 Good morning, welcome to this course in introduction to linguistics. Today we will be talking about the objectives of the course, why we should do a course in linguistics, how it helps us, are there any practical advantages and that sort of things. I hope you will enjoy the course, please relax and listen and ask me, if you feel like, if you have any doubt, ask me to help or answer you, we will get along right. Why a course in linguistics, how does it help you, particularly those that are students of technology, that are students of sciences or anyone else for that matter. Well there are two kinds of answers, one classical answer is why not, any body of knowledge, any organized body of knowledge is helpful and knowledge has no boundaries, we do not know where one ends and the other begins, can you tell me where physics ends and chemistry begins, can you tell me where history ends and literature begins, can you tell me where economics ends and politics begins, these are man made boundaries. Knowledge in any form is useful, is enlightening, is you know enhancing, it enriches you, it enriches you more than wealth or physical power enriches you, you can do without wealth, you can do without physical strength, but you cannot do without knowledge. Human beings have been gifted this unique opportunity to cultivate and acquire knowledge, you can put knowledge to any use from very mundane to very highly philosophical, it is entirely up to you, but you know acquiring knowledge is a pleasure in itself, it is like going to a concert, listening to some good songs, people will ask you what is the benefit, well what is the benefit of listening to a good song, good music, it is a pleasure in itself, of course it can have some practical uses, for linguistics also you can have some practical uses, I was telling you yesterday that you could do engineering with it, imagine you make a machine which understands natural languages like you and I do, which answers and speaks, reads and writes, recognizes voice and handwriting like you and I do, imagine the kind of revolution you will bring in the world, after all technology is all about challenging the impossible, in the realm of technology there is nothing like impossible, who could have imagined in 1908, 1909 or 1913 that hundreds of people will be sitting in the comfort of their drawing room and flying across the world in no time at affordable cost, may be your grandchildren will go for summer vacation on the moon or the mars or anywhere, when I was your age, when I was 20 or 21 it was unimaginable, believe me at least in India that we could have a something called laptop, put 6,000 books here or 12,000 books here and carry anywhere you like or internet or email or a whole lot of other things or watching cricket you know, there was the only way radio gave running commentary on cricket matches, and we sat next to the radio sets listening to some commentator telling us that Pauli Umbriger is now taking a catch or Farouk engineer is now taking a catch, but today you can watch it live. Any part of the world, anywhere you know that is engineering, but for that kind of engineering to happen you have to know a whole lot of theory, a whole lot of theoretical stuff, similarly if you want to do something in language, make a machine that recognizes the number of words, make a machine that recognizes words, anything you know, anything you will need to know about natural languages. So, I will not like to talk about applications of this knowledge, because applications are infinite, unlimited, it is the only restriction there is your imagination and your intelligence, you can put knowledge to any use, you can write better letters, if you know about language you can write better letters to your friends, to your mother, to your father, the same two lines will please your father or mother or friend immensely, they may like to keep those two lines forever, you know the applications the use of knowledge is unlimited, that is why you may remember our scriptures say, let knowledge come to us from all sides, have you heard of this, this Shloka in Sanskrit, what is it in Sanskrit, in Sanskrit it goes like the following, let knowledge come to us from all sides, so this is another body of knowledge, on this course we will be talking about two things, number one is natural language unique, different from lots of other languages, you know we hear of languages every day, the language of machine, the language of spies, the language of codes, the language of birds, the language of animals, the language of variety of kinds and there is the language that you and I use, and then you know the second objective of the course is to talk about the structure of language, is it a structured, does it have a rule, is there some way we can take it apart and point them together like a motor car, like a bicycle, like a rocket that goes into outer space, can we take it apart, put the components one side and then put them back together, that is the objective of this course, let us look at them, natural language actually is unparalleled medium of communication, nothing, absolutely nothing as we know nature today or