Language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon. Language is considered to be an exclusively human mode of communication; although animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language.
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[edit] Properties of language
A set of agreed-upon symbols is only one feature of written language; all languages must define the structural relationships between these symbols in a system of grammar. Rules of grammar are what distinguish language from other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of symbols to be manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances.
Another property of language is that the symbols used are arbitrary. Any concept or grammatical rule can be mapped onto a symbol. Most languages make use of sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not have any inherent meaning - they are merely an agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean "nothing". Another set of sounds - for example, English nothing - could equally be used to represent the same concept. Nevertheless, all Spanish speakers have acquired or learned that meaning for that sound pattern. But for Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian/Kosovan or Bosnian speakers, nada means "hope".
[edit] The study of language
[edit] Linguistics
Linguistics approaches language through meaning, discourse, semiotics (or social signification), as well as through existing narrative and grammatical structures. The recent study of semiotics and discourse have introduced linguistics to the more metaphysical and sociological perspectives available today, making it open to a wide range of inter-disciplinary subjects and approaches within the realm of the human sciences. Linguistics explores lingual trends and social constructs. It explores histories to arrive at universals, and it examines the aesthetics of various styles in these literary and cultural discourses. It also attempts to account for the development of specific words and utterances through the way they have been used.
Discourse provides an understanding of language on the basis of how it has actually been used. Semiotics is the study of the relationship between signs and what they signify. Narrative studies works on the theory of the narrative, or narratology. The study of narratives might help us to understand how the narratives and structures, that texts are based on, shape our social visions and perspectives. Semantics is the study of meaning: It attempts to understand the meaning behind texts, utterances, usages and words.
Theoretical linguistics is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Applied linguistics attempts to put linguistic theories into practice through areas like translation, stylistics, literary criticism and theory, discourse analysis, speech therapy, speech pathology and foreign language teaching.
[edit] Origins of linguistics
The historical record of linguistics begins in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी) and with Tolkāppiyar, the 3rd century BCE grammarian of the Tamil work Tolkāppiyam. Pāṇini’s grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; Western linguists only recognized the phoneme some two millennia later. Tolkāppiyar's work is perhaps the first to describe articulatory phonetics for a language. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, and consonants, which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.
Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.[citation needed] In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from Ferdinand de Saussure, Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson,[1] which are characterized as being highly systematic.[1]
[edit] Human languages
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them is linguistics. A common progression for natural languages is that they are first spoken, then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar (according to speech) is attempted.
Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a dead language. Conversely, any language that is a living language, that is, it is in a continuous state of change, is known as a modern language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible.[2] For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).
Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)
The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.
[edit] Artificial languages
[edit] Constructed languages
Some individuals and groups have constructed their own artificial languages, for practical, experimental, personal, or ideological reasons. International auxiliary languages are generally constructed languages that strive to be easier to learn than natural languages; other constructed languages strive to be more logical ("loglangs") than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban.
Some writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic or personal reasons. However, like all languages, these now appear to be based upon what some consider to be the original language, Adamic. The fantasy language of the Klingon race has in recent years been developed by fans of the Star Trek series, including a vocabulary and grammar.
Constructed languages are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by natural languages.
This part of ISO 639 also includes identifiers that denote constructed (or artificial) languages. In order to qualify for inclusion the language must have a literature and it must be designed for the purpose of human communication. Specifically excluded are reconstructed languages and computer programming languages.
[edit] International auxiliary languages
Some languages, most constructed, are meant specifically for communication between people of different nationalities or language groups as an easy-to-learn second language. Several of these languages have been constructed by individuals or groups. Natural, pre-existing languages may also be used in this way - their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called naturalistic. One such language, Latino Sine Flexione, is a simplified form of Latin. Two others, Occidental and Novial, were drawn from several Western languages.
To date, the most successful auxiliary language is Esperanto, invented by Polish ophthalmologist Zamenhof. It has a relatively large community roughly estimated at about 2 million speakers worldwide, with a large body of literature, songs, and is the only known constructed language to have native speakers, such as the Hungarian-born American businessman George Soros. Other auxiliary languages with a relatively large number of speakers and literature are Interlingua and Ido.
