Topics Language

Question One can say something mixing words from two languages (say, English and Ukrainian), and make good, clear and exact sense. One can even mix parts of words, or structures, and make perfect sense. My problem is that such an invented sentence wouldn't be meaningful according to any one of the "previously existing" languages. But, since it has linguistic meaning, it seems that it should have meaning according to some language. What language is that? The "sum" (what is that?) of the two used languages? The sum of all the existing languages in the world (since we can mix words from whatever language)? A new language created just by saying or thinking (one doesn't have to say it) the mixed sentence? And what about sentences with newly invented words? Sometimes we can invent a word and make perfect sense for people who listen to it for the first time. My point is that, after all, it seems that linguistic meaning isn't meaning according to a language. Or, if this is wrong, at least there is no "definite philosophical way" to say that something is one (rather than two or half) language, or that some sentence belongs to one language rather than to an arbitrary number of languages (made of arbitrary sums of other languages). Or so it seems to me... :-) (I love your site. It's terrible when you are on vacation, that's always when questions appear to me.)

Accepted:
June 7, 2013

Comments

It depends on what you take ‘language’ to mean. I take it to mean, roughly, a set of rules for constructing meaningful sentences. These rules specify a list of words and ways of putting them together to form sentences. It specifies the meaning of each word and how to compute the meaning of sentences from the component words and the way they are put together. All typical human languages conform to the principles of what Noam Chomsky called ‘Universal Grammar.’ Universal Grammar is a set of principles for the construction of languages, which severely constrain the range of possible human languages. All normal human children are born with a representation of Universal Grammar encoded in their mind/brains and they (or their mind/brains) use this representation to construct a representation of a language that resembles those of the people around them. Each normal adult human has at least one language represented in their mind/brains. Each such language is unique to the individual, though it will be very similar to those of many other speakers. What we call ‘English’, ‘French’ etc. are just somewhat arbitrary groupings of individual languages. So if I say e.g. ‘Je voudrais a cup of tea’ I am using a sentence of my language, or one of my languages, and many others will be able to understand it because it is a sentence of their languages too. It is an unusual sentence in that French languages and English languages tend to use different vocabularies and grammatical principals. But it is not too hard to mix and match and draw on elements of both to construct a single meaningful sentence. Also it is not hard artificially to construct a new language with just one sentence in it. Thus: the language GL contains the one, syntactically-unstructured sentence: ‘Чайбудьласка,Дарлінг’ which, when uttered or written by speaker at a time, expresses the proposition that the speaker would like a cup of tea at that time.