Entry #8 The Study of Language

 

Yule, G. (2014). The study of Language. U.K.: Cambridge University Press

Here is a brief description of the chapters:

Chapter 1: The origins of language

This chapter strives to fathom out the question of the origins of human speech. Although it is suspected that spoken language was developed between 100.000 to 50.000 years ago, there is no conclusive evidence of when and where human speech first appeared.  Thus, the opening chapter of this book provides several theories and possible explanations that aim to account for the origins of language. 

According to Yule's compilation, both science and religion have proposed a variety of answers: the first one from different angles and upon certain evidence, the latter through the grace of God, verging on the magic.  But among the compendium of scientific theories comprised in this chapter, we can identify different sources -such as the observation of the natural world, physical evolution, social relationships, and genetic mutations-  that are valid explanations provided by the scientific community to unveil the mystery. The actual birthplace of human speech could be found in those sources, or it might be a combination of more than one. 

The truth is that the origins of human speech still remain a matter of controversy and speculation, the author holds, even when we might feel more attracted to one of the theories and find its explanation more feasible. In this sense, what Yule's opening paragraph discloses is a range of possibilities instead of a concluding verdict. 

Chapter 2: Animals and human language 

This chapter analyses different properties of human language to understand the reasons why human language is so unique and different from the animals' languages. The properties are mentioned and explained in an affordable way along with the chapter.

The order in which those particular characteristics are introduced is the following: Firstly, REFLEXIVITY, or the ability to talk and think about the language. Secondly, DISPLACEMENT, which refers to the ability to talk about things that are not present in the immediate context. For instance, a case of displacement would be speaking of things that happened in the past or in the future (this capacity of abstraction is immanent in humans). Thirdly, Yule alludes to ARBITRARINESS. This property refers to the lack of connection (either natural or iconic) between the words and their meaning (the case of onomatopoeias is an exception, though). The following property of human language mentioned and described in this chapter is PRODUCTIVITY, and it refers to the ability to create new expressions and utterances. And the two last properties are CULTURAL TRANSMISSION and DUALITY. Cultural transmission implies that our language is not something that we are born with, while duality makes reference to the fact that our language is organized in two different levels: One is made up of sounds and letters, which have no distinct meaning when they are in isolation, and the other one consists of all the possible combinations of those sounds that end up producing distinct meanings.

CHAPTER 17: Language history and change 

This chapter focuses on Philology, which is the study of language history and change. We have discovered that languages are actually related, and that is because they share common ancestors. The case of Indo-European is mentioned as one of the around 30 languages that have originated from different family trees.  In them, family connections establish a possible relationship between different languages by looking at the cognates. Using information from these sets of cognates we can reconstruct the original or “proto” form in the common ancestral language through two principles: The Majority Principle and The Most Natural Development Principle. These principles allow the reconstruction of a word and make it possible to venture what the older forms could have been like. Accordingly, the phrase "The reconstruction of proto-forms is an attempt to determine what a language must have been like before any written records" could work as a good synthesis of this chapter, in my opinion. 

In addition to the previously explained concepts, chapter 17 concludes by providing a brief summary of the history of English, divided into 4 periods: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. From the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to these days, we can seize some examples of changes that certain sounds, syntax and semantics features have experienced. 

CHAPTER 18: Languages and regional variations

In this chapter, we are confronted with the fact that every language presents a lot of variations beyond what is known as the standard language. Through these pages, we learn that a standard language is an idealized variety, an accepted version that counts as the official language of a community or country, albeit not actually spoken by any native speaker. We can find it, however, in newspapers and books, in the mass media, and in academic instruction. Expectedly, when taught as a second language, the standard version is most desirable, even though it is a fact that, in a natural context, the regional variations present particular accents.  

As a matter of fact, this chapter reinforces the idea of the inescapable accent. Yule makes a point on this: every speaker presents a degree of accent, no matter how subtle it might be. And the author explains that this accent reflects the regional and/or social origins of the speaker. 

However, we must clearly distinguish between accent and dialect, Yule warns us. The notion of dialect is used to highlight the distinction between, on the one hand, two different dialects of the same language and, on the other hand, two different languages. Every dialect entrails certain features of grammar and vocabulary, as well as aspects of pronunciation. Dialectology holds that all varieties of dialects are equally important, although from a social point of view some varieties become more prestigious, for example, the standard language. 

The chapter also introduces notions such as isogloss, dialect continuum, dialect boundary, and regional dialects. The highlighted cogitation is that regional variation exists along a dialect continuum, and there are no sharp breaks from one region to the other, but a soft merging of one dialect into another. The terms "bilingualism" and "diglossia" are also mentioned and briefly explained. Although the first one is well-known and quite common, the latter describes a rather unfamiliar situation: the simultaneous existence of a low and a high variety of the same language (and the use of one or the other depending on the context).

About the issue of language planning, the chapter mentions the cases of the USA, Tanzania and Guatemala, nations with a population whose inhabitants speak native languages or dialects which are different from the official one. When this happens, governments may draw up a long-term plan of homogenization, to install one national language for the vast majority. 

By the end of the chapter, we meet the notions  "pidgin" and "creole". The first one refers to varieties that were created for practical purposes such as trading. Later in time, a pidgin might end up becoming the first language of a social community -as it happened in Hawaii- and then the label "pidgin" is replaced by "creole".

For this entry we were assigned to embed the presentations we had to explain in an oral assignment. In this assignment, we explained some chapters of the book cited above. Each group made its presentation through different slides using various tools. Both the oral presentation and the realization of the slides were a challenge for the members of the groups nevertheless we could manage to work properly. While it is a subject I am interested in, I felt the need to know as a teacher and as a language lover. Even though it is a theme that catches my attention I have always found it quite difficult to understand. At the end of the day, the election of the chapter, the summary of it, the organization of the information, the creation of the slides, and the analysis of them is a very useful way to learn this particular theme.

Regarding the topic of this entry, it would be interesting to explain the important point of all this work. After going through the different chapters assigned we discovered the value that words within language have according to their history, culture, and spreading of them throughout the globe. Nevertheless, I would like to express how this got into me. What I enjoyed the most about the various chapters was discovering many things that I did not know about the roots of languages ​​and how they developed and changed over time. Another thing that caught my attention was the fact that there are thousands of languages ​​where some are used throughout the planet and where others are incredibly on the verge of extinction. I believe that as speakers of other languages, we must understand the seriousness of the fact of the extinction of the language and do something about it so that this does not happen. Although language helps us to communicate as human beings, I find it extremely useful to know where the language we use comes from and how its mutation came to be what it is today.

Presentations: