Language |
A language is a system of expression and Communication. Individual languages use Sound, gesture, and other means to express and communicate concepts, emotions, ideas, and thoughts. Expressions of a language are analyzable into words, whose meanings are usually conventional. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages.
=Human languages=
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages , and the science studying them is linguistics.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For example, the boundaries between named language groups are in effect arbitrary due to blending between populations (the dialect continuum). For instance, there are dialects of German language very similar to Dutch language which are not mutually intelligible with other dialects of (what Germans call) German.
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==
Scientists do not yet agree on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million years ago, during the time of Homo habilis , to as recently as forty thousand years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. The nature of speech means that there is almost no data on which to base conclusions on the subject.
==Language taxonomy==
The Taxonomic 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:
The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many groups of species.)
The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to linguistic typology.
See also : Taxonomy, Taxonomic classification—for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.
=== Genetic classification ===
The worlds 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 (biology) in biology.)
=== Typological classification ===
An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the type.)
The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Comapare with analogy (biology) 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 s.
NB. 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 family) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
==Constructed languages==
One prominent artificial language, called Esperanto, was created by L. L. Zamenhof. It is a compilation of various elements of different languages, and it is intended to be an easy-to-learn language. Another prominent artificial language, called Ido, is intended to be reformed Esperanto. Other constructed languages strive to be more logical than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban.
Other writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, Artistic language, or personal reasons. One of Tolkiens languages is called Quenya, which is a form of Elvish language. It has its own alphabet, and its phonology and syntax are modelled on Finnish language. Linguist Mark Okrand has devised Klingon language and Vulcan (Star Trek) for Star Trek , which have since been developed into full languages.
=The study of language=
The historical record of the study of language begins in North India with Pini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit language morphology, known as the (). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the Root (linguistics); the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later.
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the Tolkppiyam (), a book on the grammar of the Tamil language, written around 200 BC by Tolkppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels by splitting the akshara was a breakthrough.
In the Middle East, the Persian language linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic language in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi an-nahw ( , The Book on Grammar ), bringing many Linguistics 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.
=Animal (nonhuman) language=
While the term animal languages is widely used, most researchers agree that they are not as complex or expressive as human language; a more accurate term is 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 not related.
In several widely publicised instances, animals have been trained to mimic 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 taught its grammar. There are some researchers who have demonstrated that it is possible to train chimpanzees to form grammatical productions. While animal communication has semantics, its syntax is much simpler than that of most human languages.
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, may not be a scientific question, but is perhaps more one of definition. What exactly is the definition of the word language Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have Analogous#Anatomy 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.
=See also=
= 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. *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. *Kandel, Jessel, and Schwartz (1991). Principles of Neural Science. McGraw Hill (esp. p. 1173).
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