Tuesday 27 November 2007

THE 58th QUIZ - LINGUISTICS

1. Which phrase was coined by the Polish/Austrian anthropologist Bronisław Kasper Malinowski in the 1923 work ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ to describe any expression whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information? Examples include saying ‘hello’ when meeting someone, or ‘bless you’ after a person sneezes.
2. One of the earliest known masters of linguistic ‘word play’, who was the Greek poet of the 5th Century BC who wrote an epic poem of 24 books, each book entirely omitting a different letter of the Greek alphabet?
3. Which language, with a name meaning ‘being silent’, spoken by the Aboriginal Lardil and Yangkaal tribes of the Wesley Island group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, is the only click language (ie a language that regularly uses clicks instead of consonants in words) known to have existed outside Africa?
4. With a name deriving from the Polish for ‘little tail’, what name is given to the diacritic hook placed under the lower right corner of a vowel in the Latin alphabet used in several eastern European and Native American languages? Examples from Polish include ą and ę.
5. Coined by the theologian Frederic William Farrar in 1879, what is the linguistic term, sometimes also called ‘speaking in tongues’, for the fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances that are often used as part of religious practice?
6. Arguing that other artificial languages are unnecessary as Latin is already established as the world's international language, which Italian mathematician invented the auxiliary language Latino sine flexione, essentially a simplified form of Latin?
7. There has been controversy in the method one should use to distinguish between languages and dialects since the study of language began. Perhaps the most famous distinction between the two is the Latvian-American linguist Max Weinreich’s humorous aphorism that “a language is a dialect with…” what?
8. Of what, linguistically speaking, is cherology the study?
9. Tmesis is the name given, by linguists, to the inclusion of a word within another word. But what name is given to the inclusion of sounds (or phonemes) within a word? It is divided into two types: excrescence (if the sound added is a consonant) and anaptyxis (if the sound added is a vowel).
10. Deriving from the Greek for ‘turning like oxen in ploughing’ because the hand of the writer goes back and forth like an ox drawing a plough across a field and turning at the end of each row to return in the opposite direction, what name is given to the ancient method of inscription in which, rather than going from left to right as in modern English, or right to left as in Arabic, alternate lines must be read in opposite directions?
11. Named after the American linguists who first postulated it in the early 20th Century, what name is given to the hypothesis that postulates that a particular language's nature influences the habitual thoughts of its speakers and thus different language patterns yield different patterns of thought?
12. In the 5th Century BC, Protagoras of Abdera compiled what is thought to be the world’s first glossary. It contained definitions of unfamiliar words that were to be found where?
13. From the Greek for ‘said only once’, what name is given to a word that occurs only once in the written record of a language? It can also refer to a word that appears only once in the works of an author, or in a single text.
14. Which autonomous province in northern Serbia, capital Novi Sad, is the only place outside of Romania and Moldova in which the Romanian language has official status?
15. Named after the German neurologist who discovered it in 1874, what name is given to the impairment of language comprehension and speech that results in a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal syntax, but otherwise has no recognisable meaning, that results from damage to the posterior part of Brodmann area 22 in the left hemisphere of the brain where the specialized language skill areas can be found?
16. The leading Soviet linguist of the early 20th Century, Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr, named his most famous and controversial theory, that the Kartvelian languages of the Caucasus area were related to the Semitic languages of the Middle East, after which Biblical character? This theory was officially discredited as a misrepresentation of Marxist theory in an article written by Josef Stalin in 1950.
17. A phoneme is the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes meaning in spoken language. What name is given to the smallest unit of “speech” that distinguishes meaning in body language (such as a facial expression or a hand gesture)?
18. Which Sami language that was spoken in the villages of A´kkel and Ču´kksuâl, in the inland parts of the Kola Peninsula in Russia is the most recent language to have been classified as extinct, the last native speaker, Marja Sergina, dying on 29th December 2003?
19. Which British linguist coined the terms ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ in 1954 referring to the language usage of the upper classes (U) and the rest of the populace (non-U)?
20. One of the twenty two national languages of India and the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, which is - with approximately 76 million native speakers - the world’s most widely spoken Dravidian language and the third most spoken language in India after Hindi and Bengali?


The answers:


1. PHATIC COMMUNION
2. TRYPHIODORUS
3. DALMIN
4. OGONEK
5. GLOSSOLALIA
6. GIUSEPPE PEANO
7. AN ARMY AND A NAVY
8. SIGN LANGUAGE
9. EPENTHESIS
10. BOUSTROPHEDON
11. SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
12. IN THE WORKS OF HOMER
13. HAPAX LEGOMENON
14. VOJVODINA
15. WERNICKE’S APHASIA
16. JAPHETH (JAPHETIC THEORY)
17. KINEME
18. AKKALA SAMI
19. ALAN ROSS
20. TEGULU

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