Author: admin

From time to time, during my translation work I encountered work which either : a) needs a total rewrite to fit the context, or b) direct translation can cause misunderstanding or confusion.

One of the example I encountered recently was below:

“I wanted to modernise Britain so that, while retaining pride in having worn the mantle of the world’s most powerful nation as the twentieth century began, it didn’t feel bereft and in decline as the twenty-first century arrived, because that mantle would no longer fit.”

This is a quote from the foreward of Tony Blaire’s autobiography “A journey: My Political Life”.

The Chinese Translation I read was as follows:

“我想改革英国，使它保留20世纪初、身披世界最强大帝国斗篷的骄傲，同时，面对21世纪的到来，不会由于那件斗篷不再合身而自觉衰落和衰退。”

For my bilingual friends, can you detect any problem? Let me translate the Chinese translation back, together with a new shades of connotation it acquired after the translation:

“I wanted to modernise Britain so that it retains its pride in having worn the mantle of the world’s most powerful nation as the twentieth century began, and at the same time, it won’t feel bereft and in decline as the twenty-first century arrived because that mantle will no longer fit.”

Compare this with the original quote, and it seems like the second quote took on a connotation of Tony Blaire trying to maintain that imperial mantle, instead of the original connotation of adapting with time. In fact, the article where I encountered this quote (which is written in Chinese), interpreted this quote in the second connotation.

So how would I translate the original quote?

“我想改革英国，使它保留20世纪初、身披世界最强大帝国斗篷的骄傲，同时，在21世纪的到来而那件斗篷不再合身以后，不会自觉衰落和衰退。”

The “以后” is what was missing in the original translation, but it’s important for the connotation of this quote. Because when Tony Blaire said “the mantle no longer fits”, he stated it as factual and with finality. Without translating this layer of finality with a time token, the translation could be interpreted in both ways: Britain trying to retain its former glory, or Britain accept the loss of its former glory but try to adapt and retain its national identity. By adding the time token and reordering the sentence, I gave the translation the original connotation of finality.

In defence of the original translator, it is difficult to detect such addition of meaning during first pass translation, especially if it was proofread by the same person, because the translator would still be reading this sentence within the original English context, and wouldn’t detect the added connotation.

That is why it is always a good idea to hire another proofreader, especially for sensitive material which you want to avoid misunderstanding.

If you have any phrase or sentence or short paragraph you would like me to vet, or are simply curious how I would translate it please feel free to email me or post them in the comment. I will response to them.

A good entry point would probably be the question: where does meaning reside? To many, meaning is a function of mind, or perhaps an understanding of the world around us which resides in the mind. Further consideration, though, points to a different direction.

First of all, in so far as we are discussing meaning as understood by human, we must inevitably realize that meaning cannot be separated from language. One is not complete without another. So does meaning reside in language, or perhaps is language and meaning one and the same thing? Not quite.

Without language, we cannot hope to grasp meaning. The social experience and the physical reality which forms the foundation of meaning exist as memories in our mind. For example, as a person eats when he is hungry, he experiences a feeling, a sensation. When he is being pursued by a predator, he experiences another sensation. These feelings, as well as his knowledge of physical objects, such as fire, or water, forms the foundation to meaning. In that sense, meaning cannot be separated from an understanding of one’s immediate surrounding. But understanding alone is not sufficient to derive meaning. Meaning emerges (as I’ve discussed briefly in a previous article) as two persons attempt to communicate their experiences and knowledge of the world to each other. In order for this communication to happen, a common symbol must be developed to refer to the same matter. These symbols become language. In that sense, meaning can also be viewed as residing in between people, as an abstraction of the collective understanding of the world, along with the existence of language.

