Talk:Language

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Contents

[edit] Please, no language-learning links

Wikipedia is not a web directory. The "External links" section of this page is not intended to promote every single Web page that has something to do with language; it's to provide links to more information on topics mentioned in the article.

Most of the second-language-learning links don't want to provide more information, they want to sell a service to you. Meanwhile, learning second languages isn't even really covered by this article. Those links do not belong here. See Wikipedia:External links for more information on the policy. RSpeer 16:31, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

We can have just one link: Wikibook: Languages. It's our sister Wiki project and is meant to be a learning tool. Shawnc 06:24, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] deletion

I removed the following comment for being unintelligible:

Grammatising this phenomenon was also an achievement of that time. The Tolk?ppiyar starts by defining the alphabet for optimal writing, grammatises the use of words and syntaxes and moves into higher modes of language analysis.

I am not claiming to disagree with it, I am simply stumped as to what it is supposed to mean. Which phenomenon? Does 'grammatising' mean putting something into words? Describing as part of the grammar? And which 'higher modes' of analysis?

kwami 00:41, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] how many languages

How many languages do the world have? Anybody if know, please contact me at tronghue989@yahoo.com

Estimates run from 4000 to 7000. (Usually 5000 is quoted.) The number depends on how you define languages. For example, is Scots a dialect of English, or is it a separate language? In some cases, one person might say that a certain group of people speaks one language with a bunch of dialects (and get a world estimate closer to 4000), while someone else describes the same thing as 40 closely related languages (getting a world estimate of 6-7000). kwami 00:19, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I think it is difficult to say exactly how many languages are being spoken in the world ,because the issues between dialects and real languages are not easy to decide .(Rasoolpuri)

[edit] From Basic Principles to Specifics

Sorry, I should have come in here and participated in the discussion; thanks to David Pierce for the polite reminder. I rewrote the introduction and added the section Properties of language because of a lack of structure and clarity of definition I preceived.

Language itself needs to be defined without overemphasizing the phenomenon of human language, which is a subset of it. Then and only then can anyone coming to the article gain a better understanding of the nature of human language (which is why I guess most people would be coming to the article). Human languages, programming languages, and formal languages are named thus because they are all types of the same phenomenon. Historically, this naming may have been by analogy, but such analogies hit at the root of the connection and still stand today, unlike the very loose analogies with art, etc. mentioned earlier on this talk page.

As for where my definition "A language is a system of arbitrary symbols and the rules by which they are manipulated," I formulated that on the spot (though obviously I did not originate those ideas). I most definitely stand by the notion that language by definition contains both symbols and rules. Human languages most certainly contain both, programming languages most certainly contain both, and formal languages most certainly contain both. A set of rules without something they manipulate seems nonsensical. A set of symbols without rules would only be as expressive as the number of symbols it contained, and would offer no way to use the symbols in a coherent manner to define new ones. And, the symbols are most definitely arbitrary in nature. There is nothing intrinsic about a particular symbol that forces it to be mapped onto a particular concept, object, etc. These are certainly useful properties which differentiate what is generally called language from what is not (though obviously there are some who would be upset by it because they want to think of other animals having language, when no other form of animal communication has been shown to contain rules like human language does).

However, I'm now questioning whether my definition is not lacking. For one, I'm thinking it's also fundamental that the set of arbitrary symbols be finite. Less clear to me is whether semantics is part of the definition of language. Clearly human and programming languages have semantics (which are of course based on rules), but mathematical formalisms are totally devoid of semantics. (Not understanding that did not allow non-Euclidian geometries to be found for many centuries.) Indeed, David seems to be concerned in earlier discussions with the precise difference between logic and language. Obviously, if language must have a finite number of symbols that would be a difference, but also if language requires semantics then that would be another (and possibly more crucial difference). These are points to be discussed and understood.

But, let me emphasize one reason to start from basic principles. Human languages are bound by constraints that languages in general are not bound to. There are practical reasons they should be (most especially because it would be intractible for babies to learn language if the set of all possible human languages did not have restrictive contstraints on it). A good example of a constraint (which I think I got from Chomsky somewhere) is this: human languages never form questions out of statements by reversing the order of the words of the entire sentence. There is absolutely no reason a language can't be designed in which that was done, but you won't find one that naturally evolved on planet Earth. I personally find the idea that human languages are a highly constrained subset of all possible languages to be extremely fascinating, and I think that is a basic and important fact to put in a Wikipedia article.

