Terry Nakamura
G Track
Physics
December 8, 1997
The phenomenon of language is perhaps one of the most defining and significant
characteristics which separates man from beast. With the help of this great
tool, man has achieved time and time again what was thought to be impossible
and has thus built an incredibly advanced and complex world. Language is
indispensable to all facets of everyday life, for whether in the form of
writing, speech, or even sign language, it is essential in the maintaining
of social structure and well-being. The economic, political, and social
status of every country across the globe depend on communication. The ability
to communicate and express oneself is the basis of civilization, and the
creation of language was the genesis of the profound intellectual growth
and achievements on which the world as we know it has been built upon. The
many and various cultures found across the globe would not exist without
language, and it is logical that man engages in extensive studies of it
to better understand its effects on the world around him.
The study of language, or linguistics, deals with the structure, development,
and history of language. There is an increasingly great number of various
divisions of linguistics, each dealing with a separate aspect of language
in general. Descriptive linguistics attempts to explain the phenomena
of language through the study of the sound and structure of spoken language.
Historical linguistics investigates the development of language and
how it changes over the course of time. Though these two remain the largest
branches of linguistics there is also comparitive linguistics, which
compares the structures of two or more languages, and geolinguistics,
which is the study of the effects of historical factors on language. Geolinguistics
observes and investigates such phenomena as linguistics spheres of influence,
multilingualism, class language, jargon, and slang. These subdivisions of
linguistics can all be further divided into a few common categories. These
categories are:
1. Phonology, the study of language sounds
2. Morphology, the study of various changes in the individual word
to alter its meaning (prefixes, internal changes)
3. Syntax, the arrangement of words in a sentence or word group
4. Vocabulary, the study of individual words and their origins; includes
the
subgroups:
a.) Etymology, the history of individual words
b.) Semantics, the study of word meanings
These more specific fields are useful in the study of languages across the
globe, helping to both distinguish and compare language as well as trace
its roots.
In order to fully understand the origins of language, however, one must
first ask how language is physically manifested. Because language is always
initially spoken with the development of writing following behind, it is
the vocal sounds created by various speech organs which "provide the
materials for language" (Barber 10). While phonology is mainly defined
as the historical study of language sounds, its counterpart, Phonetics,
is the study and classification of sounds not in reference to their historical
evolution, but to how they are produced and shaped into speech. Speech begins
with the lungs' expulsion of air, created by the contraction of the diaphragm
and chest muscles. This flow of air provides the vibrations needed to create
sound. Though some languages of Africa utilize solely the tongue, cheeks,
and lips to produce clicking sounds, most languages are based on the air
flow which originates in the lungs, changes somehow during its passage through
speech organs, and expels itself through the mouth or nose. The first in
a chain of speech organs is the vocal cords, located in the windpipe, which
vibrate as the air passes through them. The vibrations can be maximized
or minimized through the expansion or contraction of the muscular flesh
of the vocal cords. Most human speech occurs when the vocal cords are in
their intermediate position, allowing for the creation of the voice.
The tone or pitch of the voice can be varied moderately as speech is created,
placing emphasis on certain words of importance and making speech much more
personal. Another factor which determines the quality of speech is the nasal
cavity. If the nasal passage remains open, a higher, more penetrating sound
is produced, whereas if the nasal passage remains closed, the sound produced
is richer and deeper. The placement of the tongue in the mouth also effects
the tone of speech. The tongue's various vertical and horizontal placements
create different vowels with different sounds. The looseness or tightness
of the lips compliments these vowels and gives them distinct qualities.
As the vocal cords, nasal cavity, tongue, and lips are simultaneously shaped
in separate ways, sounds of a vast quantity can be produced.
These basic sounds dependent on the free passage of air flow are called
vowels, however another important component of language, consonants, are
created as the air flow is somehow blocked during its passage. The three
classifications of consonants are fricatives, stops, and resonants. Fricatives
are created as the flow of air is diverted as an air passage decreases in
size. As the air is forced through a more narrow passage, an audible friction
is produced. The second type of consonants, stop consonants, are produced
when the air flow is completely obstucted by the tongue and lips. Finally,
resonant consonants are created when air is allowed to pass without friction,
but with a small obstruction of some sort caused by the speech organs of
the mouth. With a variety of consonants to modify the numerous basic vowel
sounds, an immense multitude of sounds can be created. Though the great
number of languages spoken across the world can be vaguely similar or incomprehensibly
different in sound, it is important to remember that because all ethnicities
and races of humans are biologically the same, the components of the production
of sound are identical in all languages.
