weeks passed since the last topic started in here, so I will try to do it There is no better way to learn a language as to use it and so I guess it would be very useful to not let this part of this forum die
As the topic stated I want to write about language itself. I`m interested in what language is for different people. Is it just a school subject? Something you want to have good or at least acceptable marks? A possibility to talk to people, get in touch with different cultures?...and so on...
Since I`m the one who started the whole thing, I`ll make the beginning. But first I`ll give you a warning: I`m a terrible ...hmmm...well...laberbacke I`ll try to describe the development my view on languag has taken over the years, so it will sound a bit like David Copperfield at the beginning (I was born in...I grew up blabla I sincerly hope not to bore you to unconciousness. But after all this posting should be an exercise for me too
My first contact with a foreign language was indeed with English. English was just one of the nwe subjects at 5th grade and I remeber very well that
1) I really hated it to study vocabularys
2) My marks being very very bad the first years
The whole thing changed in the 10th grade. I had been in England for two weeks and stayed at a host familiy. It was there I`ve realized I`d never learned somthing that useful in school than English. This stay was a real motivation to study harder. Also I decided to study French as well and so I did at the 11th grade. "Unfortunatelly" 16 is an age the fascination of languages are easlily overthrown by the fascination for other things (you know...alcohol, partys, women and stuff ; btw: not neccesarily in that order and so I kept being a moderate English student and failed French completly.
As the topic is language I will pass over the next few years The only thing that has to be said is that my interest in language improved very much over the years. I studied different subjects as "social psychologie, philosohie, sociology, germanistik" and in every scientific field it was the language which called my attention and fascination most. But at his point it was mainly language itself and the try to develop my own writing stile in german. Than came Latin!
There is one thing you learn studying Latin and it is how languages work. While the most of my fellow students were deeply bored and depressed by the subject I was able to be excited by the way a certain kind of pronouns are used or a specific grammatical phenomen is builded. The things I learned studying Latin allowed me to develop a great number of thoughts about language to their end I had been thinking about.
This is the point this posting will drop the topic of my own story I will now try to explain some of these thoughts. For example: What is a "language"? What can we learn thinking about language? One more warning: From now on it will get a bit theoretically.
To find a defintion for language which includes all phenomens we want to call a "language" but excludes all phenomens we don`t want to call a "language" is not very easy. Finally I came to a formulation I can only hope to be able to translate correctly
:A language is a system of different signs serving the coding of meaning.
Sprache ist ein System differenter Zeichen, Zwecks der Vercodung von Sinn"
Which sign has what meaning, and which signs have what meaning in combination with other signs is a convention. We could create a new language at once. If one claps one time it should say "yes" and if one claps two times it should say "no". Of course with this language you can`t say many things. Normally a language must be able to express lots more "meanings" than "yes" and "no". I just wanted to stress the key-term "different". The more differences a language has the more "meanings" you can express. Claping three times - to stay at he example one more moment - could stand for "I don`t know". But the term "different" means a lot more. It`s also a difference wether someone claps hard or not. I would dare to assume that an angry person would clap much harder than a peacful one. It would be like shouting. It`s like the modulation of our voice. In opposition to "clap two times" is the difference in the modulation less well defined. The key term here is "interpretation"; "clap two times" has a very sharp meaning - NO - but the way the "speaker" claps is more vague. This is especially true if we don`t know the person we are speaking/claping to and even more true if this person belongs to antoher culture. Is this guy always claping this hard? Is he angry or not? Maybe all the guys at his home are clapping that way. Italians and turkish People for example speak a lot louder than we Germans do. It`s a different sign many people misinterpret.
Now let`s take a look how our real languages work. Let`s take the sentence:
"I go home."
We do have a lots of differences in here. First, the subject "I". It could have been "we" too, or they and so on. The verb is far more interesting. It could have been thousands of other words, other different signs. But I`ve choosed "go" and so you know that I do something which has to do with moving myself from one point to the other. Now:
"I went home."
Now you do know I talked about something which is not happening now but in the past. I will not bore you with fifty more examples. The point I want to get across is that there is a set of rules which every language developed in one form or the oher. It is vital for every language to provide an opportunity to express that an action has happened in the past, happens now or will happen in the future. To provide this opportunity it needs different signs, the speaker of the language know about.
Ok, why the hell is this interesting ?
The differences a language develops must be sufficent to the needs of it`s speakers. In other words: A language must provide enough differences that it`s speakers are able to express the things they have and want to express. The development of a language arranges itself in order to the needs of the people speaking it. This leads directly to another conclusion: By studying languages you learn something about the people speaking it.
For example: I do have a very close female friend and I do have very often the problem that there is not one single word for a women I'am heavily emotionally connected to without having with her. Funny, if you think about it. I can`t say "Ich gehe zu meiner Freundin" without making the people think she`s my life companion. There was not enough need to develop such a word. One more example: I followed a discussion between a German gilr and a Spanish man in a Spanish forum. She was desperate beacause she didn`t know how to say "I like someone" in Spanish. He was telling her she could say "te quiero" but she didn`t want to because "te quiero" has also the meaning "I love you". The English and the German language developed different words for two emotions and the Spanish didn`t. It seems that there had been no need for it. I don`t want to start a far fetched interpretation out of one example but I dare to guess that the Spanish people are not loving their wives and husbands less intensive than we do. So why are they using the same word? And one more interesting question: Would it be easy for a spanish person to think about this difference without having a word for it? Sure they do but what difference does it make if you have only one word for one emotion?
In case you read this. It would be great if you could testify this point. I think this is a very nice example for me but it`s a bit risky to take examples out of such forum-discussions.
I said "By studying languages you learn something about the people speaking it." I would like to go one step further:
By studying language you learn something abput mankind itself.
I`ll make a break here. I`m really afraid to have lost my last reader some lines above and in addition I`m tired.
If there is interest in my ramblings I would like to write more. The problem is that this post would go into heavy philosohical stuff from now on and I`m to tired to write this now and this posting is already blowing up the usual size. so far
Jörg