INTRO TO LANGUAGE EXTRA CREDIT ESSAY

When I signed up for the Intro to Language class, it was nothing that I had

expected it to be. I thought that language was just a form of expression that we use to

understand each other weather we speak English, Spanish, French, German, or any one of

the six-thousand five-hundred languages that there are in the world. I thought that

language was just language. Little did I know that there is much more to it than it just

being spoken. It’s deeper than that. The sources that i will be using to support my beliefs

will be from the texts "The Study of Language" written by George Yule as well as "When I Was a

Slave" edited by Norman Yetman

Since the beginning of time, cavemen were able to communicate with each other

using language. “In Charles Darwin’s vision of the origins of language, early humans had

already developed musical ability prior to language and were using it to charm each

other” (Yule 1). No one really knows or understands how language came about, but it is

an assumption that this was how it originated. When cavemen produced natural sounds,

such as grunts, it is believed that this is how the first language got started around 100,000

years ago unlike the first written language which is believed to have been started about

5,000 years ago.

There are six different sources that we use to define language; The natural sound

source, The Devine Source, The Social Interaction Source, The Physical Adaptation

Source, The Tool Making Source, and The Genetic Source. Each one of these sources are

used to help us understand the characteristics of language-from how we produce sounds

physically, to how we use sounds to understand one another. “…We still don’t seem to

have a non-controversial definition as what counts as using language. One solution might

be to stop thinking of language , at least in the phrase ‘using language’ as a single thing

that one can either have or not have” (Yule 20). We must start thinking outside the box

when we think and talk about language. It’s not just based on the way we speak and or

communicate with one another.

Language is also broken down into something that we call grammar. Grammar is

used to analyze the structure of a phrase and or sentence. Interestingly enough, there are

different parts of speech to help us do this-such and; a noun, an article, an adjective, a

verb, an adverb, and a preposition. “We assume that the use of words to refer to people,

places, and times was a simple matter. However, words themselves don’t refer to

anything. People refer” (Yule 131). We call this term reference, which is an act in which

a speaker and or writer uses language to enable a listener and or reader to identify

someone or something. For example: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a list

of thirty rights given to us humans automatically the day we are born. These rights

protect our dignity and our sanity. They are protected by law. We are all born free and

equal and no one has the right to discriminate against another human being. We also have

the right to life, the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom of thought, freedom

of expression and no one can take away your human rights. However, back in the 1800’s,

people used language in a way that was arbitrary compared to the way we live today.

There were slaves that didn’t share these rights because the UDHR did not exist. We can

see an example of this in the text “When I Was a Slave” edited by Norman Yetman. Delia

Garlic was one of the slave that states “It’s bad to belong to folks dat own you soul and

body, dat can tie up to a tree with yo’ face to d’ tree and yo’ arms fastened tight around it,

who take a long curlin’ whip and cut the blood every lick” (Yetman 43) Slaves had no

freedom at all, they were property…owned by someone else. At any giving time they

were beaten and even killed for things such as crying. Their Masters used language to

take away the human rights that they should’ve had but didn’t. This is just an example of

the reason why the UDHR was created…so that people cannot use language as a form of

punishment towards another human being. LANGUAGE CAN BE USED TO EITHER AFFIRM OR

DENY THE RIGHTS THAT WERE GIVEN TO US AS HUMANS!!!