Iberian: The extinct and almost entirely unknown language, or family of languages, of the Iberian Peninsula in pre-Roman times. (Cf. Aquitanian.)
Ibero-Basque: A designation of a hypothetical language family, assumed to comprise the extinct and almost completely unknown Iberian and modern Basque.
Ibo: An African Negro language, also called Bo, spoken in South-eastern Nigeria; a member of the Sudanese-Guinean family of languages.
Icelandic: A Scandinavian (North Germanic) language, spoken by approximately 150,000 people in Iceland.
identic: A declensional case in certain non-Indo-European languages, denoting identity or sameness.
ideogram: Any graphic character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name, or which symbolizes an abstract idea or quality.
ideograph: See ideogram.
ideographic writing; ideography: A system of writing using ideograms (q.v.) instead of letters or syllable signs.
ideophone: In the languages of the Bantu group, a vocable used to qualify a term of the utterance.
idiolect: The individual’s personal variety of the community language system.
idiom: (1) Any expression peculiar to a language, conveying a distinct meaning, not necessarily explicable by, occasionally even contrary to, the general accepted grammatical rules.— (2) The idiom is a term denoting the general linguistic or grammatical character of a language.
Idiom Neutral: An artificial language created in 1903.
idiomatic: Peculiar to a language.
idiomatic expression: An expression which has a distinct, specific meaning of its own, often incompatible with or even contrary to the individual meanings of the words which compose it.
idiomatic usage: Use of a word or expression with a meaning of its own, often contrary to the principles of grammar or logic.
Ido: An artificial language, created by Louis de Beaufront (1907).
Ijo: An African Negro language, also called Jo, spoken in Nigeria; a member of the Sudanese-Guinean family of languages.
Ile-de-France: See Francien.
illative: A Finno-Ugric declensional case, having the same denotation as the English preposition into.
illeism: Redundant use of the third-person personal pronoun.
Illinois: A North American Indian language (Central Algonquian).
illiterate: Unable to read and/or write.
Illyrian: An extinct member of the Indo-European family of languages, once spoken in the Balkans, and assumed to be related to Messapic and Venetic, possibly also Rhaetic.
Ilocano: A language spoken in the Philippine Islands by about 800,000 native speakers; a member of the Indonesian sub-family of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages.
imitative word: An onomatopoetic word (q.v.).
immediate constituent: Cf. constituents.
immediate future tense: A term occasionally used to denote a tense which expresses that an action or happening is impending.
immigrant language: A language of another country, spoken in communities composed of immigrants from that country, usually with admixtures of words and constructions borrowed from the language of the host-nation.
imperative mood: The mood of a verb used in expressing a command, request, consent, suggestion, entreaty, etc. In certain languages, the imperative mood has a present tense (expressing an order, etc., to be carried out at once) and a future tense (used to express orders, etc., the execution of which is to be delayed or deferred).
imperative sentence: A sentence expressing a command, request, suggestion, consent, entreaty, etc.
imperfect participle: A present participle.
imperfect tense: A verbal tense expressing that the action was continuous or habitual or still in progress or not completed in the past.
imperfective aspect: The verbal aspect which considers the action denoted by the verb in its progress, regardless of its beginning or completion.
impersonal mood: See infinite form.
impersonal verb: (1) In Indo-European languages, and in certain other language groups, a verb denoting an action by an unspecified or indefinite agent, and used in the third person singular only (in Indo-European languages which require a subject pronoun, such verbs are used with the neuter third person singular pronoun as subject—with the masculine third person singular pronoun in languages which have discarded the neuter gender.) (The term monopersonal or unipersonal verb is preferable in this sense).—(2) A verb the conjugational form of which does not express or emphasize whether the agent is the first, second or third person.
implication: The intensional meaning (q.v.) of a term.
implosion: In phonetical terminology, the noise heard as a result of a complete closure of the oral air passage.
improper compound: In the flexional languages, a compound word in which the elements are loosely linked and both (or all) of them are inflected.
improper triphthong: A synonym for trigraph (q.v.).
impure language: (1) A hybrid language (q.v.)—(2) Improper or unidiomatic construction or style.
inactive voice: In the grammatical terminology of certain languages which have no passive voice in the strict sense of the term, this designation is used instead of “passive voice.”
incapsulating language: A rarely used synonym for polysynthetic language (q.v.).
incapsulation: The combination or incorporation of several words or elements into one word.
inceptive aspect; inceptive verb: See inchoative aspect; inchoative verb.
inchoative aspect: A verbal aspect in which the action is considered at its start or commencement.
inchoative verb: A verb expressing an action commencing or being started (cf. inchoative aspect).
inclination: A term synonymous with enclisis (q.v.).
included position: The position had by a word, phrase or other linguistic form (q.v.) when it is a part of a larger form and does not constitute a sentence in itself.
