121-399: (Redirected from International Language ) International language may refer to: Esperanto , whose original name was international language Unua Libro or Dr. Esperanto's International Language , the first book detailing Esperanto International auxiliary language , a language meant for communication between people who do not share
242-473: A priori (where features are not based on existing languages). Esperanto's vocabulary , syntax and semantics derive predominantly from languages of the Indo-European group . A substantial majority of its vocabulary (approximately 80%) derives from Romance languages , but it also contains elements derived from Germanic , Greek , and Slavic languages. One of the language's most notable features
363-475: A "community of speakers". His original title for the language was simply "the international language" ( la lingvo internacia ), but early speakers grew fond of the name Esperanto, and began to use it as the name for the language just two years after its creation. The name quickly gained prominence, and has been used as an official name ever since. In 1905, Zamenhof published the Fundamento de Esperanto as
484-426: A basic understanding of Esperanto. The language-learning platforms Drops , Memrise and LingQ also have materials for Esperanto. On February 22, 2012, Google Translate added Esperanto as its 64th language. On July 25, 2016, Yandex Translate added Esperanto as a language. With about 362,000 articles, Esperanto Misplaced Pages (Vikipedio) is the 36th-largest Misplaced Pages, as measured by the number of articles, and
605-526: A certain degree isolating in character". Approximately 80% of Esperanto's vocabulary is derived from Romance languages. Typologically , Esperanto has prepositions and a pragmatic word order that by default is subject–verb–object (SVO). Adjectives can be freely placed before or after the nouns they modify, though placing them before the noun is more common. New words are formed through extensive use of affixes and compounds . Esperanto's phonology , grammar , vocabulary , and semantics are based on
726-477: A common brotherhood." His feelings and the situation in Białystok may be gleaned from an extract from his letter to Nikolai Borovko: The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such
847-484: A common native language International English , a concept of the English language as a global means of communication International Sign Lingua franca , any language widely used beyond the population of its native speakers Love Mathematics Music Universal language , a hypothetical historical or mythical language said to be spoken and understood by all of the world's population World language ,
968-536: A definitive guide to the language. Later that year, French Esperantists organized with his participation the first World Esperanto Congress , an ongoing annual conference, in Boulogne-sur-Mer , France. Zamenhof also proposed to the first congress that an independent body of linguistic scholars should steward the future evolution of Esperanto, foreshadowing the founding of the Akademio de Esperanto (in part modeled after
1089-493: A different context. For example, the reference of the word here depends on the location in which it is used. A closely related approach is possible world semantics, which allows expressions to refer not only to entities in the actual world but also to entities in other possible worlds. According to this view, expressions like the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to different persons in different worlds. This view can also be used to analyze sentences that talk about what
1210-440: A different sense have the same referent. For instance, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative and people can learn something from it. The sentence "the morning star is the morning star", by contrast, is an uninformative tautology since the expressions are identical not only on the level of reference but also on the level of sense. Compositionality is a key aspect of how languages construct meaning. It
1331-441: A few dorożkas with their horses squeezed in between. Such a sight it was. Later a few blocks were changed from Dzika Street to Dr. Zamenhofa Street and a nice monument was erected there with his name and his invention inscribed on it, to honor his memory. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language , to foster world peace and international understanding, and to build
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#17328584542651452-605: A language spoken internationally Other uses [ edit ] International Language (album) , a 1993 album by Cabaret Voltaire Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title International language . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_language&oldid=880569701 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description
1573-691: A language that could be used by an international Jewish conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were killed during the Holocaust , with Zamenhof's family in particular singled out to be killed. The efforts of a minority of German Esperantists to expel their Jewish colleagues and overtly align themselves with the Reich were futile, and Esperanto was legally forbidden in 1935. Esperantists in German concentration camps did, however, teach Esperanto to fellow prisoners, telling guards they were teaching Italian,
1694-413: A more complex meaning structure. In the expression "Beethoven likes Schubert", the verb like connects a liker to the object of their liking. Other sentence parts modify meaning rather than form new connections. For instance, the adjective red modifies the color of another entity in the expression red car . A further compositional device is variable binding, which is used to determine the reference of
1815-414: A particular language. Some semanticists also include the study of lexical units other than words in the field of lexical semantics. Compound expressions like being under the weather have a non-literal meaning that acts as a unit and is not a direct function of its parts. Another topic concerns the meaning of morphemes that make up words, for instance, how negative prefixes like in- and dis- affect
1936-413: A particular language. The same symbol may refer to one object in one language, to another object in a different language, and to no object in another language. Many other concepts are used to describe semantic phenomena. The semantic role of an expression is the function it fulfills in a sentence. In the sentence "the boy kicked the ball", the boy has the role of the agent who performs an action. The ball
