0 KNOWING THE MEANING WORDS

Knowledge of The Meaning of Words

         "The minute i set the eyes on animal i know what it is. I don't have to reflect a moment; the right name comes out instantly..... I seem to know just by the shape of the creature and the way it acts what animal it is. When the dodo came along he (adam) thought it was a wildcat.....But i saved him .....i just spoke up in a quite natural way.... and said "well, i do declare if there isn't a dodo". (Mark Twai, Eve's Diary in Fromkin). 

       Knowing the sound and sound patterns in our language constitutes only one part of our linguistic knowledge. In addition, knowing a language is knowing that certain sound sequences signify certain concepts or meanings or meanings. Speakers of english know what boy means and that it means something different from toy or girl or pterodactyl. Knowing a language is therefore, knowing how to relate sounds and meanings. 

        If you don't know a language, the sounds spoken to you will be mainly incomprhensible, because the relationship between speech sounds and the meaning they represent, for the most part an arbitrary one. You have to learn (when you are acquiring the language) that the sound represented by the letters house (in the written form of the language) signify the concept, if you know french, this same meaning is represented by maison, if you know Twi, it is represented by oda n, if you know Russian, by dom, if you know spanish, by casa. Similarly, the concept of bye by hand, is represented by hand in English; main in franch,nsa in Twi, and ruka in Russian.

The following are words in different languages. How many of them can you undertsand?

a. kyinii

b. doakan

c. odun

d. asa

e. toowq

f. bolna

g. wartawan

Speakers of the language from are know that they have the following meanings.

a. a large parasol (in Ghanian language)

b. living creature   (in the native American language, Papago)

c. wood (in Turkish)

d. morning (in Japanese)

e. is seeing (in a California Indian language, Luseno)

f. too speak (in Pakistani language)

g. reporter (in Indonesian)

h. teacher (in Venezuelan Indian language, Warao)

i. right on (jn Nigerian language, Hausa)

            These example show that the sounds of words are only given meaning by the language in which they occur. Mark Twain satirizes the idea that something is called X because it looks like X or called Y because it sounds like Y in the quotation at the beginning of this section. Neither the shape nor the other physical attributes of objects determine their pronounciation in any language. As the cartoon on page illustrates, a pterodactyl could have been called a ron.

         This arbitrary relationship between the form (sound) and meaning (concept) of a word in spoken language is also true of the sign language used by the deaf. If you see someone using a sign you don't know, it is  doubtful that you will understand the mesage from  the sign alone. A person who knows Chinese Sign Language would find it difficult to understand American Sign Language. Sign that may have originally been mimetic (similar to miming) or ironic (with a non arbitrary relationship between form and meaning) change historically as do words, and the iconicity is lost.These signs become conventional, so knowing the shape or movement of the hands doesn't reveal the meaning of the gestures in sign languages.

                There is, however, some "sound symbolism" in language that is, words whose pronounciation suggest the meaning. A few words in most languages are onomatopoeic - the sounds of the words supposedly imitate the sounds of nature. Even here, the sound differ from one language to another, reflecting the particular sound system of the language. In english we say cockadoodledoo to represent the rooster' crow, but in Russian they say kukuriku, in french cocoricoo,.

Sometimes particular sound sequences seem to relate to particular concept. In english many words beginning with gl to relate sight, such as glare, glint, gleam, glitter, glossy, glaze, glance, glimmer,glimpse and glisten. However, such words are a very small part of any language, gl may have nothing to do with "sight" in another language, or even in other words in English, such as gladiator, glucose, globe, glycerine, and so on. 

            English speaker know th gl words that relate to sight and those that do not, they know know the anomatopoeic words in the basic vocabulary of the language. There are no speakers of english who knows all 450.000 words listed in Webster's Third New International Dictionary; but even if there were and that were all the new, they would not know English. Imagine trying to learn a foreign language by buying a dictionary and memorizing words.

            No matter how many words you learned, you would not be able to form the simplest phrases or sentences in the language or understand a native speaker. No one speaks in isolated words. Of Course, you could search in your traveller's dictionary for individual words to find out how to say something like "car-gas-where". After many tries, a native might understand this question and then point in the direction of a gas station. If you were answered with a sentence, however, you probably would not understand what was said or be able to look it up, because you would not know where one word ended and another began.

0 KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUND SYSTEM

Knowledge of the sound system

       Knowing language means knowing what sounds are and what sounds are not in that language. This is also unconciuous knowledge that is revealed by way speakers of one language pronounce words from other language. For example, if you speak Sundanese as your mother tongue, so you will find difficulties in pronouncing the sounds f, and v. Thus when you have to pronounce the words vini,vidi,vici and por. They need to practice to get used to pronounce those words in the right way.

