Another Short History of Linguistics (66)

Someone using a word as ideogram to explain how a pictogram express abstracted concept. But I explain it very simple, if they can be expressed by picture, they use picture, if they can’t, they just put a relative picture and a sound to distinguish it. For instance this picture:

The character 足means ‘foot’, any meanings relative with it, will have this symbol.  

跑run,跳jump，跃hop，蹦bounce，蹲squat，路road，跤falls，跺stomp，踱strolled，跟follow，跪kneel，踩stamp，踢kick，踏tread etc.

Anyway, anything about foot and then the other part is only supply a sound to make it distinguished from other words. (In ancient time, the other part might be represent meaning too.) It is also a sort of semantics.

As above, when Aristotle study the semantic language while the pictogram language didn’t think it is worth for discussion, again the pictogram country lost a chance for develop an idea of linguistics. 

So we may say the Chinese is formalizing the sematic language. The key reason is first the picture is nature connected symbol, the second reason is the pictogram language find out enough phonetic symbols by tone for the necessary, while the alphabetic language doesn’t. That is why the ontology or semantic language keep stay as a metaphysics language in alphabetic languages. For instance from substance to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the concept changed 7 times, each time reduce the scope inside our memory (as Aristotle said ‘soul’), if we want this idea shift from metaphysics into physics language then we have put at least six words in from of them. That is a long compound word as substance-body-living-animal-human-Aristotle. If in any sentence, you have plenty such words, it would be ridiculous and bulky, although everyone can understand it better. But we can reduce them to the combination of two words; the last two words that is human-Aristotle. In this case, we suppose that when we say the word ‘human’ everybody know it belong to Substance-body-living-animal-human-Aristotle, as we have said that every word is a door to our minds, why every time should we only started from the single door of substance? So we may ignore this word-string and only focus on the last two classes as human-Arstotle, like what the binary nomenclature did.  From this we know that language is a tool that carrying any full meaning in a fastest simplest way, the reason is as much as possible to concentrate our mind on a smaller point.