What is Language?

    Language is a system of conventional vocal signs by means of which human beings communicate.

I-  Language as System:

A language is not just a collection of sounds and words; it is also the rules or patterns that relate these to each other. Here we have the concept of duality of patterning which corresponds to the fact that every language has two levels.

a. Meaningful Units: such as morphemes which are the smallest meaningful units of language.

E.g.: cats → cat + s

b. Meaningless Units: are units that have no meaning in themselves although they serve as components to the meaningful units such as the phonemes.

E.g.: cats → /k/ + / æ/ + /t/ + /s/

This distinction between a meaningful word “cats” and its meaningless parts /k/ + / æ/ + /t/ + /s/ is important. This duality enables humans to produce a huge number of meaningful words and sentences out of relatively few (meaningless) sounds. In English there are only about thirty-five basic sounds yet with those we can produce infinity of utterances. For instance, small signs produce infinite messages. This is one of the main characteristics that distinguish human language from the more simple communication systems of other animals.

“System” is always associated to regularities. In English, most words take the suffix “s” to indicate the plural form. This is one rule of the system. The suffix “s” is however variously pronounced as /s/ in ducks, /z/ in dogs and /iz/ in horses. “Oxen” follows the rule of the Old English. In Modern English, the regularity is that we always add “s” to form the plural of nouns.

Some grammatical Components:

1.      Parts of Speech: Words can be put in various categories called parts of speech being nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs … E.g.: ‘boy’ is a noun, ‘eat’ is a verb, ‘pretty’ is an adjective, but 

Fast could be:

·         Adverb: You have to run fast.

·         Adjective: The fast boy runs to his mother.

·         Verb: I often fast before Easter.

·         Noun: Breakfast originates from breaking the fast. 

So we need a context to be able to determine the grammatical component.

1.      Affixes: are morphemes attached to the beginning [prefix] or the end of a word [suffix] in English. Circumfixes are affixes attached to the beginning and end of a word whereas infixes are affixes inserted in the middle of a word. These two occur in other languages than English.

a.      Prefixes: incredible / not credible – reconsider / consider again

b.      Suffixes: education / to produce a noun – dancer / the doer of the action of dancing

                          i.      Inflectional Suffixes: mark distinction of number (plural s), case (genitive ‘s), person (the ‘s’ of 3^rd person sing of present verbs), tense (past ‘ed’ and progressive ‘ing’) and comparison (comparative ‘er’ or superlative ‘est’). Note that at some time of the history of the English language, these inflectional suffixes were part of the words. In Old English it was more complex, because we had many more than these.

                        ii.      A language that depends heavily on the use of inflectional is said to be synthetic like Old English which it didn’t have a word-order, but Modern English frees itself from all of these inflections. E.g.: John hits Peter ≠ Peter hits John.

                      iii.      Modern English is analytic i.e. it depends instead on word-order and function words [adding auxiliaries and prepositions]. E.g.: I gave a flower to my friend.  

2.      Concord & Agreement: Subject-Verb Agreement means that if I have the 3rd person sing, I say “he goes”, but if I have the 3^rd person plural I say “they go”. In other terms, according to the subject the verb agrees.

3.      Word-Order: is the major characteristic of Modern English for it does matter in giving the exact meaning. For instance, ‘he died happily’ means that he died with a smile on the face while ‘happily he died’ means that the speaker is happy that he died.

4.      Function Words: such as articles, prepositions, auxiliaries and conjunctions.

 

5.      Prosodic Signals: involve pitch (of the voice), stress [présent (N) – presént (V)] and tempo (rhythm of the sentence). These signals are about the melody. For instance, ‘he died happily’ means that he died without any sorrow while ‘he died, happily’ means that the speaker is happy that he died. 

Note: We need a context to be able to determine the grammatical component.

II- Language Signs: A sign is something [word, sound or drawing] that stands for something else [concept, object …]

The smallest linguistic sign is the morpheme:

1.      Free Morphemes: E.g.: act

2.      Bound Morphemes: E.g.: re – act – ive – ate – ion

3.   Idioms: In addition to word-size morphemes (free morphemes) and smaller ones (bound morphemes, linguistic signs may also be larger than words such as idioms. An idiomatic expression is a combination of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from those of its constituent parts. E.g.: give up, put off, take over, led down …

III- Language as Speech: Speech is primary because men spoke ages before writing; therefore, it comes first in language acquisition. Even illiterate people know how to speak. However, writing is permanent although it is secondary according to speech.

Obviously, writing has also some main characteristics as being permanent:

1.      It enables us to keep records of history and civilizations.

2.      It also enables us to make distinction which we cannot make through speech.

E.g.: A pretty hot day ↔ an extremely hot day that holds an unpleasant feeling.

A pretty, hot day ↔ is a hot day that holds a pleasant feeling.

3.      If speaking makes us human, writing makes us civilized and divine.

N.B.: The tone of voice and the gesture we use are not part of language as such, but rather a parallel communicative system. This is what we call paralanguage. 

IV- Language as Convention: The fact that human beings’ vocal tract apparatus has evolved, there are a limited number of speech sounds that we can all produce. However, the systems underlying the world’s various languages are conventional and usually arbitrary.

V- Language as Human: The human brain was lateralized at one time and the left hemisphere holds a place for language. As for the vocal tracts, they developed in humans and they allowed language to occur.

VI- Language as Communication: The purpose of language is to communicate whether with others by talking or with ourselves by thinking.

           

IV-       The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The concept that these two linguists came up with is that if one thinks in language then the language (s) he speaks must influence the way (s) he thinks about the world and the way (s) he perceives it.  For instance, if one’s language according to this theory has a certain number of color terms one is likely to perceive colors according to his / her language classification.

How this hypothesis can affect social attitudes in every-day life?

In English as in many other languages like French, one often uses the masculine form of pronouns when (s) he talks about persons of either sex.

E.g.:  everyone has to mind his own business. Why this sexism since everyone should not be his, but it should be his or her. British use their instead although it lacks agreement. This is what we call PL or political correctness.

Why we study the history of the English language or of any given language?

First of all, language is an ability inherent in us. English like other languages is a particular system that is a development of that ability and an expression of it.

1.      In order to understand how things are, it is useful to know how they got to be that way. So the historical approach enables us to find out about the development of humanity in general and language being one aspect.

2.      Many of the irregularities of language today are remnants of earlier regulation patterns.

E.g.: man – men / mouse – mice / child – children /

Fish (enough, women, nation) – ghoti [Georges Bernard Show]

3.      Knowledge of the history of English can help us better understand literature.

“The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seemed to freeze

Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails.

In Keats’ time, rails meant garment. Keats meant that they were wearing black clothes. A certain lack in the knowledge of the history of the period may hinder the real meaning of the lines.

Reference:

• Pyles, Thomas and John Algeo.  The Origin and Development of the English Language - 3rd edition. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.