Everything about Language totally explained
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.
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 don't have any
inherent meaning - they're merely an agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For instance, there's nothing about the
Spanish word 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, means "hope".
The study of language
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've 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.
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. In the 20th century, substantial contributions to the understanding of language came from
Ferdinand de Saussure,
Hjelmslev,
Émile Benveniste and
Roman Jakobson, which are characterized as being highly
systematic. 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 isn't 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.
Artificial languages
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Animal communication
The term "
animal languages" is often used for nonhuman languages. Linguists don't 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. 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've never been successfully taught grammar. 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. 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's some evidence that spontaneous development of complex vocal language is occurring, but it certainly hasn't 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're not
homologous..
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