I also think it is a disservice not to inform the reader on the relationships between various types of languages beyond just human languages by giving a good abstract definition (as opposed to a fuzzy dictionary definition) of what the phenomenon is and hence why and how these various things called language are related. The reader can then go on to other articles that get more specific on those types of languages. --Tox 11:22, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

User:Millosh makes some excellent points above in discussing so-called standard languages versus natural human language. I have been thinking for some time that we need some discussion of those points somewhere on Wikipedia, especially because of the problems we've had with the Serbo-Croatian language article. (There are also issues on language boundaries and standard languages that cause problems in formulating and understanding the articles on the various Chinese languages.) This goes past a broad overview of language in general into a further breakdown of concepts within human language, highlighting issues in sociolinguistics and in a certain way making a connection between constructed and naturally evolved human languages (in that these standard languages are often a hodge-podge construction based on naturally evolved dialects). This could also offer important background for articles such as Gender-neutral language and African American Vernacular English. In fact, at some point it might be useful to have a spin-off article on human language itself. I don't know. I'm brainstorming a bit here, but this article looks like it could be a very important backbone of the linguistics and individual language articles, and the programming language and formal language articles. I now wish I had looked here earlier. --Tox 13:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

I think we need to remember that our purpose here is not to decide what language is, but to say what people think language is. I have given my own views at length above, with a reference to philosopher of the early 20th century; but he seems not to have been very influential, so I cannot insist on letting his views rule here. I did once summarize here the definitions of a few published thinkers. My work was deleted, but I think such an approach is the best here. As it is, the article's list of references seems way too short to me. David Pierce 14:06, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, certainly I agree, as an encyclopedia it should not be our attempt to formulate a theory of language. But, while the purpose of a dictionary is to describe the use of a term by the people, I think an encyclopedia's purpose is to look a bit deeper at current understanding among the world's thinkers.
I'm trying to track down an explicit definition by an expert that I can cite to back up the one I gave, but the trouble is (so far) all the various books I have on linguistics and programming languages, though quite descriptive of the nature of language, do not seem to have any explicit definition. But, the notion that a language is a set of arbitrary symbols and the rules used to manipulate them is obviously older than I am and quite apparent from any study of linguistics or computer science.
The entire field of linguistics is concerned with 1) determining which symbols a language is using (starting with features and phonemes, and building up from there) and 2) which rules (phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic) make up its grammar. When designing a programming language, you determine 1) which symbols you will use and 2) the rules which will govern them. Even the layman knows their language contains symbols and rules. We've all suffered through English class in school, where our teachers constantly insist we subscribe to certain rules in our writing. The idea that a language is a particular system of arbitrary symbols and the rules that govern them just isn't controversial nor particularly new. If anything, as I said, it may be lacking in some rigor. But, it is certainly better than some vague notion of a way of communicating or expressing oneself. That tells you only about how we see it being used, not about its structure or how it works.
To understand where I'm coming from I'd recommend Pinker's Language Instinct or Words and Rules, and of Chomsky's linguistics texts, and any linguistics 101 textbook or basic comp sci textbook on programming languages. These are the kinds of texts I've studied over the years that led to what I thought was a straight-forward and noncontroversial definition, though perhaps not what the average layman would have come up with. I'll try to look through more of the discussion on this page as I have time (though I did make an effort to skim through the whole thing and read parts of it). Do you mean your summary was deleted from the talk page, or the article? --Tox 08:14, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
No linguist of any depth would restrict human language to a bunch of symbols plus grammar. Chomsky is passé; he was great when justifying allocating university funds to starting up a linguistics dept., but hasn't led to much insight into how language actually operates. Pinker is more interested in making a name for himself in a battle of Truth vs. Error in the popular literature than in revealing the complexities of language. Although such people are of course essential in any coverage of the topic, it would be a shame to limit the article to them. kwami 07:58, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm wondering if the 'language' article (I've just looked at it today for the first time) should perhaps be broken up into several discrete articles ('human language', 'mathematical language', 'animal language'...) with the article 'language' providing a very brief gloss of 'language' and then pointing to the other articles. It seems to me this would alleviate at least some of the problems being argued over, in particular the problem of how to characterise 'language', which is a quite polysemous word. Dougg 11:18, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Language is Software

