Before our next class (Thursday–remember, Tuesday follows a Monday schedule), post a comment to this blog post of at least 250 words summarizing your reading and today’s lecture. Since this was a formidable reading with advanced vocabulary, you can include some of the words and their definitions that many of you reported looking up during our discussion today.
Since we have a break before meeting again, use this time to catch up with all after-class writing assignments and post them on OpenLab. After we return on Thursday, all after-class assignments must be submitted on-time for full credit.
During our next class, we will talk about Walter Ong’s essay in our next class and practice using the library databases for your research project proposal and paper. In the meantime, consider your list of technologies and their relationship to language. Choose a technology to research that you think specifically influences how we use LANGUAGE (not simply how we communicate–look back at Fromkin for guidance on what we mean by language). Also, I would recommend choosing a technology that might have some utility for your career or for demonstrating your thinking about a technology that has a great deal of interest to you. Look at the Research Project link above for additional information about the proposal due in a few weeks.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is a distinguished professor at the prestigious University of Chicago. He is in the department of linguistics and is on the committee of evolutionary biology. He is also on a committee related to the Science, Technology and Society program. Because he is of such intellect, he writes about many complex ideas in his essay of the relationship between technology and language. He uses a strategy called rigor. This strategy’s objective is to cover all the possible bases, by addressing the points that can be brought up. In the essay he also provides a personalized definition of a word, and then he makes a point with the incorporation of the word. So, with these techniques, the main idea he portrays is that humans have a brain, and they have the function to hear and make sounds…so why not do more than that? This is defined as exaptation; when species have certain features in their body, meant for one certain function, but is used in a different function, that evolution didn’t predict it would. The prime example of this is what was discussed in class; how dinosaurs had feathers, originally to help regulate their body temperature, but over time the small dinosaurs developed the ability to fly with the se of their feathers. This is in comparison to humans, Mufwene states. He proposes the idea that we have the capability to communicate complex ideas with one another. By stating this idea, he introduces a discourse; shared ideas in a debatable form. The motif used throughout his essay is that our brain devours all types of information, and we are such complex human beings that we should use this to our advantage when it comes to language, because it is an everchanging thing that we can grasp and conform our minds to.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is the professor of the University of Chicago who played a significant role based on language by being linguistics in the university department and also goes into the field of the study of science and the evolution of biology. He defined language as a technology, our body and mind are developed for communication. Salikoko breaks down how language set as an ability to fulfill the need for daily human interactions. He revealed how discourse works in human connections, it shares conversations and debates about the different type of things. He mentioned several language terminologies, one of them is rigor. Rigor defines as a complication, but in the language itself, it helps the audiences thinking about objectives. Throughout our human interactions, it takes a step further with its evolvement. Those language evolvements are defined as the adaptation. Adaptation means that throughout human mutations, it gives the capabilities for us to survive. Human has the abilities to interact with complex ideas. For instance, animals couldn’t distinguish what happened before or what’s going to happen after by describing with their language, they couldn’t warn others to avoid predators from yesterday, but humans have the skill to express or differentiate the past and the present. Human has the mind made it feasible by our society and cognition compared to animals. The whole passage of “Language of Technology” proves the point that our brain desires to enrich the information. Language is not only the technology that we have, but exaptation also played an evolvement role in biology. Exaptation is an excellent example for bodyparts evolvement. It corrupts body part and evolves the capability of from the original form. Therefore, both language and science biology has transformed human interactions radically.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is a professor at the University of Chicago and is in the field of linguistics. He is part of a community that includes scholars and researchers who try to figure out how language came to be. In his essay, “Language as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address”, Mufwene argues that language is a kind of technology that has evolved throughout time as a form of adapting to our environment and how language does not just have one specific structure, but it consists of multiple parts that work together as one, like a computer. An example of this can be seen in the different forms of communicating. When people communicate to one another, they use the loudness of their voices and gestures of their hands, along with the expressions of their face to help communicate and understand with one another. He talks about how speech and sound developed over time through evolution. Homo Sapiens had to adapt to the environment as time went on to ensure their own survival. He also uses a lot of terminology that one might not understand if you aren’t familiar with the linguist terms. One of the words he uses is phonetic, which is the sounds that are made during speech. Another word Mufwene uses is exaptation. Exaptation is where an organism cop-opts with some of its body and uses that part of its body for something else that evolution did not intend it to be. Although Mufwene’s essay is long and has a lot of unfamiliar terminology, something that was discussed in class was how carefully he assembled his argument and how he tries to thoroughly answer every question someone may have about his argument. This kind of writing is called rigor. He does his best to cover all points of his writing and cites a lot of people, including himself. Something that I learned from this essay is that technology can be more than just a phone, a computer, an android, etc. It can also be language. Language that continues to evolve as time goes on and that has linguists asking themselves how it came to be.
Mr. Mufwene has a legendary track record in the field of linguistics, he published an impressive amount of work and on top of that he is a distinguished service professor at the university of Chicago. He opened up my mind to a lot of new concepts in his essay, “Language as Technology”. Mr. Mufwene presents his argument that language is a technology based on the definition that technology can serve as knowledge, lead to the development of products, and make our lives easier. When I first that argument I immediately thought of professor Kline and his piece, ” What is Technology?” because how many meanings technology could have and that technology does not have to be a physical product nor machine related. One of the words that Mr. Mufwene that gave me insight to what he was trying to get across was phonology, this word refers to the study of speech sounds in many different languages and their origins. Mufwene pointed out that hominids started to build a language system through sounds and passed on the knowledge from generation to generation until words developed from these sounds that we use in the 21st century. Another point that I did not noticed before was the Architectural differences between speech and singing, one system could just have tone and the other has tone and melody. Despite the words being the same language speech and signing are two different systems. I see Mr. Mufwene essay as a take on how language was the first technological system before any hardware that impacted our lives in history and that it is always evolving into a new system that is built differently, but never changes its original form.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is a linguistics researcher and professor at the University of Chicago. Like Mr. Kline at Stanford, Mr. Mufwene believes in the interdisciplinarity of the sciences and the humanities, and he examines the history of languages as he develops his theories. In his piece, “Language as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address,” he goes into great detail to try and explain how and why language has evolved as a collective technology. One of the words Mr. Mufwene used was “complexification”, which is how he describes how over time, language became more complex as humans’ social systems became more complex: more complex communication was the result. He theorizes that language is a technology used by people to complete certain tasks, that it is used as both a tool and a system, and that language was made by humanity for communication.
He introduces us to a slew of interesting words as he explains his theories on how grammar, syntax and lexical items have evolved through the use of language. I liked the word “rupestrian”, which describes paintings done on cave walls; “exaptation” is another great word which means to co-opt some part of the body to perform some other function that it was not originally intended to do through evolution. To that end, we discussed the example of birds, feathers and flight: dinosaurs originally had feathers simply to regulate their body heat. But over time and through trial and error, some smaller dinosaurs were able to use those feathers on outstretched wings in order to fly. He also uses some Latin phrases such as “ex nihilo” (out of nothing) when he referred to how language developed- out of exaptation and existing structures rather than out of nothing. He also used “hic et nunc”, which means “here and now”. He used this in a very interesting observation in which he explains that the human mind evolved to have the ability to understand things abstractly and so can think not just in the here and now, but also in terms of the past and future.
Mr. Mufwene takes pains to explain that all of his contentions are based on conjecture and theory, and so he doesn’t hold that they are infallible: some of his research is testable and some is not. Rather, he brings up all of these points about evolutionary linguistics, the human mind and language as a technology in order to develop a discourse. He cites many other scientists, agreeing with some and refuting others. He knows that we’ll never truly know how language evolved and came to be this complex system, but he wants to bring up all of these ideas so that others may contribute to the discussion and maybe bring new theories to the table.
Jessica L. Roman
ENG 1710
2/17/2018
Salikoko S. Mufwene is a distinguished Professor at the highly regards University of Chicago where he also earned his PhD, in Linguistics in 1979. He is an interdisciplinary academic who also serves on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology. Mufwene position holds language is not innate as we have previous rad but is a technology. Part of what allows him to post this is his ability to define his terms, in doing so the reader understands his definition of technology is much broader or that discussed in our previous reading. This attention to detail, or rigor, throughout his essay creates a solid argument of his beliefs that we as modern humans are actually speaking the evolution of languages. As students, we can learn from his model in how to create solid stance on our research and how we present it.
Mufwene posits that the capacity for language came to be through exaptation of our mental and cognitive as an epiphenomenon to our changes from the pressures that lead us to evolve as more complex being with complex societies. He take time to cover every facet of language and every stage from which it was produced. While much of what is presented cannot use hard evidence the ideas are just conjecture, these hypothesis are a result of the work of many. While his position may be against the innateness of language, he does not deny that humans have predisposition for the development of this complex form of communication. Mufwene also include physical modalities of communication like sign language in his argument, while also discussing the pros and cons of each as evolving humans and posits why speech because out default mode of communication.
As the essay is meant for an audience of his peer the essay itself, while rich with information, can be trying to get through for anyone who is not an expert in the field. While there were times I found myself getting lost and having to reread or even just admitting I had to skip a section The previous reading did allow for at least foundational understanding of some of the ideas presented. This article also served an almost never ending (or so it seems) supply of terms and vocabulary. While Mufwene sticks to his views, he, in writing this piece, is providing another avenue for the discourse of the origins of language.
On a personal note this assigned reading taught me that there are times I will not be able to understand every single part of a work and while I will always attempt to equip myself with the knowledge to have an understanding of information being presented There are also times we must admit we are not there (yet).
In Salikoko Mufwene’s “Language as Technology”, Mufwene uses theories from others in his writing which creates a discourse on how language came to be. He argues that language is also a technology considering its definition “technology is a means to fulfill a purpose, a device, a method, or process.” In technology, in order to produce and develop something useful to ourselves, the tools and systems must work together. Same goes for language, we must use our hearing capabilities and our body’s sound production system in order make it useful to us and develop technology of communication. Mufwene mentions the amazing things a human brain is capable of, how we can think abstractly and think of the past and future as well compared to animals who can only think of here and now. He also discusses language exaptation, how the brain and hardware was there from the beginning but at first were only adapted to function specifically such as for hearing. Our brains evolved into much more than a hardware for hearing over the years, eventually producing language. And of course through language, we were able to continuously evolve as human beings.
Despite Mufwene’s argument, I don’t really agree that language is a technology. I think that the development of language and development of technology are two different things. Technology is man-made and although it may be a part of us and our daily lives, it isn’t something that we were innate to. I agree in fact that language has come a long way since the days of a caveman but it’s something that all humans eventually adapt to naturally. Using gestures and grunting sounds are all ways to communicate instinctively as a human but not all humans can use a smartphone or know how to write. Maybe some may agree with Mufwene that language is a technology but I think it’s inherent.
This well-executed chapter written by Mr. Mufwene, a Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Has a well-pronounced grip on Language and Linguistic evolution gradually transforming into our present-day technology. It can be said that “Language as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address” is the story of how language became technology. Since our ancestral stage, people have developed language according to their convenience and several changes have occurred in the entire journey. Now, as the people are more prone to technology thus the languages are used in the process of technological developments through decoding and transformations. A bridge has been developed in between the human being and technology which helps further the process of developments.
The increase in hominids cognitive capacity lead to the expansion of our species vocabulary. Humans had the physiological weight of naming everyday entities, activities, and conditions, and that same expansion of perception led to the production of comments on these particular activities, entities, and conditions. This evolutionary step in our biology and way of communication marked the emergence of prediction strategies in our language. Functional distinctions examples could be “although, however” and an example the article used was “on the one hand, and on the other”. If vocabulary didn’t have these distinctions, humans wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively with cognitive thinking, these distinctions demonstrate thought. The article goes in depth of how our capabilities to communicate with language came to be, from our past to our current stage with technology.
A demonstration from the article that caught my fascination was the comparison of computers to living beings. Discussing languages without reference to a human’s physical components would be like talking about computers without any reference to their hardware. It would be foolish to make sense of the mind without knowledge of the neurological circuity to the brain. Humans would have had no understanding of language if our brains had not cooped vocalizations and gestures to communicate. Since language is not composed or restricted to one specification, just like computers, it consists of material and abstract parts.
Salikoko S. Mufwene “Language as Technology” was an engaging perspective into the world of language. As interdisciplinary professor at the University Of Chicago, he is apart of the Linguistic Department, the Committee of Evolutionary Biology , and the Committee of Conceptual and Historical Study of Science. Knowledgeable in myriad fields, Mufwene used numerous hypothetical theories to examine language. Is language a technology? Does it have a purpose or method for existing?
With his rigor writing style, there were times in which I was confused and unsure of Mufwene vocabulary use. Yet with research and the previous language readings in mind, I valued this writing. Viewing language as more than oral or written words with the suggestion that gestures and body language play an important role in how syntax is understood was very interesting. Body language can also be viewed as a technology because it is examined, reviewed, understood and the even imitated to convey a message. The ideas he described easily created discourse. Mufwene also looked at the evolutionary aspect of language. Animal communication is a unique concept since we must infer what the animals are conversing among themselves.This method is a survival trait. I began to view my dog’s actions with more appreciation. He had to learn a technique to convey his needs to me. In addition, this work made me view accents in different light. Pronunciation at times may sound strange. However, the communication is understood. My New York accent and my cousin’s Texas accent are different but conversing is effortless. The application of theories and ideas from the myriad perspectives Mufwene brings to life, makes me agree that language is a technology.
In addition, language has open doors to new innovations. Google translate has helped people of different dialect to understand one other with a click of a button. Social networking has allow communication from around the globe to be easy accessible. Sites like Youtube can also create one way communication content for public use. Language has open the door for communication techniques to developed and expand over time.
I never contemplated language as being a technology, like a game system or cooking utensils, but it is vital for everyday life. The way humans communicate have rules and regulations that must be followed. One cannot learn a language overnight. It is a learning process and skill. This is what makes language a technology. Although the origin of language is not easily understood, the theories about its beginning is thought provoking.
In class we went over Salikoko S. Mufwene’s “Language as Technology” as well as looked up information on the man himself. Mufwene’s “Language as Technology” a chapter from In search of Universal Grammar: From Norse to Zoque by Terje Lohndal says “that languages are technologies that different populations, at different evolutionary stages of the hominine phylogeny, developed piecemeal in response to their social pressures for richer and more explicit communication.” Mufwene believes Language to be a technology and system for the purpose of communication. Mufwene is apart of The University of Chicago’s Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division has several books and recorded speeches discussing the evolution and early purposes of language. Using the definition Mufwene’s definition of technology that “Technology (…) is a means to fulfill a purpose: a device, or method, or process” you can see how he connected language as being a technology. The purpose of language is to communicate and the fact that language is something humans developed in order to communicate.
While the Professor respects Mufwene’s work and acknowledges his research he says he personally does not think of language as a technology. Language is more of a skill than a technology, for language is not static it has more than one purpose and use. Discourse such as this is perhaps the This brought me back to a previous lesson we had where he says that. Language was potentially byproduct of natural and or sexual selection with a preference for someone that could communicate more effectively. We read of listed communication technologies such as Podcasts, Instant Messenger, Email and quiet a few more even citing youtube, Tumblr and varying forms of social media.
Salikoko mufwene is a professor at university at Chicago and he was part of the department of linguistics. In his essay “language as technology” Mufwene argues that language is a technology created by humans to fulfill a purpose (communication). He also tries to hypothesize how language came to be what it is today. In his essay he uses old quotes all the way back in the 18th century. For example, when he tries to raise the question on how language evolved form this holistic vocalizations to a digital communication system he quotes Jean-Jacques Rosseau from 1755. Mufwene also uses discourse in order to help find the answer to how language evolved in what it is today. He invites other people to join in this discussion and he uses other peoples thinking to further his hypothesis.
In our in-class discussion, we agreed that language is a technology and technology can be a system. We keep making language more and more complex because language is a forever changing thing, we keep adding more words and removing words or applying other definitions to them. We also discussed how exaptation falls into the creation of language. Early humans used the body’s ability to create sounds through evolution in order to create language. What if humans weren’t supposed to use that to create a language? This essay brings up lots of interesting questions that could bring up even more interesting answers.
TO: Professor Jason Ellis
FROM: Ronald C. Hinds
DATE: February 22, 2018
SUBJECT: Language as Technology
Salikoko S. Mufwene, who is the author of “The Ecology of Language Evolution,” published by Cambridge University press in 2001, and in 2013, is the author of “Language as Technology: some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address,” makes a credible, deliberate, methodical, well researched, painstaking contribution to develop his assumption that languages are communication technologies. He readily admits that his narrative is unfinished. It does, however, provide us with an abundance of food for thought. In its sixty (60) odd pages, which are generously sprinkled with rich sometimes daunting language, he raises the possibility that the “general architecture of language is hierarchical” with some of the building blocks more essential than others. Mufwene raises the idea of the phylogenetic emergence of language. By phylogenetic, he means relating to the evolutionary development and diversification of a species or group of organisms, or of a particular feature of an organism. As a Professional and Technical writing major in the City University of New York, CUNY system, and armed with a curious mind and using the dictionary as a collaborative tool, I am happy to be a part of his audience. I admire his steadfastness and attention to detail in exploring differences and similarities in the spoken language and “signing.” He employs footnotes and always gives “Jack he jacket and/or Jackie she jacket” (to use a colloquialism from my hometown of Georgetown, Guyana) when using material drawn from other sources; i.e. he gives credit where credit is due.
Mufwene cites Jan Koster, a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the latter who also studied at the University of Amsterdam, and who, after visiting MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976), received his PhD in 1978. Koster posits that language is only based on our innate biological capacities. Koster continues that language is a matter of applied biology, in other words, a form of technology. Mufwene refers to Dr. Steven Pinker, a linguist, cognitive psychologist and popular science author, and to Dr. Ray Jackendoff, president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), 2003, and president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, to further explain that language is “an [evolutionary] adaptation for the communication of knowledge and intentions.” Mufwene writes that sign language evolved from gestures that may have preceded intentional spoken communication including the language spoken by the ancestors of humans. As time moved on and these hominines(s) gradually spoke, their hands were freed up to hunt, gather wood, carry tools even while simultaneously grunting, and, later on, speaking. Dr. Derek Bickerton, who is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, made a point that human beings may have been speaking proto-language whilst using words without syntax as long as two (2) million years ago. Over the span of many centuries this evolved into sentences thanks to the emergence of syntax. These were long, gradual processes but language evolved.
When we consider the size of vocabulary used by a same-language community, in the case of the English Language over 100,000 words, it is truly remarkable that speakers and “signers” from this same-language community can, through innovation, actually communicate effectively. Mufwene said that, in terms of vocabulary, “languages are ingenious technologies.” Where Stephen Jay Kline, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Values, Technology and Society at the vaunted Stanford University, sees technology as hardware and artifacts, Mufwene sees languages as cultural artifacts.
Mufwene takes us through different strategies including the emergence of predication, subject and predicate, parts of speech; nouns and verbs, emergence of quantities; including basic numerals, tense; present, past and future, to build his case that communicative technology became more and more sophisticated over time. Mufwene pontificates about the concept of gradualism that he thinks is consistent with Darwinian evolutionary theory. The gradual complexification of the hominine’s cognitive capacity and need for more sophisticated communication is apropos to a sequentially gradient continuous of a protolanguage of the hominids to modern human languages spoken by Homo sapiens. This technology did not evolve as an “abrupt, catastrophic style of evolution.”
There is so much to be gained, in terms of a history of language worldview, if and when one views language through the prism of technology and we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Salikoko S. Mufwene and his fellow travelers for lifting a shade from the window to let the light rays in.
References
Koster, J. (2009). Ceaseless, Unpredictable Creativity: Language as Technology. Bio linguistics. Retrieved on 19 February, 2018 from
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/article/download/97/95
Mufwene, S. S. (2013). Language as Technology: some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address. In T. Lohndal (Ed.), In search of universal grammar: from Old Norse to Zoque (pp. 327-358). Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company. Retrieved on 19 February 2018 from http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/publications/Language%20as%20Technology.pdf
Keywords: architecture of language, phylogenetic, epiphenomena, rupestrian, exapting extant
Author Salikoko S. Mufwene, who is also a professor at the University of Chicago, explains to us the evolution of language in his article “Language as Technology”. When we think about the term technology we visualize computers, cars, smartphones, etc. Personally we don’t really see language as being a technological advancement because it is something that comes natural to us as human beings Language is something that is apart of us and not really something that we would classify as a device r a gadget. However, Mufwene disputes that claim early in his article. “Technology is a means to fulfill a purpose: a device, or method, or process.” Based on this statement one can begin to drift away from the mindset that technology Is mainly based on electronic devices and realize that language is a form of technology as well. The primary purpose or use of language is for communication does to transfer information. The author later goes into detail about how language is a form of technology by comparing the brain to a computer and how language and computers are both linked to physical components. He also discusses about how humans use sounds that they make with their bodies as well as gestures to establish a structure of language. He establishes the difference between speech and sign language and explains how they have different minimal units. Even though there is a difference between the two, they are still forms of communication and the author believes that it will help us establish a communicative system that can also be linguistic.
In the essay “Language as Technology’ by Salikoko Mufwene, he argues that language is in fact a technology. Mufwene argues that language has evolved over time to create a needed proper system of communication to help manage communities and relations between man. In the essay, Mufwene defines language as “a means to fulfill a purpose: a device, or method, or process.” Mufwene as states that i can be “knowledge (when used to handle or explain something else), practice (when extended to the solution of a problem) … in order to make our lives easier or helps us solve problems.” With language we are able to document, and thus share whichever way the knowledge we’ve accrued, at any point in time, to whomever. Language allows for knowledge to never not be known, whether it be shared between two individuals, or for the entire world. With practice, language is used to confer ideas between a set of people to work towards a solution to a problem. I agree with the idea that Mufwene is posing that language is a technology. Language is man’s creation to communicate with one another more efficiently, for whatever purpose. Man first used hand signs as a means of communication, which better suited them for hunting and having a universal means of communication. As Mufwene notes, the hominies later evolved and began speaking which allowed them to use there hands for more important things for their survival. In the end, however, language has clearly made our lives immensely easier. Without language we would have most likely succumbed to extinction, or our society would not have evolved to be at the juncture that we are currently at.
Salikoko S. Mufwene is a professor and a linguistics researcher at the prestigious University in Chicago. His area of study is interdisciplinary where he looks at both the science and the humanities how one area fulfills the other in order to form one. In his essay titles, “Languages as Technology: Some questions that evolutionary linguistics should address” he uses a word, that was greatly emphasized in class called “complexification”. This word means basically to make something more complex or difficult. In Mufwenes’ words the complexification is how language became more difficult over time and as humans’ technologies had become complex as well. Both resulting in more difficult communication as languages is human’s technology needed to easy their everyday life’s and to be able to complete their daily routines. In this the interdisciplinary field is seen. As both language and technology work together to become something greater than just one piece by itself.
In addition, in his text Mufwene tends to use quotes that are coming from quite old sources as he then uses those definition for his own benefits, as mentioned in class. In his writing he tends to be very careful when building on his arguments. He tells the reader how he sees the revolution of languages based on other opinions and theories, but he is also lenient and wanting to see more discourse in his writing. In his writing he does a lot of hypothesizing on other of those theories and opinions. Lastly, in his writing he tends to paraphrase a lot of his own words.
Salikoko Mufwene was born in Mbaya-Lareme in the Democratic Public of the Congo. He is a linguist. He works as a Professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He has worked extensively on the development of a plethora of languages. He published several articles and chapter regarding linguistics. Mufwene graduated and received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1979.
Mufwene argued about reframing language natural to technology, that it was the system to solve the problem of technology.
Salikoko Mufwene argues that language is a technology and that language can be used as a tool/technology to create new, albeit fictional ones. Mufwene’s “Language as Technology: Some Questions Evolutionary Linguistic Should Address,” redefines language from a natural ability like Fromkin, to a technology broadly defined. A system used to get the work of communication done for to solve the problem communication within an agree upon system of encoding, and deciphering sound utterances. He argues that because language is “a means to fulfill purpose” and mean “can be knowledge when used or explain something else. Practice, when extended to a solution to a problem or science as in scientific and technology. When scientific knowledge assigned to a practical thing in order to make our life easier to help us solve problem.” all of which are broad definition for technology.
Language itself is technology Mufwene say. Or a means to fulfil a purpose namely communications. There are some connections between Victoria Fromkin and Mufwene.