A
language is a particular kind of system for
encoding and decoding
information. In
its most common use, the term refers to so-called "
natural languages" — the forms of
communication considered peculiar to
humankind. In
linguistics the term is extended to refer to the
human cognitive facility of creating and
using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic
creation and
usage of systems of
symbols—each symbol referring to linguistic
concepts with
semantic or
logical or otherwise
expressive meanings.
The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as
English or
Spoken Chinese. However, there are also
written languages and other systems
of visual symbols such as
sign
languages.
Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated
communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to
as
animal language, none of these
are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use
to define language in the strict sense.
When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then,
"language" always implies a particular type of human
thought which can be present even when communication
is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes
treated as indistinguishable from language itself.
In
Western philosophy for
example, language has long been closely associated with
reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using
symbols. In
Ancient Greek
philosophical terminology, the same word,
logos, was used
as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the
philosopher
Thomas Hobbes used the
English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason,
as discussed below.
Properties of language
A set of commonly accepted signs (indices, icons or symbols) is
only one feature of language; all languages must define (1) the
structural relationships between these signs in a system of
grammar, (2) the context wherein the signs
are used (
pragmatics) and (3) dependent
on their context the content specificity, i.e. its meaning
(
semantics). Rules of grammar are one of
the characteristics sometimes said to distinguish language from
other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of signs to
be manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of
grammatical utterances. However, this definition is self-circular.
The structural relationships make sense only within language; the
structure of language exists only in language. It is impossible to
have a logically correct definition of a noun or verb. And logic
itself concerns itself with propositions which are closely linked
with content specificity i.e. semantics.
Another property of language is that its symbols are
arbitrary. Any concept or grammatical rule can be
mapped onto a symbol. In other words, most languages make use of
sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not have any
necessary and inherent meaning – they are merely an agreed-upon
convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language.
For instance, the sound combination
nada carries the
meaning of "
nothing" in the
Spanish language and also the meaning
"
thread" in the
Hindi
language. There is nothing about the
word
itself that forces Hindi speakers to convey the idea of
"
thread", or the idea of "
nothing" for Spanish
speakers. Other sets of sounds (for example, the English words
nothing and
thread) could equally be used to
represent the same concepts, but all Spanish and Hindi speakers
have acquired or learned to correlate their own meanings for this
particular sound pattern. Indeed, for speakers of
Slovene and other
South Slavic languages, the sound
combination carries the meaning of "
hope", while in
Indonesian, it means
"
tone".
This arbitrariness even applies to words with an
onomatopoetic dimension (i.e. words that to
some extent simulate the sound of the token referred to). For
example, several animal names (e.g.
cuckoo,
whip-poor-will,
katydid) are derived from sounds the respective
animal makes, but these forms did not have to be chosen for these
meanings. Non-onomatopoetic words can stand just as easily for the
same meaning. For instance, the katydid is called a "bush cricket"
in British English, a term that bears no relation to the sound the
animal makes. In time, onomatopoetic words can also change in form,
losing their mimetic status. Onomatopoetic words may have an
inherent relation to their referent, but this meaning is not
inherent, thus they do not violate arbitrariness.
Origin of language
Even before the theory of
evolution made
discussion of more animal-like human ancestors commonplace,
philosophical and scientific speculation casting doubt on the use
of early language has been frequent throughout history. In modern
Western philosophy, speculation by authors such as
Thomas Hobbes and later
Jean-Jacques Rousseau led to the
Académie française
declaring the subject off-limits.
The origin of language is of great interest to philosophers because
language is such an essential characteristic of human life. In
classical
Greek philosophy such
inquiry was approached by considering the nature of things, in this
case
human nature.
Aristotle, for example, treated humans as
creatures with reason and language by their intrinsic nature,
related to their natural propensities to be "political," and dwell
in
city-state communities (
Greek:
poleis).
Hobbes, followed by
John Locke and
others, claimed that language is an extension of the "speech" which
humans have within themselves, which in a sense takes the classical
view that
reason is one of the most primary
characteristics of human nature. Others have argued the opposite -
that reason developed out of the need for more complex
communication. Rousseau, despite writing before the publication of
Darwin's theory of evolution, claimed
that there had once been humans who had no language or reason and
who developed language first—rather than reason—the development of
which he explicitly described as a mixed blessing, with many
negative characteristics.
Since the arrival of Darwin, the subject has been approached more
often by scientists than philosophers. For example, neurologist
Terrence Deacon in his
Symbolic Species has argued that reason and
language "
coevolved."
