Language
William S-Y.Wang, 20070113
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Language is a system of symbols used uniquely by our species for communication both within ourselves and with others. All species communicate, of course, but none other has developed a system that comes even close in power and flexibility. And no other species has been able to learn human language beyond its most rudimentary form in spite of many decades of dedicated effort to teach it.
Internally language is the primary medium along which we think, i.e., analyze, organize, plan, remember, recall, etc. Externally it is the primary system whereby we exchange information with others, i.e., ask questions, make requests, share opinions, express emotions, etc. The unique design features of language began to emerge cumulatively, perhaps 100,000 years ago, shortly after our bodies took on their modern form. Language itself probably reached its modern form some 50,000 years ago, as our ancestors engaged in various behaviors that clearly required language, revealed in the archeological record as cave art, musical instruments, ritual burials, sea crossings, etc.
An early feature to emerge is the use of bodily organs that originally evolved for breathing and chewing to produce prosody and syllables constructed from vowels and consonants – to produce phonology. By means of this adaptation, the words are sufficiently brief in time so that many of them can be strung together to form numerous constructions which are short enough to fit within the span of the human working memory. This feature facilitated the accumulation of large sets of words and constructions; its emergence is the beginning of spoken language. Written language emerged much later, less than 10,000 years ago, with visual patterns as surrogates for spoken sounds. It was invented after societies had become sedentary and complex, in order to mark properties and to record historical events.
Over the 50,000 years since language reached its modern form, several thousand generations separate the first languages of our ancestors and the modern languages. Language evolves mainly as a consequence of two forces of differentiation: [1] as a child creates its own slightly different successor language on the basis of the sparse and imperfect samples available from its linguistic environment; and [2] as a speaker of language A incorporates elements of language B into his own speech, and language A changes as it absorbs an increasing number of such foreign elements. The 5000 some languages of today are presumably a subset of must larger set of languages that have existed in the world as the products of these two forces.
Much as speech was adapted from breathing and chewing, other aspects of language also were built upon other pre-existing sensori-motor, cognitive, and social skills. Many of these skills are at the foundation of other human behaviors as well, especially mathematics and music. A fundamental aspect for learning these skills is our inborn tendency to learn by imitation. Infants imitate adult facial expressions and gestures, even though they have no way of monitoring themselves. The discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in our brain in the early 1990s promises to shed important light on how we learn.
We share many of these skills for language with other primates, particularly with the chimpanzee, our closest relative; our lineages diverged some 5 million years ago. These include an awareness of our selves – most primates do not recognize images of themselves in a mirror or on a television screen. These skills also include social awareness of one’s diverse relations with others within and outside one’s own group, and to base appropriate interactions on these relations, such as dominance or subservience, deception or collaboration, sympathy or aloofness, etc. Effective use of language, for instance in the choice of words, plays a crucial role in implementing and reflecting these relations.
The infant comes to the world with much of its neural system uncommitted. Making these commitments for various functions and activities involves the growth of new neurons, forming new synapses among neurons, and coating the processes of neurons for more efficient transmission of neural signals. These maturational developments take place significantly even during the infant’s first year of life, as it practices its motor system for speaking, i.e., babbling, and as it commits its perceptual system to the requirements of the surrounding language or languages. Researchers have recently discovered that six month old infants can learn statistically from the speech samples they hear, and presumably use this information to segment words and phrases from the continuous stream of speech sounds.
Children all over the world learn their first language(s) naturally and effortlessly, regardless of the structure of the language(s). No doubt this is partly due to the fact that all languages are roughly of the same degree of complexity, in addition to the common genetic endowments. While we still do not know how to quantify linguistic complexity with precision, it is easily observed that the various components of a language typically compensate for each other, e.g., a more complex morphology goes with a simpler syntax, a more complex vowel system goes with a simpler consonant system, and conversely.
Since all languages are simultaneously the product of our genetic endowments, which we share, and of the real world, which we also share, there are bound to be numerous features which all languages share to varying extents, i.e., linguistic universals. For example, in phonology, the distinction between vowels and consonants is universal, as well as how they combine to form syllables. Furthermore, the vowels and consonants typically number in the several dozens, and they distribute themselves in a way which maximizes the perceptual space.
In semantics, there is a basic set of meanings which are present in all languages and expressed by simple words. These include objects of nature such as sun, moon, tree, water, body parts such as head, hand, eye, nose, etc. All languages have ways of referring to time and space, though often there are words shared by both dimensions such as long, short, before, after, etc. Such devices give us the important possibility of ‘mental travel’ to distant places as well as to the past and to the future. All languages have ways of stating, questioning, affirming, negating, comparing, etc. In other words, language enables us to represent reality with symbols, and thereby create mental worlds beyond reality.
In morphology, words typically divide into four major classes, roughly corresponding to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as well as several minor classes such as pronouns, prepositions, postpositions, etc. In syntax, the three basic elements of a simple declarative transitive sentence, subject [S], verb [V], and object [O] can form six possible orders. By far the majority of the languages of the world prefer three of these six possible orders, namely VSO, SOV, and SVO. That is, the preferred order is one in which S precedes O, and V occurs in any of the three possible positions. Furthermore, the preference of the primary syntactic order determines to a large extent the relative positions of modifier and modified constructions in the language. For example, in a verb final language [SVO] like Japanese, the modifier always precedes the modified. In verb middle languages [SVO], on the other hand, like Chinese and English, there is greater flexibility in the relative positions of these two constructions.
Since the end of the 18th century, linguists have found that the ancestry of languages may be traced by comparing the differences and similarities among them. One very useful tool in such comparative work is the use of regular correspondences, which are the results of sound change. For instance, the consonant /t/ in English words like two, ten, tide, tooth, etc., corresponds to the consonant /ts/ in the corresponding words in German. As another instance, the consonant /r/ in Mandarin in words like ren [person], rou [meat], ru [enter], ri [day], etc., corresponds to the consonant /j/ in Cantonese.
These correspondences are due to the fact a consonant in the language ancestral to English and German has changed to /t/ in the former and /ts/ in the latter over the centuries after the two descendents have separated. Similarly for the example of Mandarin /r/ and Cantonese /j/, and numerous such cases for all languages of the world. The method of inference is the same as that used in biology, where examination of the features in modern descendents leads to hypotheses of phylogenetic relations, such as that among the order of primates.
One bold hypothesis is that proposed by the late Joseph Greenberg, who classified the 5000 some languages of the world into less than 20 super-families. According to his hypothesis, English belongs to Germanic, which in turn belongs to Indo-European, which in turn belongs to Eurasiatic. Eurasiatic is a super-family which includes not only virtually all the languages of Europe, but also those of East Asia, such as Korean and Japanese. Such hypotheses are as stimulating as they are currently controversial. Since the phylogeny of languages is intimately intertwined with the phylogeny of peoples, many disciplines have joined forces recently to address these questions.
4