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"Language touches every part of our lives; it gives words to our thoughts, voice to our
ideas, and expression to our feelings. It is a rich and a varied human ability-one that we
can use without, even a thought, that children seem to acquire automatically, and that
linguists have found to be complex yet describable. This, language, will be the object of
our study" (Language Files-1 Introduction)
In this course we want to know what language is used for, and how its system of
arbitrary vocal symbols works. The most immediate objectives of this course are:
To lead you to examine your own believes and attitudes about language and its
use.
To study and understand the sound system of English Language and Spanish
Language
To equip students with some tools and techniques for linguistic analysis and to
give you some practice in using these to discover the organizing principles of a
language.
To acquaint students with basic concepts necessary to enhance linguistic studies.
To discover similarities and differences between both languages.
To get better knowledge in the perception and production of the new language.
Language is the highly developed form of animal signaling. It provably developed in east
Africa around 100.000 years ago, still its origin has become a trendy topic. These
predictions must have existed. First, humans noticed actions and objects. Second, they
were able to produce a range of sounds and third they must have reached the naming
insight. These preconditions enabled humans to build up a store of words. In addition,
preferences tend to become habits and habits become rules.
THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE
Language is used for persuading and influencing others, for swapping news and
conveying essential commands. Language can be used to communicate feelings and
emotions, humans may use language for purely esthetic reasons, in writing poetry, to
release nervous tensions as anger and frustration. A day to day interaction needs a
language.
PHONOLOGY
Overview
Phonology studies the distribution and organization of sounds in a language and the
interaction between those different sounds. Those sounds are called phonemes and
phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how phonemes function in a language.
Its objective is to analyze the restrictions and regularities that a language has.
Phoneme. - It is the smallest segment of sound that can distinguish two words. Take the
words PIT and BIT, they differ only in their initial sound, PIT begins with /p/ and BIT
begins with /b/. Phonemes are normally put into slant lines I I. Pairs of words such as
PIT and BIT or PIT and PUT which only have one different phoneme are known as
minimal pairs, and one way to identify the phonemes is to look for minimal pairs. Also a
phoneme can be defined as the minimal significant contrastive unit in the phonological
system.
Phonemics. - The complete set of sounds is called the phonemics system of a