Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Interactive CASE N&M? SLAV-T252: Intro to the Slavic Languages


Interested in exploring languages?  A whole family of languages?

 

Looking for a CASE N&M?

 

Want to learn linguistic analysis skills in a fun, interactive way?

 

 

Introduction to the Slavic Languages

 

SLAV-T252

Spring 2014

MW 1:00–2:15 pm, SY 103

carries CASE N&M

 

The Slavic languages form an important subgroup of Indo-European and are spoken from East and Central Europe, through the Balkans, and across northern Asia, and Russian serves as a lingua franca across Central Asia.  The three branches of Slavic (East, West, and South) are composed of over a dozen living languages and boast well over 400 million speakers.

 

The course is meant to be a fun and interactive approach to exploring linguistic processes.  No previous experience with Slavic languages is required, but an active curiosity about how people use and change language will be a plus.

 

Students acquire foundational concepts in linguistic analysis which they will use to analyze a great array of language materials from modern Slavic languages, inductively writing rules which they then test with new data from other languages and drawing conclusions about the evolution of languages and the forces which shape them.  Rather than learn about these "exotic" languages through memorizing arbitrary rules and facts, students will learn a range of linguistic approaches to understand how languages change over time and to compare aspects of the Slavic languages, from alphabets to sound systems to vocabulary to verb systems.