Did
you ever wonder why a chair is called a chair? Why the large grey mammal with
the inordinately long nose is called an elephant? And as for the Duck-billed
platypus; what’s that all about?
Our
need to communicate is part instinct and part necessity. How on earth would we
get anything done if we couldn’t communicate and understand each other’s ideas
and emotions? The phrase “no man is an island” is biologically true, of course
(we are each not a patch of land surrounded on all sides by water) but it
refers to our need to be around each other. We are social animals, and life
without words would mean we all standing around separately, scratching our heads
and all excruciatingly lonely. Words bring us together.
The Birthday of the First word
So,
we’ve established need to talk. When was the first word? I wish I knew? This is
a question that has been the subject of investigation by many scholars all over
the world for centuries. There is simply not enough direct evidence to answer
that question. Wikipedia talks about the alternative studies of fossils, the
comparison of human language with the various systems of communication amongst
animals, more specifically primates, and also language acquisition. This
question has frustrated so many of us in the past that the subject was even
banned across much of the world until late in the twentieth century. If the
leading linguists, anthropologists, psychologists and archaeologists have yet
to find the answer, then I don’t hold out much hope for myself. I suppose the
investigations will continue until the end of time, with new ideas and
innovative new methods of doing so, because that is what we do, but sadly we
may never know for sure.
Cave Graffiti
By Walter Callens [CC-BY-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
We do know however, that 30- 40,000 years ago people started
drawing pictures on walls and caves, so the need to express ourselves was
evident and compelling. There were also
notches engraved on stones which could mean a way of counting. Ah numbers, one of the three universal
languages, the other two being music of course, and love. We don’t need a
dictionary to experience those.
Let’s Break It Down
“The Building Blocks of Our Thoughts” http://hotword.dictionary.com/semiology/
The first interesting gentleman I encountered on my quest to
find out about words was a Swiss linguist called ‘Ferdinand de Saussure. He was
a teacher in the late 1800s, and was one of the first people to study language,
our need to interpret the world around us and communicate our thoughts with one
another. He decided that words were
simply ‘the building blocks of our thoughts’ and that they were our concept
(understanding) and a sound image in our mind. Hot word uses the word
‘tree’ as an example, but I like the word Duck-billed platypus, because it’s
cute, so I will use that to illustrate what he means.
Close your eyes and picture a Duck-billed platypus in your
mind. Can you see the reasons for the specific parts of the word? That one’s easy, but what about elephant, or something
that isn’t an object, but a feeling or description?
“There are only eight kinds of words!” http://www.rfwp.com/samples/grammartown.pdf
Most
of us know that we categorize types of words into verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives,
adverbs, interjections, conjunctions and prepositions, each describing the
function of that particular word. This is beginning to sound like an English
lesson, so I’ll briefly describe the function of each category, and move on to
where the alphabet came from, which is essentially the foundation of all of our
language communication.
Verb
These are words used to express action, condition or a state
of being i.e. fight, visualize, and be.
Noun
Nouns
are the words that name a person, place, thing or idea i.e. Chair, item, sausage. Louise, America and England are proper nouns
which name specific things.
Pronoun
Pronouns are words used in place of nouns
to shorten a repeated noun that has already been mentioned. They are words like
it, which, I, who, that, his, herself.
Adjective
Adjectives
are colourful words that add more information to the nouns and pronouns in the
sentence i.e. She is a hilarious person!
Adverb
Adverbs give more information about a verb,
adjective or other adverbs i.e. The man
ran quickly.
Preposition
A
preposition is essentially a link between an object in a sentence to the rest
of the sentence i.e. the vase is on the table.
Conjunction
A
conjunction is a word that connects words, or groups of words, to tell
something about the relationship between these words i.e. are, and, it.
Interjection
Interjections
are often sentence fragments that indicate emotion or surprise. It can be a
word or a short phrase I.e. Stop! This is exactly what I’m going to do, and go
back to the more interesting tale of where some of our words came from!
A, B, C
…………..
"Writers spend years
rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet; it’s enough to make you lose your mind
day by day” Richard Price (Novelist).
Originally,
the English alphabet began with 30 signs, and was known as the Semitic alphabet.
It was used in an ancient Phoenicia around 1600 B.C., and the symbols created
were only consonants.
In
1000 B.C., the Greeks twiddled around with it and adapted a shorter version
which reassigned some symbols as vowels. Later on the ancient Romans (those who first
started the Roman Empire) lived in southern Italy, around where Rome is today.
They probably did a lot of trading and fighting with their neighbour, the Greek
islands. All of this to-ing and fro-ing
resulted in exchanges of culture and the alphabet was one of those exchanges.
The Romans then went on to develop their own version of the Greek (Ionic)
alphabet which they eventually brought to England, and this is used by many
languages today.
Of
course, that isn’t the only alphabet used today. There are about 46 different
alphabets in use today. Languages of Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas
use a modified version of the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet, which is
used by many countries in Eastern Europe-like Russia, Serbia, and Bulgaria-is
based on the ancient Greek alphabet. Modern Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have
their own alphabets and some are written left to right, while others, right to
left.
Where do new words come from?
If you have ever listened to your 15 year old describing a
friend as ‘sick’, and rushed to the medicine cabinet, only to realise that this
was her cool way of saying she liked the person, then you’ll know that the
meanings of words can change from generation to generation. I wanted to know how
actual new words were created and added to the dictionary so I checked out: http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/Etymologywords.htm
This site introduced me to etymology, which tells us where a
word came from and what it used to mean.
Some new words are partly derived from other languages (borrowed), and
others overlap like ‘motor’ and ‘hotel’ creating ‘motel’. The definition I was most interested in was
one called ‘Literary and Creative Coinages’.
These are the deliciously spontaneous new words bursting forth from our
exciting and creative minds. The possibilities are endless! The B.F.G springs
to mind:
“I thought all human beans is full of brains, but your head
is emptier than a bundongle….”
Other fabulous words from Lewis Caroll like jabberwocky,
galumph, and runcible, are equally inviting but sadly, not all of the modgelaristic,
boshriflic new words make it to the dictionary. A word has to be sufficiently
widespread and well known before it is considered important enough to gain
entry into this word bible.
So clearly we have advanced from the hairy caveman dragging
us by our hair to the wood fire, indicating that he requires a cooked meal. Our
communication with one another is beautifully intricate and fascinating. Words
are progressing and expanding every single day, in every single language. Who
knows what the future of language will bring? Maybe one day we won’t have to
open our mouths to speak? We could become psychic, learn telekinesis, or
develop advanced empathic abilities. If we travel to other worlds and meet
aliens, we’ll have even more languages and methods of communication to learn!
Who knows? I’m ready! Beam me up Scottie I’ve go sooo much to tell you!!!
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