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.