1.1 What is language? Human beings can communicate with each other. We are able to exchange knowledge, beliefs, opinions, wishes, threats, commands, thanks, promises, declarations, feelings – only our imagination sets limits. We can laugh to express amusement, happiness, or disrespect, we can smile to express amusement, pleasure, approval, or bitter feelings, we can shriek to express anger, excitement, or fear, we can clench our fists to express determination, anger or a threat, we can raise our eyebrows to express surprise or disapproval, and so on, but our system of communication before anything else is language. In this book we shall tell you a lot about language, but as a first step towards a definition we can say that it is a system of communication based upon words and the combination of words into sentences. Communication by means of language may be referred to as linguistic communication, the other ways mentioned above – laughing, smiling, shrieking, and so on – are types of non-linguistic communication. Most or all non-human species can exchange information, but none of them are known to have a system of communication with a complexity that in any way is comparable to language. Primarily, they communicate with non-linguistic means resembling our smiling, laughing, yelling, clenching of fists, and raising of eyebrows. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutangs can exchange different kinds of information by emitting different kinds of shrieks, composing their faces in numerous ways, and moving their hands or arms in different gestures, but they do not have words and sentences. By moving in certain patters, bees are apparently able to tell their fellow workers where to find honey, but apparently not very much else. Birds sing different songs, whose main functions are to defend their territory or to attract a mate. Language – as defined above – is an exclusively human property. Among the characteristics that make a relatively clear distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication meaningful, two are particularly important: double articulation and syntax.
1.1.1 Double articulation Languages consist of tens of thousands of signs, which are combinations of form and meaning. Form in spoken languages is a sequence of sounds, in written languages for example a sequence of letters (depending upon what kind of writing system we are talking about) and in the sign languages of the deaf a certain combination of gestures. Here, we shall concentrate on spoken languages, and one example of a sign is the English word sit, which has the form /sIt/. Speakers of English associate a certain meaning with this form: ‘to assume a position of rest in which the weight is largely supported by the buttocks’. The form and the meaning together constitute a sign, as shown in FIGURE 1
Languages have tens of thousands of signs, and the term double articulation refers to the fact that the formal sides of these sign are built from a relatively small repertoire – usually between 10 and 100 – of meaningless sounds. In English, the number of sounds is around 50 – almost equally divided between consonants and vowels – varying somewhat between dialects and between different ways of analyzing the English phonological system. There is no connection between the meaning and any of the sounds. If the /I/ of /sIt/ is replaced by /U/, we get /sUt/, spelt soot, which has the meaning ‘a black powdery form of carbon produced when coal, wood, or oil is burned, which rises up in fine particles with the flames and smoke’. This meaning is totally unrelated to the meaning ‘to assume a position of rest in which the weight is largely supported by the buttocks’, despite the fact that the units /sIt/ and /sUt/ both start with /s/ and end with /t/ and have a vowel in between, and the difference in meaning is in no way connected to the phonetic difference between the vowels /I/ and /U/. If /t/ in /sIt/ is replaced by /k/, we get the sound sequence /sIk/, spelt sick, which is used to express another completely unrelated meaning: ‘affected by an illness’. In a “language” without double articulation, the formal sides of all signs would be constituted by individual sounds, and the number of different sounds would be equal to the number of signs. One example would be a system of communication where the formal side of of each sign is a specific cry. A human being would probably be able to distinguish several hundreds of cries, but such a system would not only be poor, but also uneconomical, and extremely vulnerable to noise.
1.1.2 Syntax The principle of double articulation has enabled human beings to create languages with an impressively large number of signs, but the inventory of signs in a language is by necessity finite. Since the number of sounds in a language usually is between 10 and 100, we could not have hundreds of thousands of different signs unless we allowed them to be extremely long, and there is anyway an upper limit to the number of signs that a human being is able to remember. It would not be very practical for a language to have separate signs for meanings like ‘man killed lion’ and ‘lion killed man’. The total number of isolated signs in a human language is generally limited to roughly 10 000–20 000, and with this number of signs we cannot talk about an infinite number of meanings – unless we combine them. The ingenious invention that enabled human beings to talk about everything they can imagine, is syntax. Syntax is used to put together signs expressing relatively simple meanings into sign combinations expressing more complex meanings. To express a meaning like ‘man killed lion’, we combine signs meaning ‘man’, ‘kill’, ‘past’, and ‘lion’, and we combine the same signs in a different way to express the meaning ‘lion killed man’. The English sign sequences man kill-ed lion and lion killed man are sentences, and the number of sentences in a language is infinite. Take any sentence in a language, and it is always possible to make it longer: man killed lion ⇒ the man killed the lion ⇒ the woman said that the man killed the lion ⇒ the old woman said that the young man killed the lion ⇒ the old woman said that the young man killed the lion that ate the antelope ⇒ the girl believed that the old woman said that the young man killed the lion that ate the antelope – and so on infinitely. Syntax is a mechanism that enables human beings to utter or understand an infinite number of sentences constructed from a finite number of building blocks. Without syntax, we would not be able to express other meanings than those associated with isolated signs, and the number of different meanings we would be able to express would be equal to the number of signs in the “language”. Writing is a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way. On the basis of this definition, writing is much younger. It is tempting – and quite reasonable – to propose that those ancient drawings and carvings cannot have been made by humans without language, but they do not constitute direct evidence of language. Writing in the strict sense started around 5 300 BP in Mesopotamia with the cuneiform writing system, and the first language ever written was Sumerian. About 300 years later, the hieroglyphic writing system appeared in Egypt. In China, writing started not more than 1 000 years later, around 4 000 BP. In the Americas, the oldest writing system is that of the Maya civilization, and the oldest documents have been dated to 2 200–2 100 BP. However, most languages in the world were not written down until the 19th and the 20th century. It is almost an understatement that language must have existed for a considerable time before humans started to write, so that nobody would question the claim that language is much more than 5 300 years old. Still, it is important to remember that we do not have any documentation of language from an earlier date.