Semantics 

 
A. the official language of Greece is Greek, which has the longest 
documented history of indo-european languages.
The Greek alphabet has been the main writing system for most of the
history, later the alphabet arose from the phoenician script and was the
basis for other writings systems such as Latin.
In ancient times, Greek was spoken as a Lingua franca which means
that it was used as a means of communication for people who did not
share the same native language or dialect.

-Greek has its own branch in the indo-european language tree and has
evolved multiple times over the last decades.

Mycenaean Civilization: ​During this period of time (1300 B.C) the

earliest traces of Greek can be traced. The texts were written in Linear B
which was a type of script.
Ancient Greek Classical Period ​the language developed into multiple
dialects; Iotic and Attic. later these two morphed into one form of Greek
known as the Attic-Ionic dialect.
Hellenistic Greek( koine):​the Greek language developed into what we
now know as Biblical Greek. Thanks to the influence of Alexander the
Great, most of the ancient world adopted Koine as a second language.
Backlash Against Koine: ​atticism surged and influenced Greek
literature and it ​treated classical Attic as the only acceptable standard for
prose writing.
Byzantine Greek: ​Atticism dominated the production of literature for the
entire Byzantine era. The development of actual daily speech during this
period is extraordinarily difficult to reconstruct since the vernacular
speech was deemed unfit for literary production.
Modern Greek:​ ​the language slowly evolved into the Greek that we
know today as a result of the different dialects spoken in each region.
Aristotle on language (nominalism: ​view which denies the existence of ​universals
and ​abstract objects​, but affirms the existence of general or abstract terms and ​predicates​.)
For him, human language’s distinguishing feature is its semantic
approach. He believed that only humans have the ability to use language
to indicate when something is positive or not, right or wrong,
advantageous or harmful, while other animals can only express pain or
pleasure. For him, human language involves ​thinking (mind)​, sensation
and a higher faculty of the soul.
Plato on language (​Cratylus)
In the dialogue ​Cratylus,​ it is considered whether language is a system
of arbitrary signs or whether words have an intrinsic relation to the things
they signify Also, in this dialogue it is stated that phonemes may
represent basic ideas or sentiments.

 
 B. ​Three main languages were in use in England in the later medieval period
– Middle English, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin.

ANGLO NORMAN: Anglo-Norman had emerged as a distinct dialect of French

after the Norman Conquest in 1066 established a French-speaking aristocracy
in English.

MIDDLE ENGLISH: The earliest literary document in English in the University

of Nottingham’s collections is a fragment from the life of St Bridget, from the
South English Legendary, composed in the late thirteenth century. The scribe
uses the Anglo-Saxon letters ‘yogh’ for ‘y’ or ‘g’ (ȝ) and thorn for ‘th’ (þ). He
leaves a wide gap between the first capital letter of each line and the rest of the
word.

FRENCH: A form of French, known as 'Law French', continued to be used by

English lawyers in written form until the seventeenth century. It became
fossilized and degraded, because after the fourteenth century, most of those
using the language did not fully understand it. Many legal terms still in
existence today derive from French, such as 'attorney', 'bailiff' and 'defendant'.

LATIN: Latin was still the preferred language for many purposes. With its fixed
grammar and spelling, it was easy to abbreviate without misunderstanding. It
remained the medium for international scholarship until the seventeenth
century.
In England, Old English was spoken up to the mid-12th century by ordinary
(non-noble) people, then Middle English began to evolve. Wealthy aristocrats
spoke Anglo-Norman French (not the same thing as French). In Germany
people spoke Middle High German, in Flanders they spoke Flemish, in Italy
many Italian dialects were used, in Spain people spoke Old Spanish. There
were many other medieval languages across Europe.

