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