if you believe in God, as we believe in God's world today, mankind is unique, mankind is different, mankind is a woman kind to you, humanity is different from animal world, primarily because of the ability it has in language, whatever we do together, war or friendship, building a hut or building a mansion or building a bridge or building anything, you know we do through language, the cooperation, the collaboration, the groups, the family, the society, the community, the country, whatever we do happens through language and there is no other medium of communication, which can come even close to the versatility, the flexibility of language, you can use language anyway, you can use language even when you are asleep, some people talk while sleeping, have you heard of them, yes or no, yes or no please, do you know anyone who talks in sleep and even they talk grammatically correctly, but have you heard of anyone who paints while sleeping, who does a sculpture while sleeping, who does computer while sleeping, have you, yes or no please, no we have not obviously, you know, because it is not so you and so language is unique, it is a unique medium of communication, you can talk in the dark, you can talk under water, you can talk in the outer space, you can be climbing on the branch of a tree and you can talk, you can be swimming in a lake and you can talk, but can you paint while swimming in a lake, can you do concerts while climbing a branch of the, climbing the branch of a tree, can you do a sculpture, any other medium of communication, any other man made medium of communication is nowhere close to language, you can communicate even when you lose voice, there are people who because of some defect or because we do not understand the reasons adequately are unable to speak, even they communicate through gestures and they have fully fledged, you know, the sign language as we call it, sign language is another expression of natural language, it is only that those people cannot hear and cannot speak, but they understand and express themselves in natural language, it is unique, there is nothing that can parallel the versatility and flexibility of natural language, we will talk more about this, you know, maybe tomorrow, how do we define language, can you try, can you give me a definition, anybody please, can you try, you may not be right, you know, does not matter, classroom is about the only place where you can make a mistake and yet you can grow, I do not mean examination hall, I mean the classroom, try, can you define language, come on, do try, what is language, at least somebody please, for the sake of the prestige of our institute, you know, so that when it goes to the U 2, nobody says, oh no student, so after all these are i, i, t, v, take, so come on please, somebody, try, I think that you will feel like answering this question, would you try, what is language, no one. Common set of rules, which everyone except for a time period that is as simple. So, the rules are integral to it, you know, it is rule bound, many people call it verbal behavior, it is a form of behavior, but verbal, you know, by which is meant, you know, words language, not written, you know, writing is not common to all of us, but speaking is, so it is a form of verbal behavior, some kind, well, is it, we will see, is it rule governed, perhaps yes, much of, you know, a good deal of language, though not entirely is rule governed, you know, for example, take a language like Hindi, lots of words have either to be masculine or feminine, chair is feminine, kursi achchi hai, table is masculine, mej achcha hai, but there are sometimes exceptions. So, you know, much language or a good part of language is rule bound, it is a form of behavior. So, in that sense, is it social behavior, do you use language only when you are with friends, yes or no, maybe quite often, you know, when we are with friends, can you imagine two friends going silently together, I have seen man and wife going silently together, you know, even without a quarrel, but two friends going silently, sometimes yes, is language only a form of social behavior, yes or no, sometimes we also talk to ourselves, we write, we speak, we write, we speak to ourselves, we write poetry, we write stories, you know, we constitute, compose our thoughts. So, language is social and language is more than social, it is all of us, it is all around us, it is inside us, outside us, we are surrounded by language, enveloped, covered by language. How does it compare with music or painting or a sculpture, you know, arts or computer language, computer language is complicated, you have to learn it in a particular manner, you have to know a lot of things before you can learn computer language, is that correct, yes or no please, but in natural language, there is no precondition, you have to know nothing before you know Telugu or Hindi or English or Swahili, okay, as you are born, you are not say, okay, obtain a certificate in mathematics before you can learn Telugu, nothing, no preconditions, it is nature, it is like oxygen around us, all you have to do is be there, okay, so it has, it has, there is no precondition