The Language Instinct

Pinker sets out to disabuse the reader of a number of common ideas about language, e.g. that children must be taught to use it, that most people's grammar is poor, that the quality of language is steadily declining, that language has a heavy influence on a person's possible range of thoughts (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), and that nonhuman animals have been taught language. Each of these claims, he argues, is false. Instead, Pinker sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by evolution to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares language to other species' specialized adaptations such as spiders' web-weaving or beavers' dam-building behaviour, calling all three "instincts".

By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are. While only some human cultures possess these technologies, all cultures possess language. As further evidence for the universality of language, Pinker notes that children spontaneously invent a consistent grammatical speech even if they grow up among a mixed-culture population speaking an informal trade pidgin with no consistent rules. Deaf babies "babble" with their hands as others normally do with voice, and spontaneously invent sign languages with true grammar rather than a crude "me Tarzan, you Jane" pointing system. Language (speech) also develops in the absence of formal instruction or active attempts by parents to correct children's grammar. These signs suggest that rather than being a human invention, language is an innate human ability. Pinker also distinguishes language from humans' general reasoning ability, emphasizing that it is not simply a mark of advanced intelligence but rather a specialized "mental module". He distinguishes the linguist's notion of grammar, such as the placement of adjectives, from formal rules. He argues that because rules like "a preposition is not a proper word to end a sentence with" must be explicitly taught, they are irrelevant to actual communication and should be ignored.

Much of the book refers to Chomsky's concept of a universal grammar, a meta-grammar into which all human languages fit. Pinker explains that a universal grammar represents specific structures in the human brain that recognize the general rules of other humans' speech, such as whether the local language places adjectives before or after nouns, and begin a specialized and very rapid learning process not explainable as reasoning from first principles or pure logic. This learning machinery exists only during a specific critical period of childhood and is then disassembled for thrift, freeing resources in an energy-hungry brain.

The implications of the language-instinct hypothesis are far-reaching. Language and similar abilities are some of the traits that most clearly set humans apart from other animals. If language and other mental abilities are in fact explainable as products of evolution, then appeal to a higher power is not necessary to describe why these abilities exist.

Pinker challenges the fields of astrobiology and artificial intelligence as well. If language is a specialized ability evolved by humans' ancestors to aid survival in a particular environment, then a search for human-like intelligence elsewhere in the universe (e.g. SETI) is as futile as it would be for elephants to conduct a Search for Extra-Terrestrial Trunks and consider all non-trunk-using species inferior.

Pinker’s claims are similar to those of E. O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge), Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), Howard Bloom (The Lucifer Principle) and Richard Brodie (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme). Each argues for sociobiology, the concept that human behaviour and thought are best explained in terms of evolution of genes and memes. Collectively, these attempts to apply evolutionary theory to psychology are known simply as evolutionary psychology. Because sociobiology/evolutionary psychology challenges traditional notions of the nature of thought, morality and emotion, the field remains controversial.

Pinker's assumptions about the innateness of language have been challenged; opponents claim that "either the logic is fallacious, or the factual data are incorrect (or, sometimes, both)". The notion of the brain/mind as a set of modules with irreplaceably distinct functions, including linguistic functions, is said to be disproved by recoveries after stroke and surgical brain hemisphere removal. The statement that deaf babies "spontaneously invent sign languages with complex grammar" is actually only true in groups of deaf children (deaf communities) while a lone deaf child in a village where everyone else can hear never invents more than simple gestures. This actually supports a view of language as a social adaptation evolutionary kludge.

[source Wikipedia]

Edward T. Hall Jr. (b. 1914 – d. 2009) was an anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher.

Edward Hall was born in Webster Groves, Missouri, Hall has taught at the University of Denver, Colorado, Bennington College in Vermont, Harvard Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology, Northwestern University in Illinois and others. The foundation for his lifelong research on cultural perceptions of space was laid during World War II when he served in the U.S. Army in Europe and the Philippines.

From 1933 through 1937 Hall lived and worked with the Navajo and the Hopi on native American reservations in northwestern Arizona, the subject of his autobiographical West of the Thirties. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1942 and continued field work and direct experience throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. During the 1950s he worked for the United States State Department, at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), teaching inter-cultural communications skills to foreign service personnel, developed the concept of "High context culture" and "low context culture", and wrote several popular practical books on dealing with cross-cultural issues. He is considered a founding father of intercultural communication as an academic area of study.

Hall first created the concept of proxemics, or personal spaces. In his book, The Hidden Dimension, he describes the subjective dimensions that surround each of us and the physical distances one tries to keep from other people, according to subtle cultural rules.

