How do you define definition?
Language has always been one of my passions - the entomology of words and phrases, the evolution of meaning over time. More than that, I'm facinated by the way that we use language to view the world around us, how it can shape and influence the world within us. The philosophy of vocabulary.
It's not a new idea, by any means. The ideas follow themselves back as far as we have words to describe them. Orwell, Marx, and further, religions that believe that names have power, that to know something's name is to have power over it. Think about it. Assemble your expectations, examine how you look at the world.
Our spoken and written language is a symbolic one. Each collection of letters is a symbol for a sound, each collection of sounds is a symbol for a thing or an action. Our language is a representation of reality. We understand the world through symbols, we transmit information through symbols - I say cat, you see a cat in your mind. The cat that I see is not the cat you see. The language of symbols is flawed, the images are unprecise. You need more words to define the first, words for colour, size, shape, texture, position - the transmission is never exact. Each extra word brings you closer, but you can only spend so much time describing a cat, and like a ball thrown at a window, halving its distance in infinately smaller increments, you're never. quite. there.
It goes further. How do we describe something for which we have no word? Our understanding of our world is through words. If you have no word for it, you use others - descriptions, definitions of form. What happens, though, if you have no words for something? How can you comprehend something if you have no tools for it? Take that to the next logical step - If we define our understanding of the world around us through the fundamental connection between language of and reality, can it not work both ways? God spoke, and the usiverse was created. Nifty thought, neh?
Before I meander off, here's one final interesting tidbit - the longer a word, the more exact its meaning. A short word can have many, many uses, but the longer it gets, the greater its precision. Ever wonder what god calls himself?
Language has always been one of my passions - the entomology of words and phrases, the evolution of meaning over time. More than that, I'm facinated by the way that we use language to view the world around us, how it can shape and influence the world within us. The philosophy of vocabulary.
It's not a new idea, by any means. The ideas follow themselves back as far as we have words to describe them. Orwell, Marx, and further, religions that believe that names have power, that to know something's name is to have power over it. Think about it. Assemble your expectations, examine how you look at the world.
Our spoken and written language is a symbolic one. Each collection of letters is a symbol for a sound, each collection of sounds is a symbol for a thing or an action. Our language is a representation of reality. We understand the world through symbols, we transmit information through symbols - I say cat, you see a cat in your mind. The cat that I see is not the cat you see. The language of symbols is flawed, the images are unprecise. You need more words to define the first, words for colour, size, shape, texture, position - the transmission is never exact. Each extra word brings you closer, but you can only spend so much time describing a cat, and like a ball thrown at a window, halving its distance in infinately smaller increments, you're never. quite. there.
It goes further. How do we describe something for which we have no word? Our understanding of our world is through words. If you have no word for it, you use others - descriptions, definitions of form. What happens, though, if you have no words for something? How can you comprehend something if you have no tools for it? Take that to the next logical step - If we define our understanding of the world around us through the fundamental connection between language of and reality, can it not work both ways? God spoke, and the usiverse was created. Nifty thought, neh?
Before I meander off, here's one final interesting tidbit - the longer a word, the more exact its meaning. A short word can have many, many uses, but the longer it gets, the greater its precision. Ever wonder what god calls himself?
posted by network_failure at 10:20 AM
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