Language sets people apart from all other creatures. Every known human society had a language and although some nonhumans can be capable to communicate with each other in fairly complex ways, none of their communication systems begins to approach language in its capability to convey information. Nor is the transmission of complex and varied info such a necessary part of the everyday lives of other creatures. Nor do other communication systems share a lot of the design features of human language, like the capability to communicate about events other than in the here and now. But it’s challenging to conceive of a human society without a language.
Language, like culture, that another more human attribute, is remarkable for its unity in diversity: there are many languages and several cultures, all different, but all fundamentally the same, because there’s one human nature and since a fundamental property of this human nature is the way wherein it allows such diversity in both language and culture. How numerous different languages are there? First, we must know how to count them, how to differentiate one language from another. Linguists usually say that language A and language B are unique if a speaker of A and a speaker of B can’t understand each other.
This is reminiscent of how biologists define distinctness in biological species, based on whether they might produce fertile offspring. According to this criterion of mutual intelligibility, there are about seven thousand unique languages in the world today. Language diversity is attested from the earliest recorded history. The story of the tower of Babel was an attempt to explain the diversity of human language. The ancient The Greeks called foreigners barbaroi since the speech of all non The Greeks sounded to them like a babbling noise barber. Certainly, to a monolingual speaker of English, even a fairly closely related language like Swedish or Dutch is totally incomprehensible, let alone a more distantly related language like Hindi or Russian, or completely independent languages like Japanese or Mohawk.
However, despite the seemingly vast differences in between them, all natural human languages are alike in their basic structural design, they’re all instances of a single entity, human language. Language and Linguistics – It’s impossible to separate language from literature, or politics, or most of our every day human interactions. Accordingly, language is treated almost exclusively from the viewpoint of linguistics, and the article focuses on what we’ve learned about language from that discipline over the last two centuries. Linguists study individual human languages and linguistic behavior to discover the fundamental properties of this human being language.
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