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Language, Language

A language is a dynamic set of visual, auditory, or tactile symbols of communication and the elements used to manipulate them.

Although other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language.

In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos , was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below. More commonly though, the English word "language", derived ultimately from lingua , Latin for tongue, typically refers only to expressions of reason which can be understood by other people, most obviously by speaking.

Rules of grammar are one of the characteristics sometimes said to distinguish language from other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of symbols to be manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances.

In Classical Greek Philosophy such questions were connected to the subject of the Natures of things, in this case "Human Nature". Therefore already in Aristotle we see language being mentioned in discussions of natural propensities of humans to be political and to dwell in city state types of communities Politics 1253a 1.2 , pair-bonding Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.12.1162a , poetical and so on.

Others have argued the opposite - that reason developed out of the need for more complex communication. Rousseau, despite writing Second Discourse before the publication of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, shockingly claimed that there had once been humans who had no language or reason and who developed language first, rather than reason - the development of which things he explicitly described as a mixed blessing, with many negative characteristics.

At the core of theoretical linguistics are the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics). The first of these encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

The fields that are generally considered as the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax, phonology, morphology, and semantics. Applied linguistics attempts to put linguistic theories into practice through areas like translation, stylistics, literary criticism and theory, discourse analysis, speech therapy, speech pathology and foreign language teaching.

Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; Western linguists only recognized the phoneme some two millennia later. Tolkppiyar's work is perhaps the first to describe articulatory phonetics for a language. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowels, and elements like nouns, verbs, vowels, and consonants, which he put into classes, were also breakthroughs at the time.In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh () made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw ( , The Book on Grammar ), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.

A common progression for natural languages is that they are considered to be first spoken, then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.

Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a living language or modern language.

The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).

In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.) The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

Several of these languages have been constructed by individuals or groups. Natural, pre-existing languages may also be used in this way - their developers merely catalogued and standardized their vocabulary and identified their grammatical rules. These languages are called naturalistic.

Two others, Occidental and Novial, were drawn from several Western languages.

It has a relatively large community roughly estimated at about 2 million speakers worldwide, with a large body of literature, songs, and is the only known constructed language to have native speakers, such as the Hungarian-born American businessman George Soros. Other auxiliary languages with a relatively large number of speakers and literature are Interlingua and Ido.

The purpose behind the development and implementation of a controlled natural language typically is to aid non-native speakers of a natural language in understanding it, or to ease computer processing of a natural language. An example of a widely used controlled natural language is Simplified English, which was originally developed for aerospace industry maintenance manuals.

Some authors restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is used for artificial languages that are more limited.

Linguists do not consider these to be "language", but describe them as animal communication, because the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different in its underlying principles from human language. Nevertheless, some scholars have tried to disprove this mainstream premise through experiments on training chimpanzees to talk. Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his proof of the language and dialects of the bees. Frisch, K.v. (1953). 'Sprache' oder 'Kommunikation' der Bienen? Psychologische Rundschau 4. Amsterdam.

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