Glossary
72 terms, in plain English with an example each. Every one of these also appears as a dotted underline wherever the app uses it — hover, or tap on a touch screen.
abjad
A script writing only consonants, leaving vowels to the reader.Arabic and Hebrew are written this way.
absolutive
In an ergative language, the case shared by the intransitive subject and the transitive object.It is the unmarked, ordinary form — the ergative is the one that stands out.
abugida
A script where each consonant carries a default vowel, changed by a mark on it.Devanagari, used for Hindi, is the best-known.
accessibility hierarchy
The fixed order in which languages allow relativisation: subject, object, indirect object, oblique, possessor.A language that can relativise objects can always relativise subjects too; the reverse is not true.
accusative
The case for the object, in languages that mark it.The "her" in "I saw her".
adposition
The umbrella term for prepositions and postpositions.Words like "in", "to", "with" — whichever side of the noun they sit.
adverbial clause
A clause setting the circumstances of the main one — when, why, although."When she arrived, I left."
affix
A piece attached to a word rather than standing alone.Prefixes go in front ("un-happy"), suffixes behind ("cat-s").
agglutinative
A language where endings stack up, each carrying one meaning.Turkish "ev-ler-im-de" is house-plural-my-in, four pieces in a row.
alignment
How a language groups the subject of a one-argument verb: with the doer, or with the done-to.This is where ergative languages differ from English.
allophone
Two sounds a language treats as the same, varying by position.The p in "pin" is puffed and the p in "spin" is not, but English speakers hear one sound.
analogy
Remaking a form on the pattern of another. What makes irregular words go regular.The old plural of "cow" was "kine"; analogy with every other noun produced "cows".
arbitrariness
The link between a signal and its meaning being convention rather than resemblance.Nothing about the word "dog" is dog-shaped.
bleaching
A word losing its specific meaning as it becomes grammatical.The "go" in "going to rain" has had all the walking bleached out of it.
call system
A fixed set of signals, each an indivisible whole, about the present.Vervet monkeys have three alarm calls — leopard, eagle, snake — and cannot combine them.
chereme
The unit of a sign language that does the job a phoneme does in a spoken one.A hand shape, a location and a movement, none meaningful alone.
classifier
A word required when counting, keyed to the shape or kind of the thing.Like English "three SHEETS of paper", but obligatory for every noun. Japanese, Chinese and Mayan do this.
clitic
Something between a word and an affix: it leans on a neighbour but is not part of it.The "'s" in "the queen of England's hat" attaches to a whole phrase, not to one word.
cognate
Words in different languages descended from the same ancestor.English "father" and Latin "pater" — related by descent, not by borrowing.
complement clause
A clause standing where a noun phrase would, as an argument of the verb."I know that she left" — the whole clause is what is known.
complementiser
The word that introduces a complement clause.English "that"; Japanese puts its "to" at the end of the clause instead.
converb
A verb form whose job is to link its clause to another one.Turkish "gel-ip" means roughly "having come", and needs no conjunction.
copula
The linking verb: "is", "are", "was".Plenty of languages have none, and simply put the two halves side by side: "he tall".
creole
What a pidgin becomes once children acquire it as a first language.It expands fast, and in a strikingly consistent direction whatever languages fed it.
cultural transmission
Being learned from others rather than inherited.Birdsong has regional dialects, so some of it is learned. A cricket's chirp is not.
deictic
A word whose meaning depends on who is speaking, and where and when."Here", "now", "this", "you" — none of them mean anything without a speaker.
deranking
Stripping tense or agreement from a subordinate verb because the main clause already carries it.English "I want to go" — "go" has no tense of its own.
design features
Charles Hockett's list of the properties that together make something a language.Every human language has all of them; almost no animal system has more than three.
discreteness
Signals falling into distinct categories rather than sliding by degree.A word is one thing or another; a growl just gets more so.
displacement
Being able to refer to what is not here and now.The honeybee dance has it: a bee reports a flower patch nobody present has seen.
duality of patterning
Meaningless units combining into meaningful ones."Cat" is three sounds, none of which means anything on its own — which is how a few dozen sounds make a hundred thousand words.
ergative
A system where the subject of "I slept" is grouped with the OBJECT of "she saw me", not with "she".It inverts an assumption English speakers do not know they hold. Basque, Georgian and Dyirbal work this way.
evidentiality
Grammatical marking of HOW you know what you are saying.In much of Amazonia you cannot just say "it rained" — you must say whether you saw it, inferred it, or were told.
fusional
A language where one ending carries several meanings at once.Latin "-us" marks masculine, singular and nominative together, and cannot be split.
