Natural language
The phrase natural language means human speech and writing. The science of studying natural languages is known as linguistics, but linguistics is not the only scholarly area with an interest in this field. The discovery of the oldest evidence of human language, primarily via vestiges of early writing, falls under the pervue of archaeology and also history. The mechanisms related to learning of human languages may be of interest in psychology and medicine due to its exercise of higher brain function. Computer scientists have been engaged in the study of human languages for the purpose of machine translation between different human languages.
Properties of natural languages
Linguistic scholars have described human languages as a system of symbols (sometimes known as lexemes) and the grammar (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The assignment of meaning to a symbol in a human language is arbitrary. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean "nothing". That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers nada means "hope". Not all mappings of symbols to concepts are entirely arbitrary, however; spoken language may assign meaning to symbols because the spoken sound is imitative of a natural phenomenon. Thus for example, the word "meow" sounds similar to what it represents (see Onomatopoeia)[1].
Origins of human language
No one yet agrees on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man.
Language versus dialect classification
From the point of view of historical comparative linguistics, two natural languages with noticable difference in pronunciation but which are still mutually intelligible may be classified as being two dialects of the same language. However, the decision to term a particular regional language as its own language, versus a dialect of another language, is sometimes also the result of political divisions, cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or other factors. Max Weinreich is credited as saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". For instance, some dialects of German are mutually intelligible with some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is usually gradual (see dialect continuum). The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.
Study of grammar
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the Tolkāppiyam
(தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar of the Tamil language, written around
200 BC by Tolkāppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowel
was a breakthrough. The historical record of the study of language begins in North India
with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of [[Sanskrit
language|Sanskrit]] morphology, known as the
Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी). Pāṇini’s grammar is
highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the
phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only
recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later.
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh 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.
- Where do Wittgenstein and Quine argue this? Philosophers such as [[Ludwig
Wittgenstein]], W. V. Quine, and Jacques Derrida have disputed the possibility of such a
rigorous study of language by questioning many of the assumptions necessary for such a study,
and have put forth their own views on the nature of language. There is no end in sight to this
debate.
Language taxonomy
The classification of natural languages can be performed on the
basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different
properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
- paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of
languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages,
- paying attention to the internal structure of languages (grammar) results in a typological
classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of
the language's grammar across languages,
- and respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities
results in areal groupings of languages.
The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation
between them is an important point for many linguistic research works. (There is a
parallel to the classification of species in biological phylogenetics here: consider
monophyletic vs. polyphyletic groups of species.)
The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of
typological—to linguistic typology.
See also Taxonomy, and Taxonomic classification for the general idea of classification
and taxonomies.
Genetic classification
The world's languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have
common ancestors. Some of the major families are the
Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages,
the Austronesian languages, and the Sino-Tibetan languages.
The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with
homology in biology.)
Typological classification
An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the
basic order of the verb, the subject and the object
in a sentence into several types: SVO, [[SOV
language|SOV]], VSO, and so on, languages. (English,
for instance, belongs to the SVO language type.)
The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen
completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their
cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural
languages—language universals.
Areal classification
The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal
linguistic units, or sprachbunds: Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of
European languages; Caucasian languages. Although the members of each group are not
closely genetically related, there is a reason for them to share
similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common
community and the languages converged in the course of the history. These are called "[[areal
feature (linguistics)|areal feature]]s".
N.B.: one should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages
which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the taxa of the
genetic classification (language families) are often given names which
themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
Constructed languages
Humans have also deliberately contructed artificial languages such as
Esperanto, Lojban, Ido, Interlingua, and Klingon.
Esperanto is a well-known artificial language that was created by L. L. Zamenhof as a
compilation of various elements of different languages, and was intended to be an easy-to-learn
language for people familiar with similar languages.
See also
References
- ↑ Sounds of the World's Animals. Catherine N. Ball, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University (year not specified). Retrieved on 2007-04-12.
External links
- Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan
- Distribution of languages on the Internet
- Speech accent archive
- [http://multilingualbooks.com/online-radio.html/ Listen to online radio of the world's
languages]
- Learning Global Languages
- English as a foreign language
- The Animal Communication Project
- [http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm The World's Most Widely Spoken
Languages]
- [http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/2000/8/8/article_01.htm "Languages — Bridges and
Walls to Communication"], from Awake! magazine
Communication at The Psychology Wiki]