Editing Language (section)

==Further reading==
* {{cite book|last=Crystal|first=David|author-link=David Crystal|year=1997|title=The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language|location=Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press}}
* {{cite journal|last1=Cysouw|first1=Michael|last2=Good|first2=Jeff|year=2013|title=Languoid, doculect and glossonym: Formalizing the notion 'language'|journal=Language Documentation and Conservation|volume=7|pages=331–359|hdl=10125/4606|url=http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/4606}}
* Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders", ''[[Scientific American]]'', vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18.   "Many [[language]]s have an [[interjection]] word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski ''et al.'', writing in the ''[[Journal of the Acoustical Society of America]]'', have] found that pain interjections tend to contain the [[vowel]] sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the [[International Phonetic Alphabet]]) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases of [[artistic symbol|symbolism]], or sound [[iconicity]], in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of [[linguistic theory]], which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words [[onomatopoeia|onomatopoeically]] imitate a sound. Also] there's the [[Bouba/kiki effect|'bouba-kiki' effect]], whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a ''feeling'' about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate the [[Trill consonant|trilled]] 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. [[Mark Dingemanse]]... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.)
* [[Gary Stix|Stix, Gary]], "Thinking without Words: Cognition doesn't require language, it turns out" (interview with [[Evelina Fedorenko]], a [[cognitive neuroscientist]] at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]), ''[[Scientific American]]'', vol. 332, no. 3 (March 2025), pp. 86–88. "[I]n the tradition of [[linguist]] [[Noam Chomsky]]... we use language for [[thinking]]: to think is why language evolved in our species. [However, evidence that thought and language are separate systems is found, for example, by] looking at deficits in different abilities – for instance, in people with brain damage... who have impairments in language – some form of [[aphasia]] [ – yet are clearly able to think]." (p. 87.) Conversely, "[[large language models]] such as [[GPT-2]]... do language very well [but t]hey're not so good at thinking, which... nicely align[s] with the idea that the language system by itself is not what makes you think." (p. 88.)
* {{cite journal | doi = 10.2307/409603 | last1 = Swadesh | first1 = Morris | author-link = Morris Swadesh | year = 1934 | title = The phonemic principle | jstor = 409603| journal = Language | volume = 10 | issue = 2| pages = 117–129 }}