The Loom of Language
Exploring the wonder in the words we weave
What's your favourite part of speech?
How might you relate it to this illustration?
It’s May 2022 and this month’s task is to write a short piece inspired by these questions that includes all 9 parts of speech in less than 100 words.
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises. What do you have to lose?
Parts of speech are the theme for this month’s competition. The illustration I’ve shared here is by the talented illustrator, Carol Michelon. It opens the section on parts of speech in my forthcoming book.
And as this is both a contest and an opportunity to learn, let’s look at some questions which relate to parts of speech.
Where do parts of speech come from?
Are they common to all languages?
How many are there in English?
Read on!
There are around 7,000 living languages spoken around the world. Many have common roots, so the words for love either from the PIE root *Liebh– vai Germanic languages (die liebe (German), liyubov (both Russian and Ukrainian), libe (Yiddish)), liefde (Dutch), iubire (Romanian), ljubavni (Serbian), ľúbostný (Slovak)), or alternatively the words which relate to love as amor (e.g., amorous) from the Proto-Italic root *ama– (amore (Italian), amour (French), armas (Estonian), amor (Spanish), etc.) will be recognisably similar. And they’ll all be recognisable as nouns. But the word for love in Arabic, for instance is very different to either love or amor. Moreover, Arabic words link much more closely to pure sound, as they are based on common roots (the root for ‘love’, for instance, being hbb). Charting how words feature in languages can be fun. Take moon (with its commonalities of Luna, and month), for instance, and you’ll get closer to the essence of the word as it’s experienced universally. But Luna and moon are very different words. In fact, it’s very hard to find words that are common to all 7,000-odd languages.
Where the attempts to find common words stop is where attempts to look at ideas that are common to all languages begin. Various lists of such ideas have been compiled. The Swadesh list is one example. There are others, such as the Dogopolsky list or the Leipzig-Jakarta list. They still boil down to lists of disparate concepts which differ across the lists. The concepts are often categorised and researchers such as Anna Wierzbicka, Otto Jespersen, Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, and others, have pointed to the existence of foundational universal concepts of thought on which language is based.
for Otto Jespersen, … unearthing “the great principles underlying the grammars of all languages” will yield “a deeper insight into the innermost nature of human language and of human thought.” Noam Chomsky, ‘What Kind of Creatures Are We?’
All languages, you see, distinguish between that which is fixed and that which is dynamic. Some words point to things that are static; others, to things like actions or states that change and shift over time. This gives rise to the difference we note in language between nouns and verbs, and how we treat them.
The distinction is also found in metaphor. At a very deep level, the static/dynamic – or yin/yang distinction, if you like – is essential to how we think.
The distinction creates the foundation for the existence of different parts of speech – English is no different.
There are nine parts of speech in English.
They can be divided into two family groups: the noun family, and the verb family.
The noun family includes nouns, adjectives, pronouns, articles, and prepositions (which join two nouns).
The verb family includes verbs, adverbs, and conjunctions (which join two verbs, stated or implied).
There’s one straddler – one part of speech which has an element of both families in it. It’s my favourite part of speech, the interjection: ‘Huh?!’ ‘Ah!’
The interjection is a logos - a union of the fixed and the dynamic, the static and the volatile. In fact, one of the meanings of logos in ancient Greek was a complete thought (expressed as a sentence) formed by combining a noun and a verb (‘Words inspire,’ ‘Flowers bloom.’ ‘Wow!’) The interjection is the only part of speech which expresses this union in a single word. Without a speaker (the static element), there would be no ‘Wow!’; without them expressing that ‘Wow!’ through action, there simply wouldn’t be a ‘Wow!’ It’s not an onomatopoeic word like ‘babble’ or ‘chatter’ that sounds like what it describes. It is what it describes. ‘Wow!’
Each part of speech can be further categorised according to differences in meaning. Nouns can be categorised as abstract, concrete, collective, or gendered; verbs, as active, stative, auxiliary, transitive, intransitive, or bi-transitive, for instance.
All of them are inspirational - as I hope you’ll find this illustration by the talented illustrator, Carol Michelon, which opens the section on Parts of Speech in my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing.
What's your favourite part of speech?
How might you relate it to Carol Michelon’s illustration, above?
Write a short piece inspired by these questions that includes all 9 parts of speech in less than 100 words.
Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Wednesday 25th May 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story, Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell. It’s due out later this year, in the second half of 2022.
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