Mutter, Utter and Stutter: Demeaning of Words

Engraved portrait of Dorothy Pentreath, last native speaker of the Cornish language, of Paul near Mousehole, Cornwall (c. 1692-1777)

English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Welsh, Swahili, Japanese and the like are called languages presumably because they satisfy unambiguous criteria. I say “presumably” because I don’t think there are any unambiguous criteria that apply to every thing we label as “language”.

I was going to ask whether we really and truly know what is a language and what is not. But then I realised that the real issue is that we just can’t agree on a definition that satisfies everyone. Another problem is that we use language to define language, which is circular reasoning, which inevitably leads to self-reflexivity and paradox. For example, I'm using language to explain why you shouldn't use language to explain language.

Most if not all people would agree that dialects, creoles and pidgins are languages. But what about “dead”/archaic languages such as Latin or Cornish?

What about sign language, music, morse code, mime, and mathematics? What about the barking of dogs, the songs of birds and whales and dolphins, the scent trails of ants, the dance of the bees? Computer programming languages? Computer machine code? Which is a language and which is not? Give reasons for your answers.

Language is a tool that helps language-users manage information. Language is a tool that helps language users create, locate, capture, transmit and receive information, as a first step on the road to truth or meaning. It’s the first step because articulating comes before validating; uttering precedes verifying. (And BTW there may not yet be computers that meet the conditions of “personhood”. But there absolutely are computers that are language-users. In fact, all computers are language-users.)

A Renormalised Cat

Schrodinger's cat. My thanks to the creator of this image. Apologies for lack of attribution but I can't remember where I got this image from.

Whereby the Akashic Record is less record than portfolio or ensemble of multi-dimensional spacetimeslices, all but one of which are potential; and the one which is not potential is brought into actuality by virtue of the actualising agent, of the Copenhagen, Everrettian or multiversal School, constructed on the premise that the Observer brings reality into being by decoherently collapsing the renormalised wave function (hopefully without killing Schrodinger's cat).

Here's what the cat is saying: "Being simultaneously dead and alive in the box gave me an incredible perspective on "life, the universe and everything" And I'm here to share that perspective with the world!"

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