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MSchnitzler2000 Main page - Language
 
I have intensively studied language at university. On this page, I give you a generally understandable overview for this topic. Furthermore I present you the most beautiful language of the world - Kölsch!
 Who wants to learn more about the peculiarities of the German language, should have a look at Bastian Sick's column "Zwiebelfisch".
CommunicationHumans and animals use any kind of communication to exchange information. We differentiate between intraspecific (within a species) and interspecific (between different species) communication. But what does this term mean at all?The linguist Charles S. Pearce defines it as follows: „Kommunikation liegt dann vor, wenn ein Organismus einem anderen Organismus ein Signal übermittelt, so dass dieser darauf angemessen reagieren kann.“
The language is a special form of communication, which only humans possess. The Greek philosopher Plato describes it as
"a means with someone uses to tell the other something about the things" Kratylos
In his work Sprachtheorie from 1934 Karl Bühler presented the so called organon model ("Organonmodell", Greek organon = tool, device) to describe the communication with language. It says that the sender uses a sign to inform the receiver about a fact. With the use of the sign (representing function, "Darstellungsfunktion") the sender also tells something about himself, e.g. by the height of the tone (expressive function, "Ausdrucksfunktion") and effect something on the side of the receiver (appeal function, "Appellfunktion").
An alternative scheme was presented by Roman Jakobson in Linguistics and Poetics (1960). In his communication model the message instead of the sign is in the spotlight and demands a context. During the contact between sender and receiver via a vocal-auditive (or gestural-visual in sign languages) channel the message is encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver. From this it follows that both participants have to know the code. The receiver has three possibilities to react on linguistic messages. He can continue with the lingustic communication, react in an other way or does not show any observable behaviour. But also the apparent non-reaction is important, because Paul Watzlawick clearly states: "One cannot not communicate."
Sign, writing and transcriptionAs I already explained, the communication is based on signs and for the language the sign system of writing was developed. The linguistics uses special characters to display any statement in an appropriate way.The semiotics is the science of signs. The Italian author Umberto Eco, which was concerned with signs not only in his famous novel Der Name der Rose, defines it as "the science of the phenomena which is based on pointing back to something else"
The basic defintion for signs is that a representing element stands for something represented (aliquid stat pro aliquo).
The logician Charles Sanders Peirce differentiates three types of signs.
In his work Cours de lingustique generale (1916) the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure describes the sign as an arbitrary combination of a sound (signifiant) with a concept, a meaning (signifié). You have to know both sides to understand the sign. This bilateral relation was expanded to the semiotic triangle by the British scientists Odgen and Richards in 1924. In this model, the speaker creates the relation between the sign and the non-linguistic reality. Although the spoken language is the basis for the linguistics, the development of writing is not uninteresting. The origin of writing dates back about 5000 years. It delevoped from pictorial representations (pictographs), which were not a writing system themselves because there was no clear combination of linguistic units and individual signs. The oldest conserved writing system was used about 3200 BC in Mesopotamia for the representation of the Sumerian language. It was a logographic system, in which individual symbols represented words. The most importnt development in the history of writing was the phonetisation. Now only syllables instead of complete words were represented by signs. The syllabic writing was first found about 1300 BC in the Semitic languages which were amongst others used by the Phoenicians. From those the Greek adopted the writing system in the 9th century BC and modified it in a way that the signs represented individual phonemes (vowels and consonants). So they had a very flexible writing system with comparatively few symbols, which is used by the most languages today - the alphabet. In order to set out phonetic statements in writing, you need a transcription. This can be fulfilled easily by using the official orthography of the respective language. Nevertheless this kind of transcription is not useful for linguistic means because there are many different writing systems and the orthographic representation often differs from the phonetics. Thus the language is transcribed with the notational system of the IPA (International Phonetic Association). The page mentioned below gives an overview of the International Phonetic Alphabet. With these symbols you can (in the opinion of the IPA) represent all languages in a consistent and phonetically exact way. Linguists can choose between a broad and narrow transcription depending on how exact the data have to be for their purpose. With the IPA system all details can be marked which a layman is not even aware of. LanguageToday's phrase /
Phrase des Tages brought to you by / präsentiert von phrasen.com
Important is the difference between natural languages (e.g. German, English) and other kinds, e.g. computer languages. In the course of history more and more languages developed so the worldwide number has increased enormously. Language typologyGerman ↔ English
German ↔ French
German ↔ Spanish
German ↔ Italian
German ↔ Chinese
Today it is estimated that more than 6000 different languages exist in the world. Linguists try to cope with this variety by comparing and classifying languages. They combine related languages to families.
The best know of these families is the Indo-European. This is not surprising as English and most of the other European languages belong to this family. Unfortunately, linguists often take their own language as a basis, following the motto: "Take any language, for instance English." The Indo-European was discovered in the 19th century, when scientists compared Latin and Greek texts with Sanskrit and found their relationship. The branches of the Indo-European are Germanic, Italic (Latin), Hellenic (Greek), Celtic, Hittite and Tocharian as well as Balto-Slavic, Albanic, Armenian and Indo-Iranian. From the Latin respectively Iranian word for "hundred" the first six branches are called centum languages, the others satum languages. The Germanic branch is further divided into West, North (Scandinavian) and East (Gothic) Germanic. The West Germanic consists of High and Low German. Modern German and Yiddish developed from the first group, English, Dutch and Frisian from the second group. The most important and beautiful variety of the German language is Kölsch. More information about this dialect, which is spoken in the region of Cologne, can be found here. The Italic branch and thus Latin was the source of the Roman languages French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Another important language family for Europe, which is not related to Indo-European, is the Finno-Ugric family, whose most important members are Finnish and Hungarian. Linguistic beginners are surprised to hear, that Finnish is closer related to the geographically distant Hungarian than to Swedish and Norwegian. The Basque language has survived as an isolated language in Spain. The basic reason for these development is the fact that language underlies a constant change. New varieties can developed due to new circumstances of life or contact between different languages. So it is also difficult to examine a language in its current state (i.e. in a synchronic compared to a diachronic analysis). A subject of permanent discussion is the question whether there was a single proto-language from which all modern languages are derived. The Caucasus is regarded as a possible source of the human language by most linguists. You can classify languages not only according to their historical development, but also concerning their grammatical structure. So German e.g. belongs to the fusional languages which express more or less complex grammatical functions by flexion. In agglutinative languages like Turkish there is an affix (prefix, suffix) for each category; those are added to the word stem one after the other. In isolating languages the grammatical functions are expressed with single words. English has developed into this direction during its history. Complicated - from the German point of view - are the polysynthetic languages (e.g. Eskimo) as it is often difficult to differentiate between sentence and word. With which criteria the languages of the world are classified, is less important. The more important task is the complete documentation of all languages because many scientists assume that the number will enormously decrease during the next century. Some languages only have two or three speakers. Before you can examine them, you have to conserve it first. Language acquisitionLanguage is species specific for humans, i.e. everyone can communicate in his native language without any problems. You do not learn language like mathematics or driving a car, for example. So we do not speak about learning a language, but language acquisition.You have to differentiate between first and second language acquistion. The latter is about a language different from the native one, i.e. a foreign language. But now I talk about the more interesting first language acquisition. How do new born children acquire the skills to use their native language? There were several ideas for this difficult question in the history of linguistics, which were all rejected. One theory said, that the children just imitate the statements of their environment. But nevertheless you can build an infinite number of sentences without having heard them before. The theory can furthermore not explain ungrammatical forms. A different explanation was based on the fact, that children are approved for correct statements and corrected at false statements. But the children only get to know that they said something wrong and not what was wrong (lack of negative evidence). An appropriate explanation was delivered in the 1960s by the famous and influential US linguist Noam Chomsky from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambrigde, MA. The central term in his theory is the universal grammar. This is an innate system of principles and parameters. The principles are basic rules which apply for all natural languages. The parameters are specific options in every language which are arranged by the offered input. For example one principle says that every phrase has a head, and the parameters decide whether the head is on the left or right side (what this terms exactly mean, is not so important). So it is clear why everyone acquire his special native language. So the language acquistion is based on the linguistic input which is offered in the environment. Following the here-and-now-principle, the first linguistic statements of children are related to their direct environment. The universal grammar also explains the infinitive creativity of natural languages; everyone is basically able to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences, even if he has never used or heard them before. Important for this variety are the recursivity of the syntax (sentences can be infinitely expanded after a fixed scheme) and the possibility to build new words by compounding and derivation. The fascinating and interesting phenomenom of language acquistion offers basic knowledge for the research of language. Further informationCommunication
Last edit of this page on
January 20, 2010 at 22:24
What was changed? links to dictionaries URL of this document: www.mschnitzler2000.de/Main_page/language.php Last edit of this document: January 20, 2010 22:24 Document printed: September 06, 2010 10:37 © 2010 Markus Schnitzler, Düren |
… presents himself
… likes to write
… wants to contribute to a better world
… loves sports and music
… is a collector
… is up-to-date
… has a lot of fun
… looks beyond the border
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