Re: Defining "Language"
| From: | taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, July 19, 2007, 12:22 |
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* John Crowe said on 2007-07-19 10:38:04 +0200
> It seems that most of the suggestions fail to differentiate language from
> lower level communication. For example, "means of symbolic communication"
> would include road signs and such.
I agree with Andreas as to what is minimally needed for a language,
namely the arbitrariness: "road sign + road sign" <-> "meaning" doesn't
map to "phoneme + "phoneme" <-> "morpheme". So: road signs are not a
language.
As to arbitrariness: I skimmed a tragic dissertation once: the author
had attempted to prove that certain sounds always imply certain
meanings (for instance sl: slippery, sly, slinky etc.), generally for
all languages, and had compared... you guessed it: only languages that
were related. I sincerely hope he/she didn't get his/her PhD.
t.
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