Topic: Linguistics

Quotes

The notion that ideas and their words are invariant lumps unaltered by combination, like bricks, is analogous to believing that an economy is a mere aggregation of Robinson Crusoes.#

The Linguistics of Corrupted Language: Why Orwell Doesn't Need Whorf
The political corruption of language is often called Orwellian, and indeed Orwell was deeply concerned with it, both his essay “Politics and the English Language”, and the role of Newspeak in his novel 1984. He has in mind a bidirectional process: The decline of a language must ultimately have political and . . .
Why Wittgenstein Needs Chomsky: Language vs. the Language Faculty
The famous quote above from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus just means that the categories we use to make sense of the world are part of us, and not part of the world. The boundaries that we draw around classes of objects – this is a chair, and that is not – . . .
What Makes Economics a Human Science? Zoöpraxeology and the Abstractive Foundation of Catallactics
Mises stresses both the purely formal character of praxeology, and the uniqueness of man set apart from animals by goal-directed action. To the extent the former is true, however, the latter becomes less unique to man, and we may usefully interpret animal behavior this way. This suggests that the study . . .
The Future of English
Languages can grammaticalize a lot of different things. Japanese grammaticalizes the shape of an object with a noun suffix. Turkish grammaticalizes how certain you are of a statement with a verb suffix. English doesn’t grammaticalize much. We just use extra adjectives and adverbs. However, I predict English will acquire a feature . . .