"For my Students:"

A Short Essay on Language
by Professor Lynn McCann

Most animals, maybe even ants, have some kind of language. Whales communicate through the high, squeaky sounds they make underwater. Monkeys "talk" with sounds, gestures and facial expressions. They can also be taught to understand many human words. Birds communicate with complicated songs, and some imitate the sounds we make. However, humans are the only creatures with a highly developed capacity for language.

Human language is an amazing and powerful gift. We humans talk about what is happening now, but we can also describe what happened yesterday, or last year. This is because humans can remember the past. We talk about what might happen tomorrow. We write things down! We understand that it is possible to communicate with someone who is not in the room at this very moment. What we write may not be read for a day, or a month, or maybe even a hundred years. Humans can imagine the future. Now, how amazing is that? Just think about it for a minute and try to imagine: which came first, the language of humans or their concept of time? No one is absolutely sure of the answer. This is only one of the mysteries of language.

We don’t think about language very much. We take it for granted. We accept without question the idea that we can say something to another person and they will understand us. We hardly ever ask, “What are we actually doing when we talk? How does that work?” One reason it works is because we agree on the meaning of the sounds we make. In the English language, we call the sounds we agree about the meaning of: “words”. In other words, our word for word is word. This silly sentence demonstrates an important point. If you find studying language or what we call "grammar" confusing, you are not alone. It is very difficult to explain words with words. There is much more to language than simply agreeing that, as the poet Gertrude Stein wrote, "a rose is a rose is a rose."

To communicate complicated ideas, we also have to agree on the way words work together to create understanding. It is one thing to shout: “Fire!” It is another thing to say: “I put dinner in the oven. Please, turn it off in an hour, or it will burn.” That whole idea depends on agreement about something called "syntax". This word comes from two Greek words, syn and taxis. The ancient Greeks agreed that syn means “together”, and taxis means “arrangement". For us, the word syntax means, “the way words are arranged together." Syntax is the structure of language.

For another example, we agree that the word “home” means a place to live, and that the word “go” means to move. When you say, “Go home,” I don’t think you are telling me that the place where I live is moving somewhere. I understand that you mean me, even if you don't say, "You." I know you are commanding me to move from where I am toward the place where I live. That's because we agree on the structure of our language, the way words relate to each other in a sentence.

It took hundreds of thousands of years for all this agreement to evolve in any language, anywhere in the world. How did it happen? The answer is: use. Usage builds agreement about the meanings of words and how they work together. After a long while, meanings and structures that everyone agrees on become standard, or the rule. We don't talk or write English as people did in, say, Shakespeare's time. They had slightly different standards and rules back then. The way people use and agree on language keeps changing all the time.

At first, of course, there was only spoken language. People talked to each other, face to face. When written language developed, the writer and the reader were separated by both time and space. The reader could not ask the writer, “Hey, what did you just say?” It became more important to agree on the meanings, spelling and syntax, so the rules became more refined. Over the centuries, ancient languages like Latin and Greek gave way to the languages of invaders. Cultures intermixed, and languages changed, borrowing words and syntax from each other, and rules became even more complicated. Eventually, people tried to write them down so everyone could be “on the same page” about grammar, and so language could be taught. This has never been easy. People have always had strong opinions about the right and the wrong way to use language, and they will probably argue about it forever.

It is important to remember that language itself came long, long before the first book of grammar rules was ever written. No two-year-old child ever learned to talk using a grammar book. It is natural to learn to talk. The rules of grammar only describe this very special thing that humans do. Grammar only explains the mechanics of our amazing gift for language. You already know a lot more about this than you think. You've been talking and communicating for years. You just read and understood this essay! Language may be mysterious, but it belongs to you. It is your human heritage.