Sei Language in the Amazon Forest - Essay Example

Morpheme helps us understand simple meanings. Words are a combination of different morphemes.

 In this paper, I discuss in detail the sound system of the language studied, Morphology and Syntax as well as Question formation and pragmatics. We detail phonemic inventories, phonotactics, Inflectional morphology and simple sentences in the language studied. We also discuss the pragmatics of wordplay and question formation strategies.

Being able to speak and understand a language requires one to master the sound system of that particular language. The sound system is an abstract category that comprises individual speech sounds.

The language chosen here is called Pitjantjatjara. It is from central Australia and it is a dialect of the Western Desert Language (Andrew).this is because of its interestingness and its similarity to my language Sei. My consonant inventory consist bilabial, labiodental, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, and glottal.

bilabial

Labiodental

Alveolar

retroflex

palatal

velar

uvular

glottal

Plosive

b

t  d

g

ʔ

Nasal

m

ɱ

ɳ

Tap of Flap

ɾ

ɽ

Fricative

ɸ

v

 ʂ   ʐ

ç

x

h ɦ

Approximant

Ʋ

Lateral Approximant

ɭ

Minimal pairs:

[h, ɦ]

[t, d]

[ʂ, z]

[ʂhɾɘ]: child

[mtɔ]: cap

[gmʂa]: run

[ʂɦɾɘ]: car

[mdɔ]: dirty

[gmʐa]: alcohol

There is Glottal, Uvular, and Labiodental in my language which is not there in Pitjantjatjara. However, both Pitjantjatjara and Sei do have Plosives, Nasals, and Bilabials.  It has 20 constants, and 20 vowels from front to back and from close to open.

In “Sei” language onset rules are similar to English, they follow the peak and the consonant sound begins the word. Consonants or vowels are allowed to peak.

In “sei”, onsets are required and complex onsets are allowed. For instance, the word [ʋɸy], which means water in English can be CCV and CC is the onset is the nucleus. In this case, complex onsets are allowed in “sei”.

In morphology and syntax, we focus on inflectional morphemes and sentential structures. Morphemes are meaningful units that form words and sentences are made up of words.

“Root morpheme” is the base of a word and has the primary meaning of a word (Bischoff and Fountain). Root morphemes can be free and bound. Below is my root chart.

Definition

Transcription

Part of speech

‘commander’

hʃa

Noun

‘old tea’

Ma

Noun

‘go’

wi

Verb

‘Fishing’

lm

Verb

‘dozen’

Hwa

Determiner

‘above’

Hur

prep

 My there categories are, Number, Tense, and Gender. In numbers the prefix e–means singular, el – means nouns in dual, and the prefix set –means three. The example will be like this:

e -  hʃa

el-     hʃa

Sel-    hʃa

singular-commander

dual-commander

trial-commander

In tenses the Infix –it– stands for action in past, –ur–action shortly, and –a– means action in the distant future. For example

l–im –m 

l– ur– m 

l–ri– m

fishing- past

fishing- near future

fishing- distant future

In gender prefix nr- means masculine, fr- means feminine and ut- means neutral gender.

          nr-          hʃa     

       fr-                           mhʃa

masculine–commander

      feminine–commander

There are six types of basic constituent order. They are ‘SOV”,”SVO”,”VSO”,”VOS”,”OVS” and ”OSV”. In Chinese we use SVO, OVS and OSV are very rare among the world languages.

The constituent order of mu languages is SVO, which is very popular in the world and very easily understood by humans.

For pragmatics, it is said in the article that it is not about how to say a thing, it is about how to use a language (Bischoff and Fountain).

Polar questions are questions that want more complex answers other than yes or no. Content questions are questions that use “what” to ask the question (Bischoff and Fountain). In my language, polar questions are similar to those in English. However, for content questions in my language, we put “what” in front of the sentence instead of the beginning.  For example:

 ei MHA kɭχʀa=Are you where (q)? =Where are you?

A joke example in my language will be like:

ʉɢ mhay çoe qɨ ɴʀɣɘ ʀχ lah ʋɸy, lalɨɡ mha fβç ɰxoe?

If your mom and I are into the water, you save who (q)?

If your mom and I dropped in the water, who will you save?

In this joke, we are asking about behavior in the future.

 In this paper my goal was,s to understand linguistics and I have focused on the key aspects of linguistics. I have focused on the sound system, morphology and syntax, and question formation, and pragmatics. From these chapters, I feel I know linguistics and I realize that every language is dynamic and amazing.