Linguistics

Linguistics
Category	Study

Linguistics is a Division B and Division C event first and most recently run as a trial event at the 2022 Lexington Invitational. Competitors are tested on their understanding of a variety of linguistics topics (including typology, phonology, semantics, historical linguistics, and cognitive linguistics) and answer practical questions about various natural and constructed languages, including transliteration, translation, and etymology.

Orthography

Orthography (etymology: Greek orthographia from orthos = correct, graphia = writing via Latin and Old French) is the branch of linguistics concerned with written language. Of interest, whilst spoken language appears to be universal in humans, this does not appear to be the case with written language. “Prehistory” refers to the many millennia during which modern humans existed yet standardized scripts (vs. simple symbols and marks) were not yet developed. Initial scripts were developed in the languages of the early “cradle” civilizations, marking the beginning of recorded history; by the 1800s, virtually all cultures had both spoken and written language due to cultural diffusion and the benefits of written language (e.g., preserving culture, lowering reliance on memory and intergenerational storytelling).

To represent languages in written form, a writing system or script is required. Scripts can take many forms (say the English alphabet, Arabic abjad, or traditional Chinese characters); all these scripts can be boiled down to their constituent graphemes (in English/languages using the Latin script, these correspond to the letters of the alphabet). When referring to a grapheme (for instance, the h in hug), angled brackets are placed around the letter (to spell hug, the graphemes <h>, <u>, <g> are sequentially written left-to-right). Different writing scripts can be classified into families based on the nature of what the graphemes convey: abjads, abugidas, alphabets, and logograms. Graphemes convey corresponding vocal emetic units; these include phones and morphemes. These will be discussed in depth later, but, in brief, phones are elementary speech sounds which include vowels and consonants (the distinction between these arises from a completely vs. incompletely open/blocked vocal tract in their vocalization). Morphemes roughly correspond to the “parts” of words that convey meaning (including base words, suffixes, etc.)

• Abjads: graphemes represent the consonants of the phonemes whilst vowels are left to inference. Examples include Arabic and Hebrew scripts of said languages.
• Alphabets: graphemes represent both vowels and consonants. Examples include the Latin script of English, French, and Latin languages and the traditional Mongolian script of this language (fun fact: this script goes top-down and left-to-right giving it its unique “tall” appearance).
• Abugidas: (or pseudoalphabets) graphemes represent vowel-consonant pairs with the consonant forming the base of the grapheme and diacritic marks “annotating” the associated vowel. Examples include the scripts of the vast majority of Indic languages (e.g., Devanagari in Hindi, Malayalam script for Malayalam, etc.)
• Logographic scripts: graphemes represent entire words/morphemes. Examples include the traditional Chinese characters and the Kanji script for parts of Japanese.

Abjads, alphabets, abugidas, and logograms are all true scripts. The development of these in the Bronze age marked the emergence of written language and the transition from prehistory to recorded history. Written language was a pivotal development in the development of complex communities and cultures due to the benefits of written script mentioned earlier (preserving culture, recording taxes and debts, lowering the reliance on imperfect memory, etc.). These true scripts can be differentiated from Neolithic protowriting in which pictorial and symbolic representation represented a limited array of words.

Links

2023 Scioly.org Event Challenges Linguistics Rules

NACLO Problem Collection (has a variety of practice and official problems)

2022 Lexington Invitational Trial Event Rules

2022 Lexington Invitational Division C Test and Key

2022 Lexington Invitational Division B Test and Key

Crash Course Linguistics (an introductory linguistics video series)