BATAAN PENINSULA STATE UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL
Telefax: (6347) 2372350
(6347) 2375830 City of Balanga 2100 Bataan, Philippines
Website: www.bpsu.edu.ph Email: graduateschoolmc@gmail.com
Email: bpsugraduateschool@gmail.com Telefax: (6347) 2376658

Name: Aika Kristine L. Valencia Teacher: Dr. Flora Canare

What We Know About Language. . .

All languages change through time.

Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social
group. Language also varies across time.

Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the
meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but
whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes
arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new languages will not
be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially
indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.

In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be shared. As a
result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not be able to understand
one another. In the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before
divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and
inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also, as people
observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the language has "gone
downhill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the language of their children
or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the language of their own youth.

How and why does language change?

There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take originate in language
learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage.

 Language learning: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the

next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received from
parents, older siblings and other members of the speech community. The experience of each
individual is different, and the process of linguistic replication is imperfect, so that the result is
variable across individuals. However, a bias in the learning process ─for instance, towards
 regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by generation. In addition, random
differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in small population.
 Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into
contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as
children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In such contact
situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.
 Social differentiation. Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment, gesture
and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved
through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (usually via exaggeration of some variants
already available in the environment), morphological processes, syntactic constructions, and so
on.
 Natural processes in usage. Rapid or casual speech naturally produces processes such
as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and Apo cope. Through repetition, particular cases may
become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more careful speech. Word
meaning change in a similar way, through conventionalization of processes like metaphor and
metonymy

Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language change, with
"internal" sources of change being those that occur within a single linguistic community, and
contact phenomena being the main examples of an external source of change. When
accompanied by splits of populations, language change results first in dialect divergence (the
kinds of differences we see between British and American English; between the French of
France and of Quebec; between New World and Old World Spanish and Portuguese). Over
longer time periods, we see the emergence of separate languages as in the contemporary
Romance languages, separated by about 2000 years, and the Germanic languages, whose
divergence began perhaps 500 years earlier. Both of these families are part of Indo-European for
which the Ethnologue web page lists 425 languages. Though political considerations often
intervene in whether a particular speech variety is considered to be a language or a dialect, the
basic idea behind linguistic classifications is that dialects are mutually intelligible, whereas
languages are not.

Wherever human exists, language exists. . .

 Words are definitely not inborn, but the capacity to acquire and language and use it creatively
seems to be inborn. Noam Chomsky calls this ability the LAD (Language Acquisition
Device). Today we will ask two questions: how did this language instinct in humans
originate? And how did the first language come into being? Concerning the origin of the first
language, there are two main hypotheses, or beliefs. Neither can be proven or disproved
given present knowledge.
2) Belief in divine creation. Many societies throughout history believed that language is the gift
of the gods to humans. The most familiar is found in Genesis 2:20, which tells us that Adam
gave names to all living creatures. This belief predicates that humans were created from the start
with an innate capacity to use language.

It can't be proven that language is as old as humans, but it is definitely true that language and
human society are inseparable. Wherever humans exist language exists. Every stone age tribe
ever encountered has a language equal to English, Latin, or Greek in terms of its expressive
potential and grammatical complexity. Technologies may be complex or simple, but language is
always complex. Charles Darwin noted this fact when he stated that as far as concerns language,
"Shakespeare walks with the Macedonian swineherd, and Plato with the wild savage of Assam."
In fact, it sometimes seems that languages spoken by preindustrial societies are much more
complex grammatically than languages such as English (example: English has about seven tense
forms and three noun genders; Kivunjo, a Bantu language spoken on the slopes of Mount
Kilimanjaro, has 14 tenses and about 20 noun classes.) There are no primitive languages, nor are
any known to have existed in the past--even among the most remote tribes of stone age hunter-
gatherers. Nevertheless, it is impossible to prove that the first anatomically modern humans
possessed creative language. It is also impossible to disprove the hypothesis that primitive
languages might have existed at some point in the distant past of Homo sapiens development.

b) Natural evolution hypothesis. At some point in their evolutionary development humans

acquired a more sophisticated brain which made language invention and learning possible. In
other words, at some point in time humans evolved a language acquisition device, whatever this
may be in real physical terms. The simple vocalizations and gestures inherited from our primate
ancestors then quickly gave way to a creative system of language--perhaps within a single
generation or two. Mention the hypothesis about rewiring the visual cortex of the brain into a
language area. According to the natural evolution hypothesis, as soon as humans developed the
biological, or neurological, capacity for creative language, the cultural development of some
specific system of forms with meanings would have been an inevitable next step.

This hypothesis cannot be proven either. Archeological evidence unearthed thus far, seems to
indicate that modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged within the last 150,000 years. By 30,000,
BC all other species of humanoids seem to have been supplanted by Homo sapiens. Could the
success of our species vis-a-vis other hominids be explained by its possession of superior
communicative skills? Speaking people could teach, plan, organize, and convey more
sophisticated information. This would have given them unparalleled advantage over hominid
groups without creative language. Of course, no one knows whether other species of humanoids-
-Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis -- used creative language. Perhaps they also did. In any
case, Homo sapiens, "the wise human," should perhaps really be called Homo loquens, "the
speaking human" because language and humans are everywhere found together, whereas wisdom
among humans is much more selectively distributed.

