 Welcome to another question of the month video. This time I will deal with the questions and comments that were posted by our YouTube channel community in March 2013. And as usual I will present the answers using the active board behind me whose content can be downloaded via the e-lecture library on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. Here is the first problem. In the video introduction language and linguistics I said that language is used oral auditorily. The criterion oral auditory is part of Richard's Hall definition which we took as a starting point for the definition of language for didactic reasons and since speech or spoken language is the most important mode of communication. We know that there are different views about language and the inclusion of other communication systems such as modern sign languages. Maybe we could say that an oral auditory language more commonly known as speech is the prototypical modern use of language among humans and that the others such as sign language are less prototypical types. The next question is about cardinal vowels. A common in the video basic segments of speech vowels one. The guy has a few large mistakes. Well apart from the question itself obviously here someone has a different idea about the production of cardinal vowel number four. So let us look at it more closely. Cardinal vowel number four is defined as a vowel with a maximum opening of the mouth with the tongue flat and low in the mouth and this is the result. Let's see whether this is a reasonable result of cardinal number four. In the language index of the virtual linguistics campus we provide you with the option acoustic vowel charts where you can access among others the cardinal vowels produced by three speakers. Daniel Jones, Peter Ladifogat and myself. Well and here is our cardinal number four. Let's start with Daniel Jones. Now the next one is mine. And here is Peter Ladifogat. And I think you can all hear that Ladifogat's cardinal vowel is more back than the one produced by Daniel Jones and by myself. You can also see the frequencies that are displayed when you click on these cardinal vowels. So I think that Jones vowel and my vowel is pretty close to cardinal number four whereas Ladifogat's is a little bit more back. This may be due to differences in our vocal tracts but all the auditory result is that Ladifogat's cardinal number four is for me too far back. By the way the ash symbol should not really be used when you argue about cardinal vowels. Any argumentation about cardinal vowels should involve the properties tongue height, tongue position and lip rounding and not any additional phonetic symbols. Here is a phonological question that has already been discussed in the video English in England Beyond RP especially the role of estuary English. Now is estuary English a dialect or just an accent? This is a perfectly legitimate question and it is very difficult to answer. Wikipedia for example contradicts itself in saying that estuary English is a dialect of English widely spoken in the southeast England and later that it is a working class accent. Perhaps we should stick to John Wells' definition who said it is standard English spoken with the accent of southeast of the southeast of England that is an accent. Theoretically the borderline between accents and dialects is clear. Now here is a standard. A standard can be defined in terms of its phonology morphology syntax and in terms of its lexis or vocabulary. Accents ideally differ from the standard only in terms of phonology whereas dialects also deviate from the standard in terms of morphology syntax and lexis. But can a variety differ from the standard only in terms of pronunciation? Probably not. There are always some specific words or particular morphosyntactic patterns which are confined to the variety. For this reason many linguists prefer the term phonological dialect whenever the focus is on phonology rather than morphology syntax or lexis. Using this more flexible term estuary English can be defined as a phonological dialect of standard English. Let's move on to morphology. In the e-lecture structural typology we introduced a triangular representation of classifying languages structurally. This representation combines two ways of classifying languages morphologically. The general parameters analytic versus synthetic where analytic is synonymous with isolating plus the integration of the two synthetic language types agglutinating and fusional. This distinction goes back to Bernard Conbury's book Language Universal and Linguistic Typology. In this book he says an analytic language is a language with a one-to-one correspondence between words and morphs. So typical languages such as Vietnamese and Chinese. A synthetic language by contrast allows the segmentation of its words into morphs. So if you want a straight line then it should be here. The straight line analytic versus synthetic. But if we look at the way languages segment their words into morphs, the two languages German and Turkish for example, where you could argue that German is a little bit less synthetic than Turkish, then we have several at least two types of synthetic languages agglutinating and fusional. So if we want to combine the analytic synthetic parameter with types of synthetic languages, we need a triangular representation. We cannot say anything about analytic languages in terms of how they segment their morphs because they don't do it. But if we look at synthetic languages, we need a differentiation between the two main synthetic types, agglutinating and fusional on the basis of their segmentability. Agglutinating, high degree of segmentability, clear cut boundaries between the morphs such as in Turkish, whereas in fusional languages the whole situation is less clear cut such as in German. Note that there are also polysynthetic languages that is languages where a large number of different morphs can be combined to form words. These languages such as Greenlandic constitute a dimension of their own. The next