An acute reader should become aware of the underlying assumption to the emergence of meaning and formation of language as described above. It is that the people involved, must already possess experience and an understanding of the world which are similar, if not identical. This is also an important factor and foundation to the existence of meaning. It is thus important to bear in mind, even as modern society evolve, that what has meaning to a group of people, and individuals which come from a certain group, might not have the same meaning to another. Even if, in modern society, the evolution of language has progressed to such a stage where symbols used in language are often defined and set down on (figurative) paper, it still doesn’t mean that these symbols can transmit meaning. This is because the foundation of meaning is common understanding and experience.

Thus far, based on our observation, we’ve described meaning as thus: it is based first and foremost, on common understanding and experience of the world, and that it resides in between people, in that it is a product of the communication process.

To take these observations further, we must also note that once a meaning is developed, it can also reside in the memory, and thus the “mind”, of an individual. But meaning as resides with individual, is different in quality with the collective meaning. This is the dual nature of meaning. First, its emergence was the consequence of common understanding and experience, and thus acquire a collective nature: it must be something common to a group of people. The method of arriving at this common experience and understanding is irrelevant: the group may acquire it during their activities together, or individually. Some common experiences are shaped by a common physical reality. However, the collective nature of meaning, also stand in contrast against the individual nature of it. Although termed as “common”, these experiences were learned through different individuals. And each individual’s interpretation and actual experience of what is “common” are most likely different in detail. For example, “hunger” is a common human experience. But to some, hunger merely means getting up to find food, to some, it produce fear and uncertainty about the future. When one individual said to another: “I am hungry”, he is attempting to express his individual circumstance through the knowledge of a collective meaning. In that sense, meaning is both a collective property, and a private one: we can only be sure of our own experience, as we, and only we, as individuals go through our own experience, but when we become aware of the commonality of these experiences, and the symbols (language) to express them, and that more than just us go through them, we become aware of the meaning of it, or rather, these experiences acquire a meaning. This the fundamental mechanism of communication.

In short, meaning must be rooted in common experience, and it is both a collective phenomenon, and an individual one. It is by nature social, because the emergence and the usage of “meaning” is restricted to a social environment, meaning in between people, and is the result of communication.

Language as a (primary) form of meaning

But for meaning to exist in this world, it cannot be without form. Language is the form of meaning. That is why language emerge together with meaning, because at the first instance of the emergence of meaning, it immediately required a form, and that form became what we now know as language.

“Language has a pre-intellectual root”, in that the physical mechanism which formed the phenomenon of language, such as our ability to produce sound, our ability to use body for gesturing and creating and using tools etc, must have developed long before the advent of language. These mechanics of forms are crucial for our form of language. We do not need to stretch our imagination too far to know that should our physical reality differ from what they are, we will develop a completely different sets of language, as evident by the sign language used by the deaf and mute, or Braille writing system developed for the blind. Even produced upon the foundation of existing predominant human language, they are so different that a common person will not understand them without conscious effort to learn them. This is simply on account on the physical limitation of the user, while many human experiences remain common.

These physical limitation shaped the form of language, and in turn shaped that form of expression of meaning. And because meaning takes the form of these physical limitation, it is easy to look at the form of meaning (language) and conclude that it is the result of human physical limitation, rather than his social experience and physical surrounding.

The nature of language

As language as a form evolves, it acquires certain patterns and characteristic particular to this form, and began to restrict and shape the expression of meaning, and ultimately, the very meaning which the language is trying to express. This is easy to understand when compared with the evolution of utensils, such as a spoon or a folk. These tools were created to facilitate eating, and in the beginning, they came in all shapes and sizes. But as these tools evolved, the shape and size began to become more standardized, and subsequently react upon the way we eat.

It is during the standardization of language, that it began to acquire its own meaning, since it became part of the common experience of human society. This is what sends the grammarist and structural linguists into a Don Quixote quest. As language becomes part of human social experience, it seems to acquire its own existence, and it is easy to forget that it is fundamentally a form of meaning, and without studying the substance behind the form, the study of form itself cannot be whole, or, to play a bad pun, is meaningless.

