🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Wim Van Nieuwenhoven wrote:

> >*** 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?
Of course there is a correlation between language complexity
and the level of the social development, as can easily be seen
by looking at the animals. 
But one very important purpose is not not explicitly mentioned in the
above list, although it is covered by the term 'inform'.
Language is used for thinking and reflecting. Reflecting about
things is nothing else than communicating with yourself or, to use
the word 'inform',
to inform yourself about new ideas and new thoughts. When you watch
yourself thinking you will realize that you often use the same language as
when
talking to other people. 
An interesting question in this context is the following:
Do humans use language well because they are smart, or are humans
smart because they use language well?
> 
> >*** 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 ...

Language not only by itself is a virus but is also serves as a vehicle
to spread viruses. Language by itself is a virus because
nearly all people are 'infected' by it and the number grows
each day. When parents speek children get infected and act as a new host
for the virus.
Language acts as a transport vehicle for viruses when transporting ideas
which are accepted by other people. In this case the idea is the virus
and spreads in the heads of the 'victims'. For example take the concept
of communism as an accepted virus or some rhymes you can't get out
of your mind and have to repeat all the time as an unaccepted virus.
In fact many parallels can be drawn from biological viruses
to these mental viruses.

> >*** 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? 

Definitely not, since evolution is a stochastic process, whereas language
developement is a teleological process, where words are invented
to suit the needs of people. 

>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
Of course noone planned it, it kind of happened. It was developed during
a long period of time, and as you can observe today the development
is still
going on. New words appear to express new situations and new concepts
and many others disappear since they are of no use any more.

> about computer languages?

Computer languages are by far less complex than the natural language,
but show the same characteristics. New paradigms need new ways of
writing programms and as soon as a core language is designed
new language constructs are added when the need arises and others are
removed. In contrast to natural language formal languages
usually are developed by a single institution and thus
can be planned to a certain degree.


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

I don't fully agree. Language can be art, no doubt,
but how can it be science? It can be the subject or the result of
scientific study or it can be used to formulate these results,
but not more. 
> 
> This is interesting: is language science and art? or, is science and
> art language?

Science and art are certainly not language, as well as a chisle and a
block of granite are not a statue.

> >*** 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, ..."
> 
> language is clearly linked with our mind, with our thoughts. But what
> kind of relation is there between these two?
Thoughts have their origin in our mind.

> 
> And than for the side-tracks:
> 
> >"Is mathematics a language?"
No. Mathematics is a science and uses a language which is
adequat for its purpose.

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

I think it's not a matter of valor to define language but just an
analytical process
of extracting the essence and the purpose of language.
If two entities have a way to communicate, that is to express their
knowledge of the world to  each other, then they are using a language.
No matter if they use gestures or words. What we can do is to classify
language in a second step. For example we can distinguish 
natural language, formal language, body language and so on.
But they all serve the same purpose and thus are languages.

> >"Is intuition a language?"
> 
> Too bad nobody had a reply to this. I guess perhabs it's too esoteric
> or something...

What do you mean by intuition? I know many people with at least as many
different interpretations. If you define it precisely I can
tell you if your definition fits into the concept of a  
language or not.

Christian