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:

Publishing

Music

Other uses

See also

Tha (Javanese)

ꦛ is one of syllable in Javanese script that represent the sound /ʈɔ/, /ʈa/. It is transliterated to Latin as "tha", and sometimes in Indonesian orthography as "tho". It has another form (pasangan), which is ◌꧀ꦛ, but represented by a single Unicode code point, U+A99B.

Pasangan

It's pasangan form ◌꧀ꦛ, is located on the bottom side of the previous syllable.

Murda

The letter ꦛ doesn't have a murda form.

Glyphs

References

See also

Thai Airways International Flight 114

Thai Airways International Flight 114, a Thai Airways International Boeing 737-400 bound for Chiang Mai from Don Mueang Airport in Bangkok, was destroyed by an explosion of the center wing tank resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank while the aircraft was parked prior to boarding on the ground on 3 March 2001. Officially, the source of the ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty, but the most likely source was an explosion originating at the center wing tank pump as a result of running the pump in the presence of metal shavings and a fuel/air mixture. One flight attendant died.

The passenger manifest included many government VIPs including Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his son, Panthongtae Shinawatra. No passengers had yet boarded the plane at the time of the explosion.

Assassination theory

Some surmise that this was a failed assassination attempt, as the explosion occurred before engine start, and originated under the seats which were to be occupied by the prime minister. Traces of Semtex, TNT, white phosphorus, PETN, and RDX were found in the wreckage.