Language in the life of man and human society

Human language is, perhaps, the most astonishing creation of man. It helps us to think, to express our thoughts and to understand each other. We make use of it in practically everything we do.

Language is a means of communication in human society. People can use other means of communication, such as red lights or flags, but these signs are interpreted into human language. So language is the normal form and the main means of communication in human society.

We cannot say anything definite about the origin of lan­guage. But we realize now that language is a product of human society and it can exist only in human society.

Man ("homo sapiens") is the only living being with the power of speech. The appearance of language on our planet is as recent as the appearance of man himself. Labour and lan­guage are distinctive and exclusive marks of human beings. Without them the growth and progress of human society is unthinkable.

Human speech differs greatly from the signal-like actions of animals, even of those which use the voice. Dogs, for instance, make only two or three kinds of noise – say barking, growl­ing and whining. In human speech different sound combinations have different meanings.

Primitive people had a few hundred words at the most. Today highly cultured nations have more than seven hundred thousand words in their dictionaries. This means that now people can communicate by words much better than they did it in the remote past. The rapid growth of the vocabulary of modern languages is due to the development of science and technology.

But spoken languages were easy to forget; so people invent­ed writing to record them. Writing is a way of recording lan­guage by means of visible marks. The first form of writing was picture writing. Symbols representing the sounds of a language appeared much later. The art of writing made it pos­sible to fix thoughts and to store knowledge, and to pass them on from one generation to another.

Mankind speaks many languages. A group of people who use the same system of speech signals is a speech community. Speech-communities differ greatly in size. An American In­dian tribe of only a few hundred persons speaks language of its own. On the other hand, there are some speech commu­nities that are very large.

English has several hundred million native speakers. For them English is their mother tongue. Millions of people with some other native language learn English for business, pro­fessional or political purposes. For them English is not their mother tongue but a foreign language. Ukrainian, Russian, French, German, Chinese and some other languages also have vast numbers of speakers.

There are people who know three, four, five or six lan­guages. They are polyglots. They study languages because knowledge of languages is their speciality or hobby.

For a modern engineer and research worker it is absolute­ly necessary to have practical command of foreign languages. A scientist who can read the literature of his field in several languages has a much better grasp of the subject.

Learning foreign languages enriches the native language, makes it clearer, more flexible and expressive.

VOCABULARY NOTES

1. to make use of smth – использовать что-либо

2.the only – единственный

3.living being – живое существо

4.as recent as = as old as – такой же старый как

5.human being – человек

6.at the most – наибольшее; не меньше, чем

7.the remote past – далекое прошлое

8.spoken language – устная речь

,9. native speaker – носитель языка

10.mother tongue – родной язык

11.to have (a practical) command (of) – владеть (практически)

12.to have a much better grasp (of the subject) – лучше владеть (пред­метом)

EXERCISES

I. Read the following international words and give their Ukrai­nian equivalents:

human, practical, communication, flag, interpret, nor­mal, form, planet, exclusive, mark, progress, action, combi­nation, primitive, nation, cultured, technology, modern, symbol, fix, represent, generation, group, system, business, polyglot, hobby, specialty, absolutely.

II. Give English equivalents of the following Ukrainian words and word-combinations:

человечество, человеческий язык, человеческое общество, способ общения, при помощи, единственный, дар речи, появление, первобытный человек, общаться с помощью слов, далекое прошлое, быстрый рост (увеличение), разговорная речь, человек, живое существо, языковая общность, с другой стороны, родной язык, владеть иностранным языком, более гибкий и выразительный.