Response to "A Commentary about the Study of Language"

Greetings everyone!

I must confess that though a bit confused concerning the content of the paper (I couldn’t decide whether concentrating on the theory, or expressing my own views towards the issue of Language Change) I eventually drew the same conclusions as Inma did. Not being able to decide whether to include my personal view or not, I only touched upon it, but luckily we have this blog!

First of all, let me say again that I agree with Inma’s comment of language being “the most personal and intimate product of human beings”. To me, language, together with the capacity of being intelligent and having free will, is what differentiate us from the other living creatures around us. As such, language is something inherent in human kind. Think for instance of dumb people. Even though they cannot articulate words they have found a parallel way of communicating with others. Humans overcome difficulties in order to fulfill the basic necessity of communication, which make us more powerful and ultimately free.
After finishing my paper I have been able to affirm that ‘language change’ is something universal, which gives evidence of my previous point. ‘Language’ is a matter of humanity, therefore it will react in a similar way notwithstanding geographical differences.

Finally, I would like to give you my reading of how people have made language evolve. For me there is no clearer evidence than that of ‘economy of the language’ and ‘practicality’. Throughout history, human kind has been trying to make language simpler, exactly as everything else. For example, while in the old times scribes had to handwrite all those ‘never-ending’ manuscripts, now we have computers that help us editing and that make our job much easier. Now, going back to my point, language has experienced a similar evolution and currently, as a result of those changes, it is more practical and economical – all those previous inflections that make us go crazy have mostly been cast away (thank God) –.

So, this said, goodbye!

Marina Torralbo Jover

PS. Although this is in a sense a commentary on Inma’s contribution I added this to the forum as a new entry just in case it was annoying to read it in the tiny font of commentaries.

A commentary about the study of language

Hi to everybody!

I would like to present to all of you an issue that appeared in my final conclusion of the paper “Linguistic Change”. I was encouraged by Alejandro to develop this idea, and I thought this is the best site to do that, so here I am.

I find it strange that other human activities, apart from language, are almost identical in different cultures and seem not to evolve: smiling, crying, sleeping, eating, walking… But something very different happens with language, that innate capacity of human beings, something universal which everybody shares.

Language is a product of human beings, among a huge amount of products. The feature that makes language so special among the other products is its arbitrary sign: language allows human beings to choose a word, a structure, an intonation, etc. in order to express… to express what? An attitude, a feeling, an idea… Human beings are constantly choosing items of the language depending to what we want to express: confidence, respect, formality, disagreement, happiness.

In this way, I infer from this idea that language is the most personal and intimate product of human beings, allowing us to choose different options according to our ideas, feelings, attitudes, adapting to any specific need from all the varied needs that we have when expressing ourselves.

Language, then, is constantly reinterpreting itself in the same way that human beings do: changes of meaning, of intonation, of spelling, appearance of new words… to sum up: evolution.

If language is the most personal and intimate product created by human beings, the study of it will get us closer to the understanding of its creators themselves. I think that the study of any product of human beings gets us closer, in a direct or indirect way, to our own nature: by means of studying the evolution of fashion, literature, buildings, etc. through the whole history, we can be a little be closer to the ideas of human beings surrounding these products, to the reasons for this evolution, their attitudes and feelings concerning the way in which something needs to change in order to adapt to their needs.

As I have said before, language is the most special product of human beings in that sense: since it covers a wide range of options (which depends on the speaker, the listener, the whole community in a specific moment of history), its study allows us (as philologists) to understand human beings better, their evolution, the nature of language change (of course!) and the nature of human beings themselves.

These ideas may appear a bit subjective, but I must confess that I love subjectivity: it allows more interpretations than objectivity, so this enriches our knowledge a lot.

Then, I would like to know your opinions about this issue, which I find very interesting (for example, is there some kind of connection between the specific use of language that a writer uses in his/her works and his/her own vision of the world? Of course! Think about the case of Virginia Woolf, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Language tells us a lot about human beings).

Cheers!

Inma XXX