Spoken and Written Languages: How Languages Work in Our Cultures

Spoken languages rely on uttering and comprehending sounds made by the human mouth that impart meaning and that allow communication between humans--transfer of facts, opinions, and ideas. Most humans can, over time and with practice, imitate these sounds and can soon make the sounds to convey meanings that can be comprehended by each other. This is how languages are learned by toddlers. And it's been discovered that language patterns are most effectively learned and acquired before a human youngster reaches age five.

As we get older, it becomes more difficult to imitate the sounds and get the meaning right for languages other than our primary one--so by the time we're adults, we have more troubles learning foreign languages than children.

We can easily recognize foreign languages (those different than our native language), and some people are skilled at recognizing dialects of their and other languages. These sound patterns are different enough that scientists have found that dogs and birds, and a few other animals, can recognize speech patterns of different languages and can tell if someone is speaking the local language or speaking a foreign language.

Eventually, with most of the languages that have a written system, youngsters start to experiment with making the marks representing the sounds that make up the language. At first, these attempts resemble doodles and random marks whether the youngsters used crayons, pencils, pens, or other markers. Adults with proficiency with the written system help children with their eye-hand coordination to arranging the marks correctly, creating strings of characters that make sense in that language when sounded out.

No matter which language, culture, or country--humans learn to speak, write, and communicate in this way.

Speaking and comprehending a language is a matter of learning the sound patterns and understanding the meaning of those various patterns as well as being able to enunciate sound patterns effectively enough to pass on a meaning.

Writing and comprehending that language is a matter of recognizing and understanding the markings and symbols that represent the sounds (and therefore the meaning) of the language.

With some languages, the sounds are represented by abstract characters in a form called "alphabet" -- named after the Greek "alpha" and "beta". These characters are assembled in specified ways to form words (called "spelling") and then these words are assembled in a certain way to form coherent sentences in that language (called “syntax” or "grammar"). Latin and Greek form a basis for many European (“Western”) languages--and a common recognizable vocabulary, alphabet, and many mathematical symbols are based on those of ancient Greek and Latin .

As Latin and Greek were spreading their influence across the known world, other cultures had established their own written systems that did not use similar alphabetic representation for their languages. Languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Hindi used individual characters to represent sounds in a similar manner as the Latin and Greek characters. But they wrote their characters from the right to the left, rather from left to right.

The Egyptians and Chinese, however, used hieroglyphics and calligraphy that were originally drawings of animals and other items. With Egyptian, each pictorial hieroglyphic character represents sounds in much the same way an alphabetic character does for Latin, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, or Hebrew. You can assemble Egyptian hieroglyphics to form words--that if sounded out would be understandable as the Egyptian spoken language. Eventually, the Egyptian hieroglyphics lost their original “picture” meaning and became characters that represent sounds as part of the spoken Egyptian language.

On the next page we look at logographic (picture) characters and contrast Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English.