Language : A Phonemic Organization

                                                                                           

     Language: A phonemic Organization

                                                   Nidhu Bhusan Das

When we say something orally, it has two aspects - oral and aural i.e., we articulate for someone to hear. We encode our message for someone to decode i.e., our oral communication  involves the use of signs and sound image. It is a phonemic organization. Now, the sound image and the sign are arbitrary. When we say or write TIGER, we use five succeeding phonemes as a signifier which evokes in the encoder and the decoder the concept (signified) of TIGER. However, what is TIGER in English is BAGH in Bengali and BYAGHRA in Sanskrit. Thus different speech communities have different phonemic organizations to refer to the animal. The relation between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, willful and irrational. This is rightly pointed out by the Swish linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his ground-breaking work A Course in General Linguistics.

We use spoken and written language to speak out our mind, to communicate or share our feeling, emotion, attitude, knowledge, perception etc. with others. The spoken language is phonological realization of the message while the written one is orthographic realization of the same.

NOW, from the above, it is evident language involves organization of phonemic and other elements, and is, therefore, a recognized structure. A phoneme-level understanding may make it clear. CAT is a phonemic organization, a sound image. Now, if we replace phoneme C by B , R, S,F ,we get BAT,SAT,RAT,FAT respectively. The change of the initial phoneme yields different sound images. It means there is a case of change in organization or structure. Phonemic organization is the smallest possible linguistic structutre.There are phrase, clause and sentence level structures in language. These structures are the reflection of the speech habit of a speech community. A language has two predominant forms - standard and dialect. We shall, here, deal with the structures of the standard form.

Phrase   A phrase is a group of words without a finite verb. It yields partial meaning e.g., on the table, by him, about the matter.

Sentence :  A sentence is a group of word which, having a finite verb, gives complete sense e.g., We use language for communication.

Clause :     A clause is a sentence within a sentence e.g., I know that he is a doctor(complex and combination of two sentences -' I know' and  'He is a doctor'),

                                                                                      I know him and he is a doctor(combination of two sentences -' I know him' and 'He is a doctor' ).    

We express different feelings, attitudes etc when we speak.So, we have different types of sentences in respect of our expression and articulation. We have thus Statement,Question,Desires and Exclamation. Their forms are different.

Language is, therefore, a structured tool of communication. We communicate because we are social beings, and social life is shared life. That communication and language are for each other is evident when we consider the basic oral and aural nature of the two. In case of language someone speaks and someone hears. In communication, there is a communicator and there is a receiver - the person communicated to. The communicator is also known as ENCODER (who encodes the message into linguistic signs, and the receiver is known a DECODER (who decodes the message).The communicator/ encoder in oral communication encodes the message phonologically and delivers the same to the receiver/decoder for decoding. In written communication the message is delivered orthographically to the receiver who is a reader. Radio is an example of oral and aural communication in which the oral and aural nature of language is realized. In case of TV communication a new dimension is added to the oral and aural nature of language.Books,newspapers represent communication through orthographic realization.