 You saw that we were talking about language as a systematic device as a system which is in built in us and if I ask you where is language located in us, what will be the answer, where is language located in us, brain right it is question like how do we see, how do we see anything with our eyes right, similarly if the question is where is language located the answer is how do we know that, answer is right and sounds very convincing but then the question comes to same brain and mind that we do not know whether it really comes to brain or not, how do we know it is located in brain. Cognitive process and all cognitive process are done by brain. And is language really a cognitive process, because we think when we speak. So, you are saying thinking is cognitive process right, can we not think without language, can we or can we not we can right, how do you how can you think without language, visuals memory, but how do we store such memories, we do not know these things. Understand the question the what is not important is we need we do not need to know answers to all these questions right, at least right away, we but we need to think about these questions at least right. And is language really a cognitive process, keep this question in mind, we will discuss about it, do we really need to think in language or can we not think without language, these are some of the questions which are important for us to understand in general, they are not necessarily directly part of this course, but anybody who understands something about language or wants to understand something about language, these are the fundamental questions you will need to answer after you have acquired certain fundamental aspects of language and when you can say I know about language right. So let me take you to more fundamental things and then we come to these questions, so when we say language is located in human mind, we also need want to say that it is a it is one of the most sophisticated product of human mind, rather it is the only product which you can which you can evaluate in a systematic way, we do many things with human mind and all of them can be studied in a systematic way, for example when we see something, we can study how the process of seeing works right, when we what else do we do with human mind, what else do we do with human mind, comparisons like mathematics logic, mathematics what else memory, in a way it would not be too much to say if we say we do everything with human mind right, can we as humans cannot function if human mind does not function in a particular way, at least we cannot function the way we do. One more question before we get into more fundamental questions and this is again for you to think, what are the things that involves language, we talked about thinking right, I really want you to think very hard, do we really need to think, do we really need language to think, communicating ideas of course and when you are thinking about this question, do evaluate whether you need language for that or not right, similarly communicating ideas, you may have wonderful ideas right, you may be doing wonders in different aspects of life, can we do such things without language, can you talk about mechanical engineering without language, we need to decide which language we need to talk in, whether we need Tamil or English that is much later question, that is much trivial question, but can we talk about anything without language, mechanical engineering just happens to be an example. We are using language, so talking without language is kind of redundant, it is pointless. That is what you are saying is it is not possible to do any anything which involves another person, essentially has language, sure I get your point, let us remove the word talking, let us say the word doing right, can we do anything with others without language and we do not want to get into the trivial aspects of this question, the important part is in order to transact anything we need language right, therefore it is also called besides this definition that I have been showing you since yesterday, it is also called a medium of transaction among us, a medium of construction of any knowledge like you are talking about restoring memory or communicating about ideas, these types of things are parts of construction of knowledge and we cannot really either construct or transact about such things without language, such is the significance of language and one of the reasons why we probably do not pay much attention to the need of looking at language in a systematic way, because it comes to us so naturally right, it comes to us so naturally that we really do not want to be very serious about it. All of you must have heard things like we do not understand the value of the gift that we can see things right, if you want to understand how fortunate we are that we can see without making much efforts without difficulties you need to talk to people who cannot right, the fact that we are able to walk without problems and if you want to understand how difficult it could be then you need to talk to people who cannot right, similarly the way we learn to walk, the way we learn to see or we happen to see similarly we end up speaking, this is what I mean when we say it comes to us so naturally okay and therefore it does not become such a such a serious thing for us to get into, however when you get into the details of it then you see the underlying system and get to know it is really a complex system okay and then we realize about its systematic arrangements all right. Now we have looked at these things, we were working on these questions right, let us talk about few more of them to come back to language learning. So each one of us speak 3, 2, 3, 4 languages right, one can ask you question this question both ways, why do we not speak just one, if the purpose of language is to communicate, why do we not speak just one language, it is rooted in the language has been developed language has been developed okay, so in other words we are saying it is not