or man made languages such as a spy language or group language, but natural languages are different, okay, they are all around us, it is difficult to define, it is extremely difficult to define natural language, why, because definitions create boundaries, definitions create limits, limitations, natural language has no limits, no limitations, okay, how do we understand it in this, we do try, we will try, you know, like we try and understand the universe, we do not know where the universe ends, we have not yet created a map of the cosmos, but we understand some physics, we understand some astrophysics and we make sense of that, so similarly you know, we do not know how much is covered by language, but from the little that we know, we will try and see what language is, but it is difficult, you know, no book, I have given you a list of books, you will not find a definition of language in any book, okay, in the end our old sages also did not define language, they said it was God's gift, it was God's Saraswati is gift, one of the many names of Saraswati is, can anyone please tell me, Vak Devi, Vak is speech, Devi is goddess, Saraswati is the goddess of speech, she has given us, by which our sages said, we do not know, our knowledge ends here, it is nature's gift, God's gift or in India it is God's gift to us, okay, essentially that is what we are saying, how can we study it, well we know two things, as in nature, you know, nothing in nature is such that is not rule bound, so here also language is also rule bound, okay, anything that has a structure, anything that has a system has two properties, please write, one is it has units, what is a bicycle, it has units, the larger unit is it has two wheels, it has a saddle, it has a frame, then you know, wheels themselves have units, what are the units of wheels, somebody please, okay, can you please capture them, can you please answer one by one, spokes, you can talk to the camera, okay, please, then next, what are the units of a bicycle wheel, tires, tubes, tubes themselves are a composition, what are the units of tubes, you have a valve, you have a mouth, the mouth has a hole, okay, come on, give me, what are the constituents of a bicycle wheel, lots of things, spokes, a spokes are attached to a rim, okay, a circular rim and you know, under the circular rim or over the circular rim, there are other things, so there are groups of units from very tiny to very large, in the end as physicists prove it so easily, we are all nothing but a structured collection of molecules, atoms or nano particles, so in language, there are units and there are rules that put those units together, just as in the bicycle, there is a rim, there is a tire and there is a tube, but there is a rule, the rule says what comes first, what comes next, can you imagine putting the tire first and tube next, may be your generation will build a bicycle, is it impossible, is it impossible, we do not know, you know, engineering says nothing is impossible, okay, but as of today there is a rule, you first have rim, then you have, come on, please, in the bicycle wheel, what do you have after the rim, tube then tire, so there is a rule, you know, in that order, similarly in language, similarly in any structured space, in any structured space, you have units and you have rules that combine those units, you will not have that body, you will not have the structure, you will not have organization, if there are no units, no rules, this is true of social structures as well, see we are a community here, IIT Madras, Indian institute of technology, Madras community, we have units, what are our units, we have students, we have come on, please speak up, you know, we have faculty, we have teachers, then we have administrators and we are all put together, you know, we will not be able to work if there are no students, we will not be able to work if there are no teachers, we will not be able to work if there are no administrators and there are rules, which put us together, which define our rules, which define our responsibilities, similarly in nature, you know, similarly in language, there are units and rules, units may be A, B or C, look at the screen, the PPT screen, rules may be A, B or C, but there, sorry, units may be A, B or C, but there are rules combining them, A only if followed by B or B only followed by C, C only if preceded by A, there are rules like that, say for example, look at Hindi or look at French, look at Hindi, you know, if the subject is masculine, then the verb has to be masculine, if the subject is feminine, then the verb is feminine, in Hindi you cannot say, and we have similar things in other languages, singular, plural, if the noun is singular, the verb is singular, if the noun is plural, the verb is plural, you know, in English, if you talk about only one person boy, then you have to say goes, if you talk about two people boys, then you can say go, you know, so there are units, there are rules, say for example, in English, you can say a book, a pen or a pencil, but can you say an book, yes or no, can you say that, you cannot say an book, why not, what is the rule, can you speak so