The Linguistics is a discipline that is responsible for the scientific study and profound natural languages and everything connected with them, understand why: the language, vocabulary, speech, pronunciation, location of languages in a cultural ethnic map and the determination and search for lost languages, among other aspects that focus on human speech. Linguistic diversity proposes and recreates laws and norms for speech in order to focus the use of language on something correct, studies its general functioning and how it behaves in the environment and in the behavior of human beings.
What is linguistics
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Modern linguistics was influenced in the studies developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in the 19th century, this scholar of the matter made it clear and precise that it is linguistics and language distinction, defining himself as the study that includes both the structure of the original languages, as well as the aspects associated with it.
During the 20th century, the renowned linguist Noam Chomsky added a fundamental aspect to the matter, developing what is known as the current of generativism, this new perspective is part of the linguistic variant that is based on the fact that speech is a process mental, and as such, the individual must be trained in their growth to develop speech skills.
Meanwhile, from the point of view of speech, the text will be considered as the superior unit of communication and the pragmatics as the one in charge of studying the enunciation and the statement.
History of linguistics
Linguistic historiography has been a rather late discipline, since only from the second half of the last century the extension and conception manuals are presented in a varied way.
In most cases they deal with the development of linguistics in the first half of the 20th century, sometimes the 19th century, paying little attention to the periods before the 19th century and ignoring the new trends and disciplines that are formed from the second half of the 20th century.
On the other hand, they are also variables in the geographical scope that they cover, since most are dedicated to the development of linguistics in the West, with the usual exclusion of Eastern Europe, and there is no shortage of those that are limited exclusively to specific countries.
The historical period is the one that preserves the written evidence of the time, together with this, the pre-scientific period, which includes all the opinions, theories or linguistic sign about the language and which were those that appeared from antiquity to the beginning of the century XIX.
It is important to clarify that the scientific time, which is in the second decade of the XIX century and the one that arrives today, is undoubtedly the most important for the main schools and linguistic currents, it is so much that from the grammar, and history of the XIX century until linguistic structuralism, has had great development and contribution by its American variant.
The descriptive linguistics, through new theories developed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, contributed to the whole language family, it is both the publication of Saussure, the Geneva school, the Prague school and Copenhagen are among the most important, achieving advancement in the developments of structural linguistics in Europe, including Poland and the Soviet Union.
Up to here it is thought that a first subperiod of the scientific period distinguished by the author could extend, since from the fifties the linguistic codes emerged as he himself has pointed out, where a series of currents, schools and disciplines were manifested that they will characterize the second half of the 20th century.
Indeed, from the date mentioned, linguistic codes not only appear within generative and transformational grammar, in semantics, semiotics and modern experimental phonetics, but also arise, by virtue of the advance of all sciences, a series of disciplines that, in general, are located in the limits of two or more traditional disciplines and therefore are very difficult to describe with precision in terms of their content.
The traditionally dominant sciences physics, chemistry and biology were joined by mathematics, logic and computer science, the proof of this is that currently the various sciences have reciprocal influence, for example, among them, the one that studies linguistics, sociology is noted. and philosophy, among others.
Hence, and for practical reasons, a limited number of disciplines have been established that deals with all the questions, themes and problems that characterize the linguistic resources of the mentioned period, reducing the Interdisciplinary sciences to only six: psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, semiotics and philosophy of language.
What does linguistics study
Linguistics (from linguistic French) is the science that studies all aspects of language, such as the ability to communicate that humans have and all aspects of a language as a concrete manifestation of that ability. Until the birth and linguistic functions such as science, grammar was traditionally the one that assumed the study of language. Within the sciences that involve linguistics, one can mention syntax, lexicography, the theory of linguistics, morphology and spelling, among others.
There are interpretations that should be avoided, such as when it is said that linguistics refers to a linguistic training, unlike an individual who has the ability to speak different languages is called a Polyglot. Linguistics does not consist, therefore, in the learning of languages or the analysis of literary texts.
In the study of language the following aspects are distinguished:
- General: theoretical study of language that deals with research methods and issues common to different languages.
- Linguistic application: branch of linguistic studies that deals with problems that are translated into language, as a means of social relationships, especially with regard to language teaching.
- Comparative linguistics: comparative grammar.
- Computational linguistics; application of the methods of linguistic or artificial intelligence to the treatment of linguistic issues.
