Quote: Aristotle established the words: subject, predicate, form, matter, energy, potential, substance, essence, quantity, quality, accidental, relation, cause, genus, species, individual, indivisible [»loreMP19_1997]

Quote: all languages are anchored in other worlds rather than in sensible experience [»mitcR_1979]

Quote: while some words correspond to reality, other don't; a theory of language must account for both [»pitkHF_1972]

Quote: we cannot abandon magic; our language assumes the existence of abstract entities; so with mankind and gravity comes Lady Luck and fate [»mitcR_1979]

Quote: natural languages use a diversity of anaphoric relations (i.e., referential dependencies) [»lopeCV12_2003]

Quote: language is a habit of speech, initiated by the passions, to share knowledge, opinions, and passions

Quote: native language is also for community; at the heart of social and political study [»pitkHF_1972]

Quote: what can be said at all, can be said clearly [»dijkEW_1979]

Quote: the alphabetical index to Roget's thesaurus demonstrates the elasticity of language to adapt to different needs [»rogePM_1853, OK]

Quote: language is not complete, e.g. calculus; it is like an ancient city of many little streets surrounded by more regular suburbs [»wittL_1958a]

Quote: the stages of writing systems are pictographic, logographic, syllabary, and alphabetic; evolves when adapted by a new culture [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: in 14 weeks create a natural language with a syntax, lexicon, translation, and course guide; indicate distinctions of tense, number, manner, mood, agency [»fishS5_2005]

Quote: mimetic sign language is like spoken language: complex forms from a small number of discrete components in a shell-like structure [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: it is not true that animals speak; otherwise they could make themselves understood by us [»descR_1637]

Quote: humans spontaneously assign symbols to objects and events; animals do not [»hausMD_2000]

Quote: humans manipulate symbol sequences to alter their meaning; a combinatoric system not available to animals

Quote: most animals have rich thoughts and emotions but no system for communicating what they think to others [»hausMD_2000]

Quote: learning a language is a matter of training, based on our natural capacities and shared understanding of the world [»pitkHF_1972]

Quote: children easily learn the primitives of a visual environment and then struggle to program with them in interesting and complex ways [»radeC3_1997]

Quote: languages have a highly analytic, shell-like structure because of learning

Quote: to master a language you must master its grammar, vocabulary, and usage [»blocJ_2001]

Quote: a sentence is words placed into a relationship with one another; generate 20 sentences from 5 random words [»fishS5_2005]

Quote: the relationships within a sentence concern actors, their actions, and the objects of those actions; a limited set of possibilities [»fishS5_2005]

Quote: a language always has a regular and abstract way of conveying distinctions of number, time, manner, space, hierarchy, difference [»fishS5_2005]

Quote: can use any formal devise to signal grammatical distinctions -- word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors [»fishS5_2005]

Quote: when you rearrange atoms, their order, shapes and motions, then you also change what they compose; just like written language [»lucr_55]

Quote: mimetic depiction in American Sign Language is like morphology in spoken languages; small number of discrete components and combinations [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: American Sign Language has a standardized lexicon of signs and a sign mime of handshapes, movements, and positions

Quote: in ASL mimetic depiction there are 7 movement roots, i.e., verbs of motion and location; e.g., hold root to indicate "be stationary" [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: morphological dimensions in mimetic ASL for movement, handshape, orientation, manner, basehand, and process morphemes; e.g., FLY vs. AIRPLANE [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: mimetic sign language is like spoken language: complex forms from a small number of discrete components in a shell-like structure [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: mimetic sign language learned by second-generation deaf; they regularize the handshapes and movements of the ASL lexicon into useful components [»newpEL_1982]

Quote: seventeenth-century scientists sought a Universal Character, or interlingua, for scientific description and argument; to replace Latin [»sparK7_1972]

Quote: Dalgarno developed a universal language based on a hierarchical classification with three letter codes; e.g., 'g' is 'Qualitas Sensibilis', 'ga' is tactus, and 'gan' is humiditas [»sparK7_1972]

Quote: Blissymbolics is a pictorial, universal language of 100 symbols [»blisCK_1965]

Quote: Blissymbolics motivated by the universal nature of Chinese ideographic writing; even invaders made Chinese by the language [»blisCK_1965]

Quote: list of symbols in Blisssymbolics; divided in matter symbols, energy symbols, and mind symbols [»blisCK_1965, OK]

Quote: Zuse envisaged a universal language for conversing with computers; Esperanto was too colloquial and Carnap's ideas were too mathematical; need something in between [»zuseK_1984]

Quote: Wilkins published a Universal Character in 1668 through the Royal Society; a massive hierarchical classification of ideas and synonyms [»sparK7_1972]

Quote: construct a Universal Character by assigning symbols for simple notions and compose these symbols for everything else; like logic and mathematics [»sparK7_1972]

Quote: Leibniz represented primitives as primes and other concepts by their products; universal dictionary for mapping concepts to numbers

Quote: since arithmetic is universally understood, a universal language for words should be possible [»sparK7_1972]

Quote: number and language skills leapfrog each other as children learn to manipulate symbols

Quote: people distinguish classes via short descriptions; using language specific to those classes; brevity is achieved without lose of information [»bongM_1967]

Quote: lexicographical hierarchies of names have a basic level where people can list many features; above it, descriptions are brief [»millGA7_1990]

Quote: a few dozen analogies account for most of the metaphors in everyday speech [»sowaJF_1984]

Quote: only an appeal to semantics can resolve the syntactic ambiguity of 'time flies like an arrow'; three acceptable structures [»oettAG_1972]

Quote: all animals recognize objects and predict their behavior; allows representation of artifacts without language [»hausMD_2000]

Quote: language enriches the human representation of artifacts, but is not necessary