slowly and please kindly take my friend, smile and tell the camera, please, so before verbal sounds, we have an, give me an example, an expression, an umbrella, an egg, yeah, an honor, lovely really, so you know, there are these rules, what are the units, an in honor, a in book, we put them together through rules, so this language like anything else in nature is nothing but a structure of units following rules, look at another example, you know, as I said and if followed by a noun, beginning with a vowel, such as an apple, an egg, an orange, what do you have, a guava, a mango, etcetera, etcetera, I said structures can be large, like I said, bicycle, first you have wheels, then you have frame, now wheels themselves have inner structure, they themselves have units, so in language also you can go from very large to very small, from tiny to the great, so you know, you can go from very large our sages said that, how big there is no limit, they said, it can be bigger than the big and how small, it can be smaller than the small, it can be smaller than anu, it can be smaller than atom, but they are all bound together by rules, even in language, you can do with, you know, the highest structure we recognize in languages, discourse or paragraph, several sentences together, the unit is smaller than that is sentence, you know, paragraphs are made up of sentences, a discourse is made up of sentences, sentences themselves are made up of phrases, we will talk about all of them, phrases themselves are made up of words, words are made up of syllables, syllables are made up of sounds, so you know, there is and sound itself is not one sound, whatever you think is one sound, whether a, a, k, a, k, a, g, whatever is not one sound, it is a bundle of several features, on this course we will talk about the science of phonetics, the production of speech sounds and you will see that what we think one sound is actually not one sound, is actually a bundle of 15 or 16 features at least put together, you can think of, you know, these are visual imagination, it is not that one is at the top, the other is at the bottom, we do not know about the geometry of language, we do not know about the trigonometry of language, we do not know how it is organized, we do not know whether we learn sentence before we learn word, we do not know whether we learn word before we learn sentence, it all comes together, it is a package, you know, you take one, you take all, you take all, you take one, the only thing we know is that we can break the structure of a language, we can analyze it by thinking of these levels, at one end is, can you tell me what is at one end? Pragmatics, the rules of social behavior, language reflects culture, if in that society gender is important, then you know, your language reflects gender, if singular plural is important then it reflects singular plural, in India in many languages, verb is one kind for plural another kind for singular, for many people we say, in Telugu we say, in Hindi we say Bat he, bat ho, kuch, ok, it is important, but if it is a king, even if the king is only one person, or if it is Rahul Gandhi, we cannot say Rahul Gandhi, he is our future prime minister, general secretary of a very important political party, we cannot say that, we say bat he, I ye, jai ye, ukarangokuchand ye, ok, so you know these are social rules, so that is at one end, now it does not mean it is high, you cannot say, lot of people imagine it vertically, highest rule, lowest rule, do you see the point, are you with me, everybody please, are you with me, right, there is nothing like high or low, we cannot say social rules are the highest, we only can say that at one end we have social rules, at the other we have language rules, linguistic rules, if you break them apart one by one, then you find in the end, you are looking at components of sounds, please write, you are looking at, then you will find you are looking at components of sounds, not even one sound, sounds themselves are constituted of things, in between we have semiotics, looking at the sign language, there is also a grammar of sign language, looking at a structure of sentences, syntax, a structure of words, morphology, a structure of syllables, sounds coming together, phonology and individual sounds, phonetics, just as here, you know, when phonic unit, one sound unit for us, another sound unit makes a sound, we study it under phonetics and phonology, sound plus sound makes a syllable, we will talk about syllable, that we study under phonology, syllable plus syllable make a word, we talk about that under morphology, similarly you know, we look at phrase plus phrase, how a phrase is built and how it behaves, how it goes with another phrase, we study that under syntax and there we study sentences, sentence plus sentence, we look at the discourse. So, you can go from one end to the other or from the other end to one, but no matter what you do, language like anything else in nature is nothing but a combination of units, please write, following rules, combination of units, combination of units bound by rules. So, we have units and we have rules, you look that the unit, you can