Is there any such thing as a primitive language?

 There are no primitive languages-all languages are equally capable of expressing any idea
in the universe. The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words
for new concepts. Simple, complex, degenerate and primitive languages are figments of
the imagination. Languages like English, with only a few changes in the endings, are said
to have a simple grammar, but can be very complicated in the way use is made of small
words like ‘the’ and ‘of’.

 ‘George plays the piano’ sounds like a simple comment until you ask the question
‘Which piano?’ My African students could never understand why we don’t say ‘George
plays a piano’, because they were taught that the piano means a particular piano. The
answer of course is not ‘This piano’, or ‘That piano’, but ‘Any and every piano’. This
type of usage of ‘the’ is irregular because ‘the’ also means ‘the only one’ or ‘a particular
one’. For example, if you say, ‘The dog bit me’, you don’t usually mean that just any dog
bit you or every dog bit you, but that a particular dog of which you are now painfully
aware bit you. While English people usually do not see that this degree of flexibility for
the meaning of a tiny word ‘the’ is difficult, many people from other language groups
find it so.

 Since all languages communicate equally well for those who naturally use them, no
language is degenerate in that sense. Any language can communicate any idea if you take
the trouble to work on it.

 Since all modern races are descended from Noah and his sons, who had a complex level
of technology, for example shipbuilding, metalcraft, farming, etc., the so-called primitive
races are not primitive at all. They should rather be called ‘ultimative’—(primus is Latin
for ‘first’ and ultimus is Latin for ‘last’). The so-called primitive races are at the end of a
chain of dissolution of the civilization and culture of their ancestor, Noah. This is why the
anthropologist cannot make up a consistent picture of the evolution of culture from
primitive to advanced. It simply never happened that way. As for the languages of
‘ultimative societies’, they are often so complex in grammar that people who speak
English find them very difficult. This is true even of many languages which have easy
vocabularies compared with English.

 Actually, the question of the complexity of a language is a purely relative one. For any
foreigner, a language may be complex when he uses his own familiar language system as
 the point of comparison. But it is obvious from the ease with which the national speakers
use the language that the greater complexity simply isn’t there.

 However, if we take as our reference point the relatively ‘moo-ving’ communication of a

cow, then men’s immense language abilities, and the overwhelming complexities of the
languages themselves, point to only one thing. Man was created with language.

Language acquisition

How do children acquire language? Do parents teach their children to talk?

No. Children acquire language quickly, easily, and without effort or formal teaching. It happens
automatically, whether their parents try to teach them or not.

 Although parents or other caretakers don't teach their children to speak, they do perform
an important role by talking to their children. Children who are never spoken will not
acquire language. And the language must be used for interaction with the child; for
example, a child who regularly hears language on the TV or radio but nowhere else will
not learn to talk.

 Children acquire language through interaction - not only with their parents and other
adults, but also with other children. All normal children who grow up in normal
households, surrounded by conversation, will acquire the language that is being used
around them. And it is just as easy for a child to acquire two or more languages at the
same time, as long as they are regularly interacting with speakers of those languages.

 The special way in which many adults speak to small children also helps them to acquire
language. Studies show that the 'baby talk' that adults naturally use with infants and
toddlers tends to always be just a bit ahead of the level of the child's own language
development, as though pulling the child along. This 'baby talk' has simpler vocabulary
and sentence structure than adult language, exaggerated intonation and sounds, and lots
of repetition and questions. All of these features help the child to sort out the meanings,
sounds, and sentence patterns of his or her language.

 In the 1960s, linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a revolutionary idea: We are all born
with an innate knowledge of grammar that serves as the basis for all language acquisition.
In other words, for humans, language is a basic instinct. The theory, however, has long
been met with widespread criticism — until now. A new study presents compelling
evidence to suggest Chomsky may have been right all along.

 In this respect, Chomsky taught that language is much like walking. Although humans
learn by example, he proposed that we are all born with a fundamental understanding of
the underlying mechanisms of language. Chomsky’s original work, called universal
grammar, is the reason why humans can recognize grammatically correct yet nonsensical
 phrases, such as “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Past research has shown our
ability to distinguish words from nonwords even without an understanding of the
language, is a skill that even non-verbal babies possess. Researchers have long failed to
prove this same instinctual knowledge also exists for grammar.
 The most commonly accepted viewpoint on language acquisition suggests humans learn
language by observing and memorizing grammatical cues. This theory posits that our
understanding of language is built solely on experience, not an internal language
processing feature. However, researchers from New York University recently used new
technology to prove Chomsky’s theory may have been factual all along (not unlike these
other scientists whose ideas were ahead of their time).
 First language acquisition refers to the way children learn their native language. Second
language acquisition refers to the learning of another language or languages besides the
native language.

