ABSTRACT
A language might be defined as anything for which a grammar can be written, and a grammar defined as a set of rules which takes as input a vocabulary and delivers as output all and only the well-formed expressions of the language. From quite a different perspective, a language can be thought of in relation to the people who use it. So people could say of English, French, etc. that these are the conventional means of spoken and written communication used in Britain, France. Thinking in such terms tends to represent the arts as media of communication and to emphasize large-scale historical and geographical traditions rather than the individual artist. Natural languages have a hierarchical organization: a small inventory of significant sounds, phonemes, twenty to thirty-five in number, is used to construct the thousands of word forms which make up the vocabulary of a language.
