Linguistics

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Is language important for the initial development of thought in children. Do you need to be able to understand or have some rudimentary understanding of language before thought processes actually takes place? If so, how do we explain a babies behaviour in any given situation, when clearly something resembling thought processes are taking place?

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Language is just structured communication. Without structure, it becomes increasingly difficult to express and understand complex ideas. Knowing you're thirsty and want juice is a bit different than trying to, say, describe Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I'll have to read up about that theorem, I've not heard of it before. Sounds interesting. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Zazaki language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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Zazaki (or Kirmanjki, Dimli) is a language spoken by Zazas in eastern Turkey. According to Ethnologue, the Zazaki is a part of the northwestern group of the Iranian section of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family.[3] Zazaki shares many features, structures, and vocabulary with Persian, Gorani, Gilaki, Talyshi and other Caspian languages, spoken in northern Iran, along the southern Caspian coast.[citation needed] According to Ethnologue (which cites [Paul 1998][4]), the number of Zazaki speakers is between 1.5 and 2.5 million (including all dialects). - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Zaza people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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The Zazas or Dimilis are an Iranic (Aryan) ethnic group in Turkey. They primarily live in the eastern Anatolian provinces, such as Adıyaman, Aksaray, Batman, Bingöl, Diyarbakır, Elazığ, Erzurum, Erzincan (Erzıngan), Gumushane, Kars, Malatya, Mus, Sanliurfa, Sivas, and Tunceli provinces. Zaza culture and language show some similarities to other Iranic (Aryan) ethnic groups, such as Gorani, Kurds, Pashtuns, Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Persians, and others.[1] Although many Zaza speakers are usually classified as a separate ethnic group, some speakers of the Zaza language actually consider themselves as Kurds.[2][3][4][5] - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Language: The first written statements in the Zaza language were compiled by the linguist Peter Lerch in 1850. Two other important documents are the religious writings (Mewlıd) of Ehmedê Xasi of 1899, and of Usman Efendiyo Babıc (published in Damascus in 1933); both of these works were written in the Arabic alphabet. The use of the Latin alphabet for writing the Zazaki language only became popular in the diaspora after meager efforts in Sweden, France and Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. This was followed by the publication of magazines and books in Turkey, particularly in Istanbul. The efforts of Zaza intellectuals to promote their native language by the written word is beginning to bear fruit: the number of publications in Zaza is increasing. The rediscovery of the native culture by Zaza intellectuals not only caused a renaissance of Zaza language and culture, it also triggered feelings among younger generations of Zazas (who rarely speak Zaza as a mother tongue anymore) in favor of the Zaza language, and thus their interest in their heritage. In the diaspora, a limited amount of Zaza-language programmes are broadcast. Moreover, with the gradual easing of restrictions on local languages in Turkey in preparation for European Union membership, the state owned TRT television launched a Zazaki TV program and a radio program, which is broadcast on Fridays. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Language Guy: Spoken vs. Written English - http://thelanguageguy.blogspot.com/2006...

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There is also a disconnect between grammatical speech and grammatical writing but here is where right wing grammarians, who usually know nothing whatever about language, intrude their unwanted selves into the discussion by insisting that white middle class matrons, to take just one group, speak "correct English" or "proper English" as if "correct English" is like "correct answer" in an addition problem or "proper English" is like "proper dress." The reality is that people of different regions, different races, different genders, different ages, different social classes, and different language backgrounds (first vs. third generation immigrants, for instance) abide by different grammatical rules and calling one way of talking "good" and another "bad" is purely and simply the result of ignorance and prejudice. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: A different trip with these tongues - latimes.com - http://www.latimes.com/news... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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At UCLA and other schools, some students are forgoing French, Spanish and Chinese to try indigenous Latin American languages such as Zapotec, Mixtec and Quechua. Some leap in for the adventure. Others want to get closer to their roots. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Learning standard languages doesn't help you understand the needs of regional areas," said Ramona Perez, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at San Diego State University. "But indigenous languages show you all the diversity we have." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Language Log: Sapir's Armchair http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll... (via http://friendfeed.com/diction...)

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"The outstanding fact about any language is its formal completeness. This is as true of a primitive language, like Eskimo or Hottentot, as of the carefully recorded and standardized language of our great cultures. […] [W]e may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate, no matter how original or bizarre his idea or his fancy, the language is prepared to do his work. […] The world of linguistic forms, held within the framework of a given language, is a complete system of reference, very much as a number system is a complete system of quantitative reference or as a set of geometrical axes of coordinates is a complete system of reference to all points of a given space." Edward Sapir - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"Sapir goes on demolish at length the idea that it could possibly be true that language limits thought, in the sense that speakers of some particular language might simply have no way to express some particular concept. This "no word for X" idea, so common in modern pop-Sapir-Whorfianism, was completely and explicitly alien to Sapir's way of thinking." Language Log - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2010...

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"And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways...When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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