DR MAY-10

 The second level of language analysis, structure, encompasses word formation, grammar, and syntax. Words and sentences are structural elements, with words categorized into grammatical types such as nouns, verbs, and pronouns, and sentences into types like questions, commands, and declarations. For instance, in the sentence "Peacocks eat insects," one can identify "peacocks" and "insects" as nouns and "eat" as a verb, classifying the sentence as a declaration. Words possess internal structures, including suffixes or markers indicating case, tense, number, and gender. Similarly, sentences follow structural rules; English typically employs a subject-verb-object order, whereas Sanskrit uses subject-object-verb. Altering these structures, such as prefixing 's' to pluralize "insect" or rearranging word order to "Eat insects peacocks," violates English structural norms.

The third level, semantics, pertains to meaning. Language elements can reference entities beyond themselves, encompassing tangible objects and abstract concepts. The word "mammoth" signifies more than its letters; it denotes an extinct, tusked creature. The sentence "Mammoths are extinct" conveys a factual statement about the world.

The fourth level, pragmatics, involves how language users convey meanings beyond literal interpretations. Idioms like "I could eat a horse" express hunger rather than equine preferences. In action films, "We need to call Washington" uses "Washington" metonymically to represent the government. Pragmatics also encompasses social nuances; responding to a dance invitation with "I am here with my partner" is a polite refusal. These indirect expressions, or implicatures, along with metaphors and metonyms, operate at this level.

Creating an alien language can begin by modifying the first level: signs. This could involve adopting unique phonemes absent in human languages or devising entirely new symbols for written forms. Innovative modalities, such as body movements akin to bee dances or electrical impulses like those used by robots in the film "AI Artificial Intelligence" (2001), could serve as communication methods. Even if structure, semantics, and pragmatics remain unchanged, altering signs can render the language distinctly alien.

Expanding further, one might construct an alien language with structures divergent from human languages. Human languages vary: some use prepositions, others postpositions; some indicate definiteness with articles like "the," while languages like Swedish use suffixes (e.g., "Vetenskapsrådet" for "the Swedish Research Council"). Sentence structures differ too; while most languages start sentences with a subject, a few begin with a verb. An alien language could amalgamate grammatical rules from various languages or introduce entirely new structural elements.

For instance, an alien language might lack certain grammatical categories, such as nouns, instead nominalizing verbs or adjectives similarly to English gerunds. Some human languages, like Salishan languages of Northwestern North America, reportedly lack a noun/verb distinction, and Quechua, spoken in the Peruvian Andes, is said to lack a noun/adjective distinction. These examples challenge the assumption that alien languages must mirror human grammatical categories.

Philosophers have envisioned languages with words of a single grammatical type. In "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (1921), Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a "logically perfect" language comprising simple signs akin to names like "Xi Jinping" or "Bogotá," representing individuals, objects, and places. Such a language would be true if its configuration of names accurately "pictures" the world.

However, the world encompasses more than objects; it includes properties and relationships. For example, "The Eiffel Tower is tall" attributes a property, while "Socrates was the teacher of Plato" denotes a relationship. Wittgenstein posited that these could be represented through configurations of names, spatial arrangements, or distances between names. Thus, a "Wittgenstein language" might consist solely of nouns, with meaning derived from their arrangement.

To achieve true alienness at the structural level, a language might forgo traditional words and sentences, instead employing elements resembling maps. In maps, elements like a church icon update automatically; relocating the icon adjusts its spatial relations. This dynamic differs from natural language, where changing a word doesn't automatically alter related elements. An alien language could function similarly, with elements representing relationships through spatial configurations, challenging conventional grammatical categories.

Languages differing in signs or structure may still be translatable into human languages. For example, a "Wittgenstein language" sentence like "Aristotle Plato Socrates," where spacing indicates "is the teacher of," could translate to "Plato is the teacher of Aristotle, and Socrates of Plato." A map icon of a church in a park might correspond to "The church is located in a park." Thus, despite differences, elements can be matched across languages.

