Language, as described above, is species-specific to human beings. Other members of the animal kingdom have the ability to communicate, through vocal noises or by other means, but the most important single feature characterizing human language that is, every individual language , against every known mode of animal communication, is its infinite productivity and creativity.
Animal communication systems are by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what may be communicated. Indeed, displaced reference, the ability to communicate about things outside immediate temporal and spatial contiguity, which is fundamental to speech, is found elsewhere only in the so-called language of bees.
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Bees are able, by carrying out various conventionalized movements referred to as bee dances in or near the hive, to indicate to others the locations and strengths of food sources. But food sources are the only known theme of this communication system. Surprisingly, however, this system, nearest to human language in function, belongs to a species remote from humanity in the animal kingdom. On the other hand, the animal performance superficially most like human speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other birds that have been kept in the company of humans, is wholly derivative and serves no independent communicative function.
Attempts to teach sign language to chimpanzees and other apes through imitation have achieved limited success, though the interpretation of the significance of ape signing ability remains controversial. In most accounts, the primary purpose of language is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmission of information from one person to another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies have drawn attention to a range of other functions for language. Among these is the use of language to express a national or local identity a common source of conflict in situations of multiethnicity around the world, such as in Belgium, India , and Quebec.
Language interacts with every aspect of human life in society, and it can be understood only if it is considered in relation to society. This article attempts to survey language in this light and to consider its various functions and the purposes it can and has been made to serve. Because each language is both a working system of communication in the period and in the community wherein it is used and also the product of its history and the source of its future development, any account of language must consider it from both these points of view. The science of language is known as linguistics.
It includes what are generally distinguished as descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics. Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it embraces, both descriptively and historically, such major divisions as phonetics , grammar including syntax and morphology , semantics , and pragmatics , dealing in detail with these various aspects of language. As is evident from the discussion above, human life in its present form would be impossible and inconceivable without the use of language.
People have long recognized the force and significance of language. Naming —applying a word to pick out and refer to a fellow human being, an animal, an object, or a class of such beings or objects—is only one part of the use of language, but it is an essential and prominent part. In many cultures people have seen in the ability to name a means to control or to possess; this explains the reluctance, in some communities , with which names are revealed to strangers and the taboo restrictions found in several parts of the world on using the names of persons recently dead.
Such restrictions echo widespread and perhaps universal taboos on naming directly things considered obscene, blasphemous, or very fearful. Perhaps not surprisingly, several independent traditions ascribe a divine or at least a supernatural origin to language or to the language of a particular community. So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. Norse mythology preserves a similar story of divine participation in the creation of language, and in India the god Indra is said to have invented articulate speech.
A similar divine aura pervades early accounts of the origin of writing. The Norse god Odin was held responsible for the invention of the runic alphabet. The inspired stroke of genius whereby the ancient Greeks adapted a variety of the Phoenician consonantal script so as to represent the distinctive consonant and vowel sounds of Greek, thus producing the first alphabet such as is known today, was linked with the mythological figure Cadmus , who, coming from Phoenicia, was said to have founded Thebes and introduced writing into Greece see Phoenician language.
By a traditional account, the Arabic alphabet , together with the language itself , was given to Adam by God. The later biblical tradition of the Tower of Babel Genesis The origin of language has never failed to provide a subject for speculation, and its inaccessibility adds to its fascination. But people have tried to go farther, to discover or to reconstruct something like the actual forms and structure of the first language. This lies forever beyond the reach of science, in that spoken language in some form is almost certainly coeval with Homo sapiens.
The earliest records of written language, the only linguistic fossils humanity can hope to have, go back no more than 4, to 5, years. On several occasions attempts have been made to identify one particular existing language as representing the original or oldest tongue of humankind, but, in fact, the universal process of linguistic change rules out any such hopes from the start.
The Greek historian Herodotus told a possibly satirical story in which King Psamtik I of Egypt reigned — bce caused a child to be brought up without ever hearing a word spoken in his presence. In Christian Europe the position of Hebrew as the language of the Hebrew Bible Old Testament gave valid grounds through many centuries for regarding Hebrew , the language in which God was assumed to have addressed Adam, as the parent language of all humankind.
Such a view continued to be expressed even well into the 19th century. Only since the mids has linguistic science made sufficient progress finally to clarify the impracticability of speculation along these lines. When people have begun to reflect on language, its relation to thinking becomes a central concern. Several cultures have independently viewed the main function of language as the expression of thought. Such an attitude passed into Latin theory and thence into medieval doctrine. Medieval grammarians envisaged three stages in the speaking process: Rationalist writers on language in the 17th century gave essentially a similar account: Such a view of language continued to be accepted as generally adequate and gave rise to the sort of definition proposed by Henry Sweet and quoted above.