<Comment on the following sentence in Computer—A computer is a machine capable of processing data according to a program — a list of instructions. The data to be processed may represent many types of information including numbers, text, pictures, or sound.>

<Also a comment on the following sentence in Language—A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes and the rules by which they are manipulated.>

From Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained 1991; ISBN: 0316180661 p. 302:

The philosopher Justin Leiber sums up the role of language in shaping our mental lives:
Looking at ourselves from the computer viewpoint, we cannot avoid seeing that natural language is our most important "programming language." This means that a vast portion of our knowledge and activity is, for us, best communicated and understood in our natural language... One could say that natural language was our first great original artifact and, since, as we increasingly realize, languages are machines, so natural language, with our brains to run it, was our primal invention of the universal computer. One could say this except for the sneaking suspicion that language isn't something we invented but something we became, not something we constructed but something in which we created, and recreated, ourselves.

[Leiber, 1991, page 8.]

Yesselman 21:57, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Philosophy of language

There ought to be a mention of Philosophy of language, since it plays an important role in the study of language. 128.6.175.79 20:48, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Learning a Language

I was wondering if it's possible for say, a native English speaker, to learn, say, French and speak them both at a native level. I guess, when the English speaker learns to speak French, will he always have an accent when he speaks it, or can he speak them both as if he were a native speaker?

It won't be possible... but not impossible. You're either left handed or right handed but a select few can be both. Same with language. One will also effect or cancle out the other. I can't explain it any better... language eh?

-G

[edit] Language as in political discourse

What would be a good way to include the information that language is also used to describe the wording of political discourse, as in:

"Let's work on some language about fuel economy to include in the State of the Union speech." ? --Ministry of Truth 07:16, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

There was some garbage text about a court room trail or something. I do not know how to revert the page back to a previous one. hi mom its your daughter

c mzcauFIg GADsiugfiu ew FHQBKFDJHGKHDFBNDFGSHFGJWHOIETUWHNLHJASOEWGTFEWLKJQPRQ3I2 EWEIYRF8WE CIUEWRYQY

[edit] "Language" vs. "A Language"

What is the difference between "A Language" and "Language"? jVirus 08:18, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

I'll add a note here because I was one of those whom you invited to comment; but let me recall one of the notes at the top of the page: "This is not a forum for general discussion about the article's subject." In the now-archived discussion page, I did talk about language as a concept, as opposed to a particular language. I don't have anything to add, unless you want to address my earlier comments specifically. (If you do, you should probably use my talk page.) I still think the language article starts out on the wrong foot, but I've already done my best to say why I think that.
David Pierce 11:11, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Hello I am a young Philosopher who belives that there is no difference between thought and language. If you can find a difference or would like to here my resoning email me at zachlilly@gmail.com

[edit] Siberian Wikipedia

Editors of this article may be interested in the proposal for closing the Siberian Wikipedia, on which a vote is currently being held in Meta. Please, take the "Addressing sockpuppetry" warning into consideration. - Best regards, Evv 04:38, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Circuitry of symbols"?

Unless I'm very much mistaken, and meaning no offense to anyone personally, describing language (or anything else for that matter) as a "circuitry of symbols" makes no sense. I deleted just this phrase, though it seems like to me the entire first paragraph is really suffering for clarity. 24.11.177.133 22:54, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] opening paragraphs

Is it just me or does the definition of language currently given at the top of this article border on the unintelligible? And I think the factoid that "many species use a language" is certainly an arguable proposition. Quite frankly, all the introductory paragraphs seem a little disjointed. 24.11.177.133 04:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I decided to just try and improve the definition myself. I'm sure it's far from perfect, but I think in any case it's preferable to talking about "conversant entities". 24.11.177.133 22:08, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
That looks a lot more readable to me. Thank you. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 00:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
It was my pleasure. Unfortunately, the second paragraph remains. It seems less a summary treatment of the topic (which I assume it's supposed to be) and more a hodge-podge of random facts. And for that matter, I'm not sure all the statements are even facts.24.11.177.133 23:32, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
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