Re: Why does some culture's language become replaced but others don't?

On 2008-07-23, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

What good would "writing" be to a poet, or other careful craftsman of
language, if it didn't reproduce that artist's exact intention?

I agree completely.

I suppose you could argue that when I read your posts or your book
(without moving my lips!), I'm replaying in my head utterances that
you uttered in your head, but that stretches the meaning of
"utterance" a bit, doesn't it?

Not to a linguist, it doesn't.

Aha, you are talking about the (wider) technical meaning of utterance
(something like "sequence of spoken or written words expressing a
complete thought") --- so there's nothing to argue about (how about
that!) because the definitions of "writing" and "utterance" refer to
each other consistently.

(I thought you were using "utterance" in a narrower sense involving
sound because you often give the impression of wanting to treat
written language as some sort of second-class citizen in comparison
with spoken language.)

Why then do you say (elsewhere) that spoken and written language are
fundamentally different things? By the definitions above, they are
simply the transient and potentially permanent ways of doing the same
thing: transmitting utterances (thoughts in the form of words) to
other people (or sometimes just to oneself).

I agree with your very eloquent statement contrasting the "natural
product of the human mind" with the "deliberate product of the human
intellect", by the way, but I don't see why that makes the second
phenomenon any less important to society or less worthy of study and
development. (I apologize if I didn't quote you quite correctly, but
I really like that explanation.)


--
I heard that Hans Christian Andersen lifted the title for "The Little
Mermaid" off a Red Lobster Menu. [Bucky Katt]
.

Relevant Pages

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