Reflection paper

What is language and why different?

Zhanguo Zheng

Professor/Assistant Director

Confucius Institute at the University of Toledo

[email protected]

Outline

I. Definitions and origins of language

II. Language variety

III. Language, culture and thought

What is language?

 a structured system of communication.（Wikipedia）

 Language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of

speech.(Ferdinand de Saussure)

 the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into

words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination

answering to that of ideas into thoughts.(Henry Sweet)

 a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and

constructed out of a finite set of elements” (Chomsky )

 ……

Human language specific

 Do animals have languages?

 What is/are specific about human language?

 Design features: arbitrariness, productivity, displacement, traditional

transmission, prevarication, learnability, reflexiveness ……

Is language universal: Origins of language

The Tower of Babel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvvl1tKqm2g

II. Language variety

Types of language

Language families

18 -19 century historical-comparative linguistic studies

Relations bw. Sanscrit and European languages --- late

18th century and 19th century historical/comparative

linguistics

>7000 languages, 142 families

Language as a structured systems

 Sound systems: every language has a set of sounds – phonemes combined in a linear order

with a set of rules

 The International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA): an internationally used system to describe

pronunciation.

 Consonants(C), vowels(V), diacritics

 Different languages have different rules of combination

 English: texts /teksts/ (C+V+CCCC)

 Chinese: 中 /tʂʊŋ/ (CC+V+C)

Structured language

 Studies of language: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax,

semantics, pragmatics

 Applied linguistics: Micro - language teaching and learning

 Macro – relations between language and other

subjects: language and cognition, language and culture, language

and computer ……

 Schools of linguistic studies: Structural, Generative, Functional,

Cognitive

A general comparison of English and Chinese

Typological classification

of languages: Inflectional,

Agglutinating, Isolating

Chinese: pictogram ---

Form + meaning + pronunciation

English: pronunciation --- form

+ meaning

derived from pictures,

standardized, simplified, stylized

The ideagraphic Chinese

男

家

Nán man/male

jiā home/house

productivity in farm

livestock 18

Tián field

口

门

日

木

人

大

从 众

林

森

昌 晶

闪 问

闩

呆

旦 火炎

焱 焚

休

people

tree

fire sun

door

mouth

big

follow crowd

woods

forest

hot

spark prosperity

glittering

morning latch

中 middle

ask

flash off fool

rest

burn

19

III. Language, Culture and Thought

Baos: founder of American anthropological study of

language, Ethnography of Communication: social and

cultural factors emphasized

Sapir-Worf Hypothesis: our language helps mould our way

of thinking and, consequently, different languages may

probably express our unique ways of understanding the

world.

Linguistic determinism: language may determine our thinking

patterns

Linguistic relativity: similarity between languages is relative, the

greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their

conceptualiztion of the world will be.

The strong version: the original hypothesis suggests,

emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our

thinking patterns.

The weak version: a modified type of its original theory,

suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture,

and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in

our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical.

Supportive evidence?

Color words in different languages

 The surprising pattern behind color names around the world

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=190s

In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a

book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: that every culture in history, when they

developed their languages, invented words for colors in the exact same order.

They claimed to know this based off of a simple color identification test, where

20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six

words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had

four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow.

If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red , and so on. The

theory was revolutionary — and it shaped our understanding of how color

terminologies emerge.

Australian aboriginal expression of possession

This piece of land is mine.

This land is me.

Thinking patterns of English and Chinese

Linear VS Curving

Oh, my god！You wouldn‘t believe it！I saw a man throwing his food at a lady during their argument while I was eating at the restaurant.

噢，天啊！简直不敢相信！我刚才去餐馆吃饭，看见一个男的跟 一个女的吵架，那个男的居然把饭泼到那女的身上去了！

Hypotaxis VS Parataxis

The long distance buses that connect all the countries in the region are

very comfortable with air conditions and TV.

长途汽车连接着这个地区的所有乡村，汽车很舒适，装 有空调和电视。

Questions for discussion

1. Do you believe that some languages in the world

nowadays are more superior than some others?

2. What are the relations between language and

culture? Which is decisive or overwhelming, if

there is any?

3. Is it possible for people from quite different

cultures to communicate without considering their

cultural differences? How?

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