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Linguistics: Languages
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language,examining it both as an abstract system and in its psychological and social contexts. Linguistics focuses on how the human mind structures, processes, and acquires language and on how language use is an integral part of human interaction. With the central role played by language in the social world, linguistics is situated at the intellectual intersection of the humanities and the sciences, including the social, biological, and behavioral sciences. Accordingly, students receive broad training that cuts across and breaks down traditional boundaries between disciplines.
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Linguistics is the science of language. Language is at once the most diverse and the most clearly structured aspect of human behavior. It distinguishes humans from other species and much of human culture depends on it. Understanding the nature of human language is therefore a key to understanding human nature. Linguistics seeks to discover the common features of the languages of the world’s peoples, to understand how languages change over time, and how language relates to other aspects of human society.
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A:Linguistics is paradoxically both a very old and a very new discipline. It's very old because its physical and physiological basis is the science of Phonetics (the study of how the sounds of human speech are produced and perceived), which was founded in ancient India about 2500 years ago, roughly the same time the Periclean Golden Age was happening in Athens. Later, three of the classical and medieval Seven Liberal Arts, studied by all university students as a basis for all other studies, were concerned with language:
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A major in Linguistics permits a student to explore both the independent and interdisciplinary aspects of human language. Courses focus on both historical and synchronic analysis, and cover several modern approaches to data.
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Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It endeavours to answer the question--what is language and how is represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language (ie., do not split infinitives). Linguists are not required to know many languages and linguists are not interpreters.
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Bloomfield and Sapir were leaders in descriptive linguistics, now often referred to as structural linguistics. According to them, languages should be described as interlocking assemblages of basic units and as functioning wholes independent of earlier developmental stages. Such descriptions might then form the basis for comparing related languages and reconstructing their common origin. Sapir identified the phoneme as a basic unit of sound patterning and offered evidence for its psychological reality. Bloomfield, on the other hand, advocated indirect observation to identify the distinct meanings associated with units of form. His followers developed a mandatory set of discovery procedures for all valid analyses that built upon the sequential distribution of units of sound.
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