Another Short History of Linguistics (28)

We have talked so much about gender. The target is show you what semantics is. It is the main property of pictogram language. At the very begin, every character must have some meaning on visual. Here we have to say, the so called ‘on visual’ is not accurately. For instance, we can draw a symbol that look like a cattle, we say this because everyone could distinguish it from sheep, dog, lion etc. without any mistake, without any explanation. But no one can draw a symbol of cow that can be distinguished with bull. In this case, a symbol of gender have to accompany with a neutral cattle symbol. On the other hand that alphabet language attach a meaning, idea or concept of ‘bull’ to this group of letters directly. Furthermore something could not be expressed by visual image properly, for instance the gender. No matter how we draw the character, it still could not represent the gender properly, or we may say you can’t get the concept by first sight of the symbol without any explanation. And different species may have different picture of sexual organs but they have a common function. That is to say, we have to attach a meaning, concept or idea on the symbol like alphabet language did. But this tradition of pictogram, left a principle as we call it semantic. Compare with alphabetic language, the principle of semantic language is most words are composed by two three or more meaning symbols. But when you invent any new character you don’t need to take responsibility of what it will pronounce. While you invent a new word in alphabetic language you have to think the pronunciation carefully. Correspondently, when invent new words in alphabetic language, you don’t need piece up meanings for that word carefully. Here we may find a very important property of any language, the only reason of a word or character to exist is that it can distinguish a meaning, concept or idea from other words or characters. If it could not fulfil this purpose, it have no reason to exist. My linguistic idea is based on this. For instance if you have only two symbols like 0 and 1, each time you can only distinguish two concept, idea or meanings. Such as distinguish all of your knowledge (memory) into two parts. By the second step, you may distinguish each of these two parts into sub-two-parts or four parts of your knowledge (memory). That the relationship of these two steps is multiplication. And so on, until you find out the right one that you are looking for. It is the same thing with the 26 alphabetic letter. First, they distinguished your knowledge into 26 parts, then 26x26 parts and so on. The process may like that we are search through a dictionary. As the average Chinese has 3,000 characters, each of them will distinguish a Chinese mind into 3,000 parts and 3,000x3, 000 and so on.

Easy to understand the semantic or pictogram language take the piecing up meanings seriously, while the alphabetic language attach importance to pronunciation. When a language made people felt that pronunciation is harder than piecing up meanings, the alphabetic language would spread easily. The harder pronouncing means that the pronouncing of word is too long for memory. For easy memory of sound they have to chop them into sound unit like alphabet.  

The emotion that caused the inventor ignoring the semantic principle and take the rule of alphabetic is that in their time, they get a much simpler vocabulary than us. According some study that 50%of our everyday used word are around one hundred words. Think about in ancient time that they lead a much simpler life than ours, why they need concentrate to memory for every word. Perhaps, they don’t need a school to learn all the handful words. They don’t need to distinguish so many species of biologics and chemical materials. All of their focus is simplify.