What Is Language?

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TigerNinja
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What Is Language?

Post by TigerNinja »

The process whereby a certain group of symbols can come together to have a larger meaning, even in simply sentences without poetry or allusions such as, "What will we eat for dinner tonight?" In that sentence there was a near future tense with an aspect of uncertainty leading to the necessity of the "What" an there was also a widely understood imperfect time reference. Tonight can mean multiple things. It can mean at 7pm or midnight or 4am in the morning. Either one of them constitutes as tonight, but due to the context, the speak and the listener, we can all understand what is portrayed by tonight. They are symbols with a larger meaning, and when you go into poetry, the symbols have a large meaning which means that the large meaning has a larger meaning to it portrayed through the smaller meaning portrayed through symbols.

Is your mind not yet blown?

The sheer complexity and number of definitions to simple phrases from colloquialisms and the like show the extensive nature of language, all packaged neatly into a group of symbols. With all of this, and so many languages, what actually defines a language. Does poetry in and of itself constitute as a language, as the meaning portrayed is by symbols meaning something larger. In the essence of it, aside from soundwaves and a means of communication? Tell me your thoughts on language.
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
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Present awareness
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Present awareness »

Language is simply sounds in the air, made to represent things which aren’t sounds in the air. As Shakespeare once said “A rose, by any other name, would still smell as sweet”. Hence, so many different language’s In the world, with different words (sounds) that represent the same object.

The meaning of words will vary from person to person, so misunderstandings occur all the time. Nevertheless, language is an effective way to communicate ideas and transfer knowlege, but not experience.
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QuarterMaster69
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by QuarterMaster69 »

Language is code that is used to transmit information from one mind to another.
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Pano
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Pano »

A construct,not the truth,not an actual thing,a delusional tool used for efficiency.The thoughts that you have when language comes to mind are not language.The word language by default is not language itself.I quote "Language is not language itself,it is but just a symbol representing something radically different than the actual symbol/code/call it whatever it is written/spoken or communicated through and/or with."
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Vivek7
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Vivek7 »

Language in itself meaningless and words are simply unintelligible utterances only if their signals are not understood. Through millenniums humans have internalized these signals, symbols and they have later on taken distinctive forms, shapes and are associated with meanings. The wisdom of language is to reach a wide spectrum of people and the internalization of these symbols, signals have been promoted to a unified language-form.
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Vivek7
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Vivek7 »

Language is language not the thing we have in mind, and yet today we love to play with language, and has gained the beauty of being something. The symbol flower a poet uses through use of language becomes a beautiful artistic presentation, and often more beautiful than the actual flower. Today we love to use it and pass time with it more anything else and that is the beauty and power of language.
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manisthajain
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by manisthajain »

Language is a talking of source to discuss anything. Still, both side agrees with the discussion, it's running when is still completed.

Today era, human makes many needful languages that make suitable and fast work.
Number2018
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Number2018 »

Language exists through the the split into two interdependent parts - a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement.
The first is expressing the sense, and the second is about the designating thing.
Number2018
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Number2018 »

For some philosophers, a subject of enancuation is not a human, it is so called abstract machine.
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Hereandnow
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Hereandnow »

Pano:
A construct,not the truth,not an actual thing,a delusional tool used for efficiency.The thoughts that you have when language comes to mind are not language.The word language by default is not language itself.I quote "Language is not language itself,it is but just a symbol representing something radically different than the actual symbol/code/call it whatever it is written/spoken or communicated through and/or with."
An interesting thing to say. The real challenge lies with, on the one hand, being stuck with language to make utterances at all, and on the other, being in a world that is overwhelmingly and nigh impossibly not language at all. Why impossible? Because what is not language cannot "thought," and the sensations of this broken arm of mine, say, is not language at all. Put yourself in that extraordinary twilight space where thought meets "world" and you are on the precipice of the most extraordinary philosophical journey, if you dare. It starts with Kant (for me, anyway). Then Kierkegaard and on into existentialism. But one should read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety right at the outset. Nothing more revolutionary at the level of the individual that this. Wittgenstein loved Kierkegaard and Sartre and Heidegger and Jaspers and so on owe so much to him that when you read him you discover these latter existentialists anew in every chapter.
Steve3007
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Steve3007 »

TigerNinja wrote:Is your mind not yet blown?
No. My mind is not not yet blown. It is blown.

I think one of the things that the first paragraph of your OP illustrates is that the words in a sentence are, in a sense, simply doors to a whole world of experience, so that the simplest of sentences can take a lifetime of experience and cultural background to fully decode. That's one reason why true language processing computer algorithms are so difficult to design.

Take, as another example, this:

"Ee bay gum lad, there's trouble at t' mill."

A short, simple sentence. But what does it mean? Well, if it means anything, then decoding it would require an understanding of such things as the Industrial Revolution, the associated mechanization of the textile industry, the dangers that were thereby introduced by having people and powerful machinery in close proximity and the historical background that led to these kinds of industries being prevalent particularly in Northern English cities.

A lot to unpack.
Steve3007
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Steve3007 »

Vivek7 wrote:Language is...
Stephen Fry wrote:Language is a whore, a mistress, a wife, a pen- friend, a check-out girl, a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen- up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.
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RJG
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by RJG »

Language is 'sensory association'; the association of one sensory experience with another.

When I experience the hearing of "C-A-T", I immediately experience the visual image of a "soft furry animal". Never fails.
Number2018
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by Number2018 »

The force, expressivity, and agency of language do not derive from its grammatical structure, they do not derive from a a combination of signifiers but from performative relations.
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JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What Is Language?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

Okay, after all the poetic responses (looking at you Steve and Stephen) I feel the need to give the over-analytic response.

It is (almost certainly?) the case that people can generate symbols in their brains that represent concepts. These concepts can be the products of experience (eg., the memory of dew on a fresh apple) or the source of experience (remembering the dew on the fresh apple). In some cases the concept is abstract, like the number 3.

Now, it is also the case that some concepts are so easily gained, like the number three, that it is likely that the same concept is symbolized in most or all human brains.

Finally, it is also the case that human brains have the capability of associating arbitrary concepts, like the number 3 and the word (pronounced or written) “three”. Similarly, concepts can be combined to form a new concept, like “three men”.

Given the above, it can be valuable for survival for one person who has a concept recently instigated in their brain, say by visual experience, to instigate that same concept in the brain of someone who has not had the pertinent visual experience. Thus, “Three men with spears coming up hill. Hide.” So language presumably developed for natural selection purposes.

Thus, it is a fortunate side effect that language becomes a “door to a whole world of experience.” But also, concepts can be combined to give more and more complex concepts. The more complex a concept is, the less likely it is to be identically represented in different brains, because one brain’s combination of concepts, giving, say, “justice”, may be comparable but not exactly the same as a different brain’s combination. Thus, philosophical discussion.

Okay, that’s enough. I’ll leave poetry as an exercise for the student.

*
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