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.
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