《The Unfolding of Language》读书笔记一

• Overview

  Page: 1~27

• Essence of Language

  This marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those what cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of out soul.

  ​ ----- 1660

  Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never intented.

  A language with only words, and no structure to prop them up, would be a poor instrument of communication.

  The structure of language is what can turn a pile of word-bricks into a palance of expressions - a castle in the air.

  结构（structure, 句法, 句型）belongs to language;

  word belongs to writing.

  Both orders are just cultural conventions, and conventions, by their very nature, can vary across time and space.

• Writing

  Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some 5,000 years ago by the people who invented writing and thus kick-started history.

• Polyglot

  Joseph Scaliger, a polyglot not only fluent in Latin, Greek and most of the modern languages of Europe, but also self-taught in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Persian, still had to give up on Basque.

• Structures of Languages

  Searching for the origin of linguistic structure is nothing less than an attempt to discover how we acquired the ability to build bridges between minds.

• Words

  • Content words

  • Grammatical words

    Conjunctions, prepositions, articles which cannot boast their own independent meaning.

    They play a crucial role in the administration of the sentence, and help to determine the hierarchy and precise relations between content words.

  • Various splinters

    Prefixes, suffixes

  1. conventions of word order

• References

1. The Unfolding of Language; Guy Deutscher