Tree of Lang
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MAP OF LANGUAGE / v0.4

Map of language

Language is a network that binds people, cultures and societies, and gives the world its shape.

Every essay laid out as one tree — the roots hold the foundational questions, the trunk the history of the field, the leaves the concrete texts. Follow a node to its essay.

Map of language Language is a network that binds people, cultures and societies, and gives the world its shape. What is language? What is language? Bow-Wow, Pooh-Pooh, Ding-Dong — Jespersen Dismantles the Theories of Language Origin Reading the "Woman" Chapter — a Claim Jespersen Made in Earnest That Wouldn't Hold Up Today Verdict — How Jespersen's Language Looks a Century Later Reading Rasmus Rask's Investigation Concerning the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language (1818) — the Man Who Established the Method of Comparative Linguistics Four Years Before Grimm Look at Grammar, Not Vocabulary — Rask's Method, Simply The Traveling Linguist — Rasmus Rask's Short, Eventful Life "Etymology Has Been a Playground for Whimsy" — Reading Rask's 1818 Original Closely Similar Doesn't Mean Safe — Reading Rask's Comparative Practice Why "Grimm's Law," and Not "Rask's Law"? Verdict — How Rask's Method Looks Two Centuries Later Reading Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar (1833/1856) — the Man Who Extended the "New Continent" of Sanskrit to the Whole of Grammar Grammar Isn't a Fossil — It's a Living Thing. Bopp's Idea, Simply Where Did the "I" in "I Give" Go? Bopp's Discovery, Simply "We Leave the Mystery of Roots Untouched" — Reading Bopp's 1833 Preface Closely From -mi to -m — Following an Ending's Wear, in the Original "Grimm's Masterly Grammar Was Not Yet Known to Me" — What Bopp Left Behind, and the Danger in a Metaphor Verdict — How Bopp's Comparative Grammar Looks Two Centuries Later Reading August Schleicher's Compendium (1861) — A Botanist Brings Another Natural Science Into Linguistics Language "Lives," But Has No "History" — Schleicher's Strange Assertion Decay, Not Progress — Schleicher's View of Language History Close Reading — "Language Lives But Has No History," and a Three-Stage Classification Close Reading — Inventing the Asterisk (*), or How to Write Down a Reconstructed Ancestor Legacy — Inherited from Bopp, Linked to Darwin, Overturned by Jespersen Verdict — How Schleicher's Compendium Looks From Nearly Two Centuries Later Reading Karl Brugmann's Grundriss (1886) — A Textbook for a Generation That Refused to Accept Exceptions "Every Exception Has a Reason" — The One Attitude the Neogrammarians Changed Analogy — How a Child's Mistake Can Rewrite the History of a Language Close Reading — A Manifesto Carried in a Single Footnote Close Reading — "A Middle Course Between Bopp and Schleicher": Brugmann Places Himself Legacy and Controversy — Inheriting from Bopp and Schleicher, Challenged by Schuchardt Verdict — How Brugmann's Grundriss Looks From Nearly 140 Years Later Reading David W. Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007) — Archaeology Answers a 200-Year-Old Question What a Horse's Teeth Can Tell You — Tracing the Origins of Riding Through Bit Wear How the Word "Wheel" Tells You the Age of a Dead Language Close Reading — "Pegged to Facts": Anthony's Methodological Self-Discipline Close Reading — "The Yamnaya Horizon Exploded": The Moment the Mother Tongue Began to Branch Legacy and Controversy — Inheriting a Question from Jones, Challenged by Renfrew Verdict — How The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Looks After the Ancient-DNA Revolution A Genealogy of "Why Does Language Change" — Opening the Map The Discovery of Correspondence — Jones and Rask Law and Organism — Grimm and Bopp Language as a Natural Object — Müller and Schleicher An Exceptionless Law, and One Step Toward the Human — Brugmann Simplification as Progress — Jespersen's Reversal What Actually Happened — Anthony and an Answer, 221 Years On Reading Ōtsuki Fumihiko's Genkai (1889–1891) — When Japan Had No Modern National Dictionary The Idea of Ordering Words "A, I, U, E, O" Explaining Japanese in Japanese — An Invention So Obvious It Goes Unnoticed Close Reading — "This Book Is a Dictionary of Ordinary Japanese Words": Ōtsuki States His Own Principles Legacy — A Dictionary