Language

So, after a long time, I have decided that I am going to try to revive this blog of mine, considering I have a lot of free time in Spain to contemplate life and stuff. So if you are a trooper and begin reading both this blog and my other one, wow. You fall into at least one of the following categories: (a) really love reading, and particularly love reading my stuff (b) have nothing better to do (c) read these only to make me feel better. In any case, thank you. It means a lot. This blog is meant to be more conducive of discussion, so go at it, y'all.

The topic today: language.

This is something that surrounds us and we encounter on a daily basis. By virtue of reading this, you are interacting with language. We are language-based creatures and need to express ourselves through words, movements, pictures, something. However, I want to here focus solely on the languages that are written (in turn read) and spoken (in turn heard).

Language and the theory or philosophy of language is an area that I have long wanted to delve into and explore, but have never had sufficient time to do so. Given this, all that follows is uneducated (for the most part) and has not been researched at all, unless mentioned. What follows are merely the things swimming around in my head at the moment or that have been doing so for some time.

This past semester I took a course in the philosophy department that was concerned with the history of ancient philosophy. We began with the first "philosopher," Thales, who believed that everything was water [ponder that for a moment...seems a little crazy, but give it some time to digest] and progressed to the biggies, Plato and Aristotle. In one of Aristotle's texts on logic (if I remember correctly, for those interested, it was in his work entitled De Interpretatione, or Of/On Interpretation), Aristotle discusses what a synonym, homonym, and other linguistic terms actually mean. Clearly articulating and revising definitions is something characteristic of Aristotle and his texts. After I read what he had to say about language, I stopped to think for a moment or two. What he said made a lot of sense on the surface and prompted more thoughts (I have not delved into the specifics of his thinking on these topics...that is for another day).

Think about how arbitrary language is.......

There is nothing within an object that clearly states what it is, its essence is not immediately tangible to us. Starting with something natural, think of an apple. There is nothing in the apple itself that says its name is "apple." None of the components of an apple, like the seeds, its skin, the flesh, the stem do not have printed on them "Hello, My name is Apple." The only way we can define what is an apple and what is not an apple is by its characteristics. We can say that apples are red, round, grow on trees, have seeds in the middle, and are generally sweet. I am not saying that this is what makes an apple an apple, but it is a rough definition of what we could consider to be an apple. For these characteristics to be defining of an apple, one has to have a group of followers or at least others who would tend to agree with your definition.

To complicate matters even further, think about the definition we provided for the apple: round, red, grows on trees, sweet. Embedded within these characteristics is another whole world of definitions, with the same issue of lacking a tangible, overtly obvious name. When you say something is red, for example, what does it mean to be red (if we get rid of all the shades of red that are and stick with a typical red, which itself is a problem because what is a normal red, but just go with it for now, huh?)? You could say that for something to be considered red, it has to have a certain hue, but hues are subjective. You could get a little more specific and claim that red falls on the shorter side of the visible light spectrum. This would be the empirical approach, but again the definition of red relies on a consensus of opinions. Therefore "Red" does not actually exist objectively, but only within our experiences and within this earthly realm.

You can do this exercise with just about any word and can never get to the objective reality of what it really means to be that thing without relying on human opinion and observation.

That is one fact of language that just totally blows my mind. Nothing objectively is what it is. Things are only things in so far as there are people to observe and describe them. Maybe, and probably most likely, I am making too many assumptions, but it seems to me that there is no foundational axiom, building block, grounding of being, foundational reality from which we derive all other things. I think I may have bugged this last part here up a little bit, making it confusing with all of my terms and phrases, but hopefully the point I was trying to make came across.

Another facet of language is the Babel problem. The Babel problem, of which many are already aware, deals with and tries to address the issue of the diverse and numerous languages we have on earth. The number of languages in the world is somewhere around 6,000 (and decreasing because some are very small and have only a few speakers left, and these few speakers are dying), but how did we come to have so many? Was there ever a time when we all spoke the same language? Why can someone from Taiwan not speak with someone from sub-Saharan Africa if they do not have language in common? How did this come to be?

This is something that has captivated my mind for many years. If we take, for example, the word "red," for example, and look at the way it is spelt and pronounced in different languages, it is amazing the wide variety that exists. Spanish: rojo. English: red. French: rouge. Albanian: i kuq. Finnish: punainen. Hungarian: piros. Get the picture? All of these words express the exact same concept, red, but all vary wildly in their pronunciation and pronunciation. I think this is even more evidence that there exists no universal language, that the entire world is subjective to our experiences and interpretation. If we all had the same experiences, would we not all express something the exact same way? I understand that language is more complicated than this, as it involves evolution of other languages, influences from these languages, etc. But just stop and think about this idea for a brief moment. It does not have to be too long, but think about the diversity of expression that revolves around a single word or concept. It is astounding.

It further amazes me that we can make sense of these scribbles on paper. I know that it may be difficult at the beginning to step outside of your upbringing and education and see these letters as nothing but scribbles, but try it some time. I think that you can appreciate it once you study a language with a script other than the Roman alphabet. For example, take Arabic. To those of us that speak a Western, Latin-based language (or at least written in the Latin script), Arabic looks like nothing but a bunch of lines and scribbles on a piece of paper. We wonder who would be able to understand that a line that has a dot on top is an "n" sound and if it has two dots underneath it it is a long "i" sound or a "y." But there are millions of people who read Arabic with no problems. They do not, presumable, think that their language is nothing but randomly drawn lines on a piece of paper. To them, it means something, it conveys their interpretations of reality, it gives them a common ground with those around them to discuss what happens to them and how they believe their world to be. To those whose primary language is Arabic, English probably looks like a bunch of lines as well. English lines look very different from Arabic lines, so one whose main language is Arabic probably thinks the same that English people think about Arabic; that English is a bunch of non-sense lines that no one could possibly understand. Yet we do. This observation astounds me at humankind's capacities. We are able to scribble something on the piece of paper and it means something to us. Imagine a complete alien were to come to planet Earth and look at what we do. That alien would have no idea what all of these lines mean. Where we see the letter "E" they see (assuming they have some sense of geometry and direction) a vertical line with three horizontal lines protruding to the right of this vertical line. It means absolutely nothing to them. To us, it is an essential building block of our understanding of the world.

If this has blown your mind, or it is too much for you to wrap your mind around, believe me, you are not alone. I have been thinking about this for a while and I still do not know what to make of it. It is a very large territory, language, and it is incredibly scary. Yet, at the same time, it is something that fascinates me. So take a break, and so will I, and think about these things, but not to the point of madness.