Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language. There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts. Mandarin and Cantonese speakers might not be able to understand what the other is saying, but they’d be able to understand what they wrote.
Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?
hakase@lemm.ee 10 months agoThat depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.
Sign language is language, since it has a grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.
Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
hakase@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Written Chinese could arguably be considered its own language.
Sure, by someone other than people who scientifically study human language, for the reasons outlined above. The study of orthography is its own separate (though closely related) field for good reason, though it’s nowhere as big as linguistics, since it’s not as scientifically interesting.
There are several spoken languages in China which are unintelligible to each other, but that look the same when written down since the written language doesn’t codify phonemes or even spoken words, but concepts.
You do understand why this supports my argument, right? Writing is just a largely arbitrary system of (imperfectly) encoding/representing human language, which must be learned, and is not acquired the way human language is. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that what is effectively a “code” for language could be used to represent multiple languages. You could just as easily do the same with written English. Heck, formal logic is specifically designed to do this for all human languages, but that doesn’t make it a language itself.
Here’s a pop article talking about the distinction, reflecting the discussion above (spoilers for the movie Arrival, which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it). I can’t point you to any peer-reviewed articles on the subject, of course, because this has been decided science since the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1913 Course in General Linguistics.
I hate referring to Wikipedia (again however, there are no articles on this because it’s settled science), but note that the article for Writing system correctly identifies writing as representing human language and not actually consisting of it.
sukhmel@programming.dev 10 months ago
Spoken language is also learnt, not acquired by some magical means
hakase@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Spoken language is acquired, not learned. This is a formal distinction in the literature, used to distinguish unconscious behaviors from conscious ones.
Learning involves something you have conscious knowledge about - you can learn how to build a birdhouse, and then you can teach me how to build one as well, because you’ve consciously learned the rules for doing so.
Acquisition is involuntary, and unconscious. Children don’t try to learn languages - any human infant given language input from any human language will acquire that language, seemingly without effort.
Also, the knowledge we gain from language acquisition is unconscious knowledge - as an English speaker, you can’t tell me why “John hit the ball” is a sentence of English and “John ball the hit” is not, other than to give an explanation that will eventually boil down to “because it just isn’t”. You don’t know why your language is the way it is - you just implicitly know exactly how it is, and how it isn’t.
So, acquisition being distinct from learning requires no magic - just an understanding of the differences between these two processes, in the same way as we can also understand the differences between writing and language.
rosymind@leminal.space 10 months ago
I agree that it has to do with definition. My definition of language might be of a wider range than yours (and linguists)
My cat, for example, might not use grammer but I can certainly communicate with her (and she with me!) In this sense she and I have a language between us that’s a mix of signs, sounds, and body language. It’s not possible for me to seperate our talks from language, even though our understanding of each other doesn’t cover specifics.
So if someone communicates with me via emoji, and I understund accurately, I would count it as language (even if it goes against classical definitions)
hakase@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Fair enough.
What would you say about a dog growling at you, communicating its displeasure at how close you are? If you back away, understanding what the dog intends to convey with its growl, does that make the dog’s growl language?
Is a honeybee secreting a pheromone to get the hive to swarm language?
If so, how is language meaningfully different from “communication”? And, is human communication with each other the same type of phenomenon as the cases you and I mentioned, or is there some sort of categorical difference there?
(Also, this definition isn’t classical - it’s quite modern. The tendency to conflate writing with language in cultures that have writing is as old as writing is, and disentangling the two is a relatively modern discovery.)
rosymind@leminal.space 10 months ago
Lemmy’s being difficult for me (or it could be Connect for Lemmy) so I keep having to find the post in order to reply to you! (Meaning I might have to stop replying, but if I do that’s why)
And yes, I would say a dog growling and a honey bee releasing pheromones are also examples of language! I’m sure many would disagree (and rightfully) but my general perspective on the matter is that any type of communication is language (but I can see how it can be argued that no, it’s not language which is different- they’re just so closely related in my mind that to me they’re practically synonyms)