2057-445: A speaker remains silent on a certain topic. A closely related distinction by the semiotician Charles W. Morris holds that semantics studies the relation between words and the world, pragmatics examines the relation between words and users, and syntax focuses on the relation between different words. Semantics is related to etymology , which studies how words and their meanings changed in the course of history. Another connected field
2178-438: A strict distinction between meaning and syntax and by relying on various formal devices to explore the relation between meaning and cognition. Computational semantics examines how the meaning of natural language expressions can be represented and processed on computers. It often relies on the insights of formal semantics and applies them to problems that can be computationally solved. Some of its key problems include computing
2299-459: A strong sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex expression is not just affected by its parts and how they are combined but fully determined this way. It is controversial whether this claim is correct or whether additional aspects influence meaning. For example, context may affect the meaning of expressions; idioms like " kick the bucket " carry figurative or non-literal meanings that are not directly reducible to
2420-508: A term. For example, the last part of the expression "the woman who likes Beethoven" specifies which woman is meant. Parse trees can be used to show the underlying hierarchy employed to combine the different parts. Various grammatical devices, like the gerund form, also contribute to meaning and are studied by grammatical semantics. Formal semantics uses formal tools from logic and mathematics to analyze meaning in natural languages. It aims to develop precise logical formalisms to clarify
2541-407: A text that come before and after it. Context affects the meaning of various expressions, like the deictic expression here and the anaphoric expression she . A syntactic environment is extensional or transparent if it is always possible to exchange expressions with the same reference without affecting the truth value of the sentence. For example, the environment of the sentence "the number 8
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#17328584542652662-476: A town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and so on. This
2783-457: A uniform signifying rank , and the presence of vultures indicating a nearby animal carcass. Semantics further contrasts with pragmatics , which is interested in how people use language in communication. An expression like "That's what I'm talking about" can mean many things depending on who says it and in what situation. Semantics is interested in the possible meanings of expressions: what they can and cannot mean in general. In this regard, it
2904-438: A very few basic words such as cent "hundred" and post "after". Semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning . It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference . Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference
3025-427: A word means by looking at its letters and one needs to consult a dictionary instead. Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive resources is finite. Many sentences that people read are sentences that they have never seen before and they are nonetheless able to understand them. When interpreted in
3146-477: Is hermeneutics , which is the art or science of interpretation and is concerned with the right methodology of interpreting text in general and scripture in particular. Metasemantics examines the metaphysical foundations of meaning and aims to explain where it comes from or how it arises. The word semantics originated from the Ancient Greek adjective semantikos , meaning 'relating to signs', which
3267-400: Is 8. Semanticists commonly distinguish the language they study, called object language, from the language they use to express their findings, called metalanguage . When a professor uses Japanese to teach their student how to interpret the language of first-order logic then the language of first-order logic is the object language and Japanese is the metalanguage. The same language may occupy
3388-470: Is a derivative of sēmeion , the noun for ' sign '. It was initially used for medical symptoms and only later acquired its wider meaning regarding any type of sign, including linguistic signs. The word semantics entered the English language from the French term semantique , which the linguist Michel Bréal first introduced at the end of the 19th century. Semantics studies meaning in language, which
3509-738: Is also Education@Internet, which has developed from an Esperanto organization; most others are specifically Esperanto organizations. The largest of these, the Universal Esperanto Association , has an official consultative relationship with the United Nations and UNESCO , which recognized Esperanto as a medium for international understanding in 1954. The Universal Esperanto Association collaborated in 2017 with UNESCO to deliver an Esperanto translation of its magazine UNESCO Courier ( Esperanto : Unesko Kuriero en Esperanto ). The World Health Organization offers an Esperanto version of
3630-426: Is created through the combination of expressions belonging to different syntactic categories. Dynamic semantics is a subfield of formal semantics that focuses on how information grows over time. According to it, "meaning is context change potential": the meaning of a sentence is not given by the information it contains but by the information change it brings about relative to a context. Cognitive semantics studies
3751-445: Is described but an experience takes place, like when a girl sees a bird. In this case, the girl has the role of the experiencer. Other common semantic roles are location, source, goal, beneficiary, and stimulus. Lexical relations describe how words stand to one another. Two words are synonyms if they share the same or a very similar meaning, like car and automobile or buy and purchase . Antonyms have opposite meanings, such as
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3872-503: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Esperanto Esperanto ( / ˌ ɛ s p ə ˈ r ɑː n t oʊ / , /- æ n t oʊ / ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language . Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it is intended to be a universal second language for international communication, or "the international language" ( la Lingvo Internacia ). Zamenhof first described
3993-408: Is even" is extensional because replacing the expression the number 8 with the number of planets in the solar system does not change its truth value. For intensional or opaque contexts , this type of substitution is not always possible. For instance, the embedded clause in "Paco believes that the number 8 is even" is intensional since Paco may not know that the number of planets in the solar system
4114-456: Is interested in how meanings evolve and change because of cultural phenomena associated with politics , religion, and customs . For example, address practices encode cultural values and social hierarchies, as in the difference of politeness of expressions like tu and usted in Spanish or du and Sie in German in contrast to English, which lacks these distinctions and uses
4235-454: Is its extensive system of derivation , where prefixes and suffixes may be freely combined with roots to generate words, making it possible to communicate effectively with a smaller set of words. Esperanto is the most successful constructed international auxiliary language, and the only such language with a sizeable population of native speakers , of which there are perhaps several thousand. Usage estimates are difficult, but two estimates put
4356-454: Is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep . There are many forms of non-linguistic meaning that are not examined by semantics. Actions and policies can have meaning in relation to
4477-446: Is possible or what is necessary: possibility is what is true in some possible worlds while necessity is what is true in all possible worlds. Ideational theories, also called mentalist theories, are not primarily interested in the reference of expressions and instead explain meaning in terms of the mental states of language users. One historically influential approach articulated by John Locke holds that expressions stand for ideas in
4598-430: Is sometimes defined as the study of context-independent meaning. Pragmatics examines which of these possible meanings is relevant in a particular case. In contrast to semantics, it is interested in actual performance rather than in the general linguistic competence underlying this performance. This includes the topic of additional meaning that can be inferred even though it is not literally expressed, like what it means if
4719-444: Is sometimes divided into two complementary approaches: semasiology and onomasiology . Semasiology starts from words and examines what their meaning is. It is interested in whether words have one or several meanings and how those meanings are related to one another. Instead of going from word to meaning, onomasiology goes from meaning to word. It starts with a concept and examines what names this concept has or how it can be expressed in
4840-504: Is sometimes understood as a mental phenomenon that helps people identify the objects to which an expression refers. Some semanticists focus primarily on sense or primarily on reference in their analysis of meaning. To grasp the full meaning of an expression, it is usually necessary to understand both to what entities in the world it refers and how it describes them. The distinction between sense and reference can explain identity statements , which can be used to show how two expressions with
4961-416: Is the idea that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. It is possible to understand the meaning of the sentence "Zuzana owns a dog" by understanding what the words Zuzana , owns , a and dog mean and how they are combined. In this regard, the meaning of complex expressions like sentences is different from word meaning since it is normally not possible to deduce what
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5082-565: Is the largest Misplaced Pages in a constructed language. About 150,000 users consult the Vikipedio regularly, as attested by Misplaced Pages's automatically aggregated log-in data, which showed that in October 2019 the website has 117,366 unique individual visitors per month, plus 33,572 who view the site on a mobile device instead. Esperanto has been described as "a language lexically predominantly Romanic , morphologically intensively agglutinative , and to
5203-508: Is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is the name given to the collection of places where it is spoken. Esperanto is the working language of several non-profit international organizations such as the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda , a left-wing cultural association which had 724 members in over 85 countries in 2006. There
5324-462: Is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax , which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics , which investigates how people use language in communication. Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning . It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies
5445-419: Is the object to which the expression points. The sense of an expression is the way in which it refers to that object or how the object is interpreted. For example, the expressions morning star and evening star refer to the same planet, just like the expressions 2 + 2 and 3 + 1 refer to the same number. The meanings of these expressions differ not on the level of reference but on the level of sense. Sense
5566-404: Is the theme or patient of this action as something that does not act itself but is involved in or affected by the action. The same entity can be both agent and patient, like when someone cuts themselves. An entity has the semantic role of an instrument if it is used to perform the action, for instance, when cutting something with a knife then the knife is the instrument. For some sentences, no action
5687-404: Is true. Many related disciplines investigate language and meaning. Semantics contrasts with other subfields of linguistics focused on distinct aspects of language. Phonology studies the different types of sounds used in languages and how sounds are connected to form words while syntax examines the rules that dictate how to arrange words to create sentences. These divisions are reflected in
5808-450: Is used if the different meanings are closely related to one another, like the meanings of the word head , which can refer to the topmost part of the human body or the top-ranking person in an organization. The meaning of words can often be subdivided into meaning components called semantic features . The word horse has the semantic feature animate but lacks the semantic feature human . It may not always be possible to fully reconstruct
5929-580: The Académie Française ), which was established soon thereafter. Since then, world congresses have been held in different countries every year, except during the two World Wars, and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (when it was moved to an online-only event). Since the Second World War , they have been attended by an average of more than 2,000 people, and up to 6,000 people at the most. Zamenhof wrote that he wanted mankind to "learn and use ... en masse ...
6050-748: The COVID-19 pandemic ( Esperanto : pandemio KOVIM-19 ) occupational safety and health education course. All personal documents sold by the World Service Authority , including the World Passport , are written in Esperanto, together with the official languages of the United Nations : English , French , Spanish , Russian , Arabic , and Chinese . Esperanto has not been a secondary official language of any recognized country. However, it has entered
6171-565: The Gulag labour camps. Quite often the accusation was: "You are an active member of an international spy organization which hides itself under the name of 'Association of Soviet Esperantists' on the territory of the Soviet Union." Until the end of the Stalin era, it was dangerous to use Esperanto in the Soviet Union, even though it was never officially forbidden to speak Esperanto. Fascist Italy allowed
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#17328584542656292-900: The Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. Beside his native Yiddish and (Belo)Russian, Zamenhof studied German, Hebrew, Latin, English, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, French, Aramaic and Volapük , knowing altogether something of 13 different languages, which had an influence on Esperanto's linguistic properties. Esperantist and linguist Ilona Koutny notes that Esperanto's vocabulary, phrase structure, agreement systems, and semantic typology are similar to those of Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. However, Koutny and Esperantist Humphrey Tonkin also note that Esperanto has features that are atypical of Indo-European languages spoken in Europe, such as its agglutinative morphology. Claude Piron argued that Esperanto word-formation has more in common with that of Chinese than with typical European languages , and that
6413-610: The Montevideo Resolution . However, Esperanto is not one of the six official languages of the UN . The development of Esperanto has continued unabated into the 21st century. The advent of the Internet has had a significant impact on the language, as learning it has become increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo , and as speakers have increasingly networked on platforms such as Amikumu . With up to two million speakers, it
6534-583: The first book of Esperanto grammar was published in Warsaw on July 26, 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades; at first, primarily in the Russian Empire and Central Europe, then in other parts of Europe, the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years before the world congresses, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals. Zamenhof's name for
6655-598: The vocabulary as a whole. This includes the study of lexical relations between words, such as whether two terms are synonyms or antonyms. Lexical semantics categorizes words based on semantic features they share and groups them into semantic fields unified by a common subject. This information is used to create taxonomies to organize lexical knowledge, for example, by distinguishing between physical and abstract entities and subdividing physical entities into stuff and individuated entities . Further topics of interest are polysemy, ambiguity, and vagueness . Lexical semantics
6776-627: The 1920s as the heyday of the Esperanto movement. During this time, Anarchism as a political movement was very supportive of both anationalism and the Esperanto language. Fran Novljan was one of the chief promoters of Esperanto in the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia . He was among the founders of the Croatian Prosvjetni savez (Educational Alliance), of which he was the first secretary, and organized Esperanto institutions in Zagreb . Novljan collaborated with Esperanto newspapers and magazines, and
6897-546: The 1970s Esperanto was used as the basis for Defense Language Aptitude Tests. Beginning in 1908, there were efforts to establish the world's first Esperanto state in Neutral Moresnet , which at the time was a Belgian – Prussian condominium in central-western Europe. Any such efforts came to an end with the beginning of World War I and the German invasion of Belgium , voiding the treaty which established joint sovereignty over
7018-420: The cognitive conceptual structures of humans are universal or relative to their linguistic background. Another research topic concerns the psychological processes involved in the application of grammar. Other investigated phenomena include categorization, which is understood as a cognitive heuristic to avoid information overload by regarding different entities in the same way, and embodiment , which concerns how
7139-454: The conditions under which it would be true. This can happen even if one does not know whether the conditions are fulfilled. The semiotic triangle , also called the triangle of meaning, is a model used to explain the relation between language, language users, and the world, represented in the model as Symbol , Thought or Reference , and Referent . The symbol is a linguistic signifier , either in its spoken or written form. The central idea of
7260-408: The context, like the deictic terms here and I . To avoid these problems, referential theories often introduce additional devices. Some identify meaning not directly with objects but with functions that point to objects. This additional level has the advantage of taking the context of an expression into account since the same expression may point to one object in one context and to another object in
7381-478: The contrast between alive and dead or fast and slow . One term is a hyponym of another term if the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For example, ant is a hyponym of insect . A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features of the type it belongs to. A robin is a prototype of a bird but a penguin is not. Two words with the same pronunciation are homophones like flour and flower , while two words with
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#17328584542657502-399: The corresponding physical object. The relation is only established indirectly through the mind of the language user. When they see the symbol, it evokes a mental image or a concept, which establishes the connection to the physical object. This process is only possible if the language user learned the meaning of the symbol before. The meaning of a specific symbol is governed by the conventions of
7623-519: The decision. However, two years later, the League recommended that its member states include Esperanto in their educational curricula. The French government retaliated by banning all instruction in Esperanto in France's schools and universities. The French Ministry of Public Instruction said that "French and English would perish and the literary standard of the world would be debased". Nonetheless, many people see
