Is language conventional?

[ClemtheCatholic]

Like, are some words intrinsically good or bad? Does the badness of words like ‘witch’ or ‘fornicator’ depend just on how people regard them? Do words carry deep meanings?

If you would like me to elaborate, I shall try! I’m just looking for some ideas and answers in this whole area. Many thanks!

 

[rossum]

Like, are some words intrinsically good or bad? Does the badness of words like ‘witch’ or ‘fornicator’ depend just on how people regard them? Do words carry deep meanings?

If you would like me to elaborate, I shall try! I’m just looking for some ideas and answers in this whole area. Many thanks!

All language is conventional. In English the word “elf” means a mythical humanoid. In German the word “elf” means the number eleven.

There is no meaning intrinsic in the word; the meaning is applied externally.

For example, here are some words:

chos mngon mdzod,
chos rnams rab tu rnam 'byed med par nyon mongs rnams,
gang phyir nye bar zhi bar bya ba’i thabs med la,
nyon mongs pas kyang 'jig rten srid mtso 'dir

To you, some of those words have a meaning: ‘gang’, ‘bar’, but the text as a whole is meaningless. To a Tibetan speaker, it is a verse from a translation of the Abhidharmakosa.

The meaning is not inherent in the words. The meaning is in the mind of the reader.

rossum

 

[schaeffer]

I think it’s half and half.

Some words are merely symbols to represent things, actions, etc.

But clearly there are other words that are intrinsically attached to the thing itself.

In nearly every culture Ma or something very similar is associated with mother.

Many words have the sound of the thing they represent.

Also, sounds/tones tend to be reacted to similarly across humanity, some sounds are harsh and biting, others soothing. Different words also contort the facial expressions which is associated with how that word is understood to the people watching the speaker.

It’s hard to imagine that in any language, a word that sounds like barf would be used for butterfly. There is an intrinsic association between sounds and ideas, at least to an extent.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

onomatopoeia aside, to borrow the words of an acquainted center “it’s all made up.” It’s a question of information encoding. (This is something that is examined in information technology, which contains more information on this than you think). A browse through a dictionary of etymology will show how much the usage of a word changes over time.

 

[PseuTonym]

The meaning is not inherent in the words. The meaning is in the mind of the reader.

How about the mind of the writer, and the minds of potential future readers after knowledge of a writing system has been lost and then the writing system is later deciphered?

In English the word “elf” means a mythical humanoid. In German the word “elf” means the number eleven.

Taking seriously your earlier quote, does it make sense to equate a string of symbols and a meaning? If the meaning of the phrase “a mythical humanoid” is in the mind of the reader, then that phrase is not itself the meaning of the English language word that we write as “elf” when we are using the conventional writing system for the English language.

Perhaps we could say that corresponding to each of two different expressions, there is a meaning in the mind of the reader, and that those two meanings are the same.

We should distinguish between homographs and homophones. “Too”, “two”, and “to” are homophones in the English language because they sound the same, but they are different words with different meanings. Minute as in small (pronounced something like my-nyoot) and minute (pronounced something like min-ut) as in 60 seconds are homographs in the English language because they are written in the same way.

What you have done is give an example of a homograph that straddles two different languages, so your example depends upon the fact that the English language and German language are written with similar writing systems. Such an example would be much more difficult to find for English and Korean.

The existence of homographs is a rather trivial fact about language that is not enough to support an extreme nominalist point of view.