There’s a slight factor, which Chris Lo has already pointed out in comments, but it’s only slight.
Spanish does not have length contrast in vowels or consonants. As a result it is syllable-timed, and it is spoken quite fast.
Italian has audible vowel length differences (stresses vs unstressed), and also long and short consonants. That makes it spoken a bit slower, and there’s more phonetic variety, which (for me) makes it a bit easier to pick out words.
The closest we have that I know of (and it’s really not very close at all) are the Pseudo-Dosithean Hermeneumata. They’re a third century AD Berlitz phrasebook of Greek and Latin. Nothing about language teaching methodology, and of course not much of a language teaching methodology is on display anyway.
I did find the following exchange in the Berlitz funny though:
Colloquium Harleianum:
23. Isn’t that Lucius who’s got my silver coins? Here he is. Then I’ll go and say hello to him. Hail, householder! Am I still not going to get back what you’ve owed me for so long? What are you talking about? You’re crazy. I lent you silver, and you call me crazy? You thief, don’t you know who I am? Why don’t you go look for whoever you made a loan to; I don’t owe you anything. You swear that to me. I’ll swear wherever you want me to; let’s go. Swear in the temple. By the God over here, you did not lend me a thing. Well, fair enough; it’s no good to doubt the word of a free man and householder.
24. And this animal-fighter is making fun of me? Let me go, and I’ll smash his teeth in. Yeah, well I’ll poke your eyes out. I can see what you would do to me. I’ll have you sent to jail, where you deserve to grow old. You’re making fun of me, you prison-guard. I don’t care what you do. You have a friend, and you’ll find one in me. Well said. OK, I forgive you.
… I dunno, maybe the Romans were onto something with their language teaching.
Supplemental to the list given by David Rosson (ah, your American bias is showing, David 🙂
Oh, and phoneticians’ papers look just like psychology papers. Four pages long, with graphs. Historical linguists’ papers are old-school chatty. Syntax papers have at least some pretence of rigour. The style of the papers lines up to the kinds of science (or Geistwissenschaft) their subdisciplines aspire to be.
Linguists don’t like the word axioms. as you can tell from the other answers: they imply a degree of mathematical rigour that just isn’t compatible with someone as messy as human language. But there are foundational assumptions to disciplines in linguistics, which are pretty much axioms. And they would be more overtly acknowledged, were linguists a more reflective bunch.
In historical linguistics, for example, you have the Uniformitarian principle. (I see from Wikipedia that Uniformitarianism is actually a geology thing, and you can see why linguists made the connection.) That’s the assumption that languages worked the same way 5000 years ago as they do now. You need that assumption to do any non-trivial historical linguistics: our documented processes of language change reach back only 2 or 3 millennia, and we need to assume that the same processes worked further back in time, if we want to say anything at all about Proto–Indo-European.
In generative syntax, you have configurationality, the principle that you can build up the syntax of a language out of phrase structure grammars (the kinds of grammar computer programmers are used to). Non-configurational language are a shock to generative syntax: they are languages where word order is seemingly random, and words do not hang together in well-defined phrases; so you can’t write a simple grammar (the kinds of grammar computer programmers are used to) to account for those languages’ syntax.
There’s other foundational beliefs, such as the primacy of spoken over written language, the “natural” evolution of language, the exceptionlessness of language change, the unidirectionality of grammaticalisation, the arbitrariness of the sign, and so forth.
There are four major groups of ancient Greek dialects:
I’ve ranked them in impressionistic order of archaicness.
The easiest explanation for the spread of the North-Western group is as a wave of settlement, that you might as well associate with Dorian invasions. You can similarly make sense of Ionic as a different wave of settlement. And you can make sense of Aeolic as what was left over in between the two waves of settlement; bear in mind that anything Ionic north of Lesbos resulted from later colonial activity.
Now, notice where Arcado-Cypriot is spoken. Some mountains in the middle of the Peloponnese, and Cyprus, which is very very far away.
The default assumption here is that the Dorian invasion pushed the previous Greek speakers of the Peloponnese up into the mountains. And that Cyprus had been settled by Greek speakers speaking that dialect, before the Dorians cut them off from the sea. In other words: that Arcado-Cypriot was a continuation of the original Mycenaean version of Greek. And there are bits of Arcado-Cypriot and Aeolic embedded in the mishmash language of Homer, although it is basically an archaic Ionic.
Why, of course:
https://www.quora.com/topic/Spec…
No, not really. There are Quora staff that have oversight of moderation; and Quorans have inferred that the bulk of moderation work is done by either bots, or cheap outsourced contractors (with frequent resulting hilarity). The latter have certainly not been discussed publicly.
