Postby Henkkles » Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:57 pm
Offloading some brain-goop here, comments are welcome, it's almost entirely train of thought:
What is language?
In the dualistic view, humans live simultaneously in two separate worlds; the so called "real" world of atoms and molecules interacting, and the semiotic world, how the human brain makes sense of it all. There is a constant negotiation inside each individual about which parts of the real world are included into the intra-cranial representation, and this has to do with their significance to us. Many other animals are capable of conceptual representation as well; all mammals can recognize members of their own species, they have concepts of what is edible and what is not.
The increase in human brain size and thus power allowed more brain power to be dedicated to this semantic mapping system, and I suspect this is where language lives. It seems a logical next step to the primate ability to exhibit mental states (anger, fear) as external ideas (facial expressions), which necessitates a finer control of the muscles and nerves in the face. The articulatory organs of humans are enervated by much the same mechanisms. Languages, then, are idioms (in the original sense) of manipulating the articulators that mutate and pass down in populations.
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