[edit] Controlled languages
Controlled natural languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a widely used controlled natural language is Simplified English, which was originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals.
[edit] Formal languages
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, and some that are more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by a combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
[edit] Programming languages
A programming language is an extreme case of a formal language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer, to perform specific tasks.[3] Programming languages are defined using syntactic and semantic rules, to determine structure and meaning respectively.
Programming languages are used to facilitate communication about the task of organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is used for artificial languages that are more limited.
[edit] Animal communication
The term "animal languages" is often used for nonhuman languages. Linguists do not consider these to be language, but describe them as animal communication, because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from true language, which has been found in humans only. Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his proof of the language and dialects of the bees.[4] Recent research demonstrates that every sign-use in communication processes follows syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules. Signs may be signals or symbols. signals in bacteria-, fungi- or plant-communication are chemical molecules ("semiochemicals"). In contrast to the analog signaling of honey bees of the southern hemisphere Karl von Frisch demonstrated that the variety of bee dances function as symbolic code for distance and direction of nutrient availability.
In several publicized instances, nonhuman animals have been taught to understand certain features of human language. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been successfully taught grammar[citation needed]. In 2003, a saved Bonobo ape named Kanzi allegedly independently created some words to convey certain concepts, however the careful examination of other apes raised in a similar manner (Washoe, Koko, and Nim Chimpsky) shows a greater degree of anthropomorphism and selective observation on the part of trainers and a lack of initiative and high levels of simple imitative behavior with the subjects.[citation needed] The African Grey Parrot, which possesses the ability to mimic human speech with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having sufficient intelligence to comprehend some of the speech it mimics. Most species of parrot, despite expert mimicry, are believed to have no linguistic comprehension at all.
While proponents of animal communication systems have debated levels of semantics, these systems have not been found to have anything approaching human language syntax. The situation with dolphins and whales presents a special case in that there is some evidence[citation needed] that spontaneous development of complex vocal language is occurring, but it certainly has not been proven.
Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behavior and the existence of mirror neurons in primates. This, however, is still a scientific question. Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have analogous features, they are not homologous[citation needed]..
[edit] See also
[edit] See also (Lists)
- Category:Lists of languages
- Ethnologue - list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
- List of basic linguistics topics
- List of language academies
- List of languages
- List of official languages
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Holquist 1981, xvii-xviii
- ^ "Language". The New Encyclopædia Britannica: MACROPÆDIA 22. (2005). Encyclopædia Britannica,Inc.. 548 2b.
- ^ What is programming language?. Webopedia. Retrieved on 2007-11-23.
- ^ Frisch, K.v. (1953). 'Sprache' oder 'Kommunikation' der Bienen? Psychologische Rundschau 4. Amsterdam.
[edit] References
- Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Chakrabarti, Byomkes (1994). A comparative study of Santali and Bengali. Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co. ISBN 8170741289
- Gode, Alexander (1951). Interlingua-English Dictionary. New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company.
- Kandel ER, Schwartz JH, Jessell TM. Principles of Neural Science, fourth edition, 1173 pages. McGraw-Hill, New York (2000). ISBN 0-8385-7701-6
- Katzner, K. (1999). The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
- Holquist, Michael. (1981) Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. xv-xxxiv
- McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
[edit] Further reading
- Berger, Ruth: Warum der Mensch spricht: Eine Naturgeschichte der Sprache. (Eichborn, Frankfurt 2008 - a comprehensive survey of the field covering the latest research both in linguistics and anthropology, unfortunately in German).
- Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. Norton.
- Witzany, Guenther. 1993. Natur der Sprache - Sprache der Natur. Sprachpragmatische Philosophie der Biologie. Koenigshausen und Neumann. Würzburg.
- International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (Frawley 2003)
- The World's Major Languages (Comrie 1987)
- The Atlas of Languages (Comrie, Matthews, & Polinsky 1997)
[edit] External links
- Language, Writing and Alphabet: An Interview with Christophe Rico Damqatum 3 (2007)
- Distribution of languages on the Internet (2002)
- Top Languages in the world Internet usage population and penetration report (Nov 2007)
- Languages in Latin America
- The impact of language in a globalised world - Goethe-Institut
- Talk about the languages with other persons
- World Atlas of Language Structures
