Talkin' About Talk Date Archives
What's Special About Language?
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Hello and welcome to Talking' About Talk. Members of the United States Senate have proposed 2005 as the Year of Languages in America. And this is the first in a series of programs to celebrate the year. So let's take a moment to think about language, a gift we ordinarily take for granted.
Have you ever wondered which language is the oldest? Or how babies learn to talk? Language is universal, and yet we have so many questions about it. Whatever happened to Esperanto? What makes Chinese hard to learn? Where did southern speech come from? Throughout the following weeks we'll explore all that and more and give you a chance to ask questions about language that may be on your mind.
Let me start with a big question. What's special about language? Well, what is it that makes us human? Is it walking on two legs or living in society? Is it our ability to love and hate? To some degree, all of those. But none is unique to the human species. Birds walk on two legs. Ants live in a society. The dog loves me and hates the cat next door. It's language that distinguishes us from all other creatures. Whatever people do when they are together, whether they play or fight, make love or serve hamburgers or build houses, they talk. We're the only creatures on the planet with the power of speech.
Every human being, rich or poor, is capable of language. Every child learns his or her native tongue, be it English or Zulu, just by being exposed to the talk around them. And they learn it equally well. Most children are fluent before they're ten years old, sometimes in more than one language. And as they grow up, they master different styles of speech. Everything from formal job interview talk to schoolyard slang.
Among the questions we'll be taking up is 'How can something as complicated as language be so easy for children to learn?' Many scientists think that certain areas of the brain specialize in language and that children are born with the capacity to learn any human language to which they are exposed. In other words, it's in our genes.
And let's not confuse language with what's on the written page. Children don't come into the world with an ability to read and write. Writing is a human invention. Spoken language is a biological trait. It's like the difference between riding a bike and walking. One has to be learned, the other comes naturally. And what comes naturally in the human species is talk.
Another thing we'll see is how much variety there is in the world's tongues and how constantly they change over time. There are thousands of languages on the planet all descended from earlier languages that spread and changed and split up into different dialects as people moved. Given enough time, separation of groups can even lead to new languages, the way French, Romanian and Spanish grew out of the Latin spoken by the Romans.
We'll also look at what linguists have discovered about how language began and whether it had more than a single beginning. There's no shortage of theories ranging from the supernatural to the imitation of animal sounds.
Oh, and do animals talk? Clearly apes and other animals communicate with each other and can be taught to do some language related tasks, but they lack the linguistic flexibility of humans, our amazing ability to express new thoughts without limits on subject matter.
So, what about computers? In some ways they're very smart but can we teach a machine to speak and understand like a human? Not quite. With some flashy imitations of human-like skills, computers are limited in their ability to understand and produce meaningful speech. And they certainly lack spontaneity and the creativity of human language. Think about it. Except for a few set phrases, such as curses or things you recite from memory like a poem or prayer, every time you speak, the sentence is unlike any other sentence you have ever spoken. Each one is unique. And everyday you create hundreds or even thousands of them. On reason language is special is that it is a universal form of human creativity. All humans are creative when it comes to talking. There is no human trait more pervasive, or more valuable, than language. It is capable of expressing all of human thought. Even thoughts about itself, which is what this radio series is all about.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Robert Rodman, linguistics professor in the computer science department at North Carolina State University. And this is the Five Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our web site at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, language makes a difference.
How Many Languages are There?
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How many languages are there? Well, I'm afraid that's one of those "it all depends" questions: how you answer it depends on what we call a language, and deciding what is and what isn't a language isn't as easy as you'd think.
Let's say you like pancakes for breakfast. Your neighbor eats the same thing, but calls them "griddlecakes". In the next county, you have to ask for "flapjacks". Now imagine that chain of contacts stretching out further. Even tiny differences wouldn't have to accumulate more than a few hundred miles before it's hard to understand people. They might even say something like "Wassup?" to mean "Hello!"
Where do you draw the line between a dialect and a language? Where does one language leave off and another begin?
Sometimes it's not so hard. People in Iraq speak Arabic; their neighbors in Iran speak Farsi, a completely unrelated language. At other times, though, the linguistic differences are small, and the answer becomes a matter of politics and sociology. Swedes and Norwegians can understand each other easily. But with different histories, customs, and governments, they see themselves as two nations, speaking two languages, not one. Same thing, more or less, goes for Malaysians and Indonesians; or Macedonians and Bulgarians.
