   #copyright

Language

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Languages

   A language is a system, used for communication, comprising a finite set
   of arbitrary symbols and a set of rules (or grammar) by which the
   manipulation of these symbols is governed. These symbols can be
   combined productively to convey new information, distinguishing
   languages from other forms of communication. The word language (without
   an article) can also refer to the use of such systems as a phenomenon.

   Human languages use patterns of sound for symbols. These sounds can be
   converted into written form with little loss of information. Gestures
   are a part of human language too. Some invented human languages have
   been built entirely on visual cues to enable communication. In human
   languages, the symbols are sometimes known as lexemes and the rules are
   usually known as grammars. "Language" is also used to refer to common
   properties of languages. Language learning is normal in human
   childhood. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to
   share certain properties, even though many shared properties have
   exceptions.

   There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect,
   notwithstanding linguist Max Weinreich's famous aphorism that " a
   language is a dialect with an army and navy." In other words, the
   distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on
   cultural differences, distinctive writing systems, or degree of mutual
   intelligibility.

   Humans and computer programs have also constructed other languages,
   including constructed languages such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua,
   Klingon, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms.
   These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by human
   languages.

Properties of language

   Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's
   area, Wernicke's area, Supramarginal gyrus, Angular gyrus, Primary
   Auditory Cortex
   Enlarge
   Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's
   area, Wernicke's area, Supramarginal gyrus, Angular gyrus, Primary
   Auditory Cortex

   Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also often conform to a
   rough grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols.
   While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it
   is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or
   regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also
   often has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and
   regular relationships between them. -->

   Another property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. 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 or
   Portuguese 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 or Serbian speakers nada means
   "hope".

   However, it must be understood that just because in principle the
   symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols
   that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as "meow" sound
   similar to what they represent (see Onomatopoeia), but they could be
   replaced with words such as "jarn", and as long as everyone memorized
   the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.

Human languages

   Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the
   science of studying them is linguistics.

   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 usually gradual (see dialect
   continuum).

   Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always
   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.

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 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, 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 features".

   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

   Some individuals have constructed their own artificial languages, for
   practical, experimental, personal, or ideological reasons. For example,
   one prominent artificial language, Esperanto, 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. 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, and (to some extent)
   Christopher Paolini, have created fantasy languages, for literary,
   artistic, or personal reasons.

The study of language

   The historical record of the study of language begins in Northern India
   with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules
   of 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. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowel,
   and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels and consonants which he put into
   classes, were also breakthroughs at the time.

   The oldest surviving written grammar for a language still commonly
   spoken today is the Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar
   of the Tamil language, written in Southern India around 200 BC by
   Tolkāppiyar.

   In the Middle East, the arabic 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.

Non-human languages

   The term " animal languages" is often used for non-human languages.
   Most researchers agree that these are not as complex or expressive as
   human language; they may better be described as animal communication.
   Some researchers argue that there are significant differences
   separating human language from the communication of other animals, and
   that the underlying principles are unrelated.

   In several publicised instances, non-human animals have been taught to
   understand certain features of human language. For example, chimpanzees
   and gorillas have been taught hand signs based on American Sign
   Language; however, they have never been successfully taught its
   grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of Kanzi, a saved bonobo
   chimpanzee allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain
   concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of semantics,
   it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages
   do.

   Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication
   methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements
   of group behaviour and the existence of " mirror cells" in primates.
   This, however, is still a scientific question. What exactly is the
   definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that,
   although human and more primitive languages have analogous features,
   they are not homologous.

Formal languages

   Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal
   languages (including programming languages and markup languages, but
   also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take
   the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal
   grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.

Language and Culture

   Language is an element of culture that contributes to every aspect of
   human relationships. Andy Clark’s assertion that language is the
   ultimate cultural artifact is backed by the countless functions that
   language serves. The role that language plays in human interaction
   transcends basic communication (such as commanding somebody to do
   something, or providing information when asked a question) to
   facilitate the existence of ethos and mythos. This cultural artifact
   encodes meanings through its ability to manipulate what others imagine.
   The existence of denotations, what we mean to point out or say, is
   often received as connotation, what people have culturally subscribed
   to understanding when something is pointed out. Because of language’s
   ability to encode a wide range of meanings, and represent almost all
   ideas, it is the ultimate cultural artifact.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