Branches of Linguistics:

➔ Applied Linguistics: ​is a variety of activities that pretend to solve daily life
problems related to language; also, applied linguistics focuses on the different
and complex areas in society where language is involved.
➔ Psycholinguistics: ​is the study of psychological and neurobiological factors
that make possible the language acquisition, using and understanding. The
researchers are made through biology, neuroscience, cognitive science and
information theory to know how the brain processes language.
Psycholinguistics involves the cognitive processes to produce sentences with
vocabulary and correct grammatical structures and the capacity to understand
them.
➔ Sociolinguistics: ​studies the influence of society in language, how a
language varies according with the context, gender, age, social class of the
speaker and also how people use functions of language to convey meaning or
aspects of our identity.
➔ Neurolinguistics: ​studies how the human brain controls, produces,
comprehends and acquires language, where the brain stores the knowledge
of the language; what makes possible the understanding of reading, writing or
speaking and what happens when we use language in our daily lives.
➔ Ethnography of communication: ​is the study of communication depending
on the social and cultural practices, beliefs and thoughts between a specific
group or speech community; in order to understand a language from an
anthropological perspective​.

Linguistics:

Chomsky’s theory
● Universal Grammar: ​American-born linguist Noam Chomsky believes that
we are born with a predisposition to learn language. The basic postulate of
UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent
of sensory experience.
● Behaviorism: ​From the perspective of traditional thinkers says that language
learning is the result of imitation, practice, feedback on success, and habit
formation, Children imitate the sounds and patterns which they hear around
them and receive positive reinforcement for doing so. Thus encouraged by
 their environment, they continue to imitate and practice these sounds and
patterns until they form ‘habits’ of correct language use.
● Language acquisition device: ​He says that language is something purely
human and that it is something innate, he referred to this ability as LAD
(language acquisition device) it was described as an imaginary box
somewhere on the brain.
● Generative grammar ​is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system
of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form
grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the
term in relation to the theoretical linguistics of grammar that he developed in
the late 1950s.
Ferdinand de Saussure:
He viewed the linguistic unit as a combination of:
● ​ ​A concept or meaning

● ​A sound-image

The sign relation is dyadic, consisting only of a form of the sign (the signifier)
and its meaning (the signified). Saussure saw this relation as being essentially
arbitrary.
There is not a natural relationship between a word and the object it refers to,
nor is there a causal relationship between the inherent properties of the object
and the nature of the sign used to denote it. For example, there is nothing
about the physical quality of paper that requires denotation by the
phonological sequence ‘paper’.
​Sapir and Whorf Hypothesis: (Linguistic Relativity) 1930
The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic
categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence
thought and decisions.
They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different
languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different
languages think about the world in quite different ways.
Labov: 1960
Labov carried out a study of dialect patterns on the Lower East Side of New
York City. Using a systematic, quantitative methodology, he demonstrated
that linguistic variation is socially stratified, such that the use of pronunciation
features (e.g., dropping of post-vocalic /r/) correlates with social class,
ethnicity, etc. in regular patterns. Labov’s early research was greatly
influential and inspired many scholars to carry out similar projects in other
communities. The paradigm came to be known as variationist sociolinguistics.
Dell Hymes:
 Was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established
disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language
use.
The "S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G" model: Hymes developed a valuable model to assist
the identification and labeling of components of linguistic interaction that was
driven by his view that, in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not
only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words
are used.
Hymes constructed the acronym SPEAKING, under which he grouped the
sixteen components within eight divisions.
Setting and scene, Participants, Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities,
Norms, Genre.
Franz Boas:
Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote
on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages.
● Boas argued that "alternating sounds" is not a feature of Native American
languages — he claimed that they do not really exist.
● In his article, Boas considers the possibility that two things or sounds that
appear to be different may in fact be the same.
● He shifted attention to the perception of different sounds. He points out that
the problem of people who describe one sound in different ways is
comparable to that of people who describe different sounds all in the same
way.
● This is crucial for research in descriptive linguistics: when studying a new
language, how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? (Here,
Boas anticipates and lays the groundwork for the distinction between
Phonemics and Phonetics.)