Some groups go to great lengths to distinguish themselves from their linguistic cousins across a border: Serbs and Croatians understand each other's speech just fine, but they use two different writing systems. Other groups do just the opposite:
A billion people live in China, with at least seven mutually unintelligible forms of regional speech. But they're reluctant to see themselves as separate nations, so they've clung to a not-very-phonetic ancient writing system that can be used anywhere in the country and lets them think of themselves as united-by-a-single-language.
So it's not easy to define what is or isn't a language, and counting is a matter of definitions. It also depends on when you count them. Languages are constantly disappearing, dying out; and in some cases, new ones are born. And there are places in the world where linguists aren't able to study the languages in use. So you'll never have an exact answer to the slippery question of how many languages there are. But I can tell you who counts them. Probably the best counters are the researchers at Ethnologue, a comprehensive directory of the world's languages that just released its 15th edition. Based largely on how well speakers can understand each other, they estimate -- as of this year -- a total of around 7,000 languages spoken or signed in the world today.
Some of those 7,000 are just about extinct, with only a handful of speakers left. In fact, about a quarter of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers.
At the other end of the scale, over 40% of the world's people are native speakers of just a dozen or so languages. Over the next century they'll probably drive hundreds, or even thousands, of smaller languages to extinction, just as superstores drive shopkeepers out of business. The largest by far is Mandarin -- nearly 900 million people in China speak it as a native tongue. Hindi, English, and Spanish each have over 300 million native speakers. The other big ones are Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Japanese, German, and French -- all of which have between 100 and 200 million native speakers.
Many of the dozen most-spoken languages are even more influential because of the number of people who use them as additional languages. Mandarin, Hindi, English and Russian, especially, each have over 100 million second-language speakers.
We often think of Europe as a very multilingual place. And it does have 238 different languages. But it doesn't compare with Asia, which has 2,269 or nearly a third of the world's languages. Africa accounts for nearly another third. Did you know there are over 1,000 languages in one region of west Africa, because every village in the area has a language of its own?
The world is a wonderland of diverse languages. You might yearn for the days before the mythical Tower of Babel, when everyone was said to speak the same tongue. But every language is a window on the culture in which it's spoken and a window on the human mind. So there are many good reasons for us to study them -- and preserve what we can of all of them.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Paul Lewis, the recently-appointed new editor of Ethnologue. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.
What was the First Language?
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Let's try a simple answer first: Over the past several hundred years, American English "spun off" from English in Britain and became a separate way of speaking. English itself "spun off" from a language that was an ancestor of today's German. Just about all of the several thousand languages in the world came into being through this kind of splitting and re-splitting.
Yes, but that doesn't answer the question: What was the first language, the one that started all the splitting? And when did language start?
Questions like these were easier to answer back when supernatural explanations were in fashion. You could just say that language was a gift granted to humans at birth, like their senses and their limbs. The answer to "when" was: when Adam and Eve lived In the Garden of Eden.
Beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a different way of thinking about the history of humans and their languages showed up. Researchers found relationships among existing languages. They began to show how "family trees" could have arisen through thousands of years of changing and splitting from languages that no longer exist. They developed a method of reconstructing those long-dead languages from clues surviving in today's languages, and almost everybody believes it gives trustworthy results for languages separated for up to about 5,000 or 7,000 years. But most scholars think that languages separated for 10,000 or more years have changed too much for the method to be reliable. And modern humans have been around five or ten times that long.
So when did wordless early humans, or almost-humans, turn into the talkers that we've since become? And what was their speech like? Over the past quarter-century increasing amounts of brainpower -- and more and more kinds of brainpower -- have been devoted to those questions. Paleontologists studying fossils and ancient artifacts have improved our understanding of humanity's early past. Psychologists have studied how infants make the transition from wordless creatures into talking children. Primatologists have devised ingenious experiments to determine how much human-like linguistic behavior apes can learn, if any. And neurologists and anatomists are making clearer just how extensively human language is enabled -- and limited -- by the human body and brain. They point out that language was impossible until modern humans were anatomically ready for it -- we had to have both the right kind of vocal tract to make speech sounds and the right kind of nervous system to control them.
Did you know that humans are unique in having a lowered larynx that permits the production of speech sounds? Speech isn't just a byproduct of a system designed for breathing and eating. Changes that took place in the larynx, pharynx and mouth came about at the cost of less efficient breathing, chewing and swallowing. You can choke from food lodged in your larynx; but a chimpanzee can't. Your dog can eat his food in a few quick gulps, but he can't talk. You can talk because you can't wolf your food. There must be great survival value in speech, if it cost us efficiency in eating. In short, we're built for speech. And the changes in our anatomy, traceable in fossil remains, took place around 50,000 years ago. So the consensus is that language probably started then, around the time our ancestors started to draw pictures on the walls of caves.