That Began as a State Project, Carried Out by "Ōtsuki Fumihiko Alone" Legacy — Why Genkai's Skeleton Still Survives in Every Japanese Dictionary Verdict — How Genkai Looks From More Than 130 Years Later Reading Yamada Yoshio's Nihon Bunpōron (1908) — The Man Who Cut Down Every Predecessor Before Making His Own Case What Is Chinjutsu Theory? — A Japanese Sentence Doesn't Decide What It's Doing Until It's Finished What Is Kakari-Musubi? — An Agreement Rule, Unique to Classical Japanese, That Reaches Across a Sentence Close Reading — "A Unified Thought Is One Unified by a Single Act of Apperception": Chinjutsu Theory in the Original Close Reading — "What Has Traditionally Been Called a Kakari-Shi": A Dialogue With Predecessors Over the Kakari Particle Legacy — The Word "Chinjutsu" Survived; Yamada's Own Grammar Never Made It Into Schools Verdict — How Nihon Bunpōron Looks From More Than a Century Later Reading Hashimoto Shinkichi — Two Discoveries, "Bunsetsu" and Old Japanese Kana Usage, That Changed How Japanese Looks What Is a Bunsetsu? — Cut a Sentence Where It Naturally Breaks, and Japanese's Skeleton Shows What Is Old Japanese Kana Usage? — Nara-Period Speakers Told Apart Two Sounds We Now Hear as One "ki" Close Reading — "You Never Cut Between Them" — The Independent/Attached Distinction Beneath the Bunsetsu Close Reading — "Truly Unexpected" — How the Two Groups of Man'yōgana Were Found Legacy — The Bunsetsu That Became the Base of School Grammar, and the Eight Vowels Handed to Arisaka Hideyo Verdict — How Much of Hashimoto Shinkichi's Two Discoveries Is Still Alive? Reading Arisaka Hideyo — Did Nara-Period Japanese Have Eight Vowels? Five Vowels Become Eight — Where the A/B Difference Shows Up What Is Arisaka's Law? — Some Vowels Never Share a Word Is the Sound of "n" (ん) Really One Sound? — Phonetic Sound Versus Phoneme Close Reading — "A Phoneme Should Rather Be Compared to the Currency Itself" — Where He Disagrees With Saussure Close Reading — "We Received a Ready-Made Phonemic System From Our Parents" — Who Made the Phonemic System? Legacy and Verdict — Arisaka's Law Holds, the Eight Vowels Remain Debated, and Onin-ron Lives On as a Question Reading Shinmura Izuru — The Man Who Chased a Word's History by Evidence Why Couldn't People Once Say "Totemo Omoshiroi"? — The History of "Totemo" Where Did "Right" and "Left" Come From? — Lining Up the Theories of Migi and Hidari Where Does "Kiseru" Come From? — Until Shinmura Izuru Withdrew His First Theory Close Reading — "Totemo Tsukaie-nai" — Checking "Totemo" in the Original Close Reading — "A Sinologist's Story-Fitting, Not Worth Taking Up" — Checking the Folk Theories of "Baka" One by One Legacy and Verdict — The Answers Move, but Shinmura Izuru's Way of Checking Remains Reading Orikuchi Shinobu — The Man Who Re-Read Words Through Ancient Life and Belief Itoshi Once Meant "Unpleasant" — How It Turned Into "Itoshii" ("Dear") "Haikara" Was Once an Insult — The Story of "High Collar" and "Ash Husk" Was the Order of Ancient Compounds Reversed? — Hashidate, Kataoka, Shitaūzu Close Reading — "Kotodama no Sakiwau Kuni" Wasn't a Phrase Praising the Language Close Reading — "Not Mere Sound Change" — Why Sake Becomes "Saka" and Tree Becomes "Ko" Legacy and Verdict — The Observations Remain; the Conjectures Are Read as Hypotheses Reading Ueda Kazutoshi — The Man Who Built the Frame of "Kokugo" and Argued the Ha-Row Was Once P Why Is the "Po" of "Okorippoi" a "Po"? — Evidence That the Ha-Row Was Once P How Does the Small "Tsu" of "Motte" and "Itte" Come About? — The Mechanism of Sokuon How Is a Standard Language Made? — The Idea of "Originally One Dialect" Close Reading — "B = (?) = P" — Working Backward From Voiced Sounds to a Vanished Voiceless One Close Reading — "The Language Common to a Nation" — What Did "Kokugo to Kokka to" Say? Legacy and Verdict — The Sound Inference Survived; the Claim About "Kokugo" Was Questioned Again Reading Kanazawa Shōzaburō — The Man Who Sought Old Japanese in Ear, Eye, Nose, and Mouth, and Argued for a Japanese–Korean Link From "Kumo" to "Kumoru," From "Te" to "Toru" — Names of Things, Names of Actions Is the "Na" of "Namida" an Old Word for the Eye? — Its Link With "Naku" Where Did the Names East, West, South, and North Come From? — The Sun, the Wind, and the Movement of Peoples Close Reading — "Weep, Smell, Speak, Hear" — Old Words for Eye, Nose, Mouth, and Ear Left in Verbs Close Reading — "Korean as a Dialect of Our Empire" — What Kanazawa Shōzaburō Wrote in the Year of Annexation Legacy and Verdict — The Way of Seeing Word-Making Survived; the Proof of "Kinship" Did Not Reading Matsushita Daizaburō — The Man Who Treated "Hana o" and "Tsuki ni" as Single Words and Rebuilt Japanese Grammar from Zero "Hana o" Is One Word, "o" Is a Part — Dividing Language into Three Steps Nine Parts of Speech Became Five — Particles and Auxiliaries Are "Shoes" Is the "Kore" of "Kore, Nani o Suru" a Pronoun or an Interjection? — Words of Intuition and Words of Concept Close Reading — "Gakusei-rashii" Is One Word Made of Three Genji — The Opening of the Theory of Elements Close Reading — "Mono," "Koto," "Hazu," "Tame" — Formal Nouns, in a Threefold Division of the Noun Legacy and Verdict — "Formal Noun" Survived; "Particles Are Not Words" Stayed a Minority View Japanese Fundamentals in the Opening of Kawabata's Snow Country Learning Long Japanese Sentences Through Mori Ōgai’s The Abe Family Learning Japanese Prose from the First Sentence of Sōseki's Kokoro Basic Japanese Grammar in Three Sentences from Mishima's The Sound of Waves Reading Japanese Narration in the Opening of Mishima's The Sound of Waves Mori Ōgai's Appendix to "The Origin of Language" — the 19th-century debate on where words come from Saussure and the Birth of Linguistics Pidgin Is Not Broken English — Reading Jespersen on Pidgin Languages A Child's "Mistakes" Aren't Mistakes — Jespersen's Observations of Children, Simply English Hasn't Decayed — It Has Progressed. Jespersen's Provocation, Simply Reading Otto Jespersen's Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922) — the Man Who Summed Up a Century of Comparative Linguistics Verdict — How Müller's Lectures Look 160 Years Later Not "the Aryan Race" — the Misunderstanding Müller Spent His Life Trying to Correct Myth as a "Disease of Language" — Müller's Comparative Mythology Isolating, Agglutinative, Inflectional — A Close Reading of Müller's Classification of Languages Müller Was the One Who Named — and Spread — "Grimm's Law" "Linguistics Is a Physical Science" — Müller's Provocation, Simply Reading Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Language (1861/1863) — the Man Who Turned Linguistics into a Sold-Out Show Verdict — How Grimm's Law Looks Two Centuries Later From a Hunch to a Discipline — What Grimm's Law Left to Linguistics Father and Brother — Why Is Only One of Them "Irregular"? The Exception in Grimm's Law, and the Man Who Solved It Reading Page 584 — A Close Reading of the 1822 Original Why Fairy Tales and Grammar Were the Same Person's Work — the Other Side of the Brothers Grimm Grimm's Law, Simply — Why father and pater Are the "Same Word" Even Though They Don't Sound Alike Reading Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, Part I, 2nd Edition (1822) — How the Man Who Collected Fairy Tales Found a Law in Language The Verdict — What Happened to Jones's Predictions About Language Comparing Gods — How Far the Same Method Reached, and Where It Overreached Jones's Discovery, Topic by Topic Reception and Legacy — From Intuition to Law Not Accident, Not Borrowing — Jones's Comparative Logic Jones's Discovery, in Plain Words Reading William Jones's Third Anniversary Discourse (1786) — One Paragraph That Started a Discipline From Picture to Use to Act — Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Austin Neither Instinct nor Race — Sapir and Plural Worldviews Toward a System of Differences — Saussure and the Independence of Linguistics Language Is an Activity — Humboldt's Turn Grammar Mirrors the Mind — the Port-Royal Wager The Question Is Born — Plato and Aristotle A Genealogy of 'What Is Language' — Opening the Map Verdictives, Exercitives, Commissives, Behabitives, Expositives — the Last Attempt at Classification Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary — Three Layers Inside 'Saying' Felicity Conditions — How a Performative Misfires, and How It Is Abused Performative and Constative — Where Exactly Is the Line Between Saying and Doing? How to Do Things with Words: Six Ideas, One at a Time How to Do Things with Words, in Plain Words Reading Austin's How to Do Things with Words (1962) — Saying Is Doing "The