question concerns the video sense in the series Semantics and Pragmatics where several viewers would have loved the idea that I also introduced types of synonymy. I didn't do it because the video would have become too long. So let's do it in a very concise manner in this particular video. Here are the conditions that can be used to define absolute synonymy. Two items are absolute synonyms if all their meanings are identical, if the respective items are synonymous in all contexts and if their meanings are identical for all dimensions of meaning. The best candidates for absolute synonymy include pairs such as Groundhog and Woodchuck, Pullover and Sweater, Bipedal and Two-Footed. They emerged in different subgroups of a speech community but are known to a larger community. Partial synonyms are also identical in meaning but fail to satisfy one or more of the conditions of absolute synonymy. The English adjectives big and large for example have one meaning in which they are synonymous. This is a big large city so it's the size parameter but if you look at other contexts then they're not synonymous anymore. I will tell my big brother I will tell my large brother well in one case you have the size H parameter two in the other you only have the size parameter. Finally two words are labeled as near synonyms if their semantic similarities are more salient than their differences. The borderline between near synonymy and non-synonymy is much less clear than the distinction between partial synonymy and near synonymy. Ordinary or specialized dictionaries such as Roger's thesaurus well you see the logos over here list many words as synonyms which are in fact near synonyms thesaurus list dictionary and so on. More examples can be found in the unit sense on the virtual linguistics campus. Let us now look at some more general problems. Meanwhile our community has grown enormously hence it is not surprising that more and more comments come in including more and more requests of this type for example could you provide e-lectures about Daeglossia present-day English versus Spanish Phonology or e-lectures about isolated languages such as Basque. Well I feel very much honored and it'll be a great pleasure to satisfy all these needs. However as you may guess this will take some time. First we'll produce those fundamental e-lectures that are required for a solid linguistic background and those we need to support the virtual sessions on the virtual linguistics campus. Later we will produce more specific e-lectures maybe these too. Here is another interesting comment. Sir it's wrong to throw your own phonological laws on any other languages or IPA facts. Well I must admit I do not understand this question. It was asked or it was associated with the video vowels and talks about consonant and I must admit I don't understand it. So let me make a suggestion here. If questions or comments do not make sense at all we ask the contributor for clarification. This can then be done via email to our email address info at linguistics-online.com but should not be added to the video itself. It only confuses all the other viewers. Another problem is that we have comments in languages other than English. Well even in my mother tongue German. Well this one means in short why don't you offer your courses in German. Well my answer to this particular remark is simple the virtual linguistics campus is an international platform. Our carrier language in teaching has always been English. And last but not least we are part of the English department of Marburg University. And finally our classes are for the world and not just for one country and one language. For these reasons we will no longer address comments written in languages other than English and kindly ask you to use English whenever you want to post a comment. And then like all humans I make mistakes. Not surprisingly at all. Meanwhile our channel hosts more than 50 hours of linguistic materials and honestly have you ever seen a human lecturer that did not produce a single mistake within 50 hours. The only difference between video lecturing on YouTube and private lecturing in class is that there are far more people who can see you and notice a mistake. I think this is great. In a lecture attended by let's say 50 students perhaps no one would have noticed that I put Shakespeare's death to 1618 and not to 1616 or that I had Jackson Town in Missouri and not in Mississippi or that in labial continental consonants the lower lip and not the lower teeth are involved. So thanks that you discovered these mistakes. And then there are even more severe mistakes such as forgetting a diphthong in German. For words such as ua and nua as the comment correctly posted. In fact some Germans would say or some German linguists would say I should have added yet another one as in words such as klar and bar. You remember all the r words in German that are problematic for German learners of English. These mistakes need correction either directly or by means of a video of this particular type. So again it's your control that assures the quality of this channel. Well that's it for now. As usual I'd like to thank all our subscribers and users. Here are those whose questions and comments I tried to answer. Their contributions which are sometimes lengthy discussions as in my e-lecture about estuary English help us to maintain the quality of our channel and are useful for all of us. And comments like this one here I especially motivating. Not surprisingly I like comments of this type. Super enjoyable lesson you are very clear and concrete with the explanations. Thanks a lot for sharing. And if someone like our subscriber Brian Colbridge says your team's contribution to the world is priceless we feel really honored and at the same time motivated to keep up this level. So once more thanks to all of you spread the word use our videos in class for your preparation and so on. So see you again in the next questions of the month video or in any of our future or already existing e-lectures. Bye bye.