linguistic musings

[tsukikage]

A cleft palate will also prevent an individual from being able to produce trills. The palate refers to the roof of the mouth. Humans have a hard palate which covers a soft palate. During fetal development some individuals do not fuse the two sides of their hidden soft palate together correctly, causing a cleft in the roof of the mouth that can prevent the vocalization of trills.

Does this apply to those who have had their cleft repaired?

Had an interesting discussion with my dad about the realities of linguistics. Unfortunately, I don't really know enough to hold a decent discussion with, well, anyone, so it didn't really go anywhere, but basically we were talking about things like whether deep structure, movement actually, or U.G. exist, etc. I will admit that my mind isn't really critical enough to decide what I buy and what I don't, so although I'm skeptical enough to take things I learn with a grain of salt, I mostly just accept what I'm taught and try to remember that there's much left to be discovered, including things that may contradict our current understanding. I also partly blame this on the fact that I am so new to my study of linguistics that I haven't had much of an opportunity to compare what I've learned to other theories that attempt to explain the same phenomena.
Anyways, this all came out of my mentioning that I think it's sort of sad that we have no sort of "linguistic fossils" with which to investigate the evolution and development of Language (and I don't mean attempts at constructing proto-language - I'm talking about how U.G. developed from when we were at a much earlier stage in evolution). I've often wondered, if there's intelligent life on other planets, do they have language such as ours, and if so, is their U.G. completely different from ours? And if so, would it ever be possible for us to learn their language? Or is the majority of U.G. determined by "communicative physics" - do complement/adjunct distinctions simply have to exist?
(Again, I'm probably buying into the specific theories that have been explained to me a little too much here, but I figure you get my drift.)

Back to studying before getting ready to head over to carve037's.

Comments

[carve037.livejournal.com]

I've thought about that quite a lot, especially since trying to cook up my own space opera setting for the BESM RPG. Like, an especially sticky point is whether you can learn a language that includes sounds that are not speech sounds for your species. For example, if you watch Star Wars, people understand R2 when he talks, even though the sounds in his droid language are just beeps. How much sense does that make? Or even further, if, say, Covenant Elites have quadrilabial fricatives, would humans be able to learn to hear them as different from bilabials? It's something worth thinking about. There's some good websites debating what we might know about alien language. Usually it boils down to "we'll have to use mathematical mumbo-jumbo to communicate, at least at first".

[tsukikage85.livejournal.com]

Well, there is the possibility that we'd be able to distinguish the sounds aurally, even if we couldn't physically produce them, but then again maybe we wouldn't. But I'm talking beyond the types of sounds our physical structures make as well, but moving into morphology and syntax.