🚀 go-pugleaf

Thanks for all the reactions I got on my question:

"What is language, its purpose, its origin?"

A summary of what you all 'taught' me and some reactions of my own:

>*** 1. Crackpot:
>"Cool!  Language is a set of 500,000 different anchors!
>A statement is a string of anchors designed to elicit a state!
>That's all there is to it!"

I think there is a usage here of some specific theoretical terms and
I'm not really catching the drift ...
And why the number 500.000?

>*** 2. James Malcom:
>"Origin: In the human mind.
>Purpose: To inform, to entertain, and to persuade.  Often, all three at once."

Is it like that  that with these three purposes we've mentioned all
purposes? And if so, can we say that language has a mainly social
purpose?

>*** 3. PStuart:
>"'Language is a virus...' -- William S. Burroughs"

I like the quote but I'd like to have some context to go with that ...

>*** 4. R. Wallace Hale:
>"Device developed by sentient entities to facilitate communications."

I like the way this is worded: it's very broad and allows a large
scale of different kind of languages.
By saying developped however, is this like these entities have planned
language to be as it suited them? Or shall we look at it from the
point of evolution? But in both cases the definiton looses some of its
broadness. In the first case: what about the natural (spoken)
language? I can't imagine someone planned it ... In the last case: how
about computer languages?

>*** 5. Bob:
>"Language is a structured representational system for communication of
>thought.  It is both science and art."

This is interesting: is language science and art? or, is science and
art language?

>*** 6. James F.

James was so kind to point me to the work of Julian Jaynes ("The
Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind")
I must admit that I didn't quite catch it all but I think it was
pointing our attention to the fact that language is enormously dynamic
and always changing throughout history ...
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

>*** 7. Larry Cardin:
>"... major vehicle of communication ...
>Language is alive it has an essence.  This essence(inference) is as much a part of our soul as rules of evidence are part of court room behavior, ..."

The soul ... I guess we'll have a longlasting discussion if I ask how
we have to define the soul :) So I'll skip that and ask you this:
language is clearly linked with our mind, with our thoughts. But what
kind of relation is there between these two?


And than for the side-tracks:

>"Is mathematics a language?"

I think the main thing is here: how broad does one wants to (dares
to?) define language? Will he allow artificial languages? Animal
languages? ...

>"Is intuition a language?"

Too bad nobody had a reply to this. I guess perhabs it's too esoteric
or something...


You know where to find me,

Wim.

e-mail:    wim.vannieuwenhoven@student.kuleuven.ac.be
web-mail:  Wivani@hotmail.com
icq:       16807186
icq-pager: 16807186@pager.mirabilis.com

web-page:  http://www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~m9408136/ling