possible to have just one language, it no matter how important it is for communication and then we know that it if it is important for communication then it would have been much easier if we spoke if everybody spoke all over the world just one language would not be difficult at all right, many of you must be familiar with the artificial language that computers or machines work with right, I do not know names of all the languages right but I am assuming that machine A and machine V, B can communicate only when both of them have both of them have same language right, they have difficulty communicating even if they have one has higher version and the other has lower version, you see the limitness limits of artificial languages, however it is not important for humans to be speaking just one language and still we can communicate effectively over a long period of time or even in a shorter period of time we do find a way to communicate with one another right, therefore many languages being around has very little to do with the answer that we need language only for communication, get this thing then how many languages do we speak in India, you found that 1600, do we know the names of all of them right and we it is okay not to know the names because that is not important right and and it is what was the source of this information of 1600, Google besides Google where did the Google where did Google get it from, generally asking you these things just so that you know about them, I referred one more sites right, that is all right, I am not interested in sites all I want to say many a times Wikipedia may not be a reliable source of it, that is what I am interested so what I am saying is many a times Wikipedia may not be a reliable source, however if you are looking at the references they are citing then you can rely on the information, so and it is important for us to in the beginning to know that one of the most authentic surveys that was done in India was around 1930 and it was done by an anthropologist called George Grierson okay and that is called the name of that project was linguistic survey of India okay, it was easy for George Grierson to do because he got help from British officials and British officers running smaller places, so when they issued orders they put their whole office on this work to find about language, it is not possible anymore for us to do because you know how our offices work, you tell someone to do something and they will really get it done for you, it is very difficult, so and I do not mean to comment on offices but what I am saying because of the British system and their rigid administration George Grierson got it done in 1930 and then he came up with this number 1650 or something, now it is not really important for any one of us to know names of all of them but it just becomes a very interesting thing and curious thing that we speak so many languages okay, then the next question is how many languages are spoken all over the world, something like 6000 or 7000 right, 6900, how much did he say? 6909, right, now if you compare these two numbers what is the percentage of total number that is spoken only in India 25 to 35, 25 to 30 somewhere between 25 to 30, you see the linguistic diversity of this geography right, it is not just one sixth of world's population but it is 30% of the languages of the world spoken here right, we have talked about common things between languages and how they differ from one another right, we will be looking at some of them in more details okay and I come back to the total number in a moment again, before that I want you to know that when we talk to people in general or even in classes in systematic way, most of the time the answers that come up are based on impressions right, like I wanted to show you the thing that we definitely use language for communication but that is not the primary thing about communication, primary thing about language okay, we do use language for communication, the simple answer to what I am raising is if it was only for communication then we would have just one or few of them to make it easier, on the other hand when you see the total number of 7000 or 1600 they do not seem to be simplifying communication right, therefore such an answer is an impression that we think this is how probably language is important okay, then when we start looking at it in a serious way, the first distinction that we make and as many of you said language is located in human mind right, when we learn language the role of human mind is very important right and it is one of the most sophisticated product of human mind, so there are two aspects of language, one is called I language and the other is called E language and these are not complicated terms, they simply mean internal language and external language, get it internal language and external language, what do we mean by them and why we need to make this distinction is following, internal language refers to the language here that is in our mind okay and I will elaborate that what we mean by language in our mind and everything related to language that happens in human mind when we study such things then we say or we think we are talking about I language okay, E language is when it gets out of us, the moment it gets out of here what does it become spoken language of course but that that is part of society right, anything out of us in terms of language is society and that is called the E language refers to everything that happens to external aspects of language that is for the purpose of interactions in society okay and whatever we do with society and language that is out of this is part of E language is what we call E language, it is this distinction making sense to you, I language and E language okay, when we are and again going back to I language when we study learning of language right, role of human mind in language and how human mind is, how human mind stores language, how language is processed in human mind, all such things are part of study within the domain of I