Many scholars have contributed to the study of language. Chomsky is often considered the originator of modern linguistics, but the ancient Indian grammarian Panini uses a very similar exact and rule-based approach in his analysis of Sanskrit.
Ferdinand Saussure is another important person who developed further such concepts as "synchronic" vs "diachronic" and "syntagmatic" vs "paradigmatic"
Roman Jakobsson introduced the study of how information is packaged and transmitted in language and the relation of this to grammar.
Leonard Bloomfield was the father of American Structural Linguistics, a school that described many Native American languages and developed further the hierarchical units of language, like phonemes and morphemes.
Sunday 9 March 2008
Saturday 8 March 2008
On Language and Art
There are multiple connections between language and art. One can be said to start with language and go into art, or making art with language. The term "language arts" can refer to rhetoric and literature (including prose, poetry and theatre). Calligraphy or constructed languages like solresol that can be expressed in music are other aspects
The other connection starts with art and goes into language, or uses art to communicate. There could be said to exist a communicative purpose to most art, since the artist often wants to influence the receiver or transmit a feeling or concept, but the relation can perhaps be best observed in artists like Kandinsky and Wagner. Kandinsky could be said to have tried to create a kind of non-linear language consisting of colours, lines and dots, expressing feelings and other abstract concepts. Wagner wrote a lot of music for the opera, the equivalent of the cinema of that time, and even when he wrote independent pieces of music they often had a theme that was supposed to evoke quite specific images in the mind of the listener.
It is maybe easier to appreciate the closeness of art and writing than art and speech. We certainly know much more about the evolution of writing than about that of speech due to the permanent nature of the former. It is clear that many letters developed from depictive symbols, A for instance, was initially a bull's head and D a fish. With cave paintings and old writing systems it is often hard to determine whether the inscriptions are there primarily for communicative, magical or decorative purposes. Then of course there is the magico-decorative uses of letters on weapons or as tattoos.
There might very well be a similar common origin to speech and music as to writing and visual art, but since speech predates writing with thousands of years, it is unlikely that we will ever know.
The other connection starts with art and goes into language, or uses art to communicate. There could be said to exist a communicative purpose to most art, since the artist often wants to influence the receiver or transmit a feeling or concept, but the relation can perhaps be best observed in artists like Kandinsky and Wagner. Kandinsky could be said to have tried to create a kind of non-linear language consisting of colours, lines and dots, expressing feelings and other abstract concepts. Wagner wrote a lot of music for the opera, the equivalent of the cinema of that time, and even when he wrote independent pieces of music they often had a theme that was supposed to evoke quite specific images in the mind of the listener.
It is maybe easier to appreciate the closeness of art and writing than art and speech. We certainly know much more about the evolution of writing than about that of speech due to the permanent nature of the former. It is clear that many letters developed from depictive symbols, A for instance, was initially a bull's head and D a fish. With cave paintings and old writing systems it is often hard to determine whether the inscriptions are there primarily for communicative, magical or decorative purposes. Then of course there is the magico-decorative uses of letters on weapons or as tattoos.
There might very well be a similar common origin to speech and music as to writing and visual art, but since speech predates writing with thousands of years, it is unlikely that we will ever know.
A definition of language
A language is a kind of system of visual, auditory, or situational constraints. A set of agreed-upon symbols is one feature of language, but all languages must also define the structural relationships between these symbols in a system of grammar. Most languages make use of sound, but the combinations of sounds used do not have any inherent meaning - they are merely an unconscious agreed-upon convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For example, many languages use different coercions as an agreed convention to represent the sounds a cat makes.
Tuesday 4 March 2008
We distinguish ourselves by having language. Religion is a big language user - it creates language by converting our inner re-representations into spoken utterances. The rationalist option focuses on the relation of language to thought; thus its answer to why we use language is: for formulating thought. Thinking in language may just be a reflection of language on thought, while language originated in not so thoughtful communication. Communication with language would thus seem to be a secondary product of a language for thought. Language is a semiotic, communicative system based on some more basic symbolic faculty; this symbolic faculty creates re-representation where was simple representation; language further contributes to that re-representation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
