Progenitors

This short series of posts presents concepts as to how colonization

might alter or enhance the colonial progenitor languages of Earth.

Linguistics:

Linguistics is a complex (and perhaps lengthy topic) and I hope you will bear with me as this series of posts addresses the potential for human language evolution as we go out into space.

Before we begin, I am including a brief linguistics primer that will help you to better understand this material as our languages are often written down and require some form of common understanding.

Terminology:

1. Syllabograms are signs used to write the syllables (or morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols represent phonemes, or a logographic script where most symbols represent morphemes—but a system based mostly on syllabograms is a syllabary.

2. A mora (plural morae or moras) is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing

3. In a written language, a logogram or logograph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters are generally logograms, as are many hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters.

4. A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language and is not necessarily the same as a word. The main difference between a morpheme and a word is that a morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but a word, by definition, always stands alone.

5. In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme /ˈfoʊniːm/ is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language. (remember this one)

6. Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds (or signs, in sign languages). The term also refers to the sound system of any particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology only related to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages.

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