7744-401: The education systems of several countries, including Hungary and China. Esperanto was also the first language of teaching and administration of the now-defunct International Academy of Sciences San Marino . The League of Nations made attempts to promote the teaching of Esperanto in its member countries, but the resolutions were defeated (mainly by French delegates, who did not feel there
7865-541: The fact that it is possible to master some aspects of a language while lacking others, like when a person knows how to pronounce a word without knowing its meaning. As a subfield of semiotics, semantics has a more narrow focus on meaning in language while semiotics studies both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Semiotics investigates additional topics like the meaning of non-verbal communication , conventional symbols , and natural signs independent of human interaction. Examples include nodding to signal agreement, stripes on
7986-423: The foreground while the base is the background that provides the context of this aspect without being at the center of attention. For example, the profile of the word hypotenuse is a straight line while the base is a right-angled triangle of which the hypotenuse forms a part. Cognitive semantics further compares the conceptual patterns and linguistic typologies across languages and considers to what extent
8107-408: The goal they serve. Fields like religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life , which is about finding a purpose in life or the significance of existence in general. Linguistic meaning can be analyzed on different levels. Word meaning is studied by lexical semantics and investigates the denotation of individual words. It is often related to concepts of entities, like how
8228-422: The ideas that an expression evokes in the minds of language users. According to causal theories, meaning is determined by causes and effects, which behaviorist semantics analyzes in terms of stimulus and response. Further theories of meaning include truth-conditional semantics , verificationist theories, the use theory , and inferentialist semantics . The study of semantic phenomena began during antiquity but
8349-511: The language in Dr. Esperanto's International Language (Esperanto: Unua Libro ), which he published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto . Early adopters of the language liked the name Esperanto and soon used it to describe his language. The word esperanto translates into English as "one who hopes". Within the range of constructed languages, Esperanto occupies a middle ground between "naturalistic" (imitating existing natural languages) and
8470-439: The language learning platform Duolingo launched a free Esperanto course for English speakers On March 25, 2016, when the first Duolingo Esperanto course completed its beta-testing phase, that course had 350,000 people registered to learn Esperanto through the medium of English. By July 2018, the number of learners had risen to 1.36 million. On July 20, 2018, Duolingo changed from recording users cumulatively to reporting only
8591-580: The language of one of Germany's Axis allies . In Imperial Japan , the left wing of the Japanese Esperanto movement was forbidden, but its leaders were careful enough not to give the impression to the government that the Esperantists were socialist revolutionaries, which proved a successful strategy. After the October Revolution of 1917, Esperanto was given a measure of government support by
8712-453: The language user's bodily experience affects the meaning of expressions. Frame semantics is an important subfield of cognitive semantics. Its central idea is that the meaning of terms cannot be understood in isolation from each other but needs to be analyzed on the background of the conceptual structures they depend on. These structures are made explicit in terms of semantic frames. For example, words like bride, groom, and honeymoon evoke in
8833-486: The language was simply Internacia Lingvo ("International Language"). December 15, Zamenhof's birthday, is now regarded as Zamenhof Day or Esperanto Book Day. The autonomous territory of Neutral Moresnet , between what is today Belgium and Germany, had a sizable proportion of Esperanto-speaking citizens among its small, diverse population. There was a proposal to make Esperanto its official language. However, neither Belgium nor Germany had surrendered their claims to
8954-429: The language would be used by radio amateurs in international communications, but its actual use for radio communications was negligible. The United States Army has published military phrase books in Esperanto, to be used from the 1950s until the 1970s in war games by mock enemy forces . A field reference manual, FM 30-101-1 Feb. 1962, contained the grammar, English-Esperanto-English dictionary, and common phrases. In
9075-457: The meaning of a word by identifying all its semantic features. A semantic or lexical field is a group of words that are all related to the same activity or subject. For instance, the semantic field of cooking includes words like bake , boil , spice , and pan . The context of an expression refers to the situation or circumstances in which it is used and includes time, location, speaker, and audience. It also encompasses other passages in
9196-492: The meaning of complex expressions by analyzing their parts, handling ambiguity, vagueness, and context-dependence, and using the extracted information in automatic reasoning . It forms part of computational linguistics , artificial intelligence , and cognitive science . Its applications include machine learning and machine translation . Cultural semantics studies the relation between linguistic meaning and culture. It compares conceptual structures in different languages and
9317-407: The meaning of particular expressions, like the semantics of the word fairy . As a field of inquiry, semantics has both an internal and an external side. The internal side is interested in the connection between words and the mental phenomena they evoke, like ideas and conceptual representations. The external side examines how words refer to objects in the world and under what conditions a sentence
9438-435: The meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics relies on logic and mathematics to provide precise frameworks of the relation between language and meaning. Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual structures used to understand
