Entry #8 The Study of Languaje
The Study of Language
Yule, George (2010) The Study of Language. (4th Edition). New York. Cambridge University Press.
Chapter 1: The Origins of Language
The origins of language have been a subject of investigation for several years and nowadays is still a mystery. Along with, different views about the beginnings of language have arisen.
First of all, The divine Source, which claims that in many religions there seems to be a divine source who provides humans with language.
Second, The Natural source, which is another view of the beginnings of the language that is based on the concept of natural sound. Besides, The basic idea is that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which early men and women heard around them.
Third, The social Source, that is another proposal involving natural sounds. It also has been called "The Yo-He-Ho Theory" whose idea is that the sound of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and the interaction had to be coordinated.
Fourth, The Physical Source, a view that states that physical features enable speech production. Among the physical features that appear relevant for speech we can name, the upright teeth, which are very helpful in making sounds such as /f /and /v/; the muscles of lips, which are more flexible and helpful in making sounds like /p/ and /b/; the shapes and muscles of the tongue, which can be used to shape a wide variety of sounds inside the oral cavity; the human larynx or voice box which contains the vocal folds, and the pharynx, which acts as a resonator for increased range and clarity of the sounds produced via the larynx and the vocal tract.
Fifht, The Tool-Making Source, that claims that the same brain activity is used for language production and making complex tools. Finally, The Genetic Source, which is another point of view that claims that human offspring are born with a special capacity for language. Moreover, It is innate, no other creature seems to have it and it isn't tied to a specific variety of language. None of these sources have been able to reveal the origin of the language; but they were able to demonstrate that early men were only able to produce some sounds and gestures.
Chapter 2: Animals and Human Language
The ability to communicate with others is a shared characteristic to all creatures. Humans, as well as animals, are able to send messages to other members of their own species; however, there are some language characteristics which can be only applied to humans. These properties make our language not only highly complex but also unique. So... are animals able to learn to communicate with humans using our language? In an attempt to give an answer to this question scientists first needed to discuss and analyse these human language properties.
Reflexivity is defined as the ability to use language to think and talk about language itself. We can reflect on the way communicative messages are created and review how they work. This is exactly what we are doing now; we are using our language to discuss and analyse some of its own characteristics.
The ability to refer to past and future time is known as Displacement. Humans are able to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment: What we ate yesterday, our plans for the future, etc. Moreover, we can ever refer to things and places whose existence is not backed up. Children talk about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, for instance, while adults make use of words such as heaven or hell.
By manipulating the different linguistic resources humans are also able to create new expressions and novel utterances. This Productivity property provides us with an infinite potential number of utterances to describe new objects and situations. Conversely, the set of signals used by animals in communication is fixed and limited. Vocal gestures forms are only used in specific situations such as establishing territory and at particular times like the mating season.
Another interesting property of human language is related to the way it is transmitted. Language Transmission is crucially and essentially cultural as children can only acquire their first language in a culture where it is passed from one generation to the next. Growing up is isolation, a child will produce no language at all; while animals will instinctively produce specific signals proper to their own species. Even if they have never listened to other animals' sound a dog will always bark and a tiger will always roar, no matter the signals they have been exposed to.
Finally, Duality property refers to the way human language is organized at two different but simultaneous levels. In the first level we can find individual sounds with no intrinsic meaning, whereas in the second one, there is a combination of these sounds that produces different meanings. This is really interesting because it reflects our ability to produce an infinite number of sound combinations, known as wods, with a limited set of discrete sounds.
All in all, in the light of these properties, scientists have done many experiments with chimpanzees in order to try to give an answer to the question set out at the beginning of this text: Are animals able to communicate with humans using our language? According to them the answer is “No, they aren't”. What animals do is to produce a particular behavior in response to a particular sound-stimuli or noise, but they don't actually understand words. The capacity to develop highly complex systems of sounds and structures, and produce extended discourse containing a potentially infinite number of novel utterances only belongs to humans.