inclusive personal pronoun: One of the plural personal pronouns found in certain languages, meaning “we and you,” or “we and they,” “you and we,” or “you and they,” in contradistinction to the exclusive pronouns (q.v.).
incomplete verb: (1) A verb of incomplete predication (q.v.)— (2) A verb, the conjugation of which does not contain all tenses and forms common to verbs of the same class. (Cf. defective.)
incontiguous assimilation: Assimilation (q.v.) when the assimilatory and assimilated phonemes are separated from each other by another phoneme or other phonemes.
incorporating language: An alternative term for polysynthetic language (q.v.).
indeclinable: Incapable of being inflected; having only one form and incapable of showing distinctions as to number, person, gender, etc.
indefinite article: A particle inserted before or prefixed to nouns to indicate that the noun is used as a generic term.
indefinite conjugation: See subjective conjugation.
indefinite declension: In German grammar, a synonym for the strong declension (q.v.) of the adjective.
indefinite pronoun: A pronoun or a word used pronominally, without reference to a specified person, object or thing. (E.g., whoever.)
independent clause: A clause which forms a complete sentence in itself.
independent element: Any word or group of words which have no grammatical connection with the rest of the sentence in which they are used. (E.g., an interjection.)
Indian languages: See American Indian languages; see also Indic.
Indic: The name of a branch of the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken in India and Ceylon; its most important members are: (1) Classical Sanskrit, (2) the medieval Prakrits (q.v.), and (3) the modern Prakrit vernaculars: Hindustani (including Hindi and Urdu), Bengali, Bihari, Marathi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Oriya, Sindhi, Pahari, Bhili, Khandesi, Assamese, Sinhalese, Kashmiri, Nepali and Romani, the language of the Gypsies (qq.v.).
indicative mood: The verbal mood which expresses that the action or state denoted by the verb is an actual fact.
indirect discourse: Any form of discourse in which the substance of the words, statements, etc., of another person are related without being quoted verbatim.
indirect object: The substantive denoting the person or object to, toward or for whom or which the action expressed by the sentence takes place.
indirect question: A question quoted in indirect discourse (q.v.).
indirect quotation: The repetition of the substance of the words, statement, etc., of another person, without quoting them verbatim.
indirective aspect: See benefactive aspect.
indirectness: Indirect discourse (q.v.).
Indo-Aryan: An alternative name for the Indic branch of the Indo-Iranian language group.
Indo-Chinese: An alternative name of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.
Indo-European: A family of languages, composed of the following languages and language-groups: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic (or Teutonic), Greek, Hittite, Illyrian, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Thraco-Phrygian, Tokharian (qq.v.). Originally, all these languages were synthetic and inflected, with a three-gender system, but at the present time many have become analytic, to varying degrees, and have adopted a two-gender or natural gender system.
Indo-Germanic: The designation preferred by German authors and linguists (indogermanisch) to Indo-European.
Indo-Hittite: A designation intended to express the relationship between Indo-European and Hittite (qq.v.).
Indo-lranian: A language group, of the Indo-European family of languages, consisting of two branches: the Iranian and the Indo-Aryan languages (qq.v.).
Indonesian: A sub-family (also called Malayan) of the Malayo-Polynesian family of languages, spoken in Indonesia, Malaya, Formosa, the Philippine Islands, Madagascar, and a great many islands of the Pacific. It consists of about 200 languages and dialects, the most important of which are: Malay, Javanese, Balinese, Batak, Bicol, Bisaya (Visaya), Bontok, Buginese (Bugi or Bugis), Dayak, Formosan, Ilocano, Macassar, Maduran (Madurese), Malagasy, Sundanese and Tagalog.
inessive: A case in certain languages (e.g., Finno-Ugric) having the same denotation as the English preposition in or within.
infection: In phonetics, a general term for vowel changes due to the influence of a contiguous or near-by vowel.
infectum: The aspectual category introduced by the Roman grammarian Varro (1st century B.C.), including the present, preterit and simple future tenses.
inferential aspect: See putative aspect.
inferior comparison: Downward comparison (q.v.).
infinite form: A collective term for verbal forms which show or imply no distinction as to grammatical person. (Cf. finite form and personal infinitive.)
infinite mood: See infinite form.
infinitive: That form of the verb which expresses action or state without indicating person or number. Certain languages, however, have personal infinitives (q.v.) which do indicate a distinction as to grammatical person and number.
infinitive clause: A clause in which an infinitive has predicative function.
infix: A formative (q.v.) inserted within a word.
inflected language: See flexional language.
inflection: The addition of certain endings (q.v.) to the base (q.v.) of a word to express certain grammatical relationships and functions and aspects. While this process is common to and characteristic, to a major or minor extent, of the synthetic languages (hence called also inflectional languages), it is of little or no importance and often non-existent in the analytic languages.
inflectional affix: A prefix or suffix without an independent meaning of its own and incapable of being used in itself.
inflexible: Incapable of being inflected; invariable in form.
informant: In linguistic study, a native speaker whose function it is to illustrate the sounds of the language so that his phrases may be recorded or imitated by the students, but not to explain grammar or structure.
ingressive aspect: A verbal aspect which considers the action as limited to its initial stage.