9559-655: The meaning of the name George Washington is the person with this name. General terms refer not to a single entity but to the set of objects to which this term applies. In this regard, the meaning of the term cat is the set of all cats. Similarly, verbs usually refer to classes of actions or events and adjectives refer to properties of individuals and events. Simple referential theories face problems for meaningful expressions that have no clear referent. Names like Pegasus and Santa Claus have meaning even though they do not point to existing entities. Other difficulties concern cases in which different expressions are about
9680-421: The meaning of the words they are part of, as in inanimate and dishonest . Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences. It relies on the principle of compositionality to explore how the meaning of complex expressions arises from the combination of their parts. The different parts can be analyzed as subject , predicate , or argument . The subject of a sentence usually refers to a specific entity while
9801-452: The meanings of sentences?", "How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the things words refer to?", and "What is the connection between what a word means, and the contexts in which it is used?". The main disciplines engaged in semantics are linguistics , semiotics , and philosophy . Besides its meaning as a field of inquiry, semantics can also refer to theories within this field, like truth-conditional semantics , and to
9922-436: The meanings of the constituents affect one another. Semantics can focus on a specific language, like English, but in its widest sense, it investigates meaning structures relevant to all languages. As a descriptive discipline, it aims to determine how meaning works without prescribing what meaning people should associate with particular expressions. Some of its key questions are "How do the meanings of words combine to create
10043-413: The meanings of their parts. Truth is a property of statements that accurately present the world and true statements are in accord with reality . Whether a statement is true usually depends on the relation between the statement and the rest of the world. The truth conditions of a statement are the way the world needs to be for the statement to be true. For example, it belongs to the truth conditions of
10164-467: The mind the frame of marriage. Conceptual semantics shares with cognitive semantics the idea of studying linguistic meaning from a psychological perspective by examining how humans conceptualize and experience the world. It holds that meaning is not about the objects to which expressions refer but about the cognitive structure of human concepts that connect thought, perception, and action. Conceptual semantics differs from cognitive semantics by introducing
10285-448: The model is that there is no direct relation between a linguistic expression and what it refers to, as was assumed by earlier dyadic models. This is expressed in the diagram by the dotted line between symbol and referent. The model holds instead that the relation between the two is mediated through a third component. For example, the term apple stands for a type of fruit but there is no direct connection between this string of letters and
10406-736: The new communist states in the former Russian Empire and later by the Soviet Union government, with the Soviet Esperantist Union being established as an organization that, temporarily, was officially recognized. In his biography on Joseph Stalin , Leon Trotsky mentions that Stalin had studied Esperanto. However, in 1937, at the height of the Great Purge , Stalin completely reversed the Soviet government's policies on Esperanto; many Esperanto speakers were executed, exiled or held in captivity in
10527-1075: The number of "active learners" (i.e., those who are studying at the time and have not yet completed the course), which as of October 2022 stands at 299,000 learners. On October 26, 2016, a second Duolingo Esperanto course, for which the language of instruction is Spanish, appeared on the same platform and which as of April 2021 has a further 176,000 students. A third Esperanto course, taught in Brazilian Portuguese, began its beta-testing phase on May 14, 2018, and as of April 2021, 220,000 people are using this course and 155,000 people in May 2022. A fourth Esperanto course, taught in French, began its beta-testing phase in July 2020, and as of March 2021 has 72,500 students and 101,000 students in May 2022. As of October 2018, Lernu! , another online learning platform for Esperanto, has 320,000 registered users, and nearly 75,000 monthly visits. 50,000 users possess at least
10648-438: The number of Esperanto features shared with Slavic languages warrants the identification of a Slavic-derived stratum of language structure that he calls the "Middle Plane". Esperanto typically has 22 to 24 consonants (depending on the phonemic analysis and individual speaker), five vowels, and two semivowels that combine with the vowels to form six diphthongs . (The consonant /j/ and semivowel /i̯/ are both written ⟨j⟩, and
10769-581: The number of people who know how to speak Esperanto at around 100,000. Concentration of speakers is highest in Europe, East Asia, and South America. Although no country has adopted Esperanto officially, Esperantujo ("Esperanto-land") is used as a name for the collection of places where it is spoken. The language has also gained a noticeable presence on the internet, as it became increasingly accessible on platforms such as Duolingo , Misplaced Pages , Amikumu and Google Translate . Esperanto speakers are often called "Esperantists" ( Esperantistoj ). Esperanto
10890-530: The petitions... About the same time, in the middle of the block marched a huge demonstration of people holding posters reading "Learn Esperanto", "Support the Universal language", "Esperanto the language of hope and expectation", "Esperanto the bond for international communication" and so on, and many "Sign the petitions". I will never forget that rich-poor, sad-glad parade and among all these people stood two fiery red tramway cars waiting on their opposite lanes and also
11011-564: The predicate describes a feature of the subject or an event in which the subject participates. Arguments provide additional information to complete the predicate. For example, in the sentence "Mary hit the ball", Mary is the subject, hit is the predicate, and the ball is an argument. A more fine-grained categorization distinguishes between different semantic roles of words, such as agent, patient, theme, location, source, and goal. Verbs usually function as predicates and often help to establish connections between different expressions to form