As I've said, we'll probably never be able to reconstruct what words those ancestors said, what their speech sounded like. But some fascinating recent research suggests that we may be able to know something about the grammar of the earliest languages -- how words came together to form sentences. Within the past few centuries several new languages of a special kind have been born. European colonists arriving in the third world communicated with their local laborers using Pidgin, a kind of adult babytalk using a hodgepodge of words from different languages, strung together with a rudimentary grammar. When children are raised speaking a Pidgin as their native language, it becomes a Creole, with a broader vocabulary and a more elaborate grammar. Now here’s the fascinating part: Unrelated Creole languages in places as far apart as Surinam, Haiti, Hawaii, and Papua New Guinea have radically different vocabularies, but they all seem to share very similar grammars, suggesting that the human brain may be hardwired to create particular patterns of speech. Could this be a clue to the language of the Garden of Eden?
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from philologist and free-lance writer Barry Hilton in Maine. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you’d like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.
Do all Languages Come from the Same Source?
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Have you ever studied German? Or Spanish, or French? If you have, you were probably grateful for cognates, foreign words that sound and look like English words with related meanings. In German, your parents are your Mutter and your Vater. In Spanish, they're your madre and padre. In French, they're your mère and père.
These resemblances not only make language learning easier, they tell us something about the history of languages. English and German share some similar vocabulary because they're both descendants of a language called Proto-West-Germanic, spoken by tribes in northern Europe well over two thousand years ago. Over time, migrations split that language into dialects, and some of the tribes moved across the North Sea into the British Isles. Fifteen centuries of separate development turned the speech of the islands into varieties of English. And the language of the Mainlanders turned into varieties of German. So we have two languages, obviously different, but also so alike that they're clearly part of the same family.
Language families, like families of people, can be connected into larger and larger groupings, spreading outward and backward in time, as your relatives do on a genealogy chart. The Germanic family that English, German and several other languages belong to has a cousin, the Romance family, which includes not only French and Spanish but also several other languages that have Latin as their common ancestor.
Now let's go back a step further in time. The Germanic and Romance families share a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European. It was spoken by tribes living some six to seven thousand years ago, probably in the steppes north and east of the Black Sea. From there the tribes spread westward across Europe and eastward and southward into Iran and northern India. As they spread and lost contact with each other, their language changed into languages like Greek, Armenian, and Albanian, and into families like Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Indian languages, and Iranian languages. Taken together, they make up the Indo-European family, the most widely-spoken languages in the world today.
Different as the Indo-European languages were from one another, they all preserved bits of ancient vocabulary and grammar. And linguists have used these bits to figure out relationships and actually reconstruct the older languages. Sir William Jones opened the way in the 18th century through a remarkable analysis of the classical Indian language Sanskrit, showing that Sanskrit was related to languages in Europe. And now, even though no one has seen or spoken the original Indo-European language for thousands of years, we know what it looks like. And by cracking the code of Indo-European, we've taken a big step toward answering the question: can all language families be linked in a super family tree that begins with a single ancestral language?
To find out, linguists have increasingly studied and compared non-Indo-European languages, asking: What families do they belong to? How far back can those families be traced? Clearly, many non-Indo- European languages can be grouped together. I've always found it amazing that Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian -- surrounded by Indo-Europeans in the heartland of Europe, are not in that family. But they do group together with several other languages to form a non-Indo-European family called Uralic. And there's a family called Turkic, which takes in Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Uighur, and some other languages in central Asia. And in China, the Sino-Tibetan family includes over 250 languages. We think that at least 200 families exist, but are they related?
There are theorists who believe we can lump all the languages of the world -- including even oddballs like Basque, that seem to fit nowhere -- into a handful of giant families.
But maybe we can't go that far. The fact that the word for "dog" in an Australian native language called Mbabaram is "dog" doesn't mean that Mbabaram is related to English; it's just a random resemblance. The fact that Chinese calls coffee "kafei" doesn't mean that Chinese is related to English, either; the origin is a Turkish word that happens to have been borrowed by both Chinese and English. And we know that languages change continuously; new words join the vocabulary and older words, including cognates, disappear. After tens of thousands of years of change, can we reliably find a common ancestor? Do all languages come from the same source? The answer is: Maybe... and maybe not. It's too soon to know.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Allan Bomhard, a linguist in Charleston who is an expert on ancient languages. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.