"In my day there were still a few of them around." Good Lord! Just HOW old are you?
67. When I was a kid there were a lot of collectors who had cars from the 1920s and 30s, and a few older models that had the "a-OO-gah" horns. I had never heard them called klaxons, much less heard of the Klaxon company who is said to have built them.
BTW, every time I read your posts I learn something new that I didn't know before. Thanks for sharing your voluminous knowledge.
I appreciate hearing that. I've always been a teacher, at times even a paid professional.
I don't think so. I'm positive that a true polymath would know what the word means and every time I come across it I have to look it up. "A person of
great learning in several fields?" I will cop to having
some learning in several fields, perhaps even
more learning than average in a few of them. But "great learning"? I don't think so.
Here I am, the Linguistics Moderator, and not only do I not understand half of this discussion, but I don't even care!
So would a code be a language?
There are many different types of communication and they all have names. A
code is a system for
converting information from one form into another, for a specific purpose such as brevity, clarity, secrecy, ease of transmission or constraints of storage media. The information must already be expressed in one form for a code to be used. Expressing thoughts in words is not code, it is language.
It could be argued that converting spoken information into symbols on paper, stone or a CRT is coding, and from a purely pedantic standpoint that would be true. However, we have already established the term "writing" for that particular type of code, the world's oldest and most widely used.
But then language doesn't require visible symbols or pictures either.
The hand signals used by deaf people--which are not all the same, even among the anglophone countries--are certainly another kind of language. And contrary to our assumptions, none of them are simply mechanical transcriptions of the local spoken language. For example they omit nearly-meaningless noise-words like articles.
That's why we have speech.
And writing. I know a deaf man who never learned ASL or lip reading. He communicates only in writing.
When you've tracked down somebody who can translate it for us, let's talk.
Frank Zappa said that music is the only true religion because it actually delivers on its promise to make you feel good, but he never called it language.
Linguists require a language to have more to it than vocabulary. It has to have
syntax, rules for combining words in organized groups which, then, express more meaning than the sum of the individual words. Many species of non-human animals obviously communicate, but they don't put sentences together, or even clauses, so they're not communicating with language.
Some dogs can learn the meaning of several dozen words, but you can't string them together in groups larger than two. So the primitive "sentence" doesn't really convey any more information than the sum of the meanings of the two words.
MUST..REST..NOW..
Aha, an
emoticon, a member of a new set of ideograms. "Emoticon" is a newly invented word, and its etymology is both obvious and clever. Dictionary.com does not identify the first appearance of this word nor the person who first wrote it. Either it sprang up in multiple places, or it spread so rapidly that the originator was never identified.