The voice produces sounds which form into words
which translate basic ideas, and consequently words are put into groups
which carry more complex meanings. The field of linguistics that deals with
the formation and meaning of these word groups is the study of syntax.
As words are pulled together into constructions, or specific groups
of words formed to convey a specific meanings. Two types of structural categories
exist in the definition of constructions. One of them is exocentric structure,
which involves word groups that are traditionally known as 'complete sentences'
("I am here"). The second structural category is endocentric
structures, which are word groups that act collectively as nouns ("the
large old house" ); verbs (should have learned); adjectives (down-to-earth);
and adverbs ("in a flash", "many years ago"). When sentences
grow and become more complicated as more words are added, certain groups
of words called a constituent class are to describe a basic idea.
Constituent classes can consist of a few words or even one word, as long
as they express an idea that would occur in the same spot in a sentence.
The group "man who lives there" and the word "dweller"
would both be found at the same location in a sentence, therefore would
be of the same constituent class. This ability to appear at one particular
part of a sentence is called privelege of occurence.
Due to the vastness of the globe and the many physical barriers which separate
people, languages in separate parts of the globe developed in very different
ways. Most theorize that there were many "root" languages which
started in separate parts of the world, slowly spreading and creating off-shoot
languages as the spans of the root languages overlapped at various points.
The languages of Europe and Western Asia, though spawned from different
root languages, are closely related. By observing the similarities in the
languages of Europe and Asia, one can trace the diffusion of phonetics and
structure. One example of this diffusion is the d- sound at the beginning
of words of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Slavic languages which indicates
the numbers two and ten. There also exists similar syntax in these languages.
The many similarities of languages in Asia and Europe inspired linguists
to classify them into the larger category of the Indo-European family.
The discovery of the relation of languages in the two separate continents
of Asia and Europe led to a new way of looking at language as a whole, as
"detailed study of the Indo-European family is important for understanding
of historical linguisic method as well as for knowledge of the interrelationships
of some of the world's most widely spoken languages" (Lehmann 18).
Linguists began to create somewhat of a family tree to trace the history
of language. The initial step to classifying languages and creating families
is to find the oldest known form of a language and dating it. A family may
consist of a number of languages, all with their own subgroups, but all
are related to one original strain of language.
The Indo-European family, is also known as the Aryan family because both
Celtic and Indic authors referred to their people by this name (Lehmann
19). The Indo-European family has a large number of subgroups which consist
of various interrelated languages from the same area. The first of these
subgroups is Indo-Iranian, which was carried to the area of Iran
and India more than three millenia ago. This is the subgroup which gave
birth to Sanskrit, which was the origin of the Hindi, Bengali, Gujerati,
Marathi, Panjabi languages as well as other lesser-known ones. Indo-Iranian
also gave birth to Avestan and Old Persian, which created the modern day
languages of Balochi, Afghan, Persian, Kurdish, and Ossetic. The second
linguistic subgroup of Indo-European is Armenian, which to present
day exists in two branches: Eastern, spoken in Russia and Iran, and Western,
spoken in Turkey. The Slavic subgroup is prime examples of languages
created by the diffusion of others, and is broken into the lesser groups
of South, West, and East Slavic. South Slavic includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian,
and Slovenian; West Slavic consists of Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Wendish;
and East Slavic consists of Great Russian, White Russian or Byelorussian
and Ukrainian. Another subgroup of Indo-European is Baltic, which
has spawned Latvian and Lithuanian. One of the most important of subgroups
is Hellenic, or Greek, which split into Mycenaean Greek, West
Greek, which split into Northwest Greek and Doric, and East Greek, which
subdivided into Attic-Ionic, Aeolic, and Arcado Cyprian. The subgroups Italic
and Celtic have many characteristics in common, with Italic eventually
evolving into Latin, which is the root of all modern Romance languages,
and Celtic evolving into Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish, Manx, and Scots
Gaelic. The displacement of Celtic has been brought about by Germanic
languages. Speakers of Germanic languages spread across Iceland, Greenland,
America, into Baltic and Slavic territory, and even south to Africa. Modern
languages such as Swedish, Danish, and Gutnish, all from East Norse, and
Norwegian, Faroese, and Icelandic West Norse are direct derivations of the
Germanic subgroup. As the various forms of Germanic spread across both eastern
and western Europe, the dialects which gave birth to Frisian, English, Yiddish,
and Dutch.
After Indo-European, the most widely studied language family is Hamito-Semitic
which was later renamed Afro-Asiatic. The Afro-Asiatic family is
comprised of five branches: Egyptian, one of the earliest known languages,
Berber, Cushitic, Chad, and Semitic. Semitic
was extremely important to the development of many languages which are spoken
throughout the world today. Semitic further subdivided with time into East
Semitic and West Semitic. Akkadian remains as the only stem from the root
of East Semitic. West Semitic, however, consists of two groups, Aramaic-Canaanite
and Arabic-Ethiopic. The Aramaic-Canaanite group included many important
and ancient languages such as Phoenician and Hebrew.
To the south of the Afro-Asiatic group, a large family called the Chari-Nile
group spread across Northern Africa. Most of the other languages of Africa
are classed in the Niger-Congo family, including Bantu and
Swahili. Lesser known African dialects such as Hottentot and
Bushman stem from the Khoisian family which thrived south
of the Niger-Congo family. Most African languages and dialects of modern
day can be traced from these three large families which dominated Africa
in its early civilization.
Yet another large linguistic family is the Dravidian, which is based
in Asia and whose major languages are spoken in southern India. The lesser
languages of Telugu, Tamil, Kanarese and Malayalam are all branches of the
Dravidian family. Just to the east of where these languages are spoken exists
the Malayo-Polynesian family, which over time has split into the
dialects of Indonesian, Melanesian, Mironesian, and
Polynesian. The Malayo-Polynesian family extends from Madagascar
to Easter Island, and from Hawaii to New Zealand. Still farther east towards
Siberia, the Palaeo-Asiatic and Hyperborean languages are
spoken, whereas the central belt of Asia is characterized by the Turkic
languages. These languages are classified mostly with the Mongol
and Manchu-Tungus languages from the Altaic family. The Altaic
family as of late has been grouped with the Finno-Ugric group from
western Asia and the resulting Ural-Altaic group, which contains sounds
such as mi mu, yo ya, and hi fu, is related
to modern day Japanese and Korean. The remaining languages of Asia all belong
to one linguistic family of great importance for its wide distribution of
subgroups and antiquity of its documents. This group is referred to as Sino-Tibetan,
and consists of three groups: Yenisei-Ostyak, Tibeto-Burman,
and (Thai-) Chinese. The first is spoken in northern Siberia, the
second consists of the languages of Burma and Tibetan, and the last includes
various languages in Thailand and the area to the east of it, as well as
dialects of China. Though only one writing system is used in China, there
are nine different dialects, the most important being Cantonese,
Mandarin, and Manchurian.
Because of the destruction of the Native American people and culture by
European invaders, little is really known about the roots of Native American
language. Though there were though to be fifty-four families of Native American
language, they were all grouped into only six due to structural similarity,.
These six divisions are as follows: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene,
Algonkin-Wakashan, Hokan-Siouan, Penutian and Aztec-Tanoan.
This general way of classifying families into large divisions is also being
used to classify the twenty-three language families of Mexico, Central America,
and Southern America.
As can be seen from these examples, the diffusion of language across the
globe and all of its complex subdivisons create a world in which one's language
is specific to their country, or in some cases their district or town. The
vast differences between cultural languages creates barriers and impair
the flow of knowledge and ideas across the world. Global harmony is also
difficult to attain when politicians must be relied upon to maintain world-wide
stability. If average people from all parts of the world could somehow communicate
in a common language, it would be much easier to relate important information
to people living outside of your immediate location on the globe. In an
effort to achieve this, Dr. L.L. Zamenhof of Poland created Esperanto
in 1887. Esperanto was created as a international language which would allow
people who speak different native languages to communicate while still retaining
their original languages and cultural identities. Esperanto is specific
to any country or people, but belongs to anybody who learns to speak it.
It has a simple, regular and extremely flexible structure, and a vocabulary
which consists of words of all different countries. According to scientific
studies, Esperanto is time times easier to learn than any other language
because of its sixteen regular and exception-free rules of grammar and regular
phonetic spelling. The rules are constantly applied and are not inconsistent
as in most other languages.
Due to the technological advancement of communication, the only barriers
between cultures are not physical, but merely consist of language and culture.
Because language is created from the basic components which all people have
in common, the speech organs and the human mind, anybody is capable of learning
Esperanto and using it on a day-to-day basis. It would provide people the
chance to learn about cultures they would never have known about and discuss
international issues with people who are actually experiencing them. With
the combined efficiency of technology and Esperanto, the world could become
much more unified and knowledgeable.