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| By studying our language we are insiders, studying a central aspect of our own lives. Being an insider has its problem. |
Many birds study partly to establish territory; honey bees tell others where their hive of food is located; calls of some primates are learned and not instinctual.
Text: Aliens come to the earth and we suppose they can hear what we are saying. They find that when we are together, we are rarely silent. Sometimes we give tongue while doing things that seem to have some purpose. We might be cooking dinner and then eating. All of these things, the alien might not understand as communication.
To us, as insiders, it seems obvious that speech includes words. If someone asks for example, for three oranges, the word three is one word with one meaning, and oranges another with another meaning. But an outsider would have no easy clue to the existence of these words.
The pauses with breathing and hesitation, but there are no audible divisions with smaller units. It might be difficult for them to discover whether parts of this speech have separate function.
A natural way is to correlate repeated signals with things people are observed to do. (Like observing “alarm call” in other species.) But this is inconclusive (text imagines a scenario where coffee is offered, some shake their heads and some hold out a cup. Coffee itself doesn’t even have to be voiced.)
Imagine the outsider trying to work out the role of coughs and sneezes
When we talk about a language, we can do so, once more, only through the medium either of itself or some other language. Our language has a word bird with the meaning as we say ‘bird’. It is therefore easy to perceive this meaning as in some way prior to the word that corresponds to it.
We are less fazed when precisely common meanings do not exist. Anyone who learns French learns for example that no single French word corresponds to the English river. Fleuve is sometimes used when river would be appropriate, but often riviere is used instead.
Navajo word for mother (referring to biological relationship between each person and their female parent.) Anthropologists discovered a form, shima, which could translate into English mother. But it doesn’t follow the primary use of biological female parent, with an emphasis on a being who gives and sustains life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be human.
Meanings are not simply given in nature, or in the way the world itself is. They are bound up with a culture of which language is one aspect.
Where the micro-fabric of chimpanzee society is maintained by grooming, that of homo loquens is maintained above all by speech.
Languages therefore has two layers of structure. Units that have meaning form specific combinations on one level, and they in turn include specific combinations of still smaller units which are themselves without meaning.
One fantasy that goes back millennia is a language in which forms for words do systematically reflect their meaning. In English, for example some words both begin with gl- and refer to the phenomenon of light: glow, gleam, glitter, or glare. But this is not carried consistently (dazzle, and shine or glove and gloat)
The structure of language is so redundant thatwecanreadleavingspacesbetweenthemmoreahelpthananecessity
Text: Language as a way of holding societies together.
Variation is not only geographical. If someone speaks English also speaks German, their behavior will be different in this way from someone who speaks only English. These points seem so obvious they scarcely seem worth making, but speech also varies across dialects and accents.
Labov’s assumption r-frequency was tied with social status in New York.
We are a single species and if any of us hears people talking in an unfamiliar language, it is clear at once that is what is happening. Yet without a language in common, people can communicate at best through gestures, smiles and so on. This is an odd thing: that language has evolved as the main means by which human beings communicate, but because there is a multitude of languages each of us is actually able to communicate with no more than a fraction of our species. How did that come about?
“Languages” are abstractions. No single form of speech or writing is called, “English” instead there are many “Englishes”
“We must in reality distinguish as many languages as there are individuals”
- Hermann Paul
Regular patterns of vowel harmony in Turkish Examples are given of words with an without a genitive case ending (GEN) deniz = sea sabun = soap deniz-in = sea-GEN el = hand el-in = hand-GEN köy = village köy- ün = village-GEN
Broca’s area’ and Wernicke’s area Broca’s = frontal lobe, immediately above the deep fold known as Sylvian fissure. Wernicke’s = further back behind the temples.