11132-401: The problem of meaning from a psychological perspective or how the mind of the language user affects meaning. As a subdiscipline of cognitive linguistics , it sees language as a wide cognitive ability that is closely related to the conceptual structures used to understand and represent the world. Cognitive semanticists do not draw a sharp distinction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of
11253-601: The pronoun you in either case. Closely related fields are intercultural semantics, cross-cultural semantics, and comparative semantics. Pragmatic semantics studies how the meaning of an expression is shaped by the situation in which it is used. It is based on the idea that communicative meaning is usually context-sensitive and depends on who participates in the exchange, what information they share, and what their intentions and background assumptions are. It focuses on communicative actions, of which linguistic expressions only form one part. Some theorists include these topics within
11374-440: The proposal with only one voice against, the French delegate, Gabriel Hanotaux . Hanotaux opposed all recognition of Esperanto at the League, from the first resolution on December 18, 1920, and subsequently through all efforts during the next three years. Hanotaux did not approve of how the French language was losing its position as the international language and saw Esperanto as a threat, effectively wielding his veto power to block
11495-526: The proposed language as a living one". The goal for Esperanto to become a global auxiliary language was not Zamenhof's only goal; he also wanted to "enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication". After some ten years of development, which Zamenhof spent translating literature into Esperanto, as well as writing original prose and verse,
11616-497: The public meaning that expressions have, like the meaning found in general dictionary definitions. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is the private or subjective meaning that individuals associate with expressions. It can diverge from the literal meaning, like when a person associates the word needle with pain or drugs. Meaning is often analyzed in terms of sense and reference , also referred to as intension and extension or connotation and denotation . The referent of an expression
11737-404: The region, with the latter having adopted a more aggressive stance towards pursuing its claim around the turn of the century, even being accused of sabotage and administrative obstruction to force the issue. The outbreak of World War I would bring about the end of neutrality, with Moresnet initially left as "an oasis in a desert of destruction" following the German invasion of Belgium. The territory
11858-450: The relation between expressions and their denotation. One of its key tasks is to provide frameworks of how language represents the world, for example, using ontological models to show how linguistic expressions map to the entities of that model. A common idea is that words refer to individual objects or groups of objects while sentences relate to events and states. Sentences are mapped to a truth value based on whether their description of
11979-403: The role of object language and metalanguage at the same time. This is the case in monolingual English dictionaries , in which both the entry term belonging to the object language and the definition text belonging to the metalanguage are taken from the English language. Lexical semantics is the sub-field of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines semantic aspects of individual words and
12100-402: The same entity. For instance, the expressions Roger Bannister and the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to the same person but do not mean exactly the same thing. This is particularly relevant when talking about beliefs since a person may understand both expressions without knowing that they point to the same entity. A further problem is given by expressions whose meaning depends on
12221-412: The same proposition, like the English sentence "the tree is green" and the German sentence "der Baum ist grün" . Utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and is about the meaning of an expression on a particular occasion. Sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart in cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony . Semantics is primarily interested in
12342-427: The same spelling are homonyms , like a bank of a river in contrast to a bank as a financial institution. Hyponymy is closely related to meronymy , which describes the relation between part and whole. For instance, wheel is a meronym of car . An expression is ambiguous if it has more than one possible meaning. In some cases, it is possible to disambiguate them to discern the intended meaning. The term polysemy
12463-440: The scope of semantics while others consider them part of the distinct discipline of pragmatics. Theories of meaning explain what meaning is, what meaning an expression has, and how the relation between expression and meaning is established. Referential theories state that the meaning of an expression is the entity to which it points. The meaning of singular terms like names is the individual to which they refer. For example,
12584-410: The sentence "it is raining outside" that raindrops are falling from the sky. The sentence is true if it is used in a situation in which the truth conditions are fulfilled, i.e., if there is actually rain outside. Truth conditions play a central role in semantics and some theories rely exclusively on truth conditions to analyze meaning. To understand a statement usually implies that one has an idea about
12705-498: The stress on the second i , but when the word is used without the final o ( famili’ ), the stress remains on the second i : [fa.mi.ˈli] . The 23 consonants are: There is some degree of allophony: A large number of consonant clusters can occur, up to three in initial position (as in stranga , "strange") and five in medial position (as in ekssklavo , "former slave"). Final clusters are uncommon except in unassimilated names, poetic elision of final o , and
12826-553: The suspicion of many states. Repression was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany , Francoist Spain up until the 1950s, and the Soviet Union under Stalin , from 1937 to 1956. In Nazi Germany, there was a motivation to ban Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish, and due to the internationalist nature of Esperanto, which was perceived as "Bolshevist". In his work, Mein Kampf , Adolf Hitler specifically mentioned Esperanto as an example of
