1174: Duality of Patterning Feb 25, 2018

As was mentioned in the discussion of semiotics, human language is arbitrary; there is no reason that the arrangements of sounds that make up each word should be the ones they are, even if a few of them are imitative. However, not only is it impressive that people know and repeat the precise arrangements of sounds as they do, but spoken languages also rely on building words out of smaller parts. These smaller parts can be as large as elements and affixes, or as small as phonemes and sounds generally, but this means that each word will not have its own unique sound. It is theoretically possible to have assign each word as a different sort of sound, such as a snort for 'dog', a sniff for 'cat', a squeal for 'fish' and so on, but this is not the case. This is called the duality of patterning, and it means not only can people use alphabets for their languages, but also that people can build large phonetic systems for language.

Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA

Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.