However, languages diverging at the semantic level pose translation challenges. Some expressions may lack direct equivalents in other languages. For instance, the German word "Fernweh" describes a longing for distant places, a concept without a direct English counterpart. Similarly, "serendipity" lacks a precise translation in Hindi. Such semantic gaps highlight the complexities in translating languages with unique conceptual frameworks.

Glossary:

  • Syntax: The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences.

  • Semantics: The study of meaning in language.

  • Pragmatics: The study of how context influences the interpretation of meaning.

  • Nominalise: To convert a word, typically a verb or adjective, into a noun.

  • Gerund: A verb form functioning as a noun, ending in '-ing' in English.

  • Metonymic: Using a related term to stand in for an object or concept.

  • Implicature: An implied meaning derived from context rather than explicit statement.

  • Lumpers: Languages or classifications that group multiple categories together.

  • Pictorial form: A representation where elements correspond to aspects of reality.

  • Isomorphic: Having a one-to-one correspondence between structures.

Word Count: Approximately 600 words

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: Approximately 17.0

 Articles Daily+ | Just ₹55/month

Sharpen your VARC with 4 daily CAT-level articles in 1 PDF — curated from AEON Essays, The Guardian, The New York Times, Philosophy Now & more.

✔️ Paragraph-wise Main Ideas
✔️ Words to Note (with meanings)
✔️ Summary & Conclusion
✔️ Doubt-solving by 99+ %ilers

No fluff. Just focused, high-quality prep — every single day.
Join now. Stay consistent. Score higher.

DM to get your subscription today - @astiflingsoul


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DR JUN.-3

Boost Your VARC Scores with Articles Daily+! 🔥 Want to level up your comprehension for CAT VARC ? Here’s how to make the most of your Articles Daily+ experience — just follow these 5 simple steps every day to the pdf attached : 🧠 1. Read mindfully – Keep a 🖊️pen and 📝paper handy. Jot down key ideas or words from each paragraph as you go. 🚫 2. Don’t fear tough words – Skip them on first go. Focus on understanding the overall meaning of the passage instead of getting stuck. 🧩 3. Summarize smartly – After reading, write your own summary combining the main ideas in your own words. 🎯 📊 4. Compare & learn – Check your summary against the one provided. See how close you got to the core message of the article! 📚 5. Decode tough vocab – Check out the difficult words list provided. See if your contextual guesses were accurate. Don’t mug them up — repeated exposure = natural comfort! 💡 💥 Do this for the daily 4 articles of Articles Daily+ for 1 month — and watch your comprehension ...
Read more

Articles Daily reading digest

 By any conceivable metric, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century constituted a watershed moment in the gestation of our contemporary secular epoch. This epochal transformation is frequently construed as the moment wherein scientific inquiry emancipated itself from the epistemological fetters of medieval theological dogma, embarking upon an autonomous trajectory that repudiated metaphysical exegeses in favor of an inquiry exclusively anchored in the disenchanted, mechanistic cosmos. Yet, such an interpretation, at best, encapsulates merely a partial veracity. Medieval scientific paradigms, generally speaking, adhered to the Aristotelian schema, elucidating phenomena through an invocation of the intrinsic causal efficacies innate to natural entities. Deific agency remained an operative principle insofar as it was posited that God had originally imbued these entities with their properties and ostensibly ‘concurred’ with their quotidian operations. Nevertheless, the mat...
Read more

DR JUL.-28

 It resembled a fragment of driftwood adrift upon the ochre-hued tumult of floodwaters, unassuming and inert, until two eyes emerged with quiet deliberation above the water’s surface. As the canoe neared, the crocodile lunged without warning, attempting to unseat its occupant. Bereft of recourse, the woman propelled her canoe toward an overhanging copse of trees. In her desperate leap to grasp a branch, the reptile rose, too, dragging her beneath the surface in a harrowing death roll. “That was the worst part of the whole experience,” she recounted from her hospital bed, voice wavering in retrospective dread. “The part that I still don’t like to remember.” In the torrid February of 1985, Val Plumwood, an Australian eco-philosopher of formidable intellect, survived this primeval encounter on a secluded river in Kakadu, a remote region of immense biodiversity. Submerged thrice beneath the water's opaque surface, she clawed herself, grievously wounded, up the embankment, fabricating ...
Read more