The main objection to it is that it either gives so wide an interpretation to thought as virtually to empty the word of any specific content or gives such a narrow interpretation of language as to exclude a great deal of normal usage. A recognition of the part played by speaking and writing in social cooperation in everyday life has highlighted the many and varied functions of language in all cultures, apart from the functions strictly involved in the communication of thought, which had been the main focus of attention for those who approached language from the standpoint of the philosopher.
These thinkers were concerned with the origin and development of language in relation to thought in a way that earlier students had not been. The medieval and rationalist views implied that humans, as rational, thinking creatures, invented language to express their thoughts, fitting words to an already developed structure of intellectual competence. The relations between thought and communication are certainly not fully explained today, and it is clear that it is a great oversimplification to define thought as subvocal speech, in the manner of some behaviourists. But it is no less clear that propositions and other alleged logical structures cannot be wholly separated from the language structures said to express them.
Even the symbolizations of modern formal logic are ultimately derived from statements made in some natural language and are interpreted in that light. The intimate connection between language and thought, as opposed to the earlier assumed unilateral dependence of language on thought, opened the way to a recognition of the possibility that different language structures might in part favour or even determine different ways of understanding and thinking about the world.
All people inhabit a broadly similar world, or they would be unable to translate from one language to another, but they do not all inhabit a world exactly the same in all particulars, and translation is not merely a matter of substituting different but equivalent labels for the contents of the same inventory. From this stem the notorious difficulties in translation, especially when the systematizations of science, law, morals , social structure, and so on are involved. The extent of the interdependence of language and thought—linguistic relativity, as it has been termed—is still a matter of debate, but the fact of such interdependence can hardly fail to be acknowledged.
Languages are immensely complicated structures. One soon realizes how complicated any language is when trying to learn it as a second language. Likewise, ongoing work in the study of language has underscored just how much effort is needed to bring palpable fact within systematic statement. This article proposes simply to give a brief outline of the way language or languages can be considered and described from different points of view, or at different levels, each contributing something essential and unique to a full understanding of the subject.
A more detailed treatment of the science of linguistics can be found in the article linguistics. The most obvious aspect of language is speech. Speech is not essential to the definition of an infinitely productive communication system, such as is constituted by a language. But, in fact, speech is the universal material of most human language, and the conditions of speaking and hearing have, throughout human history, shaped and determined its development. The study of the anatomy , physiology , neurology , and acoustics of speaking is called phonetics ; this subject is dealt with further below see Physiological and physical basis of speech.
Articulatory phonetics relates to the physiology of speech, and acoustic phonetics relates to the physics of sound waves—i. Phonetics covers much of the ground loosely referred to in language study as pronunciation. But, from a rather different point of view, speech sounds are also studied in phonology. Spoken language makes use of a very wide range of the articulations and resultant sounds that are available within the human vocal and auditory resources.
Far fewer general classes of sounds are distinctive carry meaning differences in any language than the number of sounds that are actually phonetically different. The English t sounds at the beginning and end of tot and in the two places in stouter are all different, though these differences are not readily noticed by English speakers, and, rightly, the same letter is used for them all. Similar statements could be made about most or all of the other consonant and vowel sounds in English.
What is distinctive in one language may not be distinctive in another or may be used in a different way; this is an additional difficulty to be overcome in learning a foreign language. In Chinese and in several other languages loosely called tone languages, the pitch , or tone, on which a syllable is said helps to distinguish one word from another: Languages differ in the ways in which consonant and vowel sounds can be grouped into syllables in words.
English and German tolerate several consonants before and after a single vowel: Italian does not have such complex syllables, and in Japanese and Swahili, for example, the ratio of consonant and vowel sounds in syllables and in words is much more even. All these considerations relating to the use of speech sounds in particular languages fall under the general heading of phonology , which may be defined as the sound system of a language; phonology is often regarded as one component of language structure.
Another component of language structure is grammar. There is more to language than sounds, and words are not to be regarded as merely sequences of syllables. The concept of the word is a grammatical concept; in speech, words are not separated by pauses, but they are recognized as recurrent units that make up sentences. Very generally, grammar is concerned with the relations between words in sentences. Classes of words, or parts of speech, as they are often called, are distinguished because they occupy different places in sentence structure, and in most languages some of them appear in different forms according to their function English man, men ; walk, walked ; I, me ; and so on.
