• Animal vocalizations,
• Signs vs symbols. Signs are sensible dimensions of a condition; symbols are sensible objects used to 'count as' something other than what they are - by a common act of a people. Symbols are, en soi, social artifacts. Any symbol can refer to any referent. Is music sign or symbol.
• Primate and Cetacean communication capacity. Washoe and American Sign Language (learned 140 ASL signs, made sentences, was able to lie!).
• Early signs of humans using complex symbols in communicating with one another.
• Non-verbal communication -signs: blushing, smiling, eye-contacting, yawns. Symbols: wave goodbye, handshake, bows, hand gestures. Proxemics - meaninful space. Kinesics - meaningful motions (Edward Hall, R. Birdwhistell) - Intimate, Personal, Social and Public spaces. Intimate - fill optical field, breath sounds, smell, pheromones. Ritual distances in elevators, subways, restaurants.
• Birdwhistell insight that kinesis is necessary matrix for verbal communication - tempo, timing, stance, attention, talk-switiching.

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1. One to one references "A rose is a rose..." vs "A rose is a word...". We invent a symbolic world which we then inhabit.
2. Syntax and Semantics - networks and nodes, grammar and vocab.
3. Wittgenstein, Sapir-Whorf - the structure of language that we speak structures the way we understand the world. Hopi vs Indo European "tensing". Languages are a logical framework, as is culture - each is reflexive of the other
4. Foucault - the language that we speak is the world that (a particular, historical) "we" live in. ? Who then that controls the language can influence the actual lived in universe!. Freire - if we would throw off our oppressors, first we must stop using their language.
5. "This is not a pipe", the problem of re-present-ing.
6. Illich - " In the truly oral culture, before phonetic writing, there can be no words and therfore no text, no original, to which tradition can refer, no subject matter that can be passed on. A new rendering is never just a new version, but always a new song. Thinking takes wing: inseparable from speech, it is never there but always gone, like a bird in flight...." (ABC, The Aphabetization of the Poplular Mind, page5, Illich and Sanders)

• physical equipment - nuanced control of sound production - complex of vocal cords, control of air expulsion, delicate placement of tongue, lips
• social necessity - need for much post-birth learning, huge relational load that humans live within, importance of an efficient method of transfer of knowledge not experienced (based on something other than OJT). Vocal symbolic learning is calorically much more efficient way to teach/learn some things, compared to demonstration. Language - Learning - Culture - compared to DNA-transcription- reproduction, as ways of making past available to present.
• Inference from burials, artwork - tools, sculpture, painting

1. Language Families, cognate words
2. Regularity of change - Latin lacto becomes Italian latte, Spanish leche, french lait - milk. Latin octo, It otto, spanich ocho, fr. huit.
3. Norman conquest of England - upper caste/lower caste bilingualism
   marriage- wedlock; assault - battery; testament -will; cease - desist. The Normans roasted (rostir) porc, the English baked (backen) ham - Norman words are beef, mutton, porc; english are sheep, swine/pig, cow
4. Old English to Modern: Loaf Warden - protector of the farmers grain - Loefwoerden-loewoerdan-leworden-leword-lord.
5. Diffusion, neologisms
6. glottochronology (14% on average, core words change per 100 years) - a way of tracking relationships between languages.

• Phonetics - phones, allophones
• Phonemics/phonetics - most languages use between 20-35 sounds as phonemes
• Phoneme is a class of related sounds produced by speakers that count as one significant and contrastive language unit - significant but not meaningful. Test for phonemes - change of sound will change the word (maery, mary, mery, mury- maybe changes that are not phomemic for some speakers Pittsburghers). (Marry, Mary maybe be phonemic distinguish among another linguistic group)
• phonemes - contrastive features "fat/bat" "thigh/thy".What, in any language, are the smallest sound features that are used to distinguish one word from another. In Gujarati 'bhat', 'bat' are different words distinguished by different phonemes ('b' versus 'b'aspirated), not so in English. In English, in most contexts we don't consider the different way that we say the "i" in 'high jump' and 'high school' as phonemically distinct (the first 'high' rhymes with pie, the second usually is sounded so that it is nearly the sound of 'height' if you took the 't' sound away from 'height')
• clicks - inspirations rare as phoneme (some African languages using speech clicks, Ulster Gaelic - "ay' "
• Phonemic alphabet records sounds that are psychologically relevant to speakers of a common language.

 

• morphology - morphemes, lexicon

• analytic, agglutinative language types
• Syntax -rule-ordered, grammar - Chomsky - generative, transformational grammar
• Discourse
• dialect, language, lingusitic family

1. Speech is always cultured, cultivated. So it can be a mark of the cultivating group. It often can be used by hearer to infer group to which speaker belongs or comes from. By speaker, speech can be used to proclaim belonging to a group, or maybe to avoid presentation of self as member of group. Speech can function as marker upon which to include, and differentiate matters social.
2. Language and nationality, Shibbolleth - jibboleth.(see Illich hx of mother tongue), language and social class, language and gender, .
3. Discourse strategies - speech as instrument, social capital, in conversation, social interaction and the culture wars.
4. Regional variations- dialect and politics - Ukranian and Russian and Slavic.
5. Braziian pilot flying into Malaysian airport must speak English - California politics of language (of instruction, of law)
6. Conversation - taking turns - negotiating speaking time
7. Discourse strategies - chats, interviews, speeches, gossip, declarations, imperatives, speech as a struggle for power and social advantage as much as a way of transferring/receiving data.
8. Language broadcast at 50,000 watts, from loudspeakers, or from satelllites. Howard Stern talking to us from the heavens. Freedom of speech in a world in which you can't hear yourself; where there is little freedom of listening, or of silence; What happens to this civil right, when some citizen's speech is amplified.

Development of language abilities during lifecourse

Response to sounds
Imitation
Naming
Instruction following, verbal requests/commands
Syntax acquisitions - capacity to infer a rule, and use the rule for a novel vocalization (2yr old dtr at zoo naming all the animals with her words bird, cow, cat or dog - the lions and tigers being identified with her word for dog only said much louder.)

From sound to scribbling -writing as a trace or a vestige of speech

All writing systems are not representations of language. The Chinese use ideograms. These symbolize ideas, not sounds. The first writing systems to represent sounds - the alphabetic writing systems grew up in the Levant.

Portable symbolic accounting systems: Cunieform
History remembrance symbolic systems - Hieroglyphics
Agricultural calendrical systems - Eygpt, Fertile Crescent, Maya, Aztec, Olmec