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LANGUAGE
THE FUNCTIONALITY OF LANGUAGE:
Communication, or Conformation, or Confusion?
(special thanks to a Linguistics professor who gave me her patience and share valuable facts in her lecture which is inspiring to me)
The functionality for language is not necessarily for the concern for simplification of minimum input and maximum output. By contrast, language emphasizes its complexity to help one provide more profound information to one's audiences to build up information accuracies. In some other times, linguistic confusions and jargons increase individuals survival.
Another perspective of the language is by exploiting either communication or confusion, people try to, instead of communication, comform others or to de-conform from others. This leads to another aspect of the functionality of communication: We uitilize language to keep our distinguishing diversity or to conform the differences? By then, should we say conformation instead of communication?
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Language for efficiency or language for information & prevarication?
There are four different writing systems, which are logographic writing system, syllabic writing system, and alphabetic writing system, and consonantal writing system. They all have their distinct merits and purposeful shortcomings to accommodate their users' special needs in their distinct traditions.
Therefore, it may appear to be improper for people to use a modern value to evaluate the differences in different writing systems. For example:
It leaves something to be desired while linguists claim that there are no primitive languages while the many linguistics textbooks still asking the question that which language is more economical for humans.
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Close look at the Semantic Cluster of a word: "Economical"
The term Economical, in human minds, it comes the cluster of concepts and words: efficient, simplification, survival, and minimum input, and maximum output. Therefore, being economical is a questionable value for the purpose of the existence of language.
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Communication & Miscommunication are both important
For sufficiency perspective to communication:
Although anthropologists argue that humans use language to free our hands to hunt and perform complex tasks for survival, language is more a good tool for human to provide accurate (precise) and profound (complex) information to others regarding knowledge, messages, and experiences sharing. Such as a bee use its long and complicated dance to provide accurate and profound information for other bees for the location and direction of newfound pollen sources. Another one of the anthropological observations interprets that language also allow humans to communicate while they lost their visual communication in the darkness.
For Confusion perspective of Communication:
One obvious example is that people say that there is neither a permanent friend nor a permanent enemy in the business world. Another example is say both liberal and conservative political candidates have to attract middle voters to increase their ballots, so in their campaign speeches, they have to state their political position well (confusing) enough to attract their both fundamental voters and confused middle voters.
The socially conversational jargons provide emotional attachment between speakers and listeners. So we can see that being economical is not the most essential value of the language.
Therefore, the examples above show that the key functionality of language for humans is its sufficiency to construct ideas, not the efficiency for ideas.
Above all, I point out confusion and jargon in our communication process is not to be sarcastic. In fact, both of them are the important crucial elements to make human's communication become an "Art."
The characteristics of the spoken language also apply to the written form of languages.
(You are welcome and do not hesitate to oppose to my statements on my guest book)
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