Portal:Language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Nature · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology

edit

**The Language portal**

A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes, and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. The scientific study of language, its historical development, characteristics, and use in society is known as Linguistics.

Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations.

Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.

More about Language...

edit

Language of the month (May 2007)

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language, a part of the hypothetical Altaic language family, spoken predominantly in Turkey, with smaller communities of speakers in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Russia, Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, and Romania, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe. Turkish is the largest member of the Turkic language family in terms of the number of speakers, with 65 – 73.5 million people in the world who speak it as their mother tongue. The history of the language spans over 1200 years. Ancient engravings of the Turkish language have been found in Mongolia in the Orkhon Valley. The rise of the Ottoman Empire made the language widespread, creating the literary language of Ottoman Turkish. Find out more...

Nominate | Archive

edit

Picture of the month (May 2007)

Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico

Nominate | Archive

edit

Language topic of the month (April 2007)

The grammar of the Japanese language has a highly regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. Typologically, its most prominent feature is topic creation: Japanese is neither topic-prominent, nor subject-prominent; indeed, it is common for sentences to have distinct topics and subjects. Grammatically, Japanese is an SOV dependent-marking language, with verbs always constrained to the sentence-final position, except in some rhetorical and poetic usage. The word order is fairly free as long as the order of dependent-head is maintained among all constituents: the modifier or relative clause precedes the modified noun, the adverb precedes the modified verb, the genitive nominal precedes the possessed nominal, and so forth. Thus, Japanese is a strongly left-branching language; to contrast, Romance languages like Spanish are strongly right-branching, and Germanic languages like English are weakly right-branching. Find out more...