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Languages differ in the extent to which word-form variation is used in their grammar; Classical Chinese had almost none, English does not have much, and Latin and Greek had quite a lot. Conversely, English makes much more use of word order in grammar than did Latin or Greek. Traditionally, grammar has been divided into syntax and morphology , syntax dealing with the relations between words in sentence structure and morphology with the internal grammatical structure of words. Excel can do it.
Need to do simple math? Need to combine information in multiple cells? If you encounter a situation where you need to manually update your data, you're probably missing out on a formula that can do it for you. Before spending hours and hours counting cells or copying and pasting data, look for a quick fix on Excel -- you'll likely find one. In the spirit of working more efficiently and avoiding tedious, manual work, here are a few Excel tricks to get you started with how to use Excel.
And to all the Harry Potter fans out there If you're just starting out with Excel, there are a few basic commands that we suggest you become familiar with. These are things like:. For a deep dive on these basics, check out our comprehensive guide on How to Use Excel. Pivot Tables are used to reorganize data in a spreadsheet.
They won't change the data that you have, but they can sum up values and compare different information in your spreadsheet, depending on what you'd like them to do. Let's take a look at an example. Let's say I want to take a look at how many people are in each house at Hogwarts. You may be thinking that I don't have too much data, but for longer data sets, this will come in handy. Excel will automatically populate your Pivot Table, but you can always change around the order of the data.
Then, you have four options to choose from. Since I want to count the number of students in each house, I'll go to the Pivot Table and drag the House column to both the Row Labels and the Values. This will sum up the number of students associated with each house. As you play around with your data, you might find you're constantly needing to add more rows and columns. Sometimes, you may even need to add hundreds of rows. Doing this one-by-one would be super tedious. Luckily, there's always an easier way. To add multiple rows or columns in a spreadsheet, highlight the same number of preexisting rows or columns that you want to add.
Then, right-click and select "Insert. In the example below, I want to add an additional three rows. By highlighting three rows and then clicking insert, I'm able to add an additional three blank rows into my spreadsheet quickly and easily. When you're looking at very large data sets, you don't usually need to be looking at every single row at the same time. Sometimes, you only want to look at data that fit into certain criteria.
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That's where filters come in. Filters allow you to pare down your data to only look at certain rows at one time.
In Excel, a filter can be added to each column in your data -- and from there, you can then choose which cells you want to view at once. Let's take a look at the example below. Add a filter by clicking the Data tab and selecting "Filter. In my Harry Potter example, let's say I only want to see the students in Gryffindor. By selecting the Gryffindor filter, the other rows disappear. Copy and paste the values in the spreadsheet when a Filter is on to do additional analysis in another spreadsheet.
Larger data sets tend to have duplicate content. You may have a list of multiple contacts in a company and only want to see the number of companies you have. In situations like this, removing the duplicates comes in quite handy. To remove your duplicates, highlight the row or column that you want to remove duplicates of. Then, go to the Data tab, and select "Remove Duplicates" under Tools.
A pop-up will appear to confirm which data you want to work with. Select "Remove Duplicates," and you're good to go. You can also use this feature to remove an entire row based on a duplicate column value. So if you have three rows with Harry Potter's information and you only need to see one, then you can select the whole dataset and then remove duplicates based on email.
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Your resulting list will have only unique names without any duplicates. When you have low rows of data in your spreadsheet, you might decide you actually want to transform the items in one of those rows into columns or vice versa. It would take a lot of time to copy and paste each individual header -- but what the transpose feature allows you to do is simply move your row data into columns, or the other way around.
Start by highlighting the column that you want to transpose into rows. Right-click it, and then select "Copy. Right-click on the cell, and then select "Paste Special. Check that box and select OK. Your column will now be transferred to a row or vice-versa. What if you want to split out information that's in one cell into two different cells? For example, maybe you want to pull out someone's company name through their email address.
Or perhaps you want to separate someone's full name into a first and last name for your email marketing templates. Thanks to Excel, both are possible. First, highlight the column that you want to split up. Next, go to the Data tab and select "Text to Columns. In the example case below, let's select "Delimited" so we can separate the full name into first name and last name.
Then, it's time to choose the Delimiters. This could be a tab, semi-colon, comma, space, or something else. In our example, let's choose the space. Excel will then show you a preview of what your new columns will look like. When you're happy with the preview, press "Next.