-üm" Turkish and Finnish both have vowel harmony, which adds another layer of complexity :)
Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages are agglutinating and they can build impressively long, beautiful words with complex meanings.
@@Aeturnalis I did super basic modern standard Arabic a few years ago and it does something similar with possessive suffixes - like:
um = mother
umi = my mother
umuka = your mother (if I'm talking to one dude)
umuki = your mother (if I'm talking to one girl)
umuhu = his mother
umuha = her mother
and so on and so forth
I can not fangirl enough about this series!
wish i can come across this video when i was little
now everything makes senses
Amazing, that's really awesome language.
looks like we're doing syntax next, going up from morphology instead of down to phonology and phonetics. saving the best for last i see!
Thx a lot.
I have a graduation in English, and this was the best class I've ever had
My favorite crash course 👏
Great videos. A few tiny issues I noticed in this episode, though. First, in the thought bubble definitions, it would’ve been nice to use the IPA, since this is actually what gets taught in linguistics classes. Also, since “compound” was being said/presented as a noun, the stress should’ve been on the first syllable. The transcription given looks like it was for the verb “compound”. Finally, it’s not quite right that wordhood equates with unpredictable meaning. Idioms can have unpredictable meanings, while long/complex words in polysynthetic languages can have entirely predictable meanings.
Problem is some of us don't know IPA and have never been able to find anyone who will actually explain it because they're always just using it. I'm watching this in hope that it'll finally get demystified.
@@doomedmessenger Maybe they'll introduce it in an episode on phonetics/phonology.
@@doomedmessenger True, but the fact that a series on linguistics isn't using IPA kind of damages its credibility.
@@TheGuywithaChannel I really hope they do that...
Please start a series to teach foreign languages using grammar and linguistics 🤩🤩 most people just focus on vocubulary, but learning how words are formed might be a HUGE help
The more I watch it the more I understand. Thank you for this video
may i know how morphology apply to "character-based" languages like japanese, korean or chinese? thank you
I feel like I can give a semi-satisfiable answer here, but I am not a linguist, so keep that in mind :)
The main point is that there is no such thing as a "character-based" language, really. Chinese characters is just a writing system, that can be used to write different languages down (in more or less intuitive ways), and writing systems don't really have that much to do with languages, as we usually think them to.
It is pretty common among people to associate languages with writing systems, but those are actually quite separate things. Think about it: writing did not exist for the most of human history, but people still communicated using languages. Even today, there are a lot of languages, that simply don't have any writing system at all. On the other hand, there are languages with several different writing systems, that either were used historically or are in parallel use today. Take, for example, Turkic languages of former USSR republics (think contemporary countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). Century ago, the languages there used to be written with modified Arabic script, but then, in early USSR, they were moved to Latin-based scripts. In 1930's the USSR's ideology on this topic shifted (as Stalin came to power) and those languages' writing systems were changed again, this time to Cyrillic-based. And now, after the USSR collapse, those new countries are all moving their respective languages to Latin-based scripts again, except these new scripts are different from the ones they used in early Soviet era. People, of course, aren't changing writing system overnight, so, as I understand, currently you are likely to encounter both new Latin and older Cyrillic (and it only makes sense that it probably was like that the previous times around). Now, did any of that cause a significant change to the actual languages people speak? Of course not. How would it? It just changed the squiggles they use to represent their speech when writing it down.
Ok, after this long remark, here's the answer to the actual question. Chinese language (or rather languages, because there are lots of them, Mandarin and Cantonese are just the most well-known) is what's called analytic language. It basically means that each morpheme is a separate word. There are no weird stuff like case endings, plurality endings, or verb conjugation. You can, of course, express all this concepts, it's just instead of changing a word to indicate some meaning, you just add another word nearby (think "I in-past eat" instead of "I ate"). Nothing is that black-and-white in the real world, of course, but, from what I understand, it mostly holds up for Chinese. As to writing system, you might see how this structure (lots of small words that do not change their form) maps pretty well to lots of characters (that, thankfully, do not change their form either) with one-two characters per word.
Korean and Japanese are what's called agglutinative, i.e. they usually function by combining a lot of morphemes in one long word. Here I can even give you an example:
食べる -- tabe-ru -- to eat
食べたい -- tabe-tai -- want to eat
食べたくない -- tabe-taku-nai -- don't want to eat
食べたくないです -- tabe-taku-nai-desu -- don't want to eat (with polite ending)
食べたくないですから -- tabe-taku-nai-desu-kara -- because don't want to eat (polite)
(I know English translations here are a bit odd, but I tried to map it one-to-one from Japanese.) As for writing, Japanese uses Chinese characters for word stems (in example 食 is a Chinese character) and Hiragana - a syllabary, derived from Chinese characters - for conjugation particles (in example - everything except of 食). (Well, not all word stems are written with Chinese characters, because Japanese writing system is slightly insane, but it's a good approximation.) On the other hand, Korean writing system currently doesn't use Chinese characters at all, although it did use them a bit in the past in a way similar to the current Japanese. Also, if you people have like 15 minutes, just look up hangul, Korean writing system, either on CZcams or Wikipedia, because it's, like, the best.
Btw, Vietnamese was previously written with Chinese characters too. I don't know whether you meant it in your question or not, but it's also an analytic language like Chinese.
@@harry.tallbelt6707 Thanks for the explanation! Reminds me of all the people who said "Latin is written in English" or "Mongolian is written in Russian". I can finally say something to them!
@@harry.tallbelt6707 amazing reply, v interesting :)
This series just keeps on surpassing my expectations 🤩 Thank you so much for producing such qualitative content for us !
I
If anyone's looking for some exercises or further reading/watching/listening about morphemes and what a word is, we've been putting together links at mutualintelligibility.substack.com/p/crash-course-linguistics-2-morphology (including this week an exercise on Kiswahili from the Australian Linguistics Olympiad, with answer key!)
You could make an episode on constructed languages. It would be really interesting.