       The same thing happened when the native speakers of English, they may substitute an english sound for a non-English sound when they have to pronounce "foreign" words. This is a goog example, the word Bach in German language. The sound that is represented by the letters ch is not an english sound. Therefore, most english speakers pronounces the word "Bach" with a final k sound. In reverse, if they pronounce it as the Germans do, it means that they are using a sound outside the English sound system.

      Another example : when french speak English, They often pronouncewords like this and that as if they were spelled zis and zat. The english represented by the initial letter this mispronounciation reveals the speakers' unconcious knowledge of this fact. 

     Moreover, some involuntary cries, are restricted by our own language system, and the filled pauses that sprinkled through conversational speech-like er or uh or you know in English, euleuh...euleuh in sundanese-contain only the sound in that language. Another speakers, for example, often fill their pauses with the vowel sound that starts their word for egg, oeuf, -a sound that doesn't occur in English.

    In conclusion, knowing the sound system of a language includes more than knowing the inventory of sounds, it includes knowing which sounds may start a word, and end a word, and follow each other. It can be arranged from the collection of letters. This means you have already got linguistic knowledge in your mind, and you know how to start and end those words and also know the meaning of words.

     Another example, the name of a former president Ghana was Nkrumah, pronounced with an initial sound identical to the sound ending the english word sing(for most American). Most speakers english mispronounce it (by Ghanaian standard) by inserting a short vowel before or after the n sound. Similarly, the first name of the Australian mystery write, Ngaio Marsh, is usually mispronounced in this way. These errors are caused by "no word in english starts with the ng sound.

0 Linguistic

2.  Lingusitic Knowledge 

   

It has been stated above people have been facilitated to be able to comprehen and speak and others can understand the words they convey. As Fromkin stated that : this mans :they have the capavity to understand and to produce by others. "This refers to the person with normal hearings, while for deaf person, they also can communicate by using symbols or body languge.

Most children under 6 years old can speak fluently and understand language. Their ability in speaking and understandineng language almost as proficient as their parents are. Nevertheles the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requiers profound knowledge of which speakers are unware.

When children learning to speak without understanding that sentence should consist of at least a subject and an object, an adverb etc which is optional. It is also parallel fashion a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of balance, support,and sequence that permit one to walk

0 CHAPTER 1 SEMANTICS

THE NATURE OF MEN'S LANGUAGE

    When we study language, we are aspproaching what some might call the "human essence", the distinctive qualities of mind, that are as far as we know, unique to man. (Noam Chomsky in Language and Mind).

Tehis chapter is a review about Man's Language. This is needed to remind the students about the impotance of knowing what language is

1. What is Language?

          All people will get bored if they just keep silent all day long, we need to talk with others. Wherever we go when we visit our relatives,our friends or family, we talk. We always great people when we meet them such as assalamua'alaikum,good morning,good night,gutend aben,guten morgen, etc. The people we great will never answer our greatings  in return such as : Wa'alaikumsalam or with the same greatings such as :morgen,guten tag,gutend aben,etc.

       These show that we can not live alone without talking. When we were alone, such as in our sleep sometimes people talk,we also talked aloud in our sleeping and  in also our dream, we talk to others. Even when we are alone in the jungle as stated in Pochontas, an indian story: there was interaction between Pocahontas and her ancestor that was in the shape of a tree, in other word Pocahontas talked to a tree. She said : "I'm a red man If the Great sprit had desired to be a white man, He would have made me so in the first place". Therefore, we talk to ourself. Sometimes we talk to our pets or plants or flowers regarded that they understand the words that we convey. In fact, it is hard for us to be freefrom talking or free from using words in our daily routine action.

         Fromkin states : " According to the philosophy expressed in the myths and religions of many people, it is language that is the source of human life and power"

        According to African culture, a newborn baby is a "kuntu" that means a thing, not yet a "muntu"meant a "person". Thus, a kid can be called a human being after he/she ould master at least one language by the process of learning of that language.

       As has been stated above that the language that man possessed not only as an attribute for human being that distinguish them from animals. Therefore, to understand the human through language that makes us human, we must understand the language that we posses. Moreover, based on African: "we all become human because we all come to know at least one language"

To know a language means you should know:

 - Linguistic Knowledge

 - Knowledge of The sound System

 - Knowledge of the meaning of word

- The creativity of Linguistic Knowledge

- Knowledge of Sentences and Non-Sentences