Akin to the dual nature of meaning, language possesses a dual nature as well. First and foremost, language exists when two persons are communicating. This is the actual language. This language serves the purpose of transmitting meaning between the two individuals, and can be considered as their “private” language. This is the language that serves the transmission of meaning. But language, to be effective and efficient, must serve more than two persons. Ideally, it should serve all humanity. In order to have that kind of reach, language, as a form, must be defined and described, formalized, so that it can be easily acquired by all members of the community, and that it contains definite rules of usage, and well defined “meaning”, so as to avoid confusion among users. This latter, is the collective language, and it is the language which usurps the role of meaning, and as a result, defines and controls meaning as if it is but a subset of language, not the source of it.

Language must be of both nature, because its substance, meaning, is of both nature. Its emergent and evolution are inseparable from the dual nature of meaning.

There is a need for language to be of a collective nature, because much of the human experiences are common. It will not be economically sound for every two humans to develop their private language, both to the human as a physical being (expenditure of brain resource), and human as a social being (community development). However, due to the private nature of meaning, a unified form to express meaning inevitably produce misunderstanding: what the meaning behind one individual usage of a certain sets of language might differ widely from the other individual. This would be manageable when the difference in experience is small enough, but soon it would have come to a point where such difference cause confusions among the users. This would be where language began its own evolution process.

And because grammarians forget that language is rooted in meaning, which in turns is rooted in common experience, they saw the confusion of meaning, which is in fact a difference in experience, as the result of the confusion of the structure of language, i.e., they misdiagnosed the symptom as the cause. As a result, language workers throughout the ages, but especially during the reign of structuralism, begin adding rules to language itself, in hope that when everyone speaks the same way, they will eliminate the possibility of confusions.

Therein lies the root of the separation of language and mind. Or at least our understanding of them.

When there is a breakdown in communication, the fault lies not with the language, but with the experience of the parties involved. The language used reflects their experience, not as some may belief, that the language used was insufficient to reflect their experiences and thereby causing the miscommunication.

But language is of two natures: it must be so. Even though through natural development, human has created a separate dimension to language, and assigned new assumption to language as phenomenon, it cannot, and will not, lose its original function, which is to serve as the form of meaning.

And thus, to use language truly and effectively, fulfilling its original and sole purpose, it is important to bear in mind that the foundation of meaning is common experience, and that when communication breakdown occurs, do not first review the language (although it might be useful to review the language as it might lead you to the discrepancies in experience), but attempt to understand the other’s experience, so that you may seek common ground and create meaning again.

The role of a structured collective language

It may seem from the above paragraph that the collective structured language might be responsible for communication problems and it might be best to do away with it. This is not an unreasonable deduction, although one drawn much too quick.

What exists exists for a reason.

The emergence of a collective language is not an “error”, nor is it incidental. It serve a human need, although one that is different from its proclaimed purpose to provide a “standard”, in so far as we understand “standard” as an attempt to straight jacket the expression of meaning.

Thus far, we have only considered the usage of a language in its social and natural environment. When we come to the acquisition of language, be it for a child acquiring its native language or a foreign speaker acquiring a new local language, a structured collective language serve the purpose of an effective and efficient entry point. Without the existence of a structure collective language, it will be much harder for a learner to acquire a language (much harder for a second language learner), and total immersion in the target language is almost a must. With the existence of a structured collective language, the learner are given a quick summary of the language. However, such “standard” language does not represent the highest form or the most “correct” form of the language: a correctly constructed collective language should always be the lowest common denominator. Meaning if one is to follow the collective language, one should be able to be understood by other users of the language, but it doesn’t mean one can understand other, more experienced users of the language. It is bordering on absurdity when many people consider the “standard” collective to be the most “correct” or “desired” form of language, and demanded that more experience users of the language to tailor their usage according to a “standard”, all the while unaware or forgetting that the collective merely offers a starting point.

