Linguistics loves to use examples from all languages! If you look at a text book on the subject, you'll learn about the existence of many languages, some with fewer speakers than the number of people in your class.
1:05 Don't forget contronym: one word with two or more contradictory/opposite meanings. I.e the verb "dust". As in "I dust the house", which means to remove particles from the house and "I dust for fingerprints" to add particles to see fingerprints.
If you look, you can find lots more examples. Like, "The alarm went off" could mean either that the alarm started or that it ended. People understand contronyms to mean contradictory things in different contexts. I think, in your example, people implicitly feel that dusting a house has a narrow meaning - it means removing the dust. So we aren't just using the same sense of a word different way. We're using a contradictory sense of the word.
@@0ValdeCalebros Hmm, I've typically heard the term in the context of specifically removing or adding, but you may be right that that's an additional definition for the term. Either way, the point is a contronym is another aspect to semantics to consider. Perhaps a clearer example of one is the word "sanction" which could mean to give approval for an action/thing or to punish/put restrictions on some person or nation for illicit activity. Another example would be the word "apology". In the context of an apologist, it means a justification for an action, but it could also mean expressing wrong-doing and/or remorse of an action. Edit: Funnily enough, we all assume when someone says "I apologize for my actions" that they recognize wrong-doing, but if they're playing on semantics, they may mean they think they were justified in their action. Oh, and here's an example of a word that would have recently become a contronym: "Literally". I'm sure you see/hear people using that all the time, for example "I literally died from laughter". Well, in that instance, literally actually means figuratively, otherwise they wouldn't be talking to you and they would be dead lol.
i gotta be honest, back in the day I have to read through books : a journey with words and boring pages, to be able to have a certain amount of understanding of semantic and its branches. This video gives me a lot of hope, joys, and happiness for how fun it is for people out there to obtain this kind of knowledge nowdays. Thank you so much Crash Course for your works. I adore it so much.
Taboos and euphemisms can go so far that they erase a word from usage. 'Bear', in almost every European language, means 'brown thing'; they have determined that this is a euphemism to avoid saying the animal's real name and avoid its wrath. It worked so well that that real name is no longer known.
I wouldn't sah the original term is no longer known. It's generally agreed upon that the proto-germanic word "bear" replaced was a cognate with the term that gave us Latin "Ursus" and, eventually, Spanish "Oso". We can't know what the term exactly was, or how exactly it would have evolved, but we're not in the dark either.
It's something like *urktos in PIE. The southern and eastern Indo-European languages tended to keep the word, while the northern and western ones tended to use taboo replacement via "brown one".
"How do we know what words mean?" - "Look it up in the dictionary!" is the linguistics version of "Where does electricity come from?" - "The wall socket."
In Philippine English or the English dialect used in the Philippines by Filipinos, a toilet, toilet room, bathroom, or a wash room, is called a "comfort room" or abbreviated as a "C.R." or "CR". It's maybe because we Filipinos find this particular place as a place where you can be comfortable or where you can feel comfort, but I just don't know the exact reason why and its specific origin and history.
But everyone is on a different page. If you are not familiar with British English and American English. You can be lost in the sauce. When I was learning English, I believe that English is the same all over the world but then I was exposed to a British, and I realized that it all comes down to semantics. Location and experience mold the language and understanding we use. The same goes for all languages. Remember Spanish is not alike in every country that speaks it. There will be a 10-20% mutation. Heck, it is not the same American English spoken in every place in the US either.
I used to collect reference books. I was surprised to discover that the word computer was listed in a 1921 unabridged English dictionary. I was amused to read that it described someone's job, adding up columns of numbers and/or doing other mathematics or computations.
The Norwegian matpakke is just a sandwich wrapped in paper that you usually bring either to school/work or maybe on a mountain hike. The word consists of two words. Mat(food) + pakke (package). The filling can be whatever you like.
Awesome video again! Semantics courses at my university were infamously obtuse and formal--we had to learn set theory before even talking about types of meaning--and this was WAY easier to understand. It is hard to capture the scope of Semantics though.
This is shaping up to be a great CrashCourse. I would love it if an episode was devoted to how new languages are created. I love the theory -- from Hawaii -- that it's bored children who create new languages.
The Polish example is cloooooose but not 100%. wiedzieć is used for intransitive sentences with one exception, being wiem to, i know that (the fact thing) znać is used for transitive sentences. not just people, but answers, words, etc.
It was a very good episode, as the previous ones. There is one important point to highlight though, namely that the two different meanings of 'bank' are an instance of homophony, not polysemy. Other than that, it was great!
Thanks for this. Now I know where to start in resolving some common arguments that come up for me. I think the issue is with interpretations related to predicate calculus.
Love this series. And others who love it would also probably love the podcast A Way With Words. Wish you could invite them on board, Taylor. That would be a cool interview session!
When I heard that hotdog might be a sandwich a cool podcast called 'A Hotdog Is A Sandwich' came to my mind. I recently discovered it and it's just amazing
If I don't know a word, I look it up but I also find sentences using that word and form my own sentences using that word. Practice and using the new words in your writing and speech helps move that word from your short term to your long term memory.