In The Silent Language (1959), Hall coined the term polychronic to describe the ability to attend to multiple events simultaneously, as opposed to "monochronic" individuals and cultures who tend to handle events sequentially.

In 1976, he released his third book, Beyond Culture, which is notable for having developed the idea of extension transference; that is, that humanity's rate of evolution has and does increase as a consequence of its creations, that we evolve as much through our "extensions" as through our biology. However; with extensions such as the wheel, cultural values, and warfare being technology based, they are capable of much faster adaptation than genetics.

Admirers of Hall's style of grounding anthropological theorizing in concrete examples would probably also like the work of sociologist Stanislav Andreski.

[sources: Wikipedia, Edward T. Hall website]

Factor	High-context culture	Low-context culture
Overtness of messages	Many covert and implicit messages, with use of metaphor and reading between the lines.	Many overt and explicit messages that are simple and clear.
Locus of control and attribution for failure	Inner locus of control and personal acceptance for failure	Outer locus of control and blame of others for failure
Use of non-verbal communication	Much nonverbal communication	More focus on verbal communication than body language
Expression of reaction	Reserved, inward reactions	Visible, external, outward reaction
Cohesion and separation of groups	Strong distinction between ingroup and outgroup. Strong sense of family.	Flexible and open grouping patterns, changing as needed
People bonds	Strong people bonds with affiliation to family and community	Fragile bonds between people with little sense of loyalty.
Level of commitment to relationships	High commitment to long-term relationships. Relationship more important than task.	Low commitment to relationship. Task more important than relationships.
Flexibility of time	Time is open and flexible. Process is more important than product	Time is very organized. Product is more important than process

The Chinese language (汉语/漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语/華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages. About one-fifth of the world's population, or over one billion people, speaks some variety of Chinese as their native language. Internal divisions of Chinese are usually perceived by their native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, rather than separate languages, although this identification is considered inappropriate by some linguists and Sinologists.

Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility. It is highly used in China and its provinces (Korea, Japan, Mongolia, etc.)

Standard Chinese (Putonghua / Guoyu / Huayu) is a standardized form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese, referred to as 官话/官話 Guānhuà or 北方话/北方話 Běifānghuà in Chinese. Mandarin Chinese history can be dated back to the 19th century, particularly by the upper classes and ministers in Beijing.^[5] Standard Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, also known as Taiwan), as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is influential in Guangdong Province and Cantonese-speaking overseas communities, and remains one of the official languages of Hong Kong (together with English) and of Macau (together with Portuguese). Min Nan, part of the Min language group, is widely spoken in southern Fujian, in neighbouring Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese or Hoklo) and in Southeast Asia (known as Hokkien in Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia). There are also sizeable Hakka and Shanghainese diaspora, for example in Taiwan, where most Hakka communities maintain diglossia by being conversant in Taiwanese and Standard Chinese.

[source Wikipedia]

Japanese (日本語 Nihongo ^?, [nihoŋɡo] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese immigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists.

Japanese is an agglutinative language and a mora-timed language. It has a relatively small sound inventory, and a lexically significant pitch-accent system. It is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of the speaker, the listener, and persons mentioned in conversation. Japanese vowels are pure.

The Japanese language is written with a combination of three scripts: Chinese characters called kanji (漢字 ^?), and two syllabic (or moraic) scripts made of modified Chinese characters, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名 ^?) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名 ^?). The Latin script, rōmaji (ローマ字 ^?), is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, romanization of Japanese characters, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace (see Japanese numerals).

Although Japanese is written using Chinese characters, and has historically imported many words of Chinese origin, the two languages are not actually related.

International interest in the Japanese language dates from the 19th century but has become more prevalent following Japan's economic bubble of the 1980s and the global popularity of Japanese popular culture (anime and video games) since the 1990s. About 2.3 million people studied the language worldwide in 2003: 900,000 South Koreans, 389,000 Chinese, 381,000 Australians, and 140,000 Americans studied Japanese in lower and higher educational institutions.

In Japan, more than 90,000 foreign students studied at Japanese universities and Japanese language schools, including 77,000 Chinese and 15,000 South Koreans in 2003. In addition, local governments and some NPO groups provide free Japanese language classes for foreign residents. In the United Kingdom, study of the Japanese language is supported by the British Association for Japanese Studies.

The Japanese government provides standardized tests to measure spoken and written comprehension of Japanese for second language learners; the most prominent is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which features five levels of exams ranging from elementary to advanced. The JLPT is only offered twice a year.