 For children learning their native language, linguistic competence develops in stages,
from babbling to one word to two word, then telegraphic speech. Babbling is now
considered the earliest form of language acquisition because infants will produce
sounds based on what language input they receive. One word sentences (holophrastic
speech) are generally monosyllabic in consonant-vowel clusters. During two word
stage, there are no syntactic or morphological markers, no inflections for plural or past
tense, and pronouns are rare, but the intonation contour extends over the whole
utterance. Telegraphic speech lacks function words and only carries the open class
content words, so that the sentences sound like a telegram.

Three theories
The three theories of language acquisition: imitation, reinforcement and analogy, do not
explain very well how children acquire language.

 Imitation does not work because children produce sentences never heard before, such
as "cat stand up table." Even when they try to imitate adult speech, children cannot
generate the same sentences because of their limited grammar. And children who are
unable to speak still learn and understand the language, so that when they overcome
their speech impairment they immediately begin speaking the language.

 Reinforcement also does not work because it actually seldomly occurs and when it
does, the reinforcement is correcting pronunciation or truthfulness, and not grammar. A
sentence such as "apples are purple" would be corrected more often because it is not
true, as compared to a sentence such as "apples is red" regardless of the grammar.

 Analogy also cannot explain language acquisition. Analogy involves the formation of
sentences or phrases by using other sentences as samples. If a child hears the sentence,
"I painted a red barn," he can say, by analogy, "I painted a blue barn." Yet if he hears
the sentence, "I painted a barn red," he cannot say "I saw a barn red." The analogy did
not work this time, and this is not a sentence of English.
  This hypothesis cannot be proven either. Archeological evidence unearthed thus far,
seems to indicate that modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged within the last 150,000
years. By 30,000, BC all other species of humanoids seem to have been supplanted
by Homo sapiens. Could the success of our species vis-a-vis other hominids be explained
by its possession of superior communicative skills? Speaking people could teach, plan,
organize, and convey more sophisticated information. This would have given them
unparalleled advantage over hominid groups without creative language. Of course, no
one knows whether other species of humanoids--Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis -
- used creative language. Perhaps they also did. In any case, Homo sapiens, "the wise
human," should perhaps really be called Homo loquens, "the speaking human" because
language and humans are everywhere found together, whereas wisdom among humans is
much more selectively distributed.

Sound change
Every spoken languages includes discrete sound segments like p, n or a, that can all be defined
by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a
class of consonants.

 All aspects of language change, and a great deal is known about general mechanisms
and historical details of changes at all levels of linguistic analysis. However, a special
and conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes in phonological
systems, traditionally called sound change.
 In the cases where we have access to several historical stages -- for instance, the
development of the modern Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are
remarkably regular. Techniques developed in such cases permit us to reconstruct the
sound system -- and some of the vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from
information about daughter languages.
 In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a change
occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language
became "k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there were no "t"s in it at
all, though the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have
"t"s.
 Another unconditioned sound change that occurred between Middle and Early Modern
English (around Shakespeare's time) is known as the Great Vowel Shift. At that time,
there was a length distinction in the English vowels, and the Great Vowel Shift altered
the position of all the long vowels, in a giant rotation.

Processes of sound change:

Another dimension along which we can look at sound change is by classifying changes
according to the particular process involved.
  Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most
pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/,
first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make'
became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to
make').Palatalization is a kind of assimilation.
 In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to occur
more sporadically, i.e., to affect individual words.
 Dissimilation involves a change in one of two 'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost
adjacent in a particular word such that they are no longer the same. Thus the first "l" in
English colonel is changed to an "r", and the word is pronounced like "kernel".
 Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds. Crystal cites Modern
English third from OE thrid , and Modern English bird is a parallel example. But
Modern English bright underwent the opposite change, its ancestor being beorht, and not
all "vowel + r" words changed the relative order of these segments as happened
with bird and third . Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the
word for "ask": ascian and acsian. We don't know which form was metathesized from
the other, but we do know that ascian won out in the standard language.
 Haplology is similar to dissimilation, because it involves getting rid of similar
neighboring sounds, but this time, one sound is simply dropped out rather than being
changed to a different sound. An example is the pronunciation of Modern
English probably as prob'ly.

DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, DIFFERENT SOUNDS

 It is often said that languages differ by sound or melody. What does this mean? Only when
one begins consciously the process of learning a foreign language, does one notice that the
language in question possesses sounds far removed from those in one’s own, and not even
produced in the same manner.
 Sometimes, there are also sounds which sound similar, yet prove to be different by a minute,
but essential, detail. Those sounds cannot simply be replaced by sounds one knows from
their own language. Such a replacement could change the meaning of a word or phrase, or
even cause the sentence to become incomprehensible.
 Several different sounds may sound the same to a non-native speaker, and at the same time,
deceptively similar to a sound from their own mother tongue. Although awareness of such
phenomena increases with every new foreign language learnt, only a few realize just how
much variety of sound exists in the languages of the world.