My education borrowed the psychological term Schema. Packets of cultural information that attach themselves to phonemes which add meaning beyond their definition when formed into a word. Schema can also be entirely individual. What do you think of when you think of "A Fast Car" In America it's usually a red sports car, but it breaks down depending on the individual, and country of origin.
most linguists would agree that BANK is not an example of polysemy but of homonymy, in fact BANK is the most commonly used textbook example of homonymy
If bread is on both sides of a thing, it's a sandwich. If bread is flat underneath a thing, it's a pizza. If bread is folded to hold a thing, it's a taco. If bread is wrapped to contain a thing, it's a burrito. If it's a hot pocket, it isn't food, stop trying to call it food. ;)
I feel like the AE definition is muddied a lot by advertisement... Best example is the "ice cream sandwich" - it was obviously called that because of its look _akin_ to a sandwich and to make it stand out from other cookie-and-cream ice products. But just because it sells well, doesn't mean it's actually a sandwich, right? If that was an argument, we'd also have to include small gelatenous sweet treats in the definition of "bear"...
not every speaker of every language or even is the same, though, or uses words in the same way - that's why there's sociolects and even idiolects! hoping this will get touched on in an episode on the sociocultural side + subfield of linguistics :)
@@ericBorja520 I personally drew the line when the definition started including fillings between rolls. Depending on where you are in England you call that a cob, a bap, a barm or a teacake, and I'm possibly forgetting a number of variations. I might be contradicted because that's dialect for you
*Matpakke* means “packed lunch”. If you pack a burrito, then that's your matpakke. You could pack a bowl of salad, and it would still be a matpakke. A person from Norway might usually pack a very simple sandwich with liver pate and multiple pieces of bread, but she could also bring lompe or lefse (flat bread) and it would still be a matpakke.
9:00 As o formal (as in used to be, not fancily dressed) i need to dissagree with theese associated meanings. All CC hosts like a rabbit means, that every particular CC host likes some (at least one) rabbit. Some can like more, some can like only one. Two or more can like the same rabbit (or several same rabits, while differ on others) or not, we dont know. But it deffinetelly does not mean that Every CC host each like a different rabbit - that would be much stronger condition. (Unless you would define your language that way, but we are not constructing a english now, are we?)
Hold on! I am Norwegian and I've lived and visited places across the country. Vegimite is NOT a thing that is normal on "matpakka" (which means food package for anyone who wants to know). Just saying matpakka doesn't even have to contain bread it can be a salat if you want. But vegimite isn't a thing you can find outside of the biggest cities in Norway.
seeing people in the comments talking about the Sandwich Debate, and even the Soup/Cereal convo, but the real question is: Is butt leg? (imo it totally is) also i miss my semantics homework from my undergrad days. predicate calculus was fun, easy*, and impressed my non-ling friends bc they thought i was doing some super complicated math with all the funky symbols we were using by the end of that quarter. *(for me, at the level we were at)
Aww, I was hoping we'd segue into talking about scoping quantifiers over others! Ah well, the logician in me can always go do some lambda calculus to pass the time. Great video!
There are words that sound like what they are but (what are?): "the words that sound like what they are not-or something other than what they are or meant to mean"? Entomology and Etymology. Ento- sounds close enough to ants and by extension insects, fare enough mnemonic to give you a clue. But Ety- sounds like the personal pronoun of a Dugong, Manatee, or Loch Nessie's sister. Not the study of word hist/origins, nor the best example of what I was trying to convey. But anyway what are those words called? And then there is mnem: to remember, but what is the smallest definable/translatable word part or part that caries meaning/sound? It's my understanding that it's these subset comparisons is how word translation programs work.
There's a really nice TED talk (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-F6NU0DMjv0Y.html) that goes into how dictionaries work and what makes a word "real". At the end of the day, what words and phrases mean comes down to how people use them in context, which is why you can get a phrase like "I could care less" to mean "I don't care", even though that is literally the one thing it rules out. Whatever works!
As a linguistic layman, it seems to me the Prototype definition concept lends itself to a lot of culture bias. As mentioned, a sandwich to one culture will conjure an image completely different from another. It's good in theory, but seems open to mistranslation in practice.
I think that may be precisely why it is useful - since that difference in image and understanding occurs between people and cultures, it is useful to acknowledge that and consider it part of the word's meaning - after all, we learn words in contexts, especially as children from repetition and association, therefore of course a word in someone's head will be slightly different to that in another's, this being a feature of language, not a bug
Well, culture bias is gonna exist whether we like it or not. Saying "human generally don't have or feel the need to have a concise definition of the things they talk about" is simply an acknowledgement of how things work.
Dominic Mako Lexical semantics isn’t really about finding a true meaning of a word (or its translation) that cuts through cultural bias; it’s just about describing what meaning users of a language interpret from that word. It’s true that English speakers will probably have a different prototype of a sandwich in mind than Turkish speakers, so that even if they’re speaking the same language they might get some clash of definitions, but this is just the diversity of languages in play. You can never translate a word perfectly between languages, and sometimes even within a language, different speakers will have very different ideas!
Your universal quantifier example doesn’t imply that Gav exists, because there could be zero Crash Course hosts, and so there wouldn’t need to exist any Gav for all zero of them to like him.
You may be pushing the idea a bit far there. I think whether "all" implies "at least one" is at least a matter of idiolect. A better argument would be that "All crash course hosts like unicorns" doesn't imply that unicorns exist.
Then the predicate wouldn't be valid or sound, that is, false. Linguistics (and logicians) work with predicates that are, at least, assumed valid and sound, unless they are specifically testing truth claims.
imo Gavs existence and the existence of at least two CC hosts are sticky implications, and can't be false in a world where that sentence is true. Unless we're out here flouting Gricean maxims*, to say "all CC hosts like Gav" implies there's a Gav (even if he's only a fictional concept) and enough CC hosts that you have to specify "all" instead of just saying "The CC host" *(i havent kept up with all the CC Ling videos so idk if they've covered those good good maxims yet, but if not, just basically 4 assumptions one can usually safely make of any statement coming from a cooperative conversation partner - That what they're saying is, in their opinion, relevant, true, informative to the correct extent, and conveyed sensibly)
Fun fact: The German word "gift" means poison. Originally, it started out like well, gift in English. However, people assassinated each other by giving each other "gifts", and the meaning kind of stuck.