have sound unit, you can have word unit, you can have phrase unit, you can have sentence unit, you can have other kinds of units, how do they work? Let us look at sound, I will just give you one example, what we know as a, please produce that sound, produce it, keep your mouth open like that, camera please kindly capture all the interesting mouths in this country. Now, what happens is before you to produce this sound, several features come together, first you vibrate your vocal chords, say it once again, everybody please do it. So, there is, if it does not vibrate, you will have no a, just see for example, watch me, no vibration, no sound, do it, just say do not vibrate, just say, do you feel any vibration, you do not. So, that is feature number one, next you have pressure on the root of your tongue, when you say a, say it, now say e, again say a, when you say a, where is the pressure on the tip of the tongue or the root of the tongue, root of the tongue. So, that is another feature, all of these are very interesting and significant features, without them you cannot produce a particular sound, not only that, when you say a, your lips are spread, you say a, do you say, do you say that, try, round your lips and say a, can you do that, round your lips and say e, try and say, you cannot do that, spread your lips and say o, spread your lips and now say can you, you cannot, this is how nature works with simple things and this is the challenge for engineering, can engineering replicate nature, can you do better than nature, imagine if cars had legs like human beings, rather than wheels, we will not read roads, imagine if planes could take vertically, suddenly flying will become cheaper than travelling by bullock cart, two thirds of the cost go towards maintaining airports, if flights could take off vertically, every rooftop will have an airport and it will imagine how cheap it will become, thank god it is not so cheap. So, you know everything, even an ordinary sound like a, has I have mentioned only four features, it has sixteen features, when we talk about phonetics, I will tell you how those sixteen features come together, so that we can produce a sound like a, similarly other sound, look at another sound called as in house, as in heat, look at, now for to happen no vibration of vocal cords, you just keep it switched off, then we have constriction of pharynx, your lungs constrict and then your jaws are open, can you say with closed jaws, close your jaws and say you cannot, all the different sounds, all the different sounds we produce, we produce people say fifty different kinds of sounds, actually we produced five hundred thousand million different kinds of sounds, no two sounds or no sound is spoken alike on two occasions, what you speak at nine o clock is not the same thing you speak at ten o clock, it is so dynamic, those who do engineering in speech, talk to them, go to computer science, talk to their, go to their speech laboratory and you will find that isolating the speech characteristics of sound is extremely difficult challenge, it is so dynamic, because of these multiple features. So, there are many phonic features, they combine to produce a sound, similarly there are features at each level, at the level of word, at the level of phrase, at the level of sentence, at the level of paragraph or discourse and we understand them and then we describe rules, come back to it, why is your sound human, you know natural language so unique, so complex and yet so easy, so complex and yet so easy, no mother sad down, no grandfather or grandfather sad down with the grandson and told the grandson, now open your jaws, now vibrate your vocal cords, did your grandfather say that to you, we do not, but human beings imbibe it, that is the word imbibe, they acquire it, they are programmed, they are designed, just as you know fish are designed to swim, birds are designed to fly, we may also fly some 2 meters, 3 meters, but not like birds, we may also swim for may be 4 or 5 minutes underwater without oxygen, but we are not designed like fish, so similarly you know we are designed such that we imbibe these features of language as we are born or even before we are born, today there is overwhelming evidence, a large body of evidence from medical sciences, from neurosciences, from child language that language learning begins inside mother's womb, by the time the child is about 6 months in mother's womb, you know the brain formation is complete and language learning has already begun, what is it in our in us that learns language, is it mind which portion of body do you think has language, is language in our finger which part of our body keeps language, can you tell me, and where is brain, then what is mind, please come on, which has been mapped to specific areas in the brain sir, I mean if you damage it something you cannot speak again, but people relearn it, then do they create another brain, but usually it is very specific areas in the brain, that is what we believe and that is where we are wrong, it is all over our body, you can listen through your fingers, you can read through your fingers, cannot you, sorry can you