Your last paragraph is perfect. It's pretty much just a better way of putting my understanding of how language works. You might as well have gone into my head, rearranged all the ideas, separated out all the useless chaff, and then put it back together in a way that is digestible and makes sense.
Especially the part about there being a universal language that is really something that's necessarily efficient but is still something external to the mind, and not some inbuilt magical "language mind power" inside everyone's brain.
Although, I guess, to be fair to the hardcore universal grammar types, they would probably then just ask "Well what is it that makes it possible to have a single language that can be the most efficient? If it's the most efficient across languages, then doesn't that imply there is something internal to the human mind itself that makes this trait something universal to all languages."
To that I'd probably go with the idea that it's not the human brain this tells us anything about (or mind, if you're into the whole dualism thing), but about the structure of language.
Which they'd then say something about that being the same thing because "language is always and everywhere a brain thing."
But so is every other human activity. Just because statistically 100% of people perceive, say, pain, it doesn't tell us that there is a specific "pain part of the mind universal to all humans." Pain could very well come from all types of different combinations of human interactions with the external world and the the way the nervous system (among all the others) proceeds in its work translating those interactions into something perceptible by a conscious thinking individual.
But I'm also not a professional linguist, so I very well could be completely wrong on all this.
In any event, you have gained yourself a regular reader.
Hope we can continue conversations like these. I don't get a lot of this in my "off-chain" life for any number of reasons, so I enjoy it immensely here.
Thanks!
well hit me up on discord if you ever want to chat direct and not have it be sprawled across posts. thefatkat on discord.
Yea send me some writing in a few months if you want some ideas. Not sure if you have ever done any programming. But I think it really opens up information processing.
For pain or any other experience I think of everything as little blackboxes. The human perceiving pain is a blackbox so to the extent they feel pain they have that sensation. To the extent past experience or maybe brain chemistry or other things can transform sensations, or even perspective or other things then there would be a different matrix that could contain all that information at the most efficient level.
Ultimately, I just think of it as a lowest common denominator that there be a most efficient objective way of preserving the information in one language and transfering it to another with minimal data corruption , or corruption below some threshold.
As a big fan of Richard Dawkin's "Selfish gene" I think one can think of all ontological social constructs as little replications of that information in a brain.
One could call this a universal language where most efficient storage and thus all laguages or structures might coalesce around different linguistic data structures, to think it is inherent in DNA I think might be mixing what the real process. More that it is the nature of reality once you define enough concepts of the zeitgeist.
Hope things are going well!!
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