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The Limits of Language

slate.com

36 pointsdthal8 comments

If you're interested in language, I highly recommend 'The Search for the Perfect Language'[1] by Umberto Ecco. Highly readable and incredibly interesting history of those wanting to extend the capabilities of language.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-Language-Making-Europe/...

I'm just reading Wittgenstein's works. He had also said "If you want to know whether a person is religious, don't ask them, but observe how they behave."

That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show very slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whether or not someone is religious, beyond church/temple/mosque attendance, which is equivalent to asking them.

Does he reference any data that would give his suggestion non-negligible plausibility?

I've read the quote in the book "Wittgenstein's poker". After a bit of searching, I've found the following link: https://hengstmengel.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/philosophy-to-...

I believe the explanation you're looking for is under 3.1.

Do you have any data showing that religious people deviate only slightly from non-religious people?

> The shift to online communication, textual interactions separated from accompanying physical practices, has had a persistent and egregious warping effect on language

The phone was the first change. To this day I hate speaking to people on a phone because if I don't see their eyes and body posture I have a very hard time understanding what they mean.

Usually, in a normal, face to face conversation, I have a rough idea of what someone is going to say next, which eases the cognitive burden of the conversation.

But somehow that doesn't really work over the phone, so I have to wait for people to say things, parse what they're saying, run it against various possible interpretations, and then think of an answer. It's exhausting, (not to mention error prone).

Edit -- conversation is like a dance, (or a game of chess). There are rules, within the rules, an infinite number of moves, and a limited number of "usual" moves. You normally just follow the usual moves, and sometimes you invent a new one, or place a usual move in an unusual context.

To me, talking over the phone is like trying to dance over the phone by describing to the other person what you're doing. It's not impossible, just extremely difficult.

It would seem then, that as humans, we are forcing ourselves to be less contextual on our talk and more uniform. This is precisely how cell phone talk becomes more understandable, is by meaning the same things when you talk much more consistently.

> The French equivalents for here and there are ici and là respectively. But if I point to a pen and say, “The pen is here,” the French equivalent is not “Le stylo est ici,” but “Le stylo est là.” In French, là is always used to refer to a specific place or position, while in English here or there can both work.

Well... it depends.

If both speakers are in front of a pen and one points to the pen she'll say "le stylo est là" -- that part's true.

But if you're in another part of a big house and someone yells "where is the pen", and the pen is with you in this remote room, you can yell back "le stylo est ici", meaning "it's here with me".

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