12947-500: The territory. The Treaty of Versailles subsequently awarded the disputed territory to Belgium, effective January 10, 1920. The self-proclaimed micronation of Rose Island , on an artificial island near Italy in the Adriatic Sea , used Esperanto as its official language in 1968. Another micronation, the extant Republic of Molossia , near Dayton, Nevada , uses Esperanto as an official language alongside English. On May 28, 2015,
13068-400: The uncommon consonant /dz/ is written with the digraph ⟨dz⟩, which is the only consonant that does not have its own letter.) Tone is not used to distinguish meanings of words. Stress is always on the second-to-last vowel in proper Esperanto words, unless a final vowel o is elided , a phenomenon mostly occurring in poetry. For example, familio "family" is [fa.mi.ˈli.o] , with
13189-569: The use of Esperanto, finding its phonology similar to that of Italian and publishing some tourist material in the language. During and after the Spanish Civil War , Francoist Spain suppressed anarchists , socialists and Catalan nationalists for many years, among whom the use of Esperanto was extensive, but in the 1950s the Esperanto movement was again tolerated. In 1954, the United Nations — through UNESCO — granted official support to Esperanto as an international auxiliary language in
13310-407: The word dog is associated with the concept of the four-legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning falls into the field of phrasal semantics and concerns the denotation of full sentences. It usually expresses a concept applying to a type of situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt". The meaning of a sentence is often referred to as a proposition . Different sentences can express
13431-432: The world and see them instead as interrelated phenomena. They study how the interaction between language and human cognition affects the conceptual organization in very general domains like space, time, causation, and action. The contrast between profile and base is sometimes used to articulate the underlying knowledge structure. The profile of a linguistic expression is the aspect of the knowledge structure that it brings to
13552-542: The world is in correspondence with its ontological model. Formal semantics further examines how to use formal mechanisms to represent linguistic phenomena such as quantification , intensionality , noun phrases , plurals , mass terms, tense , and modality . Montague semantics is an early and influential theory in formal semantics that provides a detailed analysis of how the English language can be represented using mathematical logic. It relies on higher-order logic , lambda calculus , and type theory to show how meaning
13673-426: The world. A group of people had organized and sent letters to the government asking to change the name of the street where Dr. Zamenhof lived for many years when he invented Esperanto, from Dzika to Zamenhofa. They were told that a petition with a large number of signatures would be needed. That took time so they organized demonstrations carrying large posters encouraging people to learn the universal language and to sign
13794-406: The world. Other branches of semantics include conceptual semantics , computational semantics , and cultural semantics. Theories of meaning are general explanations of the nature of meaning and how expressions are endowed with it. According to referential theories , the meaning of an expression is the part of reality to which it points. Ideational theories identify meaning with mental states like
13915-612: Was a need for it). The Chinese government has used Esperanto since 2001 for an Esperanto version of its China Internet Information Center . China also uses Esperanto in China Radio International , and for the internet magazine El Popola Ĉinio . The Vatican Radio has an Esperanto version of its podcasts and its website. In the summer of 1924, the American Radio Relay League adopted Esperanto as its official international auxiliary language, and hoped that
14036-406: Was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil. It was invented in 1887 and designed so that anyone could learn it in a few short months. Dr. Zamenhof lived on Dzika Street, No. 9, which
14157-536: Was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof , a Jewish ophthalmologist from Białystok , then part of the Russian Empire , but now part of Poland . According to Zamenhof, he created the language to reduce the "time and labor we spend in learning foreign tongues", and to foster harmony between people from different countries: "Were there but an international language, all translations would be made into it alone ... and all nations would be united in
14278-611: Was formally annexed by Prussia in 1915, though without international recognition. After the war, a great opportunity for Esperanto seemingly presented itself, when the Iranian delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the language be adopted for use in international relations following a report by a Japanese delegate to the League named Nitobe Inazō , in the context of the 13th World Congress of Esperanto, held in Prague . Ten delegates accepted
14399-402: Was just around the corner from the street on which we lived. Brother Afrum was so impressed with that idea that he learned Esperanto in a very short time at home from a little book. He then bought many dozens of them and gave them out to relatives, friends, just anyone he could, to support that magnificent idea for he felt that this would be a common bond to promote relationships with fellow men in
14520-469: Was not recognized as an independent field of inquiry until the 19th century. Semantics is relevant to the fields of formal logic, computer science , and psychology . Semantics is the study of meaning in languages . It is a systematic inquiry that examines what linguistic meaning is and how it arises. It investigates how expressions are built up from different layers of constituents, like morphemes , words , clauses , sentences , and texts , and how
14641-684: Was the author of the Esperanto textbook Internacia lingvo esperanto i Esperanto en tridek lecionoj . In 1920s Korea , socialist thinkers pushed for the use of Esperanto through a series of columns in The Dong-a Ilbo as resistance to both Japanese occupation as well as a counter to the growing nationalist movement for Korean language standardization. This lasted until the Mukden Incident in 1931, when changing colonial policy led to an outright ban on Esperanto education in Korea . Esperanto attracted
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