Bilibil language
Bil Bil is an Austronesian language spoken by about 1200 people near Madang town, Madang Province, Papua New Guinea.
References
Bilibil people
Prior to 1904, the Bilibil people lived on an island offshore from Madang, trading clay pots along the coast from Karkar Island to western Morobe Province. The island was too small to produce enough food for the inhabitants, and the trade therefore was an essential element of their life. They moved to the mainland to their existing village site to improve their subsistence levels.
Pot making
Bilibil women make pots, which are still produced in the traditional way. Clay is collected in the bush, mixed with sand and water and left to dry. A few days later it is formed into a wet mixture and again left to dry.
Then the women pull off enough clay and shape the lip of their pot. They hollow out the inside with a stone and beat the outside with a flat board. It must then be left to dry again before the final smoothing takes place. Before they are fired, red clay is painted on the pots. This turns them a glossy red and black when they are pulled out of the fire.
These pots are put to many uses: most importantly, they are used for bride price ceremonies. Sometimes they are still bartered for food as in the old days. The inland people come down from their mountains and meet the Bilibils at a pre-arranged place. The pots are then exchanged for taro and yams from the mountains. No money is used in these exchanges.
Language
Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.
Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have held that it originated from rational and logical thought. 20th-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language. Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky and William C. Stokoe.
Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However, any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in graphic writing, braille, or whistling. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances.
Formal language
In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it.
The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite. The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or well-formed formulas. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule.
The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactical aspects of such languages—that is, their internal structural patterns. Formal language theory sprang out of linguistics, as a way of understanding the syntactic regularities of natural languages. In computer science, formal languages are used among others as the basis for defining the grammar of programming languages and formalized versions of subsets of natural languages in which the words of the language represent concepts that are associated with particular meanings or semantics. In computational complexity theory, decision problems are typically defined as formal languages, and complexity classes are defined as the sets of the formal languages that can be parsed by machines with limited computational power. In logic and the foundations of mathematics, formal languages are used to represent the syntax of axiomatic systems, and mathematical formalism is the philosophy that all of mathematics can be reduced to the syntactic manipulation of formal languages in this way.
Language (disambiguation)
Language is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and a language is any specific example of such a system.
Language may also refer to:
