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.
In Marianne Mithun and Wallace L. Chafe’s article “Recapturing the Mohawk Language”, the two authors focus on an important aspect of language that I strongly agree on. Mithun and Chafe demonstrate how native Mohawk speakers acquire unconsciously all necessary rules of the Mohawk language. I find that their discovery can be used as an argument to prove professor Ray Jackendoff’s first fundamental rule: mental grammar.
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.
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...
Gallegos, Bee. (Ed.). (1994). English: Our official Language. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company.
Clark, Virginia P., Paul A. Eschholz, and Alfred F. Rosa. Language: Introductory Readings. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 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...
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.
Language has a personality and a mood, created by the behavior of the speakers and their cultural identity. Moreover, this includes the tools speaker use to communicate through i.e. sign language. Languages can be described by human emotions and feelings; therefore, language is personified and dynamic. Historical events have lead to changes in languages in caused flexibility and dynamicity of language. Globalization and colonization also had an effect in word borrowing, and many languages have been altered due to this. Languages are also interpre...
Language, according to Owens (2012, p. 6), “can be defined as a socially shared code or conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary symbols and rule-governed combinations of those symbols”. Language is thought to be a complex system; however, it can be broken down into three different components. These three components consist of content, form, and use. Within these three components, language has five main components which includes semantics, morphology, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics (Owens, 2012, p. 18).
prevalent within a single dialect, a single national language or a single group of social language. It is one of the most significant “modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages … [and] language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization” (Bakhtin, 2011, 358). The conscious hybridization, on the other hand, is an intentional hybrid that is primarily applied as “an artistic device” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 358). Bakhtin (2011) defines these hybrid constructions
Languages are continually changing and developing, and these changes occur in many different ways and for a variety of reasons. Language change is detectable to some extent in all languages, and ‘similar paths of change’ can be recognised in numerous unrelated languages (Bybee, 2015, p. 139). Since users of language all over the world have ‘the same mental processes’ and ‘use communication for the same or very similar ends’ (Bybee, 2015, p. 1), similar changes occur on the same linguistic aspects, and in many cases these changes produce similar results in multiple languages. However, language change is limited by the function it performs. Languages must be learnt to such an extent which allows communication between the generation above and below one’s own (McMahon, 1994, p. 5). Hence language change is a gradual, lethargic process, as only small changes in
Sociolinguists such as Eckert (2000) and Milroy (2004) have made provocative efforts to incorporate linguistic-anthropological concepts into sociolinguistic explanation (Woolard, 2008) and foundational studies by Creese (2008) include major works describing the paradigm. Rampton (2007), described the methodological tenants behind LE. LE research is yet a developing discipline that serves as a way of enriching a fundamentally linguistic project. In fact, the formulation of LE covers a large and older body of scholarship on language and culture (Rampton, Maybin, & Roberts, 2014), while simultaneously necessitating and interdisciplinary collaboration of theories and skills, thus blurring the boundaries between branches of variationist, sociological and ethnographic sociolinguistics (Tusting & Maybin, 2007). LE research on language change (Ekert, 2000) and a cultural model of cognition (Levinson, 1996) are worthwhile examples. However, the examples in the following sections serve more as a focus on contributions of LE to the field of
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
Language is a means of human communication whether verbally or nonverbally. In everyday life we use language to express our thoughts, feelings ,attitudes,etc.A great amount of social interactions takes place every day over the telephone ,by online chats, face –to face interaction or at workplaces .We use language of different forms for different functions as in to inform, question , and sometimes to strengthen social relationships or just to keep the social wheels turning smoothly. Moreover, understanding one's own language and even other cultures’ language is important to arrive at a successful and effective communication with others . The study of language can be undertaken in various ways .Semantics and pragmatics are two branches of linguistics which are concerned with the study of meaning.
Chomsky, N. (2000). Knowledge of language: Its mature, origin and use. In R. J. Stainton (Ed.), Perspectives in the philosophy of language: A concise anthology (pp. 3-44). Peterborough: Broadview Press.