Another Short History of Linguistics (2)

Robert H. Robins has spent thirty years to finish his ‘A Short History of Linguistics’. Yet he admitted that history was only for Indo-European languages. We may find that the standpoint and viewpoint is within that language family. Now I am talking about the linguistic history in a wider view, the view from nature and globe languages.

At the beginning, Robert H. Robins narrated two controversies of ancient Greece, the first one was naturalism vs. conventionalism, and the second was analogy versus anomaly.

Einstein said, people ask questions of greater than solving problems. Curiosity and Inquisitive are the basic characters and personality of a good thinker, and it caused Socratic Philosophy and Sophists argued the relationship between words and their meanings: are they based on a natural affinity between word and word meaning, or are they the result of convention and agreement? The naturalist argument leaned, as it must, on the weight of onomatopoeia. The conventionalists pointed out that vocabulary can be changed at will and that the language is equally efficient once the change has been accepted.

Without that argument today there would have no linguistics. We couldn’t evaluate it is a good thing or bad one. But the price of these two controversies was only stay in the argument, for in Asia no one could devise such an argument.

Suppose when you ask your mother, “why the ‘bird’ represent a flying animal?” in alphabetic language, what she can tell you? The answer must be, “Everybody say it like this.”; “it is came from ancient people.” Do you satisfy this answer? It may cause you feel sad for there are something in the world that others had arranged for you, don’t allow you to ask and the ancient people were a sort of god or fairy they were no human like us. But in pictogram, when the children ask the same question, the mother would give the following answer:

Bird:

 Elephant:

Tiger:

It is only a matter of psychological satisfaction, but any philosophy is built on top of such satisfaction. So I think in the two controversies of ancient Greece, the second one was the result of didn’t clearly understand the first one. It is the price of shifting pictogram to alphabet. Anyway it tell us, that at the turning point of shifting pictogram to alphabet, ancient people still kept some memory of how the pictogram work. The fact is that symbol is just symbol nothing more. As <Language A Text for Senior Students> by J.H Britton, P127 said: “when we talk to each other it is not our thoughts which pass through the air, but various arrangement of sounds which are signals for our thoughts. Your thoughts are ‘in your head’ and the writer’s are in his head. And as you well know, the thoughts of the speaker and the listener are not always exactly the same.” 

For ancient people to fully understand that the writing system is absolutely independent with meaning is not an easy job, I think that is the reason of why the Chinese room effect was so important. According: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

“The Chinese room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle to challenge the claim that it is possible for a digital computer running a program to have a “mind” and “consciousness” in the same sense that people do, simply by virtue of running the right program.”

It tell us that after thousands years study, some funny linguist still looking for a good relationship between meaning and certain symbols. This idea is still hinder our knowledge to looking for further phonetic signals, it may be another reason of that European didn’t employ tone as information carrier.