- Evolutionary linguistics: diachronic linguistics.
Describe the languages
The human being communicates through written and oral signs that have an established name and that in some way keep him in communication with his surroundings and with society.
Language is the way in which humanity satisfies the need to communicate, one of the most important characteristics of the human being is language, because through it people can express their ideas, emotions and feelings, that is why our duty as users of a language is to respect it.
It is estimated that there are approximately 6 thousand known and spoken languages, however this figure is not entirely accurate since there are various factors such as the inexistence of a universal criterion that determines whether two dialects with a certain level of reciprocal intelligibility must be taken as dialects of the same language or two different languages.
Similarly, it may happen that there are people who speak a language that was thought to be extinct, but which is used by them in their daily lives. All this indicates that it is difficult to determine with certainty the number of languages that exist worldwide.
Another interesting fact is the fact that the region where there is the least linguistic diversity is Europe and the one with the greatest diversity is New Guinea.
Linguistic change
Linguistic change refers to an inherent characteristic of the language. Linguistic change refers to the process of modification and transformation that languages undergo over time, that is, diachronically and where internal and external causes intervene. The types of language changes are:
Phonological change
When the differential content of the sources and their distribution are transformed.
Phonetic change
It is the one that refers directly to sounds.
Lexical-semantic change
It refers both to the meaning of words and to the lexical forms and written representations of the language.
Morphological-syntactic change
It refers to the form, grammar, syntax and structure of the language.
The linguistic change can occur for various reasons: the internal ones that are the linguistic ones and refer to:
Phonetic laws represent a factor of change. This is a U-turn. It is not found in the isolated word, but in all the words.
The pressure of the system (paradigmatic pressure) refers to the language seen as a system, where each element depends on the others, the effect of any change in an element cannot be considered an isolated phenomenon, since it affects the entire constitution of the linguistic system in general.
Search for lost languages
They are known as lost languages, also called dead languages, those that are not a mother tongue, nor are they spoken in any population or community, which did exist, but over time they became extinct and replaced by others.
It may be that for Spanish speakers (some 560 million worldwide according to the Cervantes Institute) it is strange to hear that there are languages that have disappeared because no one has used them, however it must be admitted that many languages have been lost and they are still being lost today, an example has been Latin, which has hundreds of years considered extinct.
There are several reasons that can make a language disappear, the most common being the derivation and transformation of the language for so long that it ends up becoming another. So it is with the so-called "classical lost languages" such as classical Greek and Sanskrit.
Another quite common reason is the wars, invasions and colonizations that have occurred throughout history and that have especially affected continents such as America and Africa.
It is important to note that natural disasters or diseases capable of dragging down populations also destroy language and culture. Thus, for example, there is the case of Arazá or Aruá, the language spoken in Brazil in a tributary of the Amazon River, which disappeared due to a measles epidemic that wiped out the entire population in 1877.
Records show that the only ones that have remained are the British words that were able to remain, by means of a British explorer.
The so-called " cultural prestige " has been the most important mechanism for the disappearance of languages in the last century. When a foreign language gains prestige, and the cultural or economic elite begin to use it, what it does is break the native language.
Thus, progressively, the learning and use of these languages will be implemented in children and in population centers towards the peripheries, causing indigenous languages to be put aside. Unfortunately this is what has been happening with the native languages of all America, which have been replaced by English, Spanish, French and European languages.
In this same context, Mexico is a country that has linguistic diversity. In the country 11 language families coexist from which 68 languages are derived, which in turn branch into 364 variants. It should be added that most of them live under the threat of extinction. Barely seven million indigenous people (40%) cultivate their languages, and most of them do so in only six languages (Nahuatl, Yucatec Mayan, Mixtec, Tzeltal, Zapotec and Tsotsil).
The National Institute of Indigenous Languages has concluded that 259 of the 364 linguistic variants are at risk of disappearance. And where most of the cases, their salvation is almost impossible, since 64 have less than a hundred speakers.
Levels of linguistics
The levels of linguistics determined that the phonetic level is a change that favored the modification of internal factors such as the articulation of words, in addition to the epithesis or the elision of sounds. It has also been mentioned that languages can be changed by external factors such as the influence of the linguistic substrate, for example, in the mother tongue. Although, in general, that is not synonymous with creation.
