#steven-roger-fischer
The current formal definition of "language" is experiencing a semantic change too, with "language" no longer the exclusive franchise of homo sapiens. It is now appreciated that any living being, in any epoch, that has used some means of conveying information to other animates has used "language" of some sort. Language is apparently a universal faculty. #anthropocentrism #linguistics #language
Each type of language used in nature differs. The deeper one probes, the more one discovers each species's communicative ability distinguished by ever more elaborate definitions of the concept "language". #nature
In its most universal meaning, language is the nexus of the animate world, its limits drawn only by humankind's crayon.
All great apes appear to display linguistic abilities that come close to what we understand as true "language", principally because the concept itself is anthropocentric. #non-verbal-communication
Humankind's very concept of what language constitutes is, by necessity, anthropocentric. We are not looking for language in animals; we are looking for human language. When we devise various ways to elicit language from fellow creatures, we are generally limiting them to human artifices.
What sets humans apart? We are no longer identifiable as the tool-making species. We seem also no longer to hold the patent on language. Perhaps humans are the animals which have simply evolved a "more elaborate communication" that has yielded unprecedented benefits for its innovators. #innovation #communication
Complex planning requires complex thought processes. The social implementation of complex planning demands a high degree of social cooperation. This implies use of language allowing conditional syntax (meaningful phrase and sentence sequencing): "if we do this, then this and this will happen". #complexity #social-networks #cooperation #cognition #executive-functioning
All experts agree, however, that in hominins language control and hand control are closely related cerebral functions. Gestures are so integral to human speech that they actually appear to facilitate the cerebral process that underlies language ability. Gestures are not only there to inform viewers and listeners but to enable the performer to think. At a very early date, the language of gesture would perhaps have contributed, in ways that are still unclear, to the growth of human vocal language. #non-verbal-communication
Before syntax, one cannot speak of articulate human language. #syntax
The fundamental social system of all hominins, including our own, may indeed be an ape social system, but humans have unqiuely elaborated vocal language and, with it, a culture based almost exclusively on this. Already nearly a million years ago with homo erectus, primitive human speech enabled some form of social planning and organization in order to acheive vast coopertive projects such as sea crossings, something no group of great apes could accomplish. #evolution
In the long process of evolving articulate speech there has always been an ebb and flow of human populations, the victims and beneficiaries of warfare and disease, accident and climate. Scores of thousands of languages and thousands of language families have come and gone without a trace.
Human language was now bound to the land. #nature
An ancient pattern of language survives on each of the world's continents, one that is greatly obscured by a profound time depth.
"Punctuated equilibrium" - borrowing a term from evolutionary biology, this recent model proposes that long periods of social equilibrium in the past experienced diffusion of linguistic features in a given area, causing different languages of that area to converge on a common prototype language. However, occasionally this state of protracted equilibrium would be "punctuated" or disturbed by a sudden change caused by one or more of those external or internal factors mentioned above. This could then increase the number of peoples and split them and their languages, creating "family trees of languages". #biodiversity
Increasing economic and political power in human society as a rule generates ever larger homogeneous linguistic units which then suppress all smaller ones. This synergistic system grows exponentially until, in the end, only a very limited number of languages and language families survive. This is the linguistic situation in the world today, with a rapidly decreasing number of languages in spite of a population surfeit. Perhaps for this reason, too, it is crucial for us to understanding the teeming linguascape of 10,000 years ago, probably the absolute boundary of linguistic reconstruction: it was the yawning funnel through which the ancestors of all survivng languages once passed.
Throughout history, the very act of writing has often been deemed a magical process. #magic #writing
Languages may "evolve", that is, develop in a way that is free from wilful human intervention, but writing systems are purposefully changed by human agents to achieve any number of specific goals. #evolution
Writing preserves spoken language, it levels, standardizes, prescribes, enriches and generates many other language-oriented processes with far-reaching social implications. Human society as we know it today cannot exist without writing. The aquisition of literacy has become, in our modern world, second in importance only to the possession of language itself. The inspired elaboration of writing has made itself, in barely more than 5000 years, almost as indispensible to humankind as the language it transmits. #writing
The core of any administration is, as ever, information control. #power
The rhebus principle (phonetic glyphs) where pictures represent parts of the word - for example, the English word "betray" would be "written" with the pictures of a "bee" and a "tray".
Scripts do not "evolve": they are purposefully changed by human agencts to improve the quality of speech reproduction (sound) and semantic transmission (sense).
The greatest change in writing systems seem to occur with speakers of other languages who borrow and adapt an ill-fitting system. #change
With pre-writing, the so-called pictographic "script", an object's depiction triggers the memory of a vocalic utterance. With the first class of actual writing, logographic writing, the picture again triggers the memory of a vocalic utterance, but here the utterance alone - not what the object protrays - conveys the message. With the second class of writing, syllabic writing, this utterance is then reduced only to its first syllable and its position within a defined, limited syllabary of sounds. With the last class of writing, alphabetic writing, the picture is a letter that is no longer related to anobject at all but reproduces only one of two different types of sounds, either a vowel or a consonant; this is then read sequentially in combination with other similarly reproduced sounds. In all classes, graphic art remains inextricably linked to huam speech. That is to say, there is no writing that can convey the full range of human thought that is not phonetic. #speech #sound #design #articulation
Just as there is no such thing as a "primitive language", there is no such thing as a "primitive script". Each script adequately fulfils the duties assigned to it for a given period in time. If one sees "primitive" features in a script, then one is judging from a time perspective.
