2014年3月2日星期日

The Defect of Indo-European Linguistics

In the history, there are so many great linguists appeared in Indo-European languages family. They had done great contribution to the world linguistic study. But until now, they still don’t understand how the language working, why? The answer is that in this language family, one of the key component of language is missing, that is tone. From history as well as common sense we know the pronunciation development was that to find out the consonant first, then vowel and the last one was tone. For in every language, the consonant was the easiest component to be noticed, then people became aware of vowel, the hardest component to be noticed was tone. Without the comparing of tone language to none-tong language, it is hard to understand how they are working, no matter great thinker or normal people. And it also proved a truth that even a great thinker could not fully understand a language other than his/her mother tongue, not to speaker of a normal person. It is totally impossible to understand a different language clearly.
People may ask another question, why there are no great linguists in tone language family, for instance the Chinese or some Africa language? The answer is also very simple. These languages never find a problem to express something. They don’t have the problem of either ambiguity or a too big vocabulary to be learnt.
The problem of Indo-European language is that they adopted the alphabetic writing system too early. For once you adopted this system, the number of sounds was settled. Or we may say any new sound would be regarded as noise and to be refused, because no letter to represent them. While the non-alphabetic language no this limit. Any new sounds could be accept. In this way the sounds in non-alphabetic language turned to be richer and richer, while the alphabetic language kept the same number of sound. 


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