Another Short History of Linguistics (50)

The reality is that any code or clue is totally irrelevant with the nature world or human’s sense. Only the necessary of human communication connected them together. In this way all language or symbol is conventional. To believe words come from nature or from human’s sense is a superstitious. The ancient people wanted built a connection between words and nature as well as human’s sense that was in fact looking a way for easy to remember. Yet they hadn’t investigate the ability of human’s memory. As the modern people know it better, what we can do will be how to format these memory, in other word is that to encode and decode them by what sort of symbols. The pictogram put a little bit more message than the alphabetic language in both vision and audition. Because the alphabetic language ignored the existing of vision and audition, when undergoing a simplification process few thousand years ago.

Since, any symbols are just lifeless codes, none of them have the nature relationship with meaning unless human connect a meaning to a code artificially. The really tough issue is how to find out adequate symbols for a certain language. Especially find out enough phonetic symbols for oral speaking. For with more specie of sound our speaking will cost shorter time and in this way time is life, saving time is saving life. Think about the Morse code, it is the simplest code in the world, but when we using it as computer language, we have to shift it to ASCII or the Unicode for the benefit of speed or fast. On the other hand, to describe a certain event of nature, we need more parallel (dimension) symbols to do it. For the nature have so many facets to be settled, once you making code for only one facet (for instance sound-letter one to one), it would be simpler but you lost information of other facets (such as radical and new sound). So we may say the simplest symbol (as Morse code has only two parallel symbols (or dimension) 0 and 1) required the longest time to sending and receiving information. Leibniz was the inventor of binary system yet when he invent the mechanical computer, he use the decimal system, the only reason is speed.

There is a not very important issue I’d like to say is confounding of two different sound. In English, it maybe the s, z, θ and ð  they are not important issue but if more and more sounds enrolled in one language, it will be a serious issue.