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| Do animals have language? Ans: Animals have systems of communication, but they are not the same as human language. Primates use a form of communication called a call system, which is much more limited than human language. There are only a limited number of calls, and their meanings are fixed and are stimuli-dependant. For example, most animals have a call for "danger," but to be used and understood it must be made in the presence of some form of hazard. There is no way to create new calls, such as "danger from a predator" vs. "danger from a falling item." There is also no way to communicate about things that are not present, such as things over the horizon or things in the past. But human language obviously has these capacities, and for this reason we can learn from each other and discuss each other’s experience. This is all possible because human language is not hard-wired genetically; it is learned. It is important to note that experiments involving non-human primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas show that they do possess rudimentary capacities for language. Several have been taught American Sign Language and are able to use a few hundred signs in fairly complex ways. When you hear Japanese-born people speak English poorly, they make similar mistakes. Why? Ans: Japanese characters are a staple on American TV, and so most Americans are familiar with what a "Japanese" accent is like. More specifically, we are familiar with the speech patterns of native Japanese speakers when they learn English later in life. One common mispronunciation is confusing the "r" sound and the "l" sound such as in "craw" and "claw." This mispronunciation is made because there is no distinction between the "r" sound and the "l" sound in Japanese. Linguists refer to these sounds as phonemes, and would talk about the r and l phoneme as /r/ and /l/. These sounds are actually very closely related, and it is only through training and the fact that the sounds are important for distinguishing between the meanings of certain words that English speakers learn to differentiate between them. As it turns out English has about 35 phonemes, but there are many phonemes not used in English that native English speakers have a hard time recognizing. For example, native English speakers have a hard time hearing the difference between the [ph] in pin and the [p] in spin that is important in Hindi spoken in India and Sesotho spoken in South Africa. What does it mean when someone calls English a "Germanic" language, since German and English don't sound alike to most people? Ans: Historical linguistics studies the evolution of languages. Linguists have shown that the Romance languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian are derived from Latin. Likewise they have shown that English, German, and Dutch are daughter languages of a protolanguage that linguists call proto-Germanic. Because all of these languages are derived from the same parental language, linguists say they belong to the Germanic family of language. Is Ebonics really a language? Ans: Controversy erupted in 1996 when the Oakland, CA School Board passed a resolution saying that many of their students spoke a language different from Standard English (SE) known as "Ebonics." This met with a great deal of resistance, and in 1997 a new resolution was passed that simply recognized the language differences that exist. While this controversy might seem somewhat new to most Americans, linguists have been studying this issue for over thirty years. These researchers would counter the prevailing American sentiment that Ebonics or Black English Vernacular (BEV) is an undisciplined and "uneducated" form of English. They argue that BEV is a relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the United States and that it follows distinct rules. It even has evolved from SE in predictable ways. For example, in deleting the present tense of the verb to be, i.e., saying, "you tired" as opposed to "you are tired" or "you're tired," BEV is similar to many languages including Russian, Hungarian, and Hebrew. Most importantly, as a system of communication, BEV is just as capable as other forms of English. |