gap
The empty position a relative clause is about, left unfilled.In "the book she read", nothing follows "read": the gap is where "the book" would be.
gloss
The meaning of a word or piece, given in a word or two.In "cat-PL", the gloss of "-PL" is plural.
grammaticalisation
A content word gradually becoming a grammatical one.English "going to" started as motion and became a future tense — "gonna", which no longer involves going anywhere.
honorific
A form that marks respect for the person addressed or discussed.Japanese and Korean change the verb itself according to who is listening.
iconic
A signal that resembles or points at what it means, rather than standing for it by agreement.A bee's dance angle IS the direction to the flowers, scaled to the sun.
interfix
A piece inserted between two parts of a compound.The "-o-" in "speed-o-meter".
interlinear
Lines stacked so each word sits above its translation.The standard way linguists present an example from a language the reader does not know.
IPA
The International Phonetic Alphabet: one symbol per sound, across all languages.It exists because ordinary spelling is inconsistent — English "ough" has six pronunciations.
isolating
A language where nothing is glued on: every meaning is its own word.Mandarin marks past time with a separate word rather than a verb ending.
lenition
A consonant weakening — a stop becoming a fricative, or vanishing.Latin "vita" became Spanish "vida", with /t/ softening to /ð/.
lexifier
The language a pidgin takes most of its WORDS from.Usually the socially dominant party's, even when its speakers were a small minority.
logographic
A script with one symbol per word or idea rather than per sound.Chinese characters. It needs thousands of symbols rather than dozens.
modality
The channel a message travels down.Speech is vocal-auditory; a sign language is manual-visual; an ant trail is chemical.
morpheme
The smallest piece of a word that carries meaning."Cats" is two: "cat" and the plural "-s".
nominaliser
A piece that turns a verb or a whole clause into something noun-like.English "-ing" in "her leaving surprised me".
nominative
The case for the subject, in languages that mark it.The "I" in "I saw her" — as against "me".
phoneme
A sound that can change a word's meaning in a given language.English /p/ and /b/ are different phonemes: "pat" and "bat" are different words.
phonotactics
The rules about what sound sequences a language allows.English permits "str-" but not "ng-" at the start of a word.
pidgin
A language built by adults with no shared tongue, for one shared activity. Nobody's first language.Small, regular, no inflection — and completely adequate for the harbour or the market it was built for.
portmanteau
One form doing the work of several, with no way to divide it.French "au" is "à" plus "le" fused beyond separating.
postposition
An adposition that follows its noun rather than preceding it."The house in" rather than "in the house". Japanese, Turkish and Hindi work this way.
pro-drop
Leaving a pronoun out when it is obvious who is meant.Spanish says "hablo" for "I speak"; the verb ending already says who.
productivity
Being able to make messages that have never been made before.It is the difference between a language and a phrasebook.
proto-language
The reconstructed common ancestor of a family. Never recorded; marked with an asterisk.Proto-Indo-European is the ancestor of English, Hindi, Greek and Russian alike.
reanalysis
Hearers assigning a different structure to the same words."A napron" was reheard as "an apron", and the n moved for good.
reflex
What an older sound turned into in a particular descendant.English "f" is the reflex of an older "p", which is why "father" answers to "pater".
relative clause
A clause that modifies a noun, saying which one is meant."The man who saw me" — the clause narrows down which man.
relativiser
The word that introduces a relative clause.English uses "who", "which" and "that"; many languages use one invariant word.
resumptive pronoun
An ordinary pronoun left in the position a relative clause is about.Hebrew and Persian say the equivalent of "the man that I saw him".
subordination
Putting one clause inside another instead of alongside it."I left when she arrived" subordinates; "she arrived and I left" does not.
substrate
The other languages in a contact situation — the ones that shape the sounds and often the grammar.A pidgin's vocabulary comes from the lexifier; its structure usually comes from here.
superstrate
The socially dominant language in a contact situation.Often the same language as the lexifier, seen from the other direction.
suppletion
An irregular form with no relation to its own stem."Go" and "went" — unrelated words serving one verb.
Swadesh
A standard list of basic meanings — body parts, kin, numbers — used to compare languages.Chosen because these words are rarely borrowed, so shared forms suggest shared ancestry.
syllabary
A script with one symbol per syllable rather than per sound.Japanese kana: か is "ka", not "k" plus "a".
transliteration
Writing a language in another script, usually Latin letters.Not translation: "Москва" transliterates to "Moskva", which still means Moscow.
typology
Classifying languages by their structure rather than their ancestry.Turkish and Japanese are unrelated but typologically alike: both verb-final and agglutinative.
valency
How many things a verb needs. "Sleep" takes one; "give" takes three.