In short, a structured collective language serve as a starting point, not an end point. It serves to introduce, not to restrict. It is a tragedy that many language workers view otherwise.

This is not an excuse to not use language properly. As the sole purpose of language is to transmit meaning, any language user should use a language which is most appropriate to his audience. But when he is unsure of what is appropriate for his audience, the language user must be able to fall back to the lowest common denominator. Language user should consider his audience, not himself, and not a nebulous “Standard” of language.

The coming year of the 羊(Yang) seemed to have excited among the press a slight interest over the actual identity of the very “holy mascot” which is supposed to represent the entire coming year. Do the Chinese refer to a sheep, a goat or a ram when they talk about 羊(Yang)? To wit, here are some articles written on this topic (Author’s Note: Lost the links in a migration) :
Chinese New Year 2015: Is it the year of the ram, sheep or goat?
Happy lunar new year! But is it the year of the sheep or something else? (The year of the “Ovicaprid”, gosh.)
Lunar New Year celebrations to welcome year of ‘any ruminant horned animal’ (ruminant horned animal… well, can’t wait for the year of the Ox to come around.)
Or for those who preferred a Chinese vantage point:
外媒：你们中国人过的羊年究竟是哪种羊啊

While I thoroughly enjoy and support this kind of cultural exchange over harmless trivia, I believe that this phenomenon of what seemed on the surface like a simple translation issue, deserves to be considered further, as it can and should reveal to any careful reader a profound difference in thinking between the Chinese civilization (and those traditionally affected by it) and the western one as represented by the English speaking world.

Language is mind. Therefore, a difference in language reveals a fundamental difference in the way one thinks, and many of these differences are subconscious.

In this case, it boils down to how the two cultures treat different entities with overt similarities. Essentially, sheep and goats are different animals, albeit closely related. (I am taking Ram out of the discussion because a ram is basically an uncastrated male sheep, although common image associated with ram has led the Chinese press I quoted above to associate it with a bighorn sheep, which can be another interesting topic on its own)

While both belonged to the subfamily of Caprinae, they have very different characteristics.

Now let me describe how these two languages treat these two animals. And for those of us who are blessedly effectively bilingual (you are effectively bilingual when you can give an impromptu speech in either language), either activate your imagination or recall those days when you were blissfully unaware of the intricacies of other languages.

For a child raised in an English environment with English as its first language, sheep and goats are two different animals. That they look somewhat alike is purely incidental. Such a person will instinctively look for differences between these two animals first, and relationships between these two animals are likely to be established only after more commonalities are found.

On the contrary, a child raised in a Chinese environment with Chinese as its first language, will most likely learn about an animal called 羊(Yang), regardless of what it is actually referring to. Sometime later in his life, he’ll realize that there are different types of Yang, such as the 绵羊 (Woolly Yang), or 山羊 (Mountain Yang), or 羚羊 (gazelle or antelope). These different Yangs may have different characteristic, but as far as a Chinese speaker is concerned, they are all one type of animals. In fact, many Chinese speakers will not be aware that these three are different animals in one subfamily. They instinctively look for the commonalities, and most saved the biologists or herders will live with the blissful illusion that Yang is an actual animal instead of an approximation of a physical appearance.

So what are the implications of this observation? Before I share my thoughts, please be aware that since I am following inductive reasoning, my conclusions are necessarily probable, instead of certain. Read them as conclusive at the risk of your own learning.

