I was reminising earlier today about things me and one of my friends would always talk about. We always had really deep and interesting conversations, and the one I remembered having with her made me think back to SED 260 when we discussed arbitrary symbols. We would always talk about how people even started language. And once someone started speaking and naming things certains names, how did they even start describing what they meant? Like, for instance--how would someone create a word such as "deliberately?" How did they describe this word to another person? Of course someone could say, "to comit an act on purpose." But then if you go way back in time, how would someone descrive that sentence? How would you tell someone what each of those words meant that you used to define "deliberately?" Like, what would you say "purpose" meant? Does anyone understand what I am trying to get at here? It is sort of like the example the text book used about the word "tree." Nothing about the word "tree" is "green and leafy" (I think that is how the book puts it even! It is so weird how people have come so far with language. Another amazing thing to think of is how the first person ever to learn a second language even learned it. They had no teacher to tell them translations or rules of grammar. They would probably just have to go to the foreign country and just live there for a long while and just start picking up on it. Language and communication really are interesting things to talk about!
-Millie
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I do get what you're saying. :-]I know when you think about it, it is really interesting to think how someone decided a tree was a tree and a book was a book and so forth. Also to wonder how someone came up with the definitions of such words as you mentioned. You think about all the words and meanings in the english langage and it is hard to think how all these words came about!!
ReplyDeleteI have thought about this multiple times and it would be very interesting to find out how these things happened. It is nice for us to be able to have the teacher to teach us the language and also for the language to be developed like it is. But it is also interesting to think about the future and what new words we will have and what old words will change in meaning.
ReplyDelete