This is similar to your premise that if a picture is being used as a picture then it must not be being used as a sign. — Leontiskos
Is a picture already a sign, albeit a non-arbitrary sign? — Leontiskos
"leaf" and a picture of a leaf are both signs of a leaf; one arbitrary and one non-arbitrary. — Leontiskos
conventional but non-linguistic meaning — Srap Tasmaner
fdrake seems stuck on non-necessary norms of interpretation, such as spacing and punctuation. I would suggest that he think about coded language, such as encryption or the hidden signs involved in a football game or military strategy, where the linguistic matter is supposed to be unrecognizable according to standard norms. — Leontiskos
Just look. It is not hard. There is some disagreement, but many linguists are fine with it. — I like sushi
Why isn't it language? You used a sign intentionally to communicate something to others. You folded your arms "to communicate." This looks like a form of sign language or body language, in a non-metaphorical sense. — Leontiskos
I guess people can either believe me or you.
Or they can just look it up and see that I am correct — I like sushi
Children who are deaf will, if put together in groups, develop sign language just as they would regular language, in the same way, along the same developmental axis, and with the same resulting richness of potential expression. — Baden
The arbitrariness of the sign, per Saussure, refers to the conventional nature of the linkage between the signifier and the signified, iirc. But there are some famous studies suggesting that might be overstated a bit (bouba/kiki for starters).
Is it not language unless the meaning relation is conventional rather than natural? The traditional answer is obviously "yes" but I'm not so sure. Especially if you wonder how language could get started in the first place.
If it's not absolutely essential, then what's the relation here? Is it the other way? That is, conventional meanings as a subset of linguistic meaning? — Srap Tasmaner
Is it not language unless the meaning relation is conventional rather than natural? The traditional answer is obviously "yes" but I'm not so sure. Especially if you wonder how language could get started in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner
If it's not absolutely essential, then what's the relation here? Is it the other way? That is, conventional meanings as a subset of linguistic meaning? That looks to be the story with writing. (Or with the use of natural gestures, like folding your arms, to indicate an attitude.) Are there counterexamples? Any cases of conventional but non-linguistic meaning? — Srap Tasmaner
The obvious example was right in front of me: cartographic symbols. While there is obviously structure in the way these are placed on the map, that structure is not grammatical. — Srap Tasmaner
One way of "problematizing" the concept of language would be to step back and ask, "What am I/we trying to do by offering the Wikipedia page definition of language?" — J
I understand why you might think that, but sign language just is language. Children who are deaf will, if put together in groups, develop sign language just as they would regular language, in the same way, along the same developmental axis, and with the same resulting richness of potential expression. Body language is nothing like sign language or spoken language. It doesn't fulfil the basic criteria I provided earlier, but sign language does (including e.g. distinct linguistic units that can be recombined to produce new meanings, and indicate grammatical categories, such as case, tense, voice, mood etc). — Baden
Which was a counterpoint to the idea that one cannot hope to recognise whether something is a language unless one already speaks it. — fdrake
Calling it a language with a spoken component (the humming) when it's produced by someone who as a premise of the video cannot communicate in spoken language is hopelessly reductive and easily refutable. And for the purpose of normalising autism no less. — fdrake
Also, for what it's worth, Baggs used to speak, went through something like normal language acquisition, got all the way to college before they started to lose their speech, I think. So we're not dealing with a "feral child" situation. And they continued to write even after they stopped speaking. It's complicated. — Srap Tasmaner
I’m posting that video here because I think it challenges us to re-consider what constitutes language. To what extent is an immediate relationship with our non-human surroundings a language? — Joshs
Here "conventional" does come apart from "arbitrary." — Leontiskos
The cartographic symbol is conventional but not arbitrary. Is it natural? — Leontiskos
She seemed to be interacting with her environment to be sure, but that is not langauge. — Hanover
The structuralist approach is to see the signifiers as forming a system, the whole group of them, and what's important is just that they can be and are distinguished from each other, a "system of differences" . — Srap Tasmaner
On the typical road maps I look at, towns and cities are indicated by circles, filled circles of different sizes and stars (for capitals). — Srap Tasmaner
If you look at formal approaches to language -- Frege, Tarski, Montague, that sort of thing -- language is a system for representing your environment. That could, conceivably, be just for you. A language of thought.
And it is only because you can put the world, or some part of it, into language, that it is useful for communication. When you communicate, you put part of the world into words (or claim to) and pass those words to someone else. Language as descriptor of the world underlies language as means of communication. — Srap Tasmaner
One way of telling the story of Western philosophy over the last few centuries is to present it as the rise and fall of a particular view of language. Gradually, piecemeal, the idea of language as primarily a matter of accurate naming and information-sharing has yielded to a recognition of language as what we could call a matter of orienting ourselves in our world—developing a range of diverse strategies for collaboration in finding our way around. The more complex the world we encounter (in introspection as well as observation), the more diverse and sophisticated will be those strategies, and the less they will have to do with carving up our environment into bite-sized pieces with definitive labels. Whatever a still over-con dent popular scientism claims, coping adequately and sustainably with our environment requires more than a catalog of isolated substances with fixed attributes. — Rowan Williams, Romantic Agenda
There are so many interesting things you could describe about stimming routines. eg Baggs is pitch matching background noises with humming, but is a nonspeaking autist, why? What's the phenomenology there? What's the expressivity?
Calling it a language with a spoken component (the humming) when it's produced by someone who as a premise of the video cannot communicate in spoken language is hopelessly reductive and easily refutable. And for the purpose of normalising autism no less. — fdrake
Were you meaning to construe the sensations as symbols? — fdrake
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