language okay and it becomes interesting only at the level of I language many people many many studies make this distinction and rightly so because not every study can include all parts of it, so depending upon who you are talking to they will tell you their study is more interesting that is if somebody is studying language as an external thing in society they will tell you it becomes interesting only when you are talking about language and how it works in society and how culture is important and other parts of important, how these things are embedded in language such things are more interesting depending upon again who you are talking to if you are talking to cognitive scientists and others who look at how language processing and role of human mind in it acquisition of language they will tell you that is the only important part about language and that is the sociology of any research or education we think what we do is more important than everyone else or at least we want to believe that so that is the part of that is the distinction between I language and E language we have looked at the distinction between language versus languages clear right when we are talking about I language we refer to language keep this in mind we refer to language and languages is part of E language I think this does not require much of elaboration the moment we say languages is part of E language and the simple not proof but simple idea to elaborate this is we can look at it we do not need to go to laboratory for this think about the following question you if you speak two languages Tamil and English or Hindi and English do you think you have two compartments in your brain are the words of these two languages stored into different places yes or no do not know we do not know you can you can say no they are not stored into different places but we really do not know right then we with that the fact that we do not know ok one more question about that and trust me these questions sound funny or maybe at times ridiculous but they tell you something does it does it pain that is does do you feel any headache when you switch from one language to the other no on the basis of these things we can say they are all all part of one thing right or for that matter when we look at human mind as a bigger thing and language as smaller thing in it we do not even know which part of this mind contains language itself forget about compartments of languages do we do we realize where here or here this site no we we can we can make sure that language is probably located here because and this has been a study this is not just part of a joke that due to brain that brain damage we find language disorder we find language loss and due to other kinds of injuries we rarely find any disorder in language and if at all some other kind of injury causes language disorder that is related to again human mind in a psychological way ok it has been established that language has huge connection with human mind but we do not know which part of it for sure and at this stage I can tell you it is not really that we do not know there has been one study by Broca had this name before no and one part of human mind is called Broca's areas Broca's area the this this scientist what he did he has studied people who got language loss or some kind of disorder in language due to head injuries and then this person finds that injury in a specific place on a specific side causes some kind of problem with language and so he made a broad generalization that probably that area is responsible for language and therefore because it was done by him so that area is called Broca's area so sometimes you will find people telling you that Broca's area is the area of language in human mind get it so but but we really do not know even if we believe Broca we have no reason not to believe him but even if we believe we do not know if other areas are responsible for language or not right and then forget about finding smaller compartments about Tamil Telugu and other things if we go into more details of let us say a language called English we do not know whether words are stored separately and then we pick words and make sentences how does human mind make a sentence do we do we have a grammar stored in one part and words in the other part and then we we do it fast and come up with sentences without us even knowing because there are lot of things that happen in human mind which we are not so aware of or so we cannot really keep up with our own mind the kinds of things that are happening there we really can keep up with all of them but so keeping those things aside the all I am trying to trying to say is it is not really possible to find out get it so and then I want to bring you to the point that the distinction that we have made between language and languages right and we have talked about certain principles and parameters governing languages so those are part of human mind what is not part of you we have no evidence to say that languages are like English Tamil Hindi in human mind but we can hypothetically say convincingly that what is part of human mind when it comes to language is principles and parameters get it and I will tell you more about that in in due course or in a in a few minutes okay I hope that point is that point is clear we talk more about that when we talk about language acquisition let me let me talk to you about next point we have a we have briefly talked about that it is a patterned system we buy by now we have only been talking that language is system I have not given you any examples to show languages system or for that matter we have talked about very few examples like certain examples of principles and certain examples of parameters that languages vary from from one another and they are part of they they are what make language as a systematic thing but look at look at this what I want to say right now it is a system of arbitrary sounds okay however the whole thing what we know as language is not arbitrary is a highly systematic phenomena we