The former can be unearthed (so Tatiana Estévez is publicly visible, and Jay Wacker and Jonathan Brill do… something, though I’m still not clear what). But it’s not particularly in any large-scale service’s interest that there be too much of a personal face on moderation: that cannot scale.
Greek is all about the formulaic expressions. If you’re the guest in a Greek wedding, you must say:
Now, if you’re the bride and groom… actually, if you’re the bride and groom, you don’t traditionally say all that much, and I’m not aware of a formulaic expression of welcome to a wedding. The generic καλώς ορίσατε “welcome” will do, if you have to say anything; but my recollection is that newlyweds mostly just beam a lot, and dance.
I’m sure I’ve answered this here already.
Positive politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve doing good things for them. They concentrate on eliminating distance between people.
Negative politeness strategies are culturally approved ways of interacting with other people, that involve not doing bad things to them. They concentrate on preserving distance between people.
Positive politeness strategies include:
Negative politeness strategies include:
Cultures have preferences for positive or negative politeness strategies. And cultures take the wrong politeness strategies very badly.
I’m sure you’ve recognised a stereotype or two in one column or the other; maybe even in both.
I understood the words and the phrases, but I had to be edified by some online links, and I’ve got an advantage in that I know why Jakobson said it the way he did.
Exec summary: there is one takeaway message for poets:
FORM MATTERS
The rest is of concern to linguists.
Selection and Combination
In structuralist linguistics, there are two structural mechanisms underlying how language works.
The syntagmatic relationship is about how words and phrases are combined to produce larger meanings. It’s syntax.
The paradigmatic relationship is about which words can be used in the slots of sentences. It’s the relationship between all nouns, or all verbs, or all adjectives. It’s lexicon.
Meaning in structural linguistics is tied up the paradigmatic relationship. Once you’ve worked out which words do the same syntactic job (nouns, verbs, pronouns), you can focus on the meaning differences between those words. In fact, the meaning of those words is defined by the available options in the paradigmatic relationship: dog = not a cat; me = not you.
That focusing on the meaning differences within an equivalence class (words doing the same job in a sentence) is the principle of equivalence.
Functions of language
Jakobson’s enduring contribution to linguistics is identifying the core functions of language. Communication is not the only function. Two functions that Jakobson pointed out, that needed pointing out, were the phatic function (keeping the channel open: “hello”, “how are you”, “ok?”), and the poetic function.
The poetic function is not just poetry: in fact, it’s not even just literature. A lot of humour is covered by the poetic function.
But the important thing about the poetic function is, that the form you use is a big part of the point of what you’re saying. It’s not just about the meaning of the words; it also about the fact that the words have metre, or rhyme, or punning similarities, or similar sounds. And so on.
The two axes
Remember: in structural linguistics, meaning is tied up with the choices of words: the paradigmatic relation. (The axis of selection.) If you use a choice of a different word, you’re expressing a different meaning. While there is also a component of meaning in the syntagmatic relation (how you put sentences together), it’s not felt to be as interesting: we’ve got nouns, we’ve got verbs, there’s a limited way of putting them together. (Remember, this is pre-Chomsky.)
Jakobson is a structuralist, and he wants to say that the poetic function of language cares about language form. So he says it in structuralist terms: We’ve been telling you that meaning is all about the axis of selection. But in poetic language, the syntagmatic relation (the axis of combination) is also a critical component of the meaning. The fact that you’ve put together words that rhyme, or that words that form a metre, or words that echo each other is just as important in the overall meaning as your initial choice of words (the strict meaning you intended to convey as a plain text communication).
We saw the principle of equivalence is how you work out the meaning of words: me = not you, dog = not cat. Different metres have different meanings too. So do different rhyming schemes. So there is a principle of equivalence at work in poetic structures as well. But it is a principle of equivalence that works on how words are put together, rather than just choices of words. So poetic language projects the principle of equivalence, from the axis of selection, to the axis of combination.
O RLY?
I have to say that, even without switching on Chomskian understandings of language, this is a specious way of thinking about language: different sentence structures also generate different meanings out of the combination of meaningful words, and there’s nothing intrinsically poetic about that. Semantics is propositional, not just lexical, and rhetorical, not just propositional.
But structuralist linguistics was the last time literature scholars and linguists were on speaking terms. So it was an important message for literature scholars to take in from structuralist linguistics, that poetic language is all about how you put words together, and that how you put words together separates poetic language from normal language.
Eutychius Kaimakkamis’ is the most complete answer; I’ll only add: