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WHAT IS LANGUAGE - Coggle Diagram
WHAT IS LANGUAGE
Knowledge of Words
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When you know a language, you know words in that language, that is you know which sequences of sounds relate to specific meanings and which do not.
If you do not know a language, the words of that language will be mainly incomprehensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meanings they represent is, for the most part, an arbitrary one.
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The conventional and arbitrary relationship between the form (sounds) and meaning (concept) of a word is also true in sign languages.
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If someone using a sign language, it is doubtful that you will understand the message from the signs
alone.
To know a language we must know words of that language. but no speaker knows all the entries is an unabridged dictionary and even if someone did he would still not know that language.
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Language and Thought
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Different languages encode different categories and that speakers of different languages therefore think about the world in different ways. For example, languages break up the color spectrum at different points. In Navaho, blue and green are one word.
If speakers were unable to think about something for which their language had no specific word, translations would be impossible, as it would be to learn a second language.
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People believe that by changing the way we talk, we can change the way we think; that if we eliminate racist and sexiest terms from our language, we will become a less racist and sexist terms from our language
Descriptive Grammars
In our sense, the grammar is the knowledge speakers have about the units and rules of their language-rules for combing sounds, rules of word formation, rules for combining words inti phrases and phrases into sentences as well as the rules for assigning meaning.
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Every human being speaks a language knows its grammar. When linguists wish to describe a language, they make a explicit the rules of the grammar of the language that exist in the minds of its speakers.
Linguist's description is a true model of the speakers' linguistic capacity, it is a successful description of the grammar and of the language itself. It explains how it is possible for you to speak and understand and make judgements about well-formedness and it tells what you know about the sounds, words, phrases and sentences of your language.
Teaching Grammars
The descriptive grammar of a language attempts to describe the rules internalized by a speaker of that language
Teaching grammars can be helpful to people who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous socially and economically to do so.
This kind of grammar gives the words and their pronounciations, and explicitly states the rules of the language, especially where they differ from the language of instruction.
Teaching grammars assume that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language with the grammar of the native language.
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Sign languages
The sign languages of deaf communities provide some of the best evidence to support the view that all languages are governed by the same universal principles.
ASL (American Sign Language) and other sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings. They are usually use hand, body and facial gestures as the forms used to represent words and grammatical rules.
Deaf children who are exposed to signed languages acquire them just as hearing children acquire spoken languages, going through the same linguistic stages, including the babbling stage. Neurological studies show that signed languages are organised in the brain in the same way as spoken languages, despite their visual modality.
Universal Grammar
The universal rules are of particular interest because they give us window into the human "faculty of language" which enables us to learn and use any particular language.