What Is Language?
- TigerNinja
- Posts: 92
- Joined: July 23rd, 2016, 3:59 am
What Is Language?
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.
- Present awareness
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Re: What Is Language?
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.
- QuarterMaster69
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Re: What Is Language?
- Pano
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Re: What Is Language?
- Vivek7
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Re: What Is Language?
- Vivek7
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Re: What Is Language?
- manisthajain
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Re: What Is Language?
Today era, human makes many needful languages that make suitable and fast work.
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Re: What Is Language?
The first is expressing the sense, and the second is about the designating thing.
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Re: What Is Language?
- Hereandnow
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- Favorite Philosopher: the moon and the stars
Re: What Is Language?
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.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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Re: What Is Language?
No. My mind is not not yet blown. It is blown.TigerNinja wrote:Is your mind not yet 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.
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Re: What Is Language?
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.
- RJG
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Re: What Is Language?
When I experience the hearing of "C-A-T", I immediately experience the visual image of a "soft furry animal". Never fails.
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Re: What Is Language?
- JamesOfSeattle
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Re: What Is Language?
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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2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
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