Essay On Quadrilingualism

I just discovered the beauty of language.

I am an undergraduate student of language and literature at UP Baguio. As a freshie, I am currently taking my first major course, which is BLL 101: Introduction to Linguistics.

Linguistics and polyglotism

What is linguistics, anyway? It is a common belief that linguists are people who study, learn and speak multiple languages.

This is not true. People who speak multiple tongues are called polyglots. If a person speaks two languages, he/she is bilingual and someone who speaks three languages is called trilingual. Can you guess what is the term for a person who speaks four languages? Quadrilingual.

Multilingualism is, however, not the focus of linguistics.

The science of language

“Linguistics is the

Grammar is mostly perceived to be what is taught in school, but, as with polyglotism and linguistics, this is not the case.

Mental grammar refers to the built-in structures in the mind that help a person understand language. Children acquire these mental grammars at a young age, and is said to be universal and true for all languages.

Descriptive grammar is the grammar linguistics focus on. This type of grammar is concerned with how people speak, to describe how one person uses his/her language. A linguist might say that English speakers usually use double negatives, such as “I don’t want no more food.”

Language “purists”, however, despise the use of double negatives. Robert Lowth, who was a Bishop of the Church of England, proposed this idea. He said that when two negatives are used together, it becomes positive. He based this thought on Latin, which was considered a “pure” language at the time. Instead of saying, “I don’t want no more food,” someone should say, “I don’t want anymore food.”

While descriptive grammar describes how people speak, prescriptive grammar attempts to legislate rules for how people should speak. Other examples of this is the rule for splitting