Hi Homo Sapiens,
I am writing this blog to blurt out my feelings and passion for this course that I developed 2 years ago after coming across some of the terms that are specifically used in this field. This course helps you to understand a quality that is not only unique to us ‘Homo Sapiens’ but to explore also how we acquired it naturally not only through experience from the environment but something that has been encoded by God into our brains-“Language”. Linguistics is a science that refines the brain in understanding speech in our brains and the one used in our community in everyday use. The different levels that operate beneath the different layers that starts from sound /p/,/o/,/t/-morpheme /-s/, word- /pots/ and then using it in a sentence “The beautiful vintage pots in the garden” comprises a lot of thinking but no brainstorming. This whole operation of forming a sentence in our mother tongue comes so naturally to us that makes me say that we take the obvious for granted!
“John washed his car and Bill washed his car too” What is the second pronoun referring to? Is it really Bill or John? This is the subject inquiry of the next level called Semantics which is the study of meaning and deciphering ambiguity that the language encodes. Meaning in language makes a lot of difference in our perceiving the world in general!
The horse that raced past the barn…. fell. A sentence where you have to backtrack the meaning called a Garden Path Sentence. You are lead to a false track in the beginning; its only when you re-interpret the semantics playing beneath these words when you arrive at the correct interpretation.
The power of language cannot be subdued. It is what leads a nation, states,armies together. Surely this gift is given to us to exploit it in myriad ways and that is what we have been created for. Sometimes I think you have to be evil brains to understand the sentence structure when it comes to constructions like those above 😛
I can’t accept reality on a platter handed to me it has to be wrapped in illusions for me to uncover and therefore I developed an interest in this field of inquiry. Hope this short intro to this field will help those Homo Sapiens who are reading this to convert them into budding Linguists in future. It is false that I am lying 😀
Wordie Birdie 