Introduction to Linguistic (1)

What is Language?

The origin of language

What is Language? (1)

• Several European languages have two words to translate the English word ‘language’– French: ‘langage’; ‘langue’– Italian: ‘linguaggio’; ‘lingua’– Spanish: ‘lenguaje’; ‘lengua’

• According to Sapir (1921: 8): ‘Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.’

What is Language? (2)

• Based on Bloch & Trager in their Outline of Linguistics Analysis (1942: 5): ‘A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which group co-operates.’

• According to Hall in Essay on Language (1968: 158): ‘Language is the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.’

What is Language? (3)

• Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957: 13) said that all languages in their spoken or written form, are languages in the sense of his definition: since (a) each natural language has a finite number of sounds in it (and a finite number of letters in its alphabet-on the assumption that it has an alphabetic writing system); and (b) although there may be infinitely many distinct sentences in the language, each sentence can be represented as a finite sequence of these sounds (or letters).

The divine source (1)

• According this view, language is given by God since the human is born.– God, created Adam and “whatsoever Adam called

every living creature, that was the name” (Genesis, 2: 19)

– In Hindu tradition, language came from the goddess Sarasvati, wife of Brahma, creator of the universe.

– In most religions, there appears to be divine source who provide humans with language.

The divine source (2)

– An Egyptian pharaoh named Psammentichus tried the experiment with two newborn infants around 600 B.C. After two years in the company of sheep and a mute shepherd, the children were reported to have spontaneously uttered, not an Egyptian word, but the Phrygian word bekos, meaning ‘bread.’

– James IV of Scotland carried out a similar experiment around A.D. 1500 and the children were reported to have started speaking Hebrew.

– Children living without access to human speech in the early years grow up with no language at all.

The natural sounds source (1)

• This view suggested that primitive words could have been imitations of natural sounds which early men and women around them.

– “Bow-wow” theory: when an object flew by, making “caw-caw” sound, the early human imitated the sound and used it to refer to the object associated with the sound. In English, we have cuckoo, splash, bang, boom, rattle, buzz, hiss. it has also been suggested that the original sounds of language came from natural cries of emotion, such as pain, anger and joy, in English we have ouch, oops .

The natural sounds source (2)

– “Yo-heave-ho” theory proposed the sounds of a person involved in physical effort could be the source of our language, especially when that physical effort involved several people and had to be coordinated.

The oral-gesture source • The “oral-gesture theory” proposes an extremely

specific connection between physical and oral gesture. It is claimed that originally a set of physical gestures was developed as a means of communication. It is proposed by Sir Richard Paget (1930)

• Then a set of oral gestures, specifically involving the mouth, developed, in which the movements of the tongue, lips and so on were recognized according to patterns of movement similar to physical gestures.

Physiological adaptation (1)

• Other proposal about the origin of human speech concentrates on some of the physical aspects of humans which are not shared with other creatures, not even with other primates.

• Human teeth are upright, not slanting outwards like those apes, and they are roughly even in height. Such characteristics are not needed for eating, but they are extremely helpful in making sounds such as f, v and th.

Physiological adaptation (2)

• Human lips have much more intricate muscle interlacing than is found in other primates and their resulting flexibility certainly helps with sounds like p, b and w.

• The human larynx, or the vocal cords differs significantly in position from that of monkeys. This created a longer cavity, called the pharynx, above the vocal cords, which can act as a resonator for any sounds produced via the larynx.

Physiological adaptation (3)• One unfortunate consequence is that the position of

the human to choke on pieces of food. Monkeys may not be able to use larynx to produce speech sounds, but they do not suffer from the problem of getting food stuck in the windpipe.

• The human brain is lateralized, that is, it has specialized functions in each of the two hemispheres. Those functions which are analytic, such as tool-using and language, are largely confined to the left hemisphere of the brain for most humans.