Merlin Donald sees language as a later
development building upon what he refers to as
mimetic culture, emphasizing
that this coevolution depended upon the interactions of many
individuals. He writes that:
A shared communicative culture, with sharing of mental
representations to some degree, must have come first, before
language, creating a social environment in which language would
have been useful and adaptive.
The specific causes of the natural selection that led to language
are however still the subject of much speculation, but a common
theme which goes right back to Aristotle is that many theories
propose that the gains to be had from language and/or reason were
probably mainly in the area of increasingly sophisticated social
structures.
In more recent times, a theory of
mirror
neurons has emerged in relation to language.
Ramachandran has gone so far as to
claim that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for
biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a
host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and
inaccessible to experiments". Mirror neurons are located in the
human inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe, and are
unique in that they fire when completing an action and also when
witnessing an actor performing the same action. Various studies
have proposed a theory of mirror neurons related to language
development .
Language May Have Evolved from Visual-Spatial Working Memory
During the Evolution of Stone Tool Technology
Vandervert (2009a, 2009b; Vandervert, Schimpf & Liu, 2007)
proposed a neuro-cognitive explanation of the evolutionary
relationship between reason and language.According to this view, a
new class of mental capacities evolved within human
working memory which was selected in a
step-by-step collaboration with evolving cognitive functions of the
cerebellum. This new class of mental
capacities evolved from visual-spatial working memory, which we
share with animals, and came to constitute the articulatory speech
loop of working memory (see working memory). Noting that the human
cerebellum has experienced a fourfold increase in size in the last
million years, Vandervert believes the main drivers of the
evolutionary selection toward uniquely human mental and
communicative capacities (of which language is only a portion) were
the requirements of coordinated working memory-cerebellar control
during 100’s of thousands of years of stone tool technology
evolution. That is, over millennia the making of stone tools
required progressively more complex blending between structured,
planned intentions of the central executive of working memory and
refined, repetitive composite series of perceptual/motor control by
the cerebellum. The cerebellum constantly refined the processes of
working memory on the one hand, and the repetitive execution of
complex knapping (stone sculpting) movements on the other; thus
this process formed a positive feedback loop between the two.
Specifically, Vandervert (2009b) described the working
memory/cerebellar feedback loop leading to language as follows:
In terms of cerebellar modeling architecture, it is
proposed that the selective advantage of language evolution was
that it enhanced the speed of control and the further decomposition
and re-composition (Flanagan et al., 1999) of working memory’s flow
of visuospatial imagery in socially and technologically (stone
technology at first) adaptive ways. These are precisely the
management properties of cerebellar models within the cerebellum’s
hierarchical control architecture. Within this view it can be
speculated that the selective evolution of language allowed
visuospatial imagery (which we share to a great extent with other
animals) to be analytically manipulated in working memory and to be
directly communicated in finely articulated ways, a tremendous
competitive advantage in any survival context—but this would also
have greatly enhanced the internal silent speech dialogue necessary
to learning. (p. 25)
Vandervert connects stone tool technology with the structural form
and abstract qualities of language, art, music, and mathematics, by
arguing that (a) stone tool-making selected working memory toward a
structure capable of sequential composite tasks (much like
following a recipe) involving considerable planning and social
coordination, and (b) advances in stone tool-making, in itself,
represented a huge selective shift toward new working memory
processes which could envision/manipulate the environment into
wholly new forms of tools which did not exist in nature. He
contends this shift involved the selection of central executive
functions in working memory that could compose abstract entities
divorced from given concrete realities. In the transitional process
from visual-spatial working memory to the abstractions of the
articulatory speech loop, structured links evolved in working
memory, and these constitute a
universal grammar. In ontogeny, these
links guide the development of speech
language acquisition in the
infant.
References
Flanagan, R., Nakano, E., Imamizu, H., Osu, R., Yoshioka, T., and
Kawato, M. (1999). Composition and decomposition of internal models
in learning under altered kinematic and dynamic environments.
Journal of Neuroscience, 19, 1-5.
Vandervert, L. (2009a). Working memory, the cognitive functions of
the cerebellum and the child prodigy. In L.V. Shavinina (Ed.),
International handbook on giftedness (pp. 295-316). The
Netherlands: Springer Science.
Vandervert, L. (2009b). The emergence of the child prodigy 10,000
years ago: An evolutionary and developmental explanation. The
Journal of Mind and Behavior, 30, 15-32.
Vandervert, L., Schimpf, P., and Liu, H. (2007). How working memory
and the cerebellum collaborate to produce innovation and
creativity. Creativity Research Journal, 19, 1-18.
