Difference between revisions of "Language"
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Revision as of 16:37, May 29, 2008
A language is a collection of symbols (called vocabulary) and rules for connecting these symbols (called grammar) that facilitates communication.
Origin
The origin of language has been debated for long time among linguists, biologists, cognitive scientists, theologians, anthropologists, along with many other disciplines. Currently, the most wide held belief is that language has evolutionary origins (Pinker, 1997). However, this has not been proven definitively.
Although linguists have been able to allocate most languages to a small number of language "families", they have been unable to find a common origin of these language families. A few of the largest and oldest families include: Proto-Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Nigar Congo families (Campbell, 98).
Examples of Languages
- Spanish
- Mexican Spanish
- French
- Hebrew
- Portuguese
- German
- Dutch
- Chinese
- Ugaritic
- Ukrainian
- Yiddish
- Russian
- English
- Flemish
- Greek
- Bulgarian
- Albanian
- American sign language
- Aramaic
- Sumerian
- Sanskrit
- Akkadian
- Babylonian
- Turkish
- Arabic