will be elaborating on this aspect throughout the semester many examples that we will be talking about whether we come back to this or not will be around this but therefore it is important for us to know right in the beginning that it is it has a huge role of arbitrariness in it by it I mean language language has huge role of arbitrariness in it in the sense that it is a sis it it to begin with it is a system of arbitrary sounds and I will elaborate that to you what I mean by arbitrary sounds in MA in a minute however language itself is not arbitrary at all and that is what we mean why it is a purely rule governed system nothing happens in language which is which is just for that it is possible that we do not know everything that is happening in language just like we do not know everything that is happening in human mind but we know certain things on the basis of which we can say language is not an arbitrary phenomena it is a systematic phenomena it is a rule governed phenomena now let me let me give you couple of examples at this point so when we say okay let us talk about what we mean by arbitrary sounds okay what is this why do we call it mobile which is and I am not asking a philosophical question okay you can say it is portable therefore we call it mobile my question is even not to that extent my question is if we all called this something else right if let us say we called this aeroplane will that be a problem no no I know right now it will be a problem because if I ask you please give me your aeroplane then we want to understand one another there will be a problem right which is called breakdown in communication so we need we need to call it the same thing if we are talking about one language then we need to understand that whatever it is called both of us know the same thing that is going to relax communication otherwise it will just simply breakdown right we cannot choose our own words for things right what is this thing slide changer I cannot call it anything else right you cannot call it anything else we need to call things the same way that is for communication but what what I want to to to bring out is if we all called this thing something else then we will all call this something else right a pen why is it called a pen or for that matter anything why is it called that this is called a desk right we could have called it a room or it would not make any difference right the in short and I am I am talking about a very significant point that naming anything is arbitrary any name is arbitrary to the extent that as long as we know what we are talking about we are fine right there is no reason why this should only be called a mobile there is no reason why this should only be called a pointer or is remote control or whatever slide changer we could have called this also pen and then that thing as remote get it so naming things is arbitrary and then if we call let us say we have an object pen again again one more time I will tell you the meaning of arbitrariness is there is no reason why the word pen is associated with the object that it refers to the association between the object and the word is arbitrary at the same time and if you understand that kind of arbitrariness then you also understand why what are the sounds involved in the word pen sounds involved in word pen you understand the meaning of sounds words are made of sounds right so what is the first word of pen and remember first sound of pen and remember I am not talking about letters and that distinction I will make again when we move ahead slowly I do not want to talk about everything at a time so I want to draw your attention to very significant thing I am talking about first sound not the first letter what is the first sound in the word pen very nice and what is the first letter P so at now you can begin to see that the letter P is only a device to represent a particular sound okay and that device is just designed to be able just designed for us so that we can write something that is not how we speak what we speak is the first sound is pa and then you can begin to see that this sound is not specific to English alone do we not have this sound in our languages we do right and then you will you will see in a more clearer way that sounds are common in languages okay okay so let me let me come back to this so why only pa and then what is the last sound in this word pen no and the middle sound a why only these sounds in that word okay that is also arbitrary okay and I promise you I will take you through certain more nuanced constraint on formation of a word to see that not any few sounds together makes a word there the construction of a word follows a very systematic constraint on them which comes little later but this is exactly what we mean by saying when we say language is a system of arbitrary sounds the association and when we come up with a word the association between word and the object is also arbitrary but what is not arbitrary is underlying system what we call language what we refer to as language is not arbitrary which is when we say Tamil is a verb final language remember this thing we did this exercise yesterday Tamil is a verb final language or Malayalam is a verb final language or Hindi is a verb final language it never happens in a strict word order that verbs will start coming in the middle of the sentence okay some of you can argue that I can come up with a sentence and a still good grammatical sentence where verb is in the middle of the middle of it but that is called scrambling because of the strength of the language and I again I will talk to you about that strength little later it is possible in our languages to move words around and still retain grammaticality of that sentence however in some languages it is not possible to move words around right we can say I am reading a book in our languages where we can scramble words around is that possible how do we say this word this sentence in Hindi I am reading a book anybody speaks Hindi everybody understand this sentence yes can we say