LANGUAGE (CONTINUE) -SOLEHA

On Friday class, January 4, 2004, before the presentation started, we had continued our lesson about “language”. Complexity of language also involves “slangs”, “metaphor”, “analogies”, “similies”, “perception” and “extent of language”

Slangs refer to words that have many meanings. People do not read about slangs in proper literature book but it is learned through daily lives. Among English slangs that frequently used are “hot”, “cool” and “too phat”. These three words are basically bringing the same meaning of interesting and attractive. Another slangs word is “bling2” and it is referred to accessories. As I am Malaysian, I also know several Malay words that are used in slangs. For example, “cun”, “kot”, “the tarik kau” and so on. Each of these words has its own meaning and it is understood by people although it is not mentioned in any dictionaries.

Metaphors, analogies and similies are quite same but they are also different at certain points. Metaphors are used when we are trying to explain something by using something else. However, similies are used when we want to put any relations to something that we are going to say. For example, “cars to men are as shopping to women.” In addition, expressions are words related to oral language. The example of expressions could be, “do you want me to lend a hand?” Other component of language that we had discussed is perception. As we know, different people have different perception. This happens because people see things through different ways. Therefore, in conveying message to others, a communicator must consider about the audience’s perception.

In language, it always has new words. As we had discussed, things from slangs maybe come out in dictionary as new words. The extent of language is also considered as complexity of language. For example, artificial language is language that is created to represent language that is used everyday such as JAVA language. Besides, another type of extent of language is specialized language such as Jargons. Jargons refer to language that is used by certain group of people.