Within the levels of linguistics the following can be mentioned:
Phonological
It is the linguistic level that is responsible for emitting each of the phonemes corresponding to each language, it organizes them to achieve the formation of words, the phonetic sets are variable and is associated with different factors such as: time, space, attitude of the inhabitants, sociocultural level.
Morphologic
It is the one in charge of studying how the word is structured, delimiting, classifying and defining them, in turn, the morphology is classified in inflectional morphology that gives rise to the word and the lexical morphology that provides the resources for the study words that contain other languages and thus extract or form new verbs.
Lexical
It refers to all the words that the languages contain, which change language and in some cases also their meaning. The lexicon is made up of words, but the meaning of each of them is usually old and not so recognized.
Syntactic
It is responsible for studying the linguistic units of words to achieve coherent sentences, the syntactic level has a particular characteristic called recursive, which is what allows syntactic structures to fit within others.
It is important to mention that phonetics is the branch of linguistics that studies the production and perception of the sounds of a language in their physical manifestations.
Within phonetics there are various branches among which are: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, phonetics and experimental phonetics.
The latter (experimental phonetics) is in charge of studying the various oral sounds from a physical point of view, collecting and quantifying data about the emission and production of the development of sound waves (responsible for configuring articulated sound). The set of data analyzed to measure the sounds depends on the precision of the instrumental information as well as other related knowledge. Important differences in each spoken sound have also been discovered.
Articulatory phonetics for its part, is the one that studied the sounds of a language from the physiological point of view, that is, it describes what oral organs are involved in its production, where it is found and how it is done. When sold through the mouth, nose, or throat, so that different sounds are produced.
The movable lips, the jaw, the tongue and the vocal cords are part of the articulating organs that allow language to develop. Through these, the human being allows the process of air in the lungs. They are the teeth, the alveoli, the palate and the soft palate. Sounds are produced when two articulatory organs are brought into contact, for example the bilabial (p), which requires contact between the two lips.
In the same way, Phonematics is presented, which is the study of sounds in speech, that is, of the sources that are the minimum distinctive units.
For example, between the words the and the there is only one difference in meaning and in a way that represents the distinction between the phonemes and.
The same happens between shovel, stop, pay, corduroy and pass, the differences of meaning are based on the different forms that distinguish, that is,,,, and. Phonemes are also configured by minimal units that differ from each other and are the distinctive features themselves.
Finally there is Acoustic Phonetics, who is the one that studies the sound wave as the output of any resonator; That is, equip the phonation system with any other sound emission and reproduction system.
There is a greater interest in the articulation or production of sounds, thanks to the sound waves since it receives and decodes the information despite the fact that it has been emitted by means of an oral articulation or by means of a certain emitting device. sounds or even through a parrot.
The spectrograph can be used to record the most significant characteristics of the sound waves and to determine the result of the various articulating activities. Experimentally, in order to arrive at a knowledge in turn.
In a few words, it can be said that phonology represents the study of the sources of a language. Describe how sounds work on an abstract or mental level.
What is applied linguistics
Applied linguistics refers to the understanding of everything related to language in human events, it also supports all those people who work in different areas in which language is used as a form of communication. Applied language can be said to be a science that studies language and different languages, in addition, it contributes to the understanding of all communication systems, their learning, the internal structure, grammar, social and psychological aspects of the use of a language; when problems arise, the applied language seeks to find the solution.
Types of linguistics
Linguistics presents a breadth of disciplines with fields always in constant evolution. Below are the different types of linguistics that exist:
Theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is responsible for creating patterns that explain how the language works, that is, what are the elements that compose it or what its structure is like.
Theoretical linguists deal with the scientific structure of language, including grammar, syntax, morphology, and semantics. They tend to explain language according to various theoretical rules.
Synchronous linguistics
Synchronous linguistics studies the language at a certain time, leaving aside the evolutionary part of its history.
When analyzing the linguistic phenomenon in depth, it becomes evident that the language is the first current place, organized, structured and more or less fixed and at the same time, a living instrument, a birth and an evolution, whatever it is, implies a series of problems impossible to study as the systematization of linguistics.
Micro linguistics
It is a study of the phono-morphological aspects of language from a qualitative point of view. Understand the formal and schematic structure of a text: it is who gives meaning to the written text
Macrolinguistics
This is the study of natural languages that includes a series of factors that have contributed to its development, for example pragmatics, semantics and sociolinguistics, it was also included.