The first implication I concluded from this observation, is that English speakers are generally more aware of differences, and can thus be better at classifying things based on differences in the details. It might or might not be related to the fact that the scientific revolution began in England, but I tend to think it is not a mere coincidence. To many English speakers, differences among objects are instinctive, whereas for Chinese speakers, they must be learned. The reverse is also true: for English speakers, commonalities among objects must be established and if necessary, proven, whereas for Chinese speakers, they are instinctive. Which brings me to my second conclusion:

English, as far as lexical efficiency goes, is highly inefficient, because English speakers tend to go overboard with giving a different lexicon for every noticeable difference. A Chinese native speaker will be shocked to learn that not only sheep and goats are different, a ram (male sheep) is also different from an ewe (female sheep), just as a buck (male goat) is also different from a doe (female goat). There are six lexicons involved. In Chinese, only five are involved: 公、母、羊、绵、山。You may think one lexicon is not much of a difference, but number isn’t the only difference. In English, the relation among these lexicons are not immediately obvious: a person who first encounter the word “ram” will not associate it with sheep or buck, although these words are related. Also, in English, these words are rarely reused outside of their specific context. Whereas in Chinese, a ram is a 公绵羊(male woolly Yang), and an ewe is a 母绵羊 (female woolly Yang). Not only is the relationship and logic behind the word immediately apparent, the lexicons are reused frequently elsewhere too, especially lexicons like 公 (male) or 母 (female). Not convinced? For the English speakers, I challenge you to tell me what is a “wether” without resorting to a dictionary or the internet. For those of you who also knew Chinese, the Chinese word would be telling: 阉羊. And literally translated, it is the very explanation of “wether”: a castrated Yang.

What a minute. Which Yang? A goat or a sheep? Well, a wether refer to a castrated ram or buck. And here is the third observations I want to make. Due to its nature to seek generalization, it is easier for the Chinese to create “collapsed concept”. As in, “a male sheep or goat” will simply be 公羊 (Male Yang) in Chinese. “Mutton”, which in an English dictionary would be a mouthful “meat of a sheep or goat”, will simply be 羊肉 (Yang meat), in which the lexicon 肉 (meat) is reused in the Chinese words for beef, pork and poultry, unlike mutton. And you’ll never find an entry for 羊肉 in a Chinese dictionary, because the term is self-explanatory. While on the topic of meat, to add to the English confusion, the meat of a young goat is sometimes referred to as “kid”, same as the live animal. You’ll never have such confusion in Chinese.

These observations led to a conclusion I’ve long held: It is easier for a Chinese to learn about the world through literature than an English speaker, and it is thus more useful to learn Chinese. Imagine you are someone who have only seen sheep in your life and learned its respective word (“sheep” or “羊”). One day, you read on some article about this new animal called the goat, or “山羊”. If you are an English speaker, it is impossible for you to establish any idea of the new animal without somehow coming across its picture or its definition. For a Chinese reader, you can immediately established two things: one, it looks similar to a sheep, and that it is somehow related to a mountain. These, you establish as you read. This is especially important for casual readers who aren’t likely to break away from their reading to check references. It’s not all good for the Chinese readers though. While easier to associate new concepts with existing ones, the Chinese reader is also in a higher risk of establishing a wrong association, thereby having a wrong impression of the new concepts, which can take a lot of effort to correct.

The last thing I want to say in this article, is that this is not one of those “Which is better, English or Chinese” article. Having used both languages over a long period of time, I’ve come to appreciate the idiosyncrasies and beauty of these two languages. The observations I’ve made above, are simply one aspect of language, which I hope to bring to the attention of more people. Chinese has its moment of confusion as well. For example, 阉羊(a wether), pronounced Yan Yang, sounds exactly the same as 腌羊, which means preserved mutton (although in Chinese preserved mutton always comes with 肉 as in meat). No chance you’ll get that confusion in English.

Finally, I wish all who read this article a happy year of the Young (And this is my personal preferred translation of Yang, although it has got nothing to do with sheep/goat/ram/ovicaprid/horned ruminant animal) ahead.

For a marxist, discussing consciousness as a topic is akin to an atheist discussing God. How do you discuss a concept which do not exist according to your philosophy? Why should you even discuss it? However, to look at the human world objectively, to adopt the attitude of a real diamat, we must admit to ourselves that such concepts like “consciousness” and “God” exist in the language of men, and therefore, exist in the collective mind of the society. To suggest otherwise, ironically, would actually fall into the trