Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my.

Oh, wow. Hello, you're all listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 66, an overview of language.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, or what possibly will turn into two episodes, because I've got a fair bit of material here, but we'll see how we go.

We're going to look at language, particularly I'm going to look at the various subfields of linguistics,

and look at the various insights and perspectives

that they bring to light on understanding how language works and what it is and how it functions.

So, in particular, we're going to look in turn at phonetics, phonology,

morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

These are all different sort of levels of analyzing language, building from the very simple

and small aspects to the large and complicated ones.

No real recommended pre-listing for this episode, although it will be a fair, or parts of it

will be a fairly nice complement to the episode on knowledge representation, which was

episode 64.

Okay, so without further ado, let's get right into it.

And before we begin, though, we must begin by defining what we mean by language,

or at least having some sort of basic definition out there so that we know what we're talking about.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and language, broadly speaking, is the human system for relating sounds or gestures or symbols and meaning.

So language is an abstract system which places a relationship between some abstract thing. It could be a gesture,

a sign, a symbol, a squiggle, or a sound, or anything like that. It relates, so language relates

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