Shooting of the Hunters": Structural Ambiguity and the Autonomy of Syntax Negation, Questions, and Do: One Analysis Explains Them All The Limits of Phrase Structure: Why the Passive Can't Be a Rewrite Rule "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously": Grammar Is Neither Meaning Nor Probability Nine Ideas from Syntactic Structures, One at a Time Syntactic Structures, in Plain Words Reading Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957): Grammar Is Independent of Meaning The Relative Pronoun and the Hidden Sentence: How Many Judgments Fold Into One Word? Anatomy of the Verb: Person and Number, Tense, and the Verb Inside "I Think, Therefore I Am" Substantive and Adjective: What Does "White" Actually Mean? Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar in Plain Language (Part 2): the Verb That Declares, and the Sentence Hidden Inside a Sentence Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar in Plain Language (Part 1): Look Inside Your Head, and Grammar Appears Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar (1660) — the Wager That the Shape of Language Copies the Shape of the Mind Will There Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow? — Future Contingents and Determinism Affirmation and Negation, Universal and Particular — the Origin of the 'Square of Opposition' Truth Lives Only in the 'Assertion' — a Prayer Is Outside Logic Noun and Verb — the Verb 'Co-Signifies' Time 'By Convention' — Aristotle's Answer to Cratylus Reading Aristotle's De Interpretatione — Words Are 'Symbols by Convention,' and Truth Lives Only in the Sentence No Truth Is Learned from Names — the End of the Cratylus and the Theory of Forms A Name Is 'Vocal Imitation' — ρ for Motion, λ for Smoothness The Flood of Etymologies — a Name Carries a Theory (and Is This a Joke?) A Name Is a 'Tool' — the Shuttle, and the Lawgiver Who Makes Names Physis or Nomos — Two Positions on the 'Correctness' of Names Reading Plato's Cratylus — Is a Name Natural or Conventional? The West's First Philosophy of Language A Typology of Languages, and the Problem of "Ranking" — from Humboldt to Sapir The Organ That Forms Thought, and the Speech That Lives in Dialogue Infinite Use of Finite Means — the Source of Generative Grammar Worldview — a Language Draws a Circle Around a People Inner Form — a Language's "Shape" Is Neither Its Sounds nor Its Rules Energeia — Language Is Not a Thing but an Act Reading Humboldt's On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) — Language Is Not a Product but an Activity Following a Rule, and the Private Language Argument Family Resemblance — "Don't Think, But Look!" Language-Games and "Meaning Is Use" "Whereof One Cannot Speak" — The Limits of Language The Picture Theory — "A Proposition Is a Picture of Reality" Wittgenstein on Language — From the Picture to the Language-Game Value and Difference — "In a Language There Are Only Differences" Synchrony and Diachrony — a Language as a Present-Tense System, or as a Current The Arbitrary Sign — Why a Tree Can Just as Well Be Baum or Arbre Language and Literature — What Translates and What Does Not (Sapir, Chapter 11) From the Sound Pattern to the Phoneme — Sapir's Chapter 3, and What Came After Language, Race and Culture Are Separate — Sapir's Argument Sapir's "Drift" — a Language Moves Down Time and Has Its Own Slope Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 2: Form, Meaning, and Why Languages Have No Rank Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 1: Is Speech an Instinct, and What Is a Sound? Reading Edward Sapir's Language (1921) — Speech Is Neither Instinct Nor Race Langage, Langue, Parole — Why Saussure Split "Language" in Three Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 2: How the System Works, and How It Changes Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 1: What Language Is, and What a Sign Is Saussure's Course in General Linguistics: An Overview What Are Words? The Abe Family’s long sentence Syntactic Structures Humboldt's Diversity Wittgenstein Sapir's Language The Course — overview
ToL · Words Connect Worlds 01 — 05
Roots — foundational questions — philosophy, linguisticsTrunk — the history of the field and its methodsLeaves — concrete essays — literature, textsFallen — dead languages

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