We had a course at IISER(Indian Institute of Science Education and Research), Pune where
we have been introduced to linguistics and phonetics. We all thought that there
is no use of such course for science students because we thought that this
course will be an unscientific course. It will be mostly mugging up things. So
some of us decided to skip the lectures. But we attended few of them and we
were clueless of what the lecturer is saying. There were some jargons like
analysis of language, phonetics and phonology. And when I heard that we are
going to have a session on language during our induction program, I expected
the same thing.
But
when the session started I sensed that this is different from what I expected.
And as the session progressed, astonishingly, I realized that language is as
scientific as anything else. I came to know about natural tendency for
alternation of C and V. And I also realized that all the languages are almost
same, the difference lies in the script in which they are written.
We also try to design a general formula for
making negative of a sentence and at that moment I realized that language is no
less logical than mathematics. SVO and SOV structure of sentences, there is a
governing rule behind almost everything we did. Then we realized that language is
something that comes naturally to us. “We
apply the rules without knowing them”.
I would like to say that I personally feel, it would have been better if I would have
attend the full course at IISER. But still I am happy that at the end of the
day my myth that language is unscientific faded away.
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