Language

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

11– Language as putative science.
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of the occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later – only now – it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be again put back.
Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.

[Human, All too Human]

Heidegger, Martin wrote:

With regard to the Latin name for the true, verum, we shall keep two incidents in mind:
1. Verum, ver-, meant originally enclosing, covering.
The Latin verum belongs to the same realm of meaning as the Greek αληθες, the uncovered – precisely by signifying the exact opposite of αληθες: the closed off.
2. But now because verum is counter to falsum, and because the essential domain of the imperium is decisive for verum and falsum and their opposites, the sense of ver-, namely enclosed and cover, becomes basically that of covering for security against. Ver is now the maintaining-oneself, the being-above; ver becomes the opposite of falling.
Verum is the remaining constant, the upright that which is directed to what is superior because it is directing from above. Verum is rectum (regere, ‘the regime’), the right, iustum.
For the Romans the realm of concealment and disconcealment does not at all come to be, although it strives in that direction in ver, the essential realm determining the essence of truth. Under the influence of the imperial, verum becomes forthwith ‘being-above,’ directive for what is right; veritas is then rectitude, ‘correctness,’ we would say.
The originally Roman stamp given to the essence of truth, which solidly establishes the all-pervading basic character of the essence of truth in the Occident, rejoins an unfolding of the essence of truth that begin already with the Greeks and that at the same time marks the inception of Western metaphysics.

Our brain uses up more energy than that of any other animal, which may have helped us to evolve complex cognitive traits, such as using languages to communicate [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— New Scientist (@newscientist) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

There are significant similarities between music and language, suggesting at least a common origin. For example, many subtle aspects of language are mediated by regions of the right hemisphere which also mediate the performance and experience of music. Furthermore these right hemisphere regions are the homologues of areas in the left hemisphere that are involved with language production and comprehension – they are in the ‘same’ position on the other side of the brain. Music and language have a shared architecture, built out of intonational phrases related by a kind of ‘syntax’, although the syntax of music has more to do with the overall shape of the whole piece over many minutes (or, in the case of Wagner, 31 hours) than with the specific relationship of rapidly successive elements in a linear progression. In both music and speech, the phrase is the basic unit of structure and function, and both speech phrases and musical phrases have melody and rhythm, which play a crucial role in their expressiveness. There is even a close semantic relationship between music and language: musical phrases convey specific meanings that, if required, we will intuitively associate with specific words.
When it comes to understanding the origins of language, however, there is less agreement, and speculation has followed one of three paths. There are those who believe that music is a useless spinoff, or epiphenomenon, of the development of language; there are those, on the contrary, who believe that language itself developed out of musical communication (a kind of singing); and finally there are those who hold that music and language developed independently but alongside one another, out of a common ancestor, which has been dubbed ‘musilanguage.’ It seems to me that this last option is hard to distinguish from the ‘music came first’ position. That is because, while ‘musilanguage’ may not have been very sophisticated music, it must have been more like music than like referential language, and, for it to have been a ‘language’ in any sense, it must have relied on what we think of as the musical aspects – the non-verbal aspects – of language, such as pitch, intonation, volume, rhythm and phrasing. The very existence of the concept of ‘musilanguage’ merely points up how much the musical aspects of language do contribute to meaning, in that they could in themselves provide the basis for communication of meaning.
[The Master and His Emissary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World]

Smith, Adam wrote:

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

Heidegger, Martin wrote:

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Smith, Adam wrote:

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

Heidegger, Martin wrote:

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Baudelaire, Charles wrote:

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly.
To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Dunbar, Robin wrote:

Eventually, even this form of communication would have exhausted its capacity to bond groups. A more efficient mechanism for bonding was needed to allow group size to continue its upward drift. At this point, the vocalizations began to acquire meaning. But the content was largely social: gossip had arrived. This need not have involved any dramatic change, for as the studies by Seyfarth and Cheney have shown, primate vocalizations are already capable of conveying a great deal of social information and commentary.

Dunbar, Robin wrote:

The central argument revolves around four key points: (1) among primates, social group size appears to be limited by the size of the species' neocortex; (2) the size of human social networks appears to be limited for similar reasons to a value of around 150; (3) the time devoted to social grooming by primates is directly related to group size because it plays a crucial role in bonding groups; and finally, (4) it is suggested that language evolved among humans to replace social grooming because the grooming time required by our large groups made impossible demands on our time.
Language, I argue, evolved to fill the gap because it allows us to use the time we have available for social interaction more efficiently.

Dunbar, Robin wrote:

In fact, we now know that grooming stimulates the production of the body’s natural opiates, the endorphins; in effect, being groomed produces mildly narcotic effects. The problem here is that vocalizations are just, well, vocalizations.
They don't have the same opiate-releasing properties as grooming. However, suppose that as language develops, signals associated with language themselves begin to stimulate opiate production. Smiling, and particularly, laughing do just this, and this may well explain why smiling and laughing are such important components of conversation.

Dunbar, Robin wrote:

Language has an additional benefit invaluable in these circumstances. It allows us to exchange information about other people, so short-circuiting the laborious process of finding out how they behave. For monkeys and apes, all this has to be done by direct observation.