Another Short History of Linguistics (51)

I believe that the biggest different between science and religion is that religion always flatter the old doctrine in new way, while science always enlarge the detail of doctrine and to find fault in it. All the languages experienced from ancient simple society and todays complex society. Of course some requirement for today was not thought by ancient people. So, every language has to change its structure according the necessary of development. History told us that nearly all science was developed depending the big tree of mathematics. Normally any other development would be degenerated into a deliration. Yet today, most linguists don’t even know what the meaning of mathematics is. For the education system don’t require them to learn it.

Nearly all science is according a certain train of thinking, that is once we don’t know something, we try to split it into simpler or smaller pieces or elements then try to understand it, if still couldn’t then split these pieces or elements again until we understand it. The biggest question for linguist is what is the basic element? Some thought it is the sentence, others believe it is the word and another would regard the alphabetic letters, phonetic letter etc. but I think the basic element is the sound. For in the world, everybody uttered the same sound when utilize language. And sound must be uttered one by one, from ancient time until today, so only count the number of sound will lead us to understand the language mathematically. It is the simplest thing for everybody not just linguists, but it seemed the most simple thing could be the hardest one for some scholar.

I have meet many scholars, some of them know mathematics and English but don’t know what is tone language, others  know English, tone language and mathematics too, but all of them don’t want link these knowledge organically. For the tradition is not like this. Perhaps they believe that math is math and language is language, totally forget what Pythagoras said that everything can be expressed by mathematics. In fact mathematics is another sort of language. And when we describe a changing system, mathematics is better and clearer than normal language.