What is Language?

Question:share your thoughts

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: share your thoughts

Normally I don't answer questions of the form "what is X" because I believe that meaning depends on context, and by asking a question like that you rob the word of context, and therefore rob it of meaning. You might say that I don't believe in necessary and sufficient conditions. I'm a non-essentialist.

That said, I really wanted to point out that not everybody thinks of language as a system. Some people like Wittgenstein (and me) think that it is closer to a game, where people use words in order to affect their situation, NOT to communicate some inherent meaning. Also, we Wittgensteinians think that if language is going to communicate anything at all, it HAS to be social. There has to be a shared idea of how to use a word.

Like anything, whether it follows rules or not is kind of a matter of how you look at it. Language happens, then we assign rules to model it. Sure, English, french, etc have rules, but I can imagine a language with only a few words that don't follow those rules at all. Whatever my made-up language does, people will be able to look at it later and say "look, it followed these rules". Whether the rules were there to begin with is irrelevant.

Mentalese is usually social as well, because it (usually) involves concepts that are learned from a society. It's status as language depends on what you mean by language in a given context.

A form of communication.
Thanks for mentalese- Reason we tell children to think before speaking to help get the message across, by choosing certain words and or adding facial expressions.

Verbal symbolicism.

Language is the art of comunitcation and common understanding between two or more people.

A language is a system, used to communicate, comprised of a set of symbols and a set of rules (or grammar) by which the manipulation of these symbols is governed. These symbols can be combined productively to convey new information, distinguishing languages from other forms of communication.

It is how humans communicate.

The Mankind's greatest invention.

The simplest way of communication

It is a means of communication.

Language is the highest form of communications of mankind. Language enables us to deliver our thoughts and exchange ideas with other people. It is a way humans are converge to have a peaceful agreement. It is the best tool and weapon of humankind.

Language breaks the barrier of people.

Thanks for asking. Have a great day!