Re: THEORY Ideal system of writing

Ray Brown wrote:
> Apparently, the idea of that there are universal notions, common to the
> language & thought of all peoples, and that these concepts can be combined
> to express all experiences, truth etc. is older than the 17th century.
Although not inclined to philosophizing, I've long thought that to be true,
and suspect that the underlying/universal form of language would probably
resemble logical notation-- one- and two-place predicates etc. I don't
believe Fillmore ever claimed universality for his Case Grammar, but it
seems to have been implicit-- that every language(1) has ways to express the
relationships between its predicates and arguments, be it by word order,
morphology, adpositions, whatever.

The weak form of the hypothesis is probably what enables us to translate
"anything" from one language to another.
=========================
(1) Well, almost every.... I believe reference has been made to a S.American
language with free word-order and no case marking, so that { John + love +
Mary } out of context means J loves M or M loves J.  (I could be wrong.)


In
> the early 14th century Ramon Lull (aka Raymond Lully) put forward such
> ideas in his "Ars Magna" (1305-8).
>
> Ray
> ===============================================
> http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
> ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
> raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
> ===============================================
> "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
> interfere with language."         J.G. Hamann, 1760
>

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