Humanities

• Linguistics


  The scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics
• Communication


  The act of conveying information from one person or place to another
• Language is a set of organized complex sounds that is meaningful and attributed only to the human species used for communicative purposes
• Humans communicate to express ideas, feelings and thoughts to others
• Language is an important tool to unravel our social life, when the language used in the context of communication, blends with its culture
• Man is a social animal, hence, there is a natural connection between the language spoken by someone from a social group and his/her social identity
• Human language is organized means that it is made up of a patterned system of sound signals
• Human language came into existence because of the needs of people to interact with one another for survival purposes in social groups
• Different animals have ways through which they communicate with each other but none is comparable to that of the human language because of distinct properties which it possesses
• People interact primarily through the use of language and this takes place in different social contexts with sounds, words, phrases and structures with properties of tribe, religion, or race
• Noam Chomsky


  Cognitive science stating that the ability to use language is innately endowed on humans and exposed to any language because the human brain is wired at birth
• A child who is born and not developing any recognizable language is not the case with other species as humans do
• Chomsky used the concept of universal grammar to explain the underlying rules which children unconsciously acquire when learning a language
• Every language has parameters that make it unique in the way people express themselves through externalized languages like Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa and others
• Understanding the workings of language is essential in order to understand how communication is processed
• Languages existed in the spoken form before the development of orthography (writing pattern)
• Effective communication requires more than just an understanding of the words of the language, but the context of use, the situation and social background of the speaker all contribute to the meaning of any utterance
• Characteristics of human language

  • Attributes associated with human languages that put the human communicative ability on a higher level from any other forms of communication
• Language


  A set of conventional communicative signals used by humans for communication in any speech community
• Language


  • Exists in society as a tool for nourishing and developing culture and establishing human relations
• Productivity/creativity


  Human beings have a creative linguistic capacity, as a result they are able to understand, create and renew utterances
• People have the ability to produce an endless number of sentences and expressions that have never been heard before
• Children can produce utterances on their own without being taught by anybody and they are understood by anyone around them
• It is possible for a second language learner to produce utterances that have never been heard before
• Displacement


  With the use of language, people can talk about things which are not present, which have passed or which are yet to come
• Duality


  The human language has two levels - the sound of that language and the meaning of the symbols they represent
• Language is arbitrary - there is no natural relation between the words and the ideas conveyed
• Development of communication


  • Requires language
  • Influenced by the background of the speaker
• Contrary to machines, language learners can generate sentences that they have not been exposed to
• The extent to which individuals can produce new sets of utterances is endless
• Language changes according to the needs of society and with that the vocabulary is enlarged as new words are introduced into the languages
• Displacement


  Ability to discuss objects and signals that are not located within their immediate vicinity, including those that have passed or are still to come
• Language pattern and structure is tailored to suit whatever circumstance humans want to describe
• Duality


  The human language cannot be interpreted based on the component sounds, as the sounds and the words they represent do not have any direct relationship. The property of being dual means that the individual units of sounds are combined together to derive meaningful words.
• Duality


  • /t/, /æ/,/1/, /b/, /e/, //, // can yield different meaningful words such as /terbl/'table', tablet/"tablet', /æɲ1/anyi Igbo 'we' (first person plural)
• Arbitrary


  There is no inherent relation between the words of a language and their meanings or the ideas conveyed by them
• Arbitrary


  • A female adult human being is called a woman in English, aurat in Urdu, zen in Japanese, etc.
• Symbols


  Representations that stand for something else
• Human sound systems


  • They are arbitrary
  • They cannot operate with such restrictions as the use of only one symbol to represent a particular thing
• Language is not genetically restricted to the use of only one symbol to represent a particular thing