Language

Language is one of the fundamental topics in human sciences. It’s the trait that conspicuously distinguishes humans from other species, it’s essential to human cooperation; We accomplish amazing things by sharing our knowledge or coordinating our actions by means of words. It is distinctive, essential, mysterious, practical and central to human life.

Language comes so apt to us that we forget that how strange and miraculous gift it is. It is not a peculiarity of one culture, but it has been found in every society ever studied by anthropologists. There are some 6000 languages spoken on Earth, all of them complex, and no one has ever discovered a human society that lacks complex language.

Study of Language :

How language works :

Grammar – assembly of words, sentences, phrases.
Phonology – study of sounds
Semantics – study of meaning
Pragmatics – study of use of language in conversation

How it is processed in real time : a field called psycho linguistics.
How it is acquired : by children; study of language acquisition.
How it is computed : in the brain, the discipline called neuro linguistics.

Unlike spoken language, which is found in all human cultures throughout the history, writing was invented a very small number of times in human history, about 5,000 years ago. And alphabetic writing where each mark on the page stands for a vowel or a consonant, appears to have been invented only once in all of human history by the Canaanites about 3,700 years ago.

What sticks in memory is far more abstract than the actual sentences that we hear, something we can call meaning or content or semantics. When it comes to understanding a sentence, the actual words are a tip of a vast iceberg of a very rapid, unconscious, non-linguistic processing that’s necessary even to make sense of the language itself.

Language can be divided into three topics:

Words : These are the basic components of sentences that are stored in a part of long term memory that we call mental lexicon or mental dictionary.
Rules : The recipes or algorithms that we use to assemble bits of language into more complex stretches of language including

Syntax : The rules that allow us to assemble words into phrases and sentences.
Morphology : The rules that allow us to assemble bits of words; like prefixes and suffixes into complex words.
Phonology : The rules that allow us to combine vowels and consonants into the smallest words.

Interface : We need a interface to connect this knowledge of language to the world, that allow us to understand language coming from others and to produce language that others can understand.

Except for a small number of cliched formulas, just about any sentence you produce or understand is a brand new combination produced for the first time perhaps in your life, perhaps even in the history of the species. This is because when we know a language, we haven’t just memorized a very long list of sentences, but rather have internalized an algorithm or grammar for combining elements into brand new assemblies.

Language in general, have long distance dependencies. The word in one position in a sentence can dictate the choice of the word several positions downstream. For example if you start a sentence with ‘either’, somewhere down the line, there has to be an ‘or’. If you have an ‘if’, generally you expect somewhere down the line there to be a ‘then’. But sentences can be difficult to understand if they have too many long distance dependencies because that can put a strain on the short-term memory of the reader while trying to understand them.

At the two-word stage, which you typically see in children who are 18 months or a bit older, kids are producing the smallest sentences that deserve to be counted as sentences. They put these words together using rules in their own mind. For example, a child may say “more outside!”. Children solve the problem of language acquisition by having the general design of language already wired into them in a form of universal grammar, a spreadsheet for what the rules of any language have to look like.

Poverty of the Input : If you look at what goes into ear of a child, and at the talent that they end up with as adults, there is a big chasm between them. This chasm can only be filled in assuming that the child has lot of knowledge of the way language works already built in.

Phonology, as a branch of linguistics, consists of formation rules that capture what is a possible word in a language according to the way it sounds. When a language user deliberately manipulates the rules of phonology, that is, they don’t speak in order to convey content, the also pay attention to what phonological structures are being used. We call it poetry or rhetoric.

Pragmatics, as a branch of linguistics, consists of how people understand language in context using there knowledge of the world and their expectation about how other speakers communicate. It is deployed effortlessly, but involves many intricate computations.

Language allows us to exchange an unlimited number of ideas, using a finite set of mental tools. Those mental tools comprise of large lexicon of memorized words and a powerful mental grammar that can combine them.

The study of language has many practical applications including computers that understand and speak, the diagnosis and treatment of language disorders, the teaching of reading, writing and foreign languages, the interpreting of the language of law politics and literature.