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September 18, 2005
Questions
What and what is not language. Why make a distinction?
Language is an organized set of sounds (or signs as in ASL) that convey emotions and thoughts directly from the brain and when produced can be understood by another human (or animal). Language has to be universalized within a group of people so as to be understood by everyone within that group. What is not language is emitting sounds or words not known or understood by the speaker, such as the book references talking parrots. Animals may have a set of sounds they use for communicating basic emotions and ideas of anger, fear, territory and food but it is very limited and they do not create new sounds for more complex emotions.
You might say that you learned a new word today, but not “I learned a new sentence today.” Why? /Equally probable?
I think this question could really go either way. I know that if I am learning a new language, I tend to learn in both phrases or sentences and words. One of the very first pieces of French I learned was “Je m’appelle Freya” and was then told in English this meant “I am called Freya.” From there I could deduce ‘je’ is I and ‘m’appelle’ translates to ‘am called.’ I did not first learn the meanings of each separate word. A fair amount of my French lessons were taught in this fashion. Learn phrase/sentence; learn meaning of sentence; learn meaning of words. However, on the same note I was also taught the meaning of individual nouns, verbs, and adjectives in addition to whole sentences. Learning a foreign language is a mixture of learning new words and learning new sentences. Though I believe this to be true for foreign languages, I don’t believe it to be true for learning in my primary language, English. I already have a very extensive knowledge of English and therefore learning a new sentence is improbable. Generally when we learn a new word in our native language it is a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb. We do not learn pronouns or prepositions because there is a very small amount of them and they have been installed in our brains for a very long time. Accordingly, a sentence must have either a pronoun or noun and prepositions for it to make sense to us. For example; if I read the sentence “He is a cuckold.” in English I would indefinitely understand the words ‘he’, ‘is’, and ‘a’ because they are simple words I have known all my life though I might not know the meaning of ‘cuckold’ because it is a rather obsolete and unused word used in everyday conversation. Therefore I would not have learned a new sentence but a new word, “cuckold.”
Posted by lcisfreya at September 18, 2005 03:18 PM
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