Literacy has always had a profound impact on spoken language. Educated, literate speakers are usually their society's leaders. #power
However imperfect, writing is now an indispensible expression of living speech.
All language growth, decline and change is the result both of time and of a society's strength or weakness.
This global expansion has resulted in the creation of International Standard English, the world's primary language of bilingual speakers. In numbers of first-language speakers, English is second only to Mandarin Chinese. The international growth of English has been unparalleled in world history. With the advent of International Standard English, a veritable world language has nearly been achieved for the first time.
Lexicostatistics - the comparison of 100 (or 200) items of basic or culturally neutral words among related languages. Lexicostatistics holds that core vocabulary always behaves differently from non-core; that word replacement occurs at a constant rate; and that a lexicon or list of words alone can provide information on genetic relationships.
Paradoxically, the greater the human population, the fewer the languages. The isolated communities of prehistory presumably enjoyed enormous linguistic diversity. #diversity
One often hears such popular expressions as the "5000 year-old Tamil language" or the "1500 year-old English language." Nothing could be further from the truth. No language on Earth is "older" than any other: every currently spoken, natural - that is, neither revived nor invented - tongue shares exactly the same age.
"Linguistic science is a step in the self-realization of man," wrote the eminent American linguist Leonard Bloomfield at the beginning of the 20th century. The step traverses millennia.
Aristotle - "speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind."
More was written about language in the second half of the 20th century (50 years) than in the preceeding 2500.
Chomsky believes that linguistics, psyhcology and philosophy are no longer to be held as separate disciplines but comprise a unitary system of human thinking that should be understood as a larger whole. #holistic #systems-thinking #psychology
Computational linguistics, also known as natural language processing, began in 1946 when computers were first used to generate machine translations from Russian into English.
Linguistic science contributes greatly to the store of human knowledge.
Linguistics continually evolves, like the languages it investigates. This is not only because of new insights, but also because of the fluid social changes, interests and priorities that affect the course of language studies.
All living languages experience constant change.
(The latter half the 20th century) has experienced a difficult reweaving of the social fabric that is still unfinished.
The older one becomes, the more one must abandon inherited usages and redefine venerable concepts. For many it is a difficult, if not impossible, task.
The recent modernization of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) has essentially eliminated what had come to be called "BBC English", an easily recognizable received pronunciation of the English language that had long been held in high regard. Now, older listeners, be they in Britain or New Zealand, register alarm at hearing in BBC broadcasts what they register as "lower-class pronunciation"; they feel that this not only "lowers standards" but also demonstrates "a beastly lack of good taste". However, such protestations are meaningless in the larger saga of living languages. "Superior" dialects are only a chimera, as special dialects themselves very soon mutate and/or lose what made them special. #class
For throughout most of human history, blood was tongue. Because of small human populations, those who spoke like you usually were related to you.
Since the articulation of speech, humankind's vaaried appreciation of language's role in society has either united or divided communities, formed them or invited warfare. Caugh in-between, multilingual cultures experience constant friction.
Samuel Johnson, who attempted in the 18th century to write the first "complete" dictionary of English, declared his goal was to "redefine our language to grammatical purity and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms". Johnson was of course doomed from the start, since there is no such thing as a "pure" language. For English in particular, of the 10,000 most frequent words, only 31.8 are inherited Germanic, with the remaining consisting of 45% French, 16.7% Latin and several minor contributing languages.
The error of linguistic purists has always been their failure to realize that borrowing is one of a language's greatest strengths. Human languages are not stones, they are sponges.
"Political correctness" is first and foremost linguistic. One suffers harm if one does not speak the speech of those in power. #power
Most attempts to save endangered languages have failed. One simtimes argues that similar to maintaining faunal and floral diversification it is essential for humankind to maintain linguistic diversification, too, in order to avoid a culturally depleted world. However, each culture changes to adapt and survive; this is not loss, but social evolution. There is far more enthusiasm among foreign linguists to save endangered languages than among those indigenous communities speaking them. For scientific purposes endangered languages must of course be documented in formal descriptions, at once and with all available resources. But they cannot be saved. #loss #evolution #documentation
New technologies such as programming (computer) languages are elaborating innovative extensions of human speech, allowing a new medium of language to artificually communicate with itself. #coding
Computers expedite the manipulation of descriptions of values, properties and methods in order to more readily provide solutions to particular problems. #humans-and-machines
Language is the most precious human resource, Australian linguist Robert Dixon has recently asserted.
Language defines our lives, it heralds our existence, it formulates our thoughts, it enables all we are and have. [But] language is not something that is permanent, stable and fixed. As the river of history itself, language is in constant flux, ever changing, ever mutating, replacing, dying, rejuvenating, growing.