Linguistics - Features of Languages
Refactored from Linguistics Notes Meta
#linguistics
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
— Genesis 2.19
- Features of a language
- Forms: sounds or shapes. These probably don’t mean anything
- Combination of forms create meaning
- The duality of patterning explains why multiple layers of structure creates meaning. How languages developed this way without being designed to develop this way is probably another example of emergence
- Signs, in linguistics, means things that mean something beyond itself
- Meanings of signs only meaningful to those who use the language because words don’t actually hold inherent meaning. In other words, the features of languages are more or less arbitrary. This can be explained to some extent by A Note on Meaningless Coincidence, Lao Tzu on Naming, and Existentialism.
- Languages can also:
- The ability to talk about other time and places known as displacement
- The ability to use a language to talk about itself known as reflexivity
- The same identified language can be different for individuals because there are always variations, and that is totally okay
- People’s own version of a language is called their idiolect
- Redundancies in a language is important as it ensures that the language will still function under small errors as in computer systems