Re: Apes and language

On Jan 24, 4:31 pm, Richard Herring <junk@[127.0.0.1]> wrote:

Which just shows that your traffic analogy is a bad one. Languages
aren't material objects. They don't have a "per se" mode of existence:
they are either "made use of" or they are nothing.

Human language is born out of material culture: words
name objects, human made things, and treat natural
and living entities as if they were human made things.

And that's all? Never heard of Hockett? You don't think the ability to
convey *any kind* of information, and to express *new* ideas, is
possibly more important?

How many ideas do you find in sci.lang? there is much more
chatting, bounding (or is it boundaging?), we belong together,
and we show that we are a group, and this or that member
does not belong, and when we can act against him, we are
growing closer ... Transmitting ideas is a late achievement
of language that came into existence with human material
culture which demans ideas ...

You could just as well say that all cars and means of transportation
have one thing in common, too: they are means of conveying chickens to
market. Do you really think that's a defining feature of cars and means
of transportation?

So you are a chicken? and your working place is a market
where you or your eggs are being sold?

You fill this newsgroup with your witterings on Magdalenian permutations
and combinations, and yet it doesn't occur to you that you're using the
real uniquely defining properties of language to do something that
animals, plants, cells, bacteria and genes and their "languages" are
incapable of doing?

My Magdalenian experiment, going on for almost three
years now, is of course based on my definition of language
from 1974/75.

No. As if I asked you what all moving cars and means of transportation
have in common, that other instances of traffic do not.

What have different people in common that loves does not?
People fall in love, are in love, make love, the meeting of
people results in love, but people are not love, apart
from some very special people, mostly mythological or
religious or from literature who symbolize love, Venus,
Aphrodite, Isis, Mary, Romeo and Julia ...

If it still makes no sense, we must conclude that your transport analogy
is flawed.

It works perfectly well. Now a question for you. You say
that humans are using language while animals communicate,
so if people call a charismatic politician a born communicator
they actually call him an animal?
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Exception to the rule? (Tarski´s T-scheme)
    ... > imply the existence of at least two objects, ... By itself the T-schema implies only that the ... > the relevant instances of the T-scheme depends upon the object language. ...
    (sci.logic)
  • Re: Qualia Question
    ... > define words in language any way you want. ... sense happening in our head - our thoughts etc), ... exist in an alternate universe (the universe of everything ... existence, when in fact, there is only one in our universe. ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Creating a "toy" OO/AO language...
    ... since when calculus became a proof of existence of a result? ... I asked you for the language we are speaking. ... language of mathematical analysis indeed defines sine. ... Clearly operations are defined on the values of R. In mathematics we cannot ...
    (comp.object)
  • Re: Calling all pedants
    ... refers to the existence of "alternate" timetables where something has ... There are approx 1 Billion English speakers / users in the world. ... less than half speak it as a first language. ...
    (uk.railway)
  • Re: Exception to the rule? (Tarski´s T-scheme)
    ... Let's consider this criticism first. ... So, it seems to me that this first criticism, that the T-scheme doesn't ... And similarly through all the other sentences of the language in question. ... the existence of both y and y*). ...
    (sci.logic)
Quantcast