Another Short History of Linguistics (30)

We say the science is started from Thales. It is true. What is a scientific expression at the beginning? It could be mathematics and geometry. Both of them are abstracted from the natural world yet you could not see them from the natural world directly. For instance the basic sign of geometry is a straight line. It is an abstract line and its diameter is 0. In the natural world no one can get such line. From Thales to Chomsky all of the linguists were looking for the spiritual of expression. They think that once they got it, all the expression of human will follow a certain rule and turned to be much easier. But it is a fruitless study, for language expression like the picture expression, every signal must follow the change of certain world not a certain rule that summarized by human. For this reason, I think the rationalism started from Thales is only a de-pictogram rationalism. On the other hand, all the pictogram language seemed understand that it impossible, so pictogram accept the reality and once they accept the reality, they started to simplify their expression sound by sound, character by character and word by word. And I have summary this process into my linguistic law. While the alphabetic language was looking for unified rules of expression.

Pythagoras was the student of Thales. Thales had suggested him to study in Egypt. Why Thales had such suggestion? Because he wanted Pythagoras felt the power of pictogram and looking for solution of enriching the alphabet language of Greece. Thales had done good job. He tried to unify the expression of language by the rule of mathematics as he believe that everything could have linkages with mathematics. At his time, there was no logarithmic, no trigonometric function and no exponential function etc. there was only simple calculation of number. He didn’t know there was so many relationship among numbers, so he try to think the relationship among numbers was one followed another. For him, to create a better language the first is to prove everything link with a number, then every number has a relationship with logic, finally everything link with logic. The first step is express a straight line of geometry by number, so he declared that every point on a straight line is connected with a number. But his disciple Hippasus found there were some number are not existed rationally or we may call them as irrational number. It may ruin total doctrine of Pythagoras. If between every two rational numbers, there are countless irrational numbers, what the irrational number represent for? Since Pythagoras could not answer this question, he turned sham into anger and he send someone to kill Hippasus.