read through your fingers, you can yes it is all over us, that is why in our classical literature, we do not use mind brain, we use the word consciousness, it is all over, because you know even today, we do not know where mind ends and body begins, do you know that, can you say up to here is mind, our bald people have no mind, our bald people have only mind, can we say that, we cannot say that, we do not know where mind ends and body begins, we do not know what is the difference between mind and brain, we do not you know lot of there are lot of you know clever definitions, some people say brain is the hardware, mind is the software, wonderful good to hear you know, it makes a good essay, but that is not true, lot of people believe that language as Anurag right, said lies in the front left part of your forehead, people call it Broca's area, but there is enough evidence to prove that even that is not correct, it can be damaged in an accident, but through therapy you relearn it, now do you by relearning mean, it another part of the brain is built there, is it do you acquire a new forehead, you do not, it is all over man's you know, we know hardly enough about mind, brain and how language works, when I come to phonetics and phonology, I will tell you, I will draw your attention to more problems in this area, there are these problems, we do not know enough, all I will say is, we do not know enough yet, may be in your generation, your researchers, you guys will acquire that knowledge and disseminate it to the world, thought and words which came first, can you think of anything without words, can you think of anything without words, can you have words without thought, can you have a word which has nothing, which is just like a bag, a plastic bag carrying nothing, thought has words, words have thoughts, they go together, what came first, we do not know whether meaning or word, whether word or meaning, they are all together, all we know is, human beings learn this, acquire this language, acquire natural language, almost effortlessly, there may be some instruction from family and friends about, more about social aspects, uncle Kuparnam, say good morning, good morning to uncle, poor you know, a teen month old kid, why do not you leave it free, let it go around rather than teach a stupid, you know, good morning, good morning, you know, Namaskar Monday, Chappan day, why are you traveling that little kid, but you know, nobody tells that little kid, now say passive voice, have you heard any parents saying that, but we all learn passive voice, all of us in our languages also, you know, my favorite joke is, whenever the milk was spilt, my daughter said that, her mother said, you spilt the milk, but when it happened, because of my wife, she said that the milk got spilt, we all have active and passive voice, but did we, did our mother sit down and tell us, today my dear son, my dear daughter, I am going to teach you, how to use passive voice in Hindi, or in Telugu, or in Tamil, they told us about social manners, Tata, Patti, Nana, grandfather, grandmother, he gives credit to your father, be kind to him, these things we are, you know, we are told, but not about language, we acquire it automatically and it develops with exposure, the only thing that is required is exposure, if you are exposed to language, you learn language, that is the only precondition, otherwise human beings are designed to, and yet, there is difference, all of us learn our first languages equally well, but do, why do not we learn subsequent languages equally well, there are some people whose English and Telugu are equally good, there are some people whose English is better than their Telugu, right, when they speak Telugu, it seems as if they were speaking English, I know of people in Hindi, when they speak Hindi, it looks like they are speaking English, you know, Hindi, English intonation, English pronunciation as on aircrafts, air hostesses, they use an affected accent, there are people, lots of them whose Telugu is better, but English is not as good, right, now why does this happen, these are the questions for which we do not have answers, okay, so it is a very, you know, it is a challenging area of knowledge, it is a vast body of knowledge, I will give this mail to Mahesh and Mahesh will pass this on to you, I have at the end put a test, it is a self test, give this test to yourself today and try and see, if you are able to do it, and then you will realize that this is language, okay, then you will realize that language is unique, we may not know all of it, we may not have a grip on it, but here is the goal, a challenge, we have to learn, okay, you know, the test is very simple, take a sentence like a brown fox jumped over a lazy dog, we can say this in any language, we can say that in Telugu, how would you say that in Telugu, I can say that in Hindi, a poor dog jumped over a lazy dog, okay, but can I say that in painting, in music maybe, some excellent people can, but common and ordinary people cannot, so do these tests, okay, I will circulate it to, I will give it to Mahesh and Mahesh will circulate it to you, okay, thank you, have a good day.