What is Language?
By my point of view, language is a signaling system which operates with symbolic vocal sounds, and which is used by a group of people for the purposes of communication.
Let me look at this definition in more details because it is language, more than anything else that distinguishes human from the rest of the animal world.
It’s true that other animals communicate with one another by means of cries; for example, many birds utter warning calls at the approach of danger; apes utter different cries, such as expressions of anger, fear and pleasure. But these various means of communication differ in important ways from human language. For instance, animals’ cries are not articulate. This means basically that they lack of structure given by the contrast between vowels and consonants. They also lack a kind of structure that enables us to divide a human utterance into words.
We can change an utterance by replacing on word in it by another: a good illustration of this is a teacher who can say, e.g. “textbooks are behind the green box”, or he/she can change one word and say “homework are behind the green box” or “textbooks are behind the pink box” ; but a bird has a single utterance cries which means “danger”
This is why the number of signals that an animal can make is very limited whereas in human language the number of possible utterances is infinite. It also explains why animal cries are very general in meaning. We are more civilized than animals with beautiful language. Thus, we should maintain such signaling system as a magnificent human language for our next generation.
Well, to me language is a tool for communication. As long as you can understand others, it is fine. It is about encoding and decoding. It is fun so that’s why I like studying language. Another aspect, I see language as a kind of art. We use them to express our opinion, feeling, need and etc. All kind of languages, for instance, spoken, written, or body language, could be very powerful. It’s up to the person who uses it. We can use them either for good or bad result. A word of a politician can cause war. A body language like giving somebody a pat on the shoulder could make the person fell so good without saying anything. Language is so wonderful, but we should use it carefully too.
ReplyDeleteBy Nok (Kanokwan)530132001 ^_^
Language plays the important role for the human in the world to communicate with other people. There are a large number of different languages around the world depending on the different cultures. I like to learn new language because I think that every language is unique and outstanding. Every language is charming and interesting in my opinion. If possible, I would like to learn every language all over the world. However, Thai language is my first language and I think that Thai language is the most beautiful language in the world. I am Thai people and I am really lucky that I have my own language that can show the civilization of Thailand.
ReplyDeleteAs in my point of view, although languages can distinguish humans from other creatures. I still believe that languages are a barrier to obstruct mankinds communicate with each others. The diffence of languages has confused human for a long time and created various disputes. There are more than a thousand languages confound around the world. Fortunately that we can learn and develop the languages. Nowadays, English is served as a primary language of the world and this would be a good opportunity to demolish the language barrier if all of people could united and speak the same language.
ReplyDeleteNuttagon Sattayapanich 530132006
Language is a tool for expressing ideas by writing, speaking, or even using gestures. Every world language has different characters of alphabets, sounds, gestures and meanings. It depends on each community to create rules of the language. For example, in some community, nodding head means “yes”, whereas it means “no” in the other community. Moreover, languages are also related to cultures. Cultures have great influence on every language. For instance, in terms of vocabularies, some culture may have unique objects which only occur in that culture, so people in that community may give the objects specific names, which only people in the community understand. Therefore, every language has different characters and rules, which sometime it is complicated, but it will be understood by people in each community
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