Ingrian: A dialect of the Finnish group of the Finno-Ugric (or Uralic) sub-family of the Ural-Altaic family of languages.
Ingush: A Chechen dialect (Eastern Caucasian group of the North Caucasian family of languages).
Ingweonic: See Anglo-Frisian.
initial accent: Accent or stress falling on the first syllable of a word.
initial glide: See on-glide.
initial inflection: Inflection by prefixing a letter or a syllable or otherwise modifying the beginning of a word.
initial mutation: The change of the initial consonant of a word, under certain conditions, observed in many languages, and of paramount importance in the Celtic languages where the initial consonants of words change in accordance with the final sound of the preceding word or with the position of the word in question in the sentence; this initial mutation occurs in the form of aspiration; lenition or nasalization (qq.v.).
initial stress: Stress on the first syllable.
innovation: A change in sound, word form, or word meaning, which begins at a certain geographical location and radiates outward to neighboring areas.
inordinated adjective: That one of two adjectives modifying the same substantive which has a stronger qualifying effect on the substantive and may be considered to form a closer-knit unit with the latter.
inseparable: Incapable of being severed.
inserted clause: A parenthetical clause (q.v.).
inspiration: In phonetical terminology, the intake of breath.
instructive: In certain languages (e.g., Finno-Ugric languages), a case having the same denotation as the English by means of.
instrumental: A declensional case in which a noun, adjective, pronoun or numeral is used when denoting the agent or means through or by which the action is performed. (In certain languages, also used after certain prepositions and in many idiomatic constructions.)
instrumentalve: Another name for the instrumental (q.v.) case.
instrumentative verb: A verb which indicates the instrument of the action, too. (E.g., to pistol-whip.)
integration: The act or process of organizing parts into a whole or wholes and systematically arranging wholes, usually in the order of their importance.
intension: See intensional meaning.
intensional meaning: The qualities or properties the possession of which is implied, suggested or connoted by a word or term. Synonymous with connotation. (Often called simply intension.)
intensity accent: The distribution of stress over connected sounds.
intensive: In various expressions (e.g., intensive pronoun), this term means emphatic.
intensive aspect: A verbal aspect expressing that the action or state is being intensified in character.
intensive compound: A compound in which the meaning of one component serves to intensify the meaning of the other one. (E.g., stone-deaf.)
interdental: A sound made with the tip of the tongue between the teeth.
Interglossa: An artificial language proposed by Hogben, based on Greek and Latin roots with a system of syntax resembling that of Chinese.
interjection: An exclamatory word, invariable in form, often derived from some stereotyped phrase, used to express emotion.
interjectional phrase: A phrase or group of words used as an exclamation or interjection.
interjectional theory: That theory which maintains that human speech originated from ejaculations uttered by primitive man under the influence of pain or intense emotions. (Often referred to as the pooh-pooh theory.)
interlanguage: A generic term for all languages created or adopted for international communication.
interlingua: (1) An artificial language, consisting of inflectionless Latin (therefore originally named Latino Sine Flexione), created by Giuseppe Peano and first used by him in 1908., —(2) An artificial language created more recently by the International Auxiliary Language Association.
interlinguistics: The comparative study of widely-known languages to determine which elements are common to a number of them. The auxiliary language, Interlingua (q.v.—2), has recently been devised on the basis of this technique.
intermediate sound: A sound which partakes of the nature or characteristics of two sounds, and represents a transition between those two.
internal flexion: Inflection (q.v.) of words by internal phonemic change or gradation.
internal hiatus: See hiatus.
internal punctuation marks: Punctuation marks used within sentences.
International Phonetic Alphabet (I.P.A.): See page 104.
interpreter: A person who explains the meaning of something— specifically, one who translates orally from one language into another.
interrogation point: The punctuation mark [?], more commonly called a question mark.
interrogative: Indicating, expressing or introducing a direct question.
interrogative sentence: A sentence containing a direct question.
intervocalic: Said of a consonant or group of consonants appearing or sounded between two vowels.
intonation: The modulation of the voice; pitch; tone quality; the musical flow of speech.
intransitive verb: A verb expressing an action or state which does not go beyond the agent, and does not require (and often cannot take) a direct object.
invariable: Having only one form; incapable of inflection or other changes.
inverse spelling: A phenomenon of overcorrection (q.v.) appearing in writing, as when Latin stone-cutters inscribed diaebus instead of diebus because they were conscious of the fact that they were prone to use e for ae.
inversion: A reversal or modification of the normal sequence or order, especially of the normal word order.
inverted sound: A cacuminal (q.v.).
involution: In grammatical terminology, the use of an involved sentence structure.
