19/10/09

What is Tongue as Language?

What is tongue as language?
When we hear the word tongue it may recall the anatomic part of the body that helps us not only to feed our organism or taste desserts but also to create sounds that will give live to words because they will be carrying out a meaning (remember, a word without a meaning is not really a word). This is exactly why we also call tongue to the languages spoken by people. The tongue or language, not taken in the sense of general systems of rules and elements of which we have already talked about, but in a more specific term as a system created by societies to interchange meanings (core meaning of the communication process) using audible and graphic signs.

How does it work?
The “tongue” functioning comes with the common understanding in which people may agree to give a certain combination of sounds and graphic signs a specific meaning. For example, the Romanian is a language that only people born in Rumania or who have studied the language can understand, because they have learned the decoder to the sounds and writing and know the cultural implications or levels that each word can have.

In this understanding a single word can have more meanings than those stated on a dictionary. We found a variety of levels of meanings. The first one is the so called general level in which the word relates to the acoustic image in a conventional form, which means that every person who knows the language can understand the relation between the word and the meaning; the next level is more local and just the people of a specific region knows the relation, which means that not native speakers will find hard to catch this relation; a third level of relations between meaning and words can be observed among the variety of groups that conforms the population and the only way of knowing these relations is living with those groups.

What is it for?
If people inside a country do not share the same instructions to decode the words that are spoken, then communication will not be possible and union and progress will be difficult to reach. In other words, the importance of language is that it organizes and settles down an given group of rules that will make mandatory to people that want to develop in a certain place to know them in order to share with the community instructions, directions, thoughts, ideas, jokes, etcetera. If tongues or languages do not exist, people will find it difficult to share complex thoughts as they will only have the ability to communicate mainly simple directions, instructions and feelings that have to be with survival. Some experts opine that words for “No!” may sound mostly the same in almost all cultures, and if they do not sound the same, they may have a similar intension.


PICS
Aztec Virgula

WE RECOMMEND:
EDWARD FINEGAN, Language: Its Structure and Use.
FRANK PARKER and KATHRYN RILEY, Linguistics for Non-Linguistics: A Primer with Excercises.