Chapter 11: Discourse Analysis
Chapter 17: Language History and Change
Throughout this chapter, the writer tries to explain the connections or similarities that exist among different languages by tracing their roots through history. The subject matter concerned with it is called "Philology" and it creates "family trees" that show how languages are interrelated. In addition to this, the writer states that languages have in common a former ancestor, "The Proto-Indo-European language, that is the reason why some languages have similar words with the same meaning, they are referred as "cognates". Although languages have the same roots, they do not remain alike. Throughout the years, languages have been modified by external causes such as invasions, wars, or upheavals. Furthermore to these external changes, there are other types of changes that occurred within a specific group of people in a specific place. The most common changes occurred within the structure of language, its sounds, and semantic aspects.
“Englisc” language has gone through substantial changes to become the English we use today and its history is divided into four periods of time.
In the first period of time before 1100 d.C, which is known as ‘Old English’, a group of germanic tribes moved into the British Isles in the 5th Century. These pagan tribes of Angles, Jutes, and Saxons are known as the Anglo-Saxons and they were the primary sources who develop the English language. ‘Englisc’ as Old English was known means pertaining to the Angles, this word came from the Angles. We use many basic terms from their language. For example, man, woman, child, and house.
As it was mentioned before, these early settlers or invaders were pagan, however, there was a time around the 6th and 8th Century that Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and a lot of terms from Latin, the language of Religious, came into Old English at that time. Contemporary words such as angel, bishop, priest, church. They all date from this period.
After that, from the 8th Century through the 9th and 10th Centuries another group of northern Europeans came to plunder and then settler in the British coasts. They were the Vikings and they spoke ‘Old Norse’ and from their language, some words were adopted, for example: “give”, “leg”, “skin”, etc. The ending of the Old English period is marked by the conquest of the Norman-French at the Hasting Battle and it gives birth to the beginning of the Middle English which lasted 400 years from 1100 to 1500. These new invaders became the ruling class and they spoke French. As a result, during the following 200 years, the French would become the language of the nobility, the law, the government, and the civilized life in England. Despite this, English remained the language of the peasants. French origin words were borrowed to refer or describe prepared dishes.
The borrowing of words from French, Old Norse, or Latin are examples of external changes.
From the late Middle English to the beginning of the Early Modern English period, which lasted from 1500 to 1700, the sounds of the English language underwent a substantial change known as “The great vowel Shift” which involved the fronting and raising of the long, stressed monophthongs. During the transition from Middle English to Modern English, that is the English we used today, some sounds disappeared and it is known as sound loss. The initial [H] of many Old English words was lost, some other words, however, lost sound but kept the spelling, resulting in the “Silent Letters” of Contemporary written English. In addition, there are 3 other sound changes known as Metathesis, Epenthesis, and Prothesis. The first one is a process by which there is a reversal of the position of two sounds in a word. The second one is a process by which a sound is added in the middle of a word. and the last one is a process by which a sound is added at the beginning of a word. Generally, Spanish speakers who are starting to learn English are troubled by this last process because they tend to add a prothetic vowel at the beginning of some English words that start with an [S].
Furthermore, remarkable differences between the structure of Old English and Modern English sentences are founded in Old English texts, such as the verb-subject order, the subject-object-verb order, or the object-subject- verb order. However, these word orders are no longer used. The subject-verb-object order is the one who has prevailed in time. In addition to this, the negative also differs and a “double negative” construction was also possible. During this transition, a large number of inflectional suffixes were lost.
And last but not least, there are another 2 processes that involve semantic changes and they are called ‘broadening’ and ‘Narrowing’ of meaning. In the first one, the meaning of a word becomes broader or more inclusive than its earlier meaning and in the second one, a word gets a more restricted meaning than it had before. However, the main source of change seems to be the constant process of cultural transmission by which each new generation has to find a way in using the language of the previous generation, or by which each child has to recreate the language of the community and there should be an occasional desire to be different.
In conclusion, languages will not remain stable and that change and variation are inevitable. This last change which seems to be inevitable is viewed from a Synchrony view in terms of differences within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time.
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