When learning Japanese in a college setting, students are usually first taught how to pronounce romaji. From that point, they are taught the two main syllabaries, with kanji usually being introduced in the second semester. Focus is usually first on polite (distal) speech, which is what students would be expected to use when interacting with native speakers. Casual speech and formal speech usually follow polite speech, as well as the usage of honorifics.

[source Wikipedia]

Ottoman Turkish was a Turkic language highly influenced by Persian and Arabic. The Ottomans had three influential languages: Turkish, spoken by the majority of the people in Anatolia and by the majority of Muslims of the Balkans except in Albania and Bosnia; Persian, only spoken by the educated; and Arabic, spoken mainly in Arabia, North Africa, Iraq, Kuwait and the Levant. Throughout the vast Ottoman bureaucracy Ottoman Turkish language was the official language, a version of Turkish, albeit with a vast mixture of both Arabic and Persian grammar and vocabulary. If the basic grammar was still largely Turkish, the inclusion of almost any word in Arabic or Persian in Ottoman made it a language that was essentially incomprehensible to any ethnic Turkish Ottoman subject who had not mastered Arabic, Persian or both.

Because of a low literacy rate among the public (about 2–3% until the early 19th century and just about 15% at the end of 19th century), ordinary people had to hire special "request-writers" (arzuhâlci s) to be able to communicate with the government. The ethnic groups continued to speak within their families and neighborhoods (mahalles) with their own languages (e.g., Jews, Greeks, Armenians, etc.) In villages where two or more populations lived together, the inhabitants would often speak each other's language. In cosmopolitan cities, people often spoke their family languages, many non ethnic Turks spoke Turkish as a second language. Educated Ottoman Turks spoke Arabic and Persian. In the last two centuries, French and English emerged as popular languages, especially among the Christian Levantine communities. The elite learned French at school, and used European products as a fashion statement. The use of Turkish grew steadily under the Ottomans, but, since they were still interested in their two other official^{[ citation needed ]} languages, they kept these in use as well. Usage of these became limited, though, and specific: Persian served mainly as a literary language for the educated, while Arabic was used for religious rites.

[source Wikipedia]

Arabic (العربية al-ʿarabīyyah ^{[note A]} or عربي/عربى ʿarabī ^{[note B]}) is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century CE. This includes both the literary language (Modern Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic, for documents as well as formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and radio broadcasts) and the spoken Arabic varieties, spoken in a wide arc of territory stretching across the Middle East and North Africa. Arabic is a Central Semitic language, most closely related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic and Phoenician. Written Arabic is distinct from and more conservative than all of the spoken varieties, and the two exist in a state known as diglossia, used side-by-side for different societal functions.

Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language: on purely linguistic grounds they are considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political and/or ethnic reasons. If considered multiple languages, it is unclear how many languages there would be, as the spoken varieties form a dialect chain with no clear boundaries. If Arabic is considered a single language, it counts more than 300 million first language speakers, more than that of any other Semitic language. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would be Egyptian Arabic with over 50 million speakers — more than any other Semitic language.

The modern written language comes from the language of the Quran (Classical or Quranic Arabic). It is widely taught in schools, universities, and used to varying degrees in workplaces, government and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is the official language of 26 states and the liturgical language of Islam. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the grammatical standards of Quranic Arabic and uses much of the same vocabulary. However, it has discarded some grammatical constructions and vocabulary that no longer have any counterpoint in the spoken varieties, and adopted new constructions and vocabulary from the spoken varieties. Much of the new vocabulary denotes concepts that have arisen post-Quranic, especially in modern times.

Arabic is the only surviving member of the Old North Arabian dialect group, attested in Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions dating back to the 4th century. Arabic is written with the Arabic alphabet, which is an abjad script, and is written from right-to-left.

Arabic has lent many words to other languages of the Islamic world, like Persian, Turkish, Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Malay and Hausa. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a major vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics and philosophy. As a result, many European languages borrowed many words from it, especially in Romance languages, particularly Spanish, Portuguese, and Sicilian, owing to both the proximity of European and Arab civilizations and 700 years of Muslim/Moorish rule in some parts of the Iberian peninsula.

Arabic has borrowed words from many languages, including Hebrew, Greek, Persian and Syriac in early centuries, Turkish in medieval times and contemporary European languages in modern times. However, the current tendency is to coin new words using the existing lexical resources of the language, or to repurpose old words, rather than directly borrowing foreign words.

[source Wikipedia]

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