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.
