LINGUISTICA

] Variation and universality
Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm of generative grammar, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.
In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals, or universals of language.
Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other;[13] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).
Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.
[edit] Structures


Ferdinand de Saussure
It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).
In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in "I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,[14] which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems.
Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages (most notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.[15]
[edit] Selected sub-fields
[edit] Historical linguistics
Main article: Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative method. Often the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families descending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to "synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of language.
[edit] Semiotics
Main article: Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless semiotic disciplines closely related to linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.
[edit] Descriptive linguistics and language documentation
Main article: Descriptive linguistics
Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid 20th century. The rise of American descriptive linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that were (and are) rapidly moving towards extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that investigate the relations between language, culture and society.
The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language documentation requires the linguist to collect a preferably large corpus of texts and recordings of sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.[16]
[edit] Applied linguistics
Main article: Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.
Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim.[17] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter, or in an international lingua franca like English.[17] Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved.[17] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[17]
[edit] Description and prescription
Main articles: descriptive linguistics and linguistic prescription
Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.
[edit] Speech and writing
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language. This is because:
• Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
• Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
• People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.
[edit] History
Main article: History of linguistics
The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC)) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law

Incuti magara burya ntabwo zibonekera ntamunoza musangira utwanyu nk’abaguzanya mu gitondo urubanza rwaza ntuhamubone agahimba impamvu’ agamije kwiyerurutsa ati mfite akazi kenshi n’ubu ngubu ndi kure n’ubwo ukwezi kutarapfa ariko ako si ababazo
ndatuma umwaana aze akurebe
Ntutungurwe n’ukw inkuri ishir’utamurabutswe abo utazi mutajya imbibI bikabazindura bagashyika uko bari kose ntacyo baguhishe /ineza ‘aho iri irangwa no guca bugufi ntigirirwa gusa uwuzi ngw’azayikwishyure.

Umuryango ugukuyeho amaboko
Umuvandimwa akakwiyibagiza
Uwo mwonse rimwe akakwihakana
Wo muziranye ati baga wifashe uti mbayuwande?ko binyobeye !
Ugatizw’ ikiganza na rubanda
iZuba rikongera rikarasa .

BAAT CM ft NEG G THE GEN. REACORED 16th june 2011

“Does every Human Being qualify to be called PHILOSOPHER?”

“Does every Human Being qualify to be called PHILOSOPHER?”
On Earth, from long ago, the origins of both life and philosophy are not too distant, as well, their battle field is the world and Actors are Human Beings with regard to their surroundings; philosophy as a considerable co-walker of life is known early from 600 Y.B.C. from then people are qualified Philosopher according to philosophical consideration as independent in time-period and place-realizations of an Entity to qualify. Thus in history people who are verily eligible to be called philosophy the same eligibility will change in centuries succession ,with evolution People discover more as they get old, curiosity furthers with experience. “Only the route towards philosophical life determines the quality of your philosophy”
As matter of fact, the chronology and the space changed a lot philosophical concepts: requirements or life conditions brought Humanity to philosophy and to make it a career ,it was enough to sort out an ancestral model Wise to coop the way of thinking, acting and of living in general, How, not only to benefit the Humanity surroundings –the environment-but also to catch the real sense facing solutions to different W-Questions that opposes life to Humanity.
There are some criteria to be called philosopher a part from having fixed a guide liner philosopher, place localization also matters, bright philosopher anciently are Milesians(Greece) plus they Linked Neighbors, Westerners or simply they come from North Hemisphere since the are the first to raise curiosity spirit and to experiment grounds of they curiosity upon life: cosmology, concept of universe, Religion and Christianity and later on Rebirth” Renaissance “and enlightenment (18th Century) they lived philosophy and were qualified philosophers. However regardless of traditional thematic borders some ancient philosophers and school did not register though philosophy was active in their daily life, case of traditional Rwandan ITORERO ,the thinking was enhanced, critic mindset was upraised.
As tools of philosophy growth to become rigid , circles of scholars are most highlight once a model ancestral was chosen to be imitated, followers were gathered to transmit and to inherit Hands out case type of primitive and ancestral philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaxmenes. Some of their theories are still valuable like Theorem of famous philosophers-scientists.
To note that fathers of philosophy fully did not attend such actual schools or their being scholar instructed in domains impurely philosophical rather than philosophy itself helped them to carry out realizations that proved they were thirsty of curiosity, they always dreamt to light each and every thing or think at their right. Through their disciples circles or schools their ideas were conveyed generation to generation .This is at the foot of historical era.

From Modern Era philosophy did not neuter its poles, it walks side by side with politics, literature/poetry and leisure/entertainment,..
Mostly with Contemporary Period philosophy changed” who is philosopher “and how does this attain philosophical qualities ,the flow to philosophical life ;its personal roles together with the package he/she amassed which all need the judgment by an independent jury .Tangible actions are relate to sure sources and lastly valuable as philosophy by Professional Teams or experienced Boards supplemented by your initial effort.

Philosophy is actually academic, taught as academic course/programme, its outcomes are nowadays professional and recognized both by their achievements and certificates they hold in the domain.
Philosophy with Modern era changed also its scope ,a philosopher comes from any side of the world ,a unique condition is success specialization from school and of course from the field of philosophy ;we no longer only know Plato ,Socrate ,Saint Thomas d’acquin and Hellenistic school but we also speak of philosophers like Alex Kagame ,Julius NYERERE ,many Philosophers from all corners of Africa and the world at large and their schools are live from their Works ,Novels ,Sayings ,… They one again have been impassively assisted by Committee Philosophical congress, magazine or by recognized Agencies to academically asses they Works in relation to their own life for at last a philosophical recognition.

In conclusion, on one hand, during Pre-philosophy period Westerners in general and Helenians in particular having been inherited from their model patriarchs and their traditional schools they qualified and they were registered “called philosophy.”
On another hand contemporary philosophy does not encounter any spatial barriers the only ground matter is professionalism one you have attended successively academic school of philosophy as far as philosophy is considered as a conditional modern instruction to first of all fulfill any person qualifies to be called philosopher.
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