Ionian: One of the literary dialects of ancient Greek.
I.P.A.: The International Phonetic Alphabet (see page 104).
Iranian: The name of a branch of the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken in Iran, the Iranian Plateau and in part of the Caucasus. The languages which constitute this branch are: Persian, Kurdish, Pushtu (or Afghan), Ossetic, and Balochi, and probably the extinct Khotanese and Old Sakian.
Irish: A language of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic group of the Indo-European family of languages, the official language of Eire. Frequently referred to by linguists as Irish Gaelic. (The designation Erse is not used by the inhabitants of Eire themselves). The Irish language between 600 and 1200 A.D. is referred to as Old Irish, while the state of the language from 1200 and 1600 A.D. is called Middle Irish; Modern Irish is the Irish language since the early 17th century A.D.
Irish Gaelic: See Irish.
Irishism: A word or idiomatic expression or construction peculiar to or characteristic of the speech of the Irish.
Iroquoian: A family of North American Indian languages; its surviving members are: Huron (or Wyandot) Iroquois, the languages of the Five Nations (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca), Cherokee and Tuscarora.
Iroquois: (1) A North American Indian language, member of the Iroquoian family, spoken in Canada, in the Montreal region.— (2) Often used as a designation of the entire Iroquoian family.
irregular: Deviating, in some or several or all features, from the recognized norm or standard.
irrelevant: Said of those articulatory features of a phoneme which are not relevant or distinctive, i.e., non-phonemic. Though they play no role in distinguishing the meaning of words, the irrelevant features may be very important in clarifying dialect differences and in determining “foreign accent.” (E. Dorfman)
Irtysh: An Asiatic language; a member of the Western Turkic group of the Altaic sub-family of the Ural-Altaic family of languages.
Isaurian: An extinct language, of undetermined linguistic affinities, preserved in inscriptions and in glosses recorded by some classical scholars. Classified as Asianic.
isogloss: On linguistic maps, a line separating the areas (called isogloss areas) in which the language differs with respect to a given feature or features, i.e., a line marking the boundaries within which a given linguistic feature or phenomenon can be observed.
isoglottic line: An isograph (q.v.).
isograph: Any line on a linguistic map, indicating a uniformity in the use of sounds,. vocabulary, syntax, inflexion, etc. (Cf. isolexic, isomorphic, isophonic, isosyntagmic, isotonic lines.)
isolated opposition: The relationship of a set of phonemes whose relevant feature is not shared by other sets; l:r as nothing else in English.
isolating language: A language in which all words are invariable and their interrelationship in the sentence is indicated solely by their relative positions and connective words.
isolexic lines: Lines on a linguistic map, indicating the approximate boundaries of the speech-areas in which a uniformity in the vocabulary of the speakers and in their use of words can be observed.
isomorphic lines: Lines on a linguistic map, indicating the approximate boundaries of the speech-areas in which a uniformity in grammatical forms, inflections, etc. can be observed.
isophonic lines: Lines on a linguistic map, indicating the approximate boundaries of phonetically homogeneous speech-areas, i.e., of areas where identical phonetical features prevail in the pronunciation of the language.
isosyntagmic lines: Lines on a linguistic map, indicating the approximate boundaries of the speech-areas in which a uniformity in syntax can be observed.
isotonic lines: Lines on a linguistic map, indicating the approximate boundaries of the speech-areas in which a uniformity can be observed in the use of speech-tones.
Isotype: A system of writing using non-phonetic signs of universal significance, designed as a medium of education. (The word Isotype is the combination of the initials of the full name, International System Of Typographic Picture Education.)
Istro-Romanian: The Romanian dialect spoken in parts of Istria. It is heavily interlarded with Italian and Slavic words.
Italian: A Romance language, the native tongue of approximately 60,000,000 people in Italy and its colonies.
Italic: A group of the Indo-European family of languages, usually divided into the Latino-Faliscan, Osco-Umbrian and Sabellian (qq.v.) branches.
Italicism: A word, expression, grammatical or idiomatic construction peculiar to, characteristic or reminiscent of the Italian language.
Italo-Celtic: A designation of the hypothetical common parent language of the Italic and Celtic languages.
Itelmic: See Kamchadal.
iterative aspect: That verbal aspect which expresses that the action is a repeated or habitual one.
iterative compound: A compound word formed by repetition of a word.
iterative numeral: A numeral which answers the question “How many times?” (Also referred to as multiplicative numeral.)
Ivrit: The Hebrew name of the modernized Hebrew which is the official and national language of Israel.