Monday, January 7, 2013

Different languages are different, but the same

Language is a pretty complex thing. Whereas we all see the English language as pretty simple since we speak it all the time and don't even think about it, there are a lot of smaller parts that go in to making English what it is, and for that matter making any language what it is. It seems weird, at least to me, that there are things all languages have in common. I mean, English has a lot of letters that = one word, Hebrew can combine lots of words into one word using specific letters that have more meaning, and Chinese uses one symbol that stands for an entire word. So how do all these languages connect? They all have a basic structure.
There are 3 parts to the language structure. The first are the phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. In English, there are 40 phonemes. Even though there are only 26 letters, phonemes include sounds like "ch, th, and qu."
The next part of language structure is the morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest linguistic units that have meaning. For example, the word "dogs" has 2 morphemes: "dog" is the subject word and the "s" implies plural.
But now that we have all these parts to words, the words have to make sense. That is how we get to part 3 of language structure: grammar. These are the rules of language that enable us to communicate with and understand each other. One part of this is the syntax, the way words are ordered, and the other part is semantics, the rules used to derive meaning from morphemes, words, paragraphs, (and the list goes on). So in English particularly, you would say "fat person" to imply that fat modifies the person. And even though the syntax is different depending on which language you are speaking, it is still syntax nonetheless, and every language has specific syntax that works.
So overall, even though different languages seem totally different, they all have structure, and this means that every language has phonemes, morphemes, and grammar.

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