The subject I’m going to discuss in this essay is about the language Esperanto, and other artificial languages. The subject of artificial languages is a difficult yet interesting one. It is so, because the majority of “serious” linguists do not see artificial languages as a real area of linguistics, since they believe that you can’t have linguistics of an artificial language.
An interesting question arises from the study of artificial languages. Why do so many people dedicate so much work “to attempt to tame the language by making it more orderly, more rational, less burdened with inconsistencies and irregularities”? (Okrent, 2009). There are hundreds of artificial languages, and some may deem them failures. Nonetheless, there is some logic for the desire to create a new and improved language. For thousands of years we have had to deal with words that mean more than one thing, with idioms, with exceptions to every grammatical rule, misunderstandings, irregular verbs, etc. And while most of us don’t mind, there are other that thrive to make a world a better place through language (Okrent, 2009).
But why, then, are these efforts to build a new language fail time after time? In her book, “In the Land of Invented Languages”, linguist Arika Okrent tells us one of the reasons why these inventors are ridiculed by the linguist community (and by everybody else). She says, and in my research I found it true, that these people lose respect with their claims of: “It can be learned in twenty minutes! It can express anything you wish to say with a vocabulary of only fifty items! It is logically perfect!” (Okrent, 2009). To this I would add the fact that most of these people imagine an idealistic reason for their language.
For example,...
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...ting Office.
Geoghegan, R. (2009). Dr. Esperanto's international language, introduction & complete grammar. Seattle: Biblioteko Culbert.
Miner, K. (2011). The impossibility of an Esperanto linguistics. Interlingvistikaj Kajeroj, 2(1), 26-51. Retrieved from http://www.riviste.unimi.it
Okrent, A. (2009). In the land of invented languages. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
References
Bartholdt, R., & Christen, A. (1914). Esperanto: Hearings before the committee on education. Washington: Government Printing Office.
Geoghegan, R. (2009). Dr. Esperanto's international language, introduction & complete grammar. Seattle: Biblioteko Culbert.
Miner, K. (2011). The impossibility of an Esperanto linguistics. Interlingvistikaj Kajeroj, 2(1), 26-51. Retrieved from http://www.riviste.unimi.it
Okrent, A. (2009). In the land of invented languages. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
First, a brief background in the three dimensions of language discussed throughout this paper. The functional, semantic, or thematic dimensions of language as previously mentioned are often used in parallel with each other. Due, to this fact it is important to be able to identify them as they take place and differentiate between these dimensions i...
The article The Strange Persistence of First Languages by Julie Sedivy was an intriguing and eye-opening piece of writing to read. The concepts she brought to life through her explicit writing revealed many things I had never heard of before. The further I read, the more I wanted to know and the deeper my interest became. As a monolingual, this article was insightful, captivating and ultimately provided me with a new perspective on language.
Since it’s been a predominant topic of our discussion, let us talk about the infamous English language. We can be sure that it has painstakingly progressed throughout generations of reevaluation and modernization, and has thus become what it is today. It has gone in several directions to try and mesh with the various epochs of language, from the Shakespearean era to the common English slang we use now, we can all agree that English is a language that has been transcending and will continue to transcend into many
How can it be that something so uniquely human and commonplace in our everyday existence as language, could transcend the limits of our immediate understanding? We all know how to speak and comprehend at least one language, but defining what we actually know about that language an infinitely more demanding process. How can a child without previous knowledge of the construction and concepts of language be born into the world with an innate ability to apprehend any dialect? Mark Baker, in his book The Atoms of Language, seeks to address these unsettling questions, proposing as a solution, a set of underlying linguistic ingredients, which interact to generate the wide variety of languages we see today.
It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. But how is one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?
Hill, Jane H., P. J. Mistry, and Lyle Campbell. The Life of Language: Papers in Linguistics in Honor of William Bright. Berlin [etc.: Mouton De Gruyter, 1998. Print.
Poststructuralists aggressively declares that we cannot trust linguistic systems to convey truth, the foundations of reality are unpredictable and the world of literacy as we know it begins to unravel...
Mujica, Mauro E. “Why the U.S Needs an Official Language.” Worldandi.com. 2003. Web. 31 July 2011. .
Language is a means of communication and it varies from one community to another. Everyone has a mother tongue which depended on the family’s upbringing. A second language can be learned along the way. There are also instances where a person is born in a community that speaks two languages and therefore, had to learn both languages. The quality of the languages learned will be affected by how well the community speaks both languages. This can later develop into a new form of language. The essay describes the frustration of the author who felt rejected by different groups for speaking a different form of language. Her essay aims to gain sympathy from readers by seeing the issue from her point of view. Anzaldua attempts to achieve this in her essay by raising issues on identity and discrimination. She wanted to highlight that language is not determined by a country’s physical borders.
Prof Fishman, J 1991, . Reversing language shift: theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.za/books?id=ah1QwYzi3c4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Text linguistics is a “discipline which analyses the linguistic regularities and constitutive features of texts” (Bussmann, 1996: 1190). According to this definition, text linguistics is mainly concerned with studying the features that every piece of writing should have in order to be considered as a text. It is also defined by Noth (1977 in Al-Massri, 2013:33) as “the branch of linguistics in which the methods of linguistic analysis are extended to the level of text.” This means that text linguistics aims at producing rules and methods that can be used to analyze the whole text. This approach has been put forward by the two scholars Robert-Alain de Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler in their seminal book “Introduction to Text Linguistics”, in 1981. The study of texts in linguistic studies starts in
Clark, Virginia P., Paul A. Eschholz, and Alfred F. Rosa. Language: Introductory Readings. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. Print.
Slocum, J. (1984). "Machine Translation: its History, Current Status and Future Prospects ", Siemens Communications Systems, Inc., Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
Now, have you ever looked—I mean really looked at the English language? It is a very confusing language and it’s no wonder so many other people have so much trouble understanding it. Have you ever talked to someone from a foreign country and you’ve had to rephrase the entire thing you were trying to say because they didn’t understand? That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
113-117. 151-195. The. English: A Linguistic Tool Kit, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University. English in the World, (2012), (U214, Worlds of English, DVD ROM), Milton Keynes, The Open University.