can we move words around in this sentence no no no not changing anything just moving words around we can say that that is still a good sentence right can we do this with English sentence can I say when I when I need to say I am reading a book right can I say I book I am reading that sentence is not and we are not trying to make fun of it we are only trying to make a point that scrambling words around in a sentence in a given language may be possible may not be possible in languages like ours it is flexible it is possible and because of that flexibility we can still retain grammaticality of the sentence however the reasons why certain things are flexible and we still retain grammaticality does not mean that Hindi is not a word final language or Tamil is not a word final language in a normal order of words in a given sentence verbs always come in the final position of a of a sentence that is what is a principle behavior in language at this point and this is not arbitrary that is languages do not choose that to until 2014 we will remain word final see this thing after 10 years from now we will change this does not happen it never happens ok and this is part of a systematic phenomena this is part of a rule governed phenomena get it we cannot have a sentence in any language of the world without a verb in it you must have heard this word verb right I am I am sure almost all of you must have gone through some or the other language class what are the languages you have studied in a classroom environment English of course for everybody right Hindi for some people or maybe many many Tamil nobody has studied Tamil in class ok one person at least two so when the only reason why I am asking this question is when you study language in a systematic way in a classroom then you come up with these words people tell you these things nouns verbs right subjects and objects there therefore I am talking about talking about this thing so far you may not have noticed this thing or you may not have taken a note of it or may not you may not have been pointed to this but there is no language in which you have a sentence and sentence does not have a verb ok and and I can give you an example of that can you give me a smallest sentence smaller than that go very nice that is a sentence right but other things with one word do not form a sentence for example if I say hello is that a sentence no see this thing the smallest sentence go is a sentence because it is a verb which tells you that you may not have anything else visible in the sentence one one can argue that when we say go we mean you go so you is not really visible and therefore it it is not just a word it is more than more than a word and that is not what we are talking about right now we are talking about visible elements and even when we have just one visible element it is a sentence because it has a verb and other things do not therefore we can say verb becomes the most important part of a sentence and we cannot create a sentence without a verb and that is true for all the languages of the world ok this is part of this is what tells us language must be a rule governed phenomena no matter what ever is the role of arbitrariness in it alright ok the last thing is I think this point should be clear by now when we try to make these things explicit right then you can say I am doing linguistics these things fall within the areas of linguistics and by explicit I mean it is not that you do not know the things that I am talking about and again I will I will be talking about lot of things lot of things which as a speaker of any language you already know but such things are just not explicit ok and this is just the like take the example that we just just talked about it is not that you do not know that in in the languages that you speak for you to make a sentence it is important to have a verb right you know this thing but it is just not explicit to us all the time and it is not a fair question to the speakers of Telugu or Tamil or Hindi or any any or for that matter English or French for anyone to ask them this question that do you know this rule in your language this is not a fair question to ask them because people learn these rules the speakers of different languages learn these rules automatically and the word automatic is very important we will be elaborating on that ok we do not know that and I am using the sentence very carefully we can say in when we are talking about language that we can we can we can say language happens to us do you realize when you get fever when you get fever no no you realize but do you realize when it is coming to you I mean it does not come to you knock your door say I am going to stay with you for three four days that does not happen it just happens to you we can we can extend the same logic that language from the very beginning starts happening to us ok and I will elaborate on that a little in in more details for longer time shortly so this is what linguists do and this is what happens in linguistics now we have a we do not have too much of time but we will try to justice try to do justice with at least one of one of these things right and then we will discuss remaining part of it tomorrow these are not this not again very serious questions related to the domain of this this course because most of the things in this course are going to be about I language ok. However these are important things just like the numbers of languages spoken either in India or in other other places to know that there are just so many languages not just few similarly these things are important for us to know so if someone asks you what is the national language of India we have no national language how about others we have no national language why what is Hindi official language first official language official language of India right and this is this is an important thing to know I must tell you many of us many people have this confusion many people will tell you I do not want to blame anybody whether purposely or or ignorantly that Hindi