The study of language
Linguistics
Linguistics is the
scientific study of language, encompassing a number
of sub-fields. At the core of
theoretical linguistics are the
study of language structure (
grammar) and
the study of meaning (
semantics). The
first of these encompasses
morphology (the formation and
composition of
words),
syntax (the rules that determine how words combine
into
phrases and
sentences) and
phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract
sound units).
Phonetics is a related
branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of
speech sounds (
phones), non-speech
sounds, and how they are produced and
perceived.
Theoretical linguistics is
mostly concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge.
The fields that are generally considered as 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.
History
The
historical record of linguistics begins
in India
with
Pāṇini, the 5th century BC
grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the
(अष्टाध्यायी) and with Tolkāppiyar,
the 2nd century BC grammarian of the Tamil work Tolkāppiyam(தொல்காப்பியம்). 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 linguist
Sibawayh (سیبویه) made a detailed and professional
description of
Arabic in 760 AD 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.
Human languages
[[Image:Brain Surface Gyri.SVG|thumb|Some of the areas of the brain
involved in language processing:
Broca's
area(Blue),
Wernicke's
area(Green),
Supramarginal
gyrus(Yellow),
Angular
gyrus(Orange),
Primary
Auditory Cortex(Pink)]]
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and
the science of studying them falls under the purview of
linguistics. A common progression for natural
languages is that they are considered to be first spoken, then
written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar
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 in a continuous state of change is known as a
living language or
modern
language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is
usually impossible. 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.
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. 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 a formal language endowed with
semantics 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 non-human systems of communication. 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 human language.
Nevertheless, some scholars have tried to disprove this mainstream
premise through experiments on training chimpanzees to talk.
Karl von Frisch received the Nobel
Prize in 1973 for his proof of the language and dialects of the
bees. Current research indicates that signalling codes are the most
fundamental precondition for every coordination within and between
cells, tissues, organs and organisms of all organismic kingdoms.
All of these signalling codes follow combinatorial (syntactic),
context-sensitive (pragmatic) and content-specific (semantic)
rules. In contrast to linguists, biolinguistics and biosemiotics
consider these codes to be real languages.
In several publicized instances, non-human 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. 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.
Lists
Notes
- Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983). Course in General
Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.
Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN
0-8126-9023-0
- Politics 1253a 1.2
- Second Discourse
- Evolutionary Origins of the Social Brain. In O.
Vilarroya and F. F. i Argimon (eds.), Social Brain
Matters: Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition.
Rodopi, 2007, 18: 215-222.
- Imitation and Mimesis. In S. Hurley and N.
Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to
Social Science, Volume 2: Imitation, Human Development, and
Culture. MIT Press, 2005, 14:282-300.
-
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p1.html
-
http://psycserver.psyc.queensu.ca/donaldm/reprints/evolutionaryOrigins18.pdf
-
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=uJTc5wlAYAUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA229&dq=Arbib+From+grasping+to+complex+imitation:+mirror+systems+on+the+path+to+language&ots=-b6u5FyQbC&sig=yupQRSaXgn43CcBKuJImHqXspwg
-
http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~junwang4/langev/localcopy/pdf/christiansen03trends.pdf
- Zvelebil, Kamil. 1973. The smile of Murugan on Tamil literature
of South India. Leiden: Brill. - Zvelebil dates the
Ur-Tolkappiyam to the 1st-2nd BC
- Holquist 1981, xvii-xviii
- Frisch, K.v. (1953). 'Sprache' oder 'Kommunikation' der Bienen?
Psychologische Rundschau 4. Amsterdam.
- Witzany, G. (2007). The Logos of the Bios 2. Bio-Communication.
Helsinki, Umweb
See also
- Study of language
- Types of language and language relationships
- Non-spoken forms of communication
- Origins of language
- Religion and mythology
- Education and public policy
- Language and culture
- Communication with other species
- Semiotics
- Other
References
- Chakrabarti, Byomkes (1994).
A comparative study of Santali and Bengali. Calcutta: K.P.
Bagchi & Co. ISBN 81-7074-128-9
- 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.
- Gode, Alexander (1951). Interlingua-English
Dictionary. New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing
Company.
- Holquist, Michael. (1981) Introduction to Mikhail
Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.
Austin and London: University of Texas Press. xv-xxxiv
- 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.
- McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English
Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Zvelebil, Kamil (1973). The mile of Murugan on Tamil
literature of South India. Leiden: Brill.
- Saussure, Ferdinand de (1983). Course in General
Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.
Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. ISBN
0-8126-9023-0
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