is the national language of India that is not true India does not have a national language it has the the state policy on language says it only has official languages somebody said its first official language does it mean we have second one too so that is not true it is just like we do not have a national language it is also true that English is not second official language and the word in the constitution has been chosen very carefully in India is the only nation in the world which has a language component in its constitution ok you may not be aware or maybe you are I am not trying to trivialize it or underestimate you when did India get independence understand we know this thing when did we get our republic set up that is when did the constitution get in effect January 26 remember we celebrate two different things 15th of August and 26th of January what happened on 26th of January constitution came into effect why did constitution not come into effect on 15th of August 1947 we did not have one we are saying that we created this big document in two years only that is not true many of the many parts of constitution I am not an expert on constitution so I cannot tell you this thing with with authority but many parts of constitution were already accepted from the existing documents around that time you may may hear many a times even these days that certain things we are following from British system we are not following from British system per se what we mean is we adapt adopted such things from British system in our constitution what delayed acceptance of that document for two more years was debate on language there was a committee set up it was called that that is famously known as constitution assembly debate ok there was a chairman of that that that that assembly and then all kinds of debate took place the longest debate was about language ok if you are interested in this if these documents are available online I am not sure if it is available on Wikipedia or not but you will definitely find documents related to constitution assembly debates and then such documents relating to language not not necessarily you have to read that but if you are interested in this sometimes you can look at it what happened was the the decision about language took longest time they still did not settle this question after the long and it is it happens normally that when we do not have a consensus we settle down with some compromise formula and that was the most significant thing to come up with and this is where this question is important that English is not second official language like Hindi in that assembly debate in that in those debates many people wanted to declare Hindi as national language ok many people wanted to declare Hindi as national language but that did not happen what happened was Hindi was declared as an official language of India which was also very difficult ok then English was declared as associate official language of India and there is a difference between first and second when we say something first and something second we are trying to put them in order and when we say associate official language that is because it was put in place at par with Hindi so you can it is it is not second it is just one and associate you may see even now after six how many years of independence sixty or so many years of independence that people talk about many things in English even in our parliament that that is the reason for this and then then one more thing I tell you and then we stop we will talk about rest of this thing these things tomorrow it was also decided that we will review this question of English after ten years ok which was around 1960s 61 or 62 do you know something significant happening around 1962 63 China war Pakistan wars and one more significant aspect significant thing that happened was the first prime minister of India Pandit Nehru died around the same time around 63 64 and if you look at our political system carefully there were lot of instability at that time in political sense and then this question get not did not get revised at that time did not was not brought for revision and the more we moved ahead in time more difficult it became to revise this thing and until today everybody just wants to leave it the way it is because you can understand the sensitivity involved with issues related to language this is the this is the position on it national language official language and a state policy state policy on language the last part that I told you that people do not want to discuss is my addition this is not official ok but as you can see it is true that people do not want to discuss and rightly so because it has potential for many many many issues and this is the only time when we are talking about these external far too external things about language we will be restricting to I language and also one more thing I want to say with which way I want to conclude a systematic study of language in a scientific fashion and particularly the aspects of language which are rule governed takes place not with emotional issues so many of the many of the things that I am going to be talking to you about is has has no no association or relation with anything emotional about languages in fact if you understand in the last so many years nothing scientific can be done when you when you bring any emotional issues in it right science science does not move any further up after that so knowing very well that languages a marker of identity it has potential to create many problems in in the real world many of the things that we will be talking about is related to I language and only scientific aspects of language ok however we will still discuss these the last two things tomorrow which is the distinction between language and dialect and language and variety I invite you to take a look at these things like you have looked at a number of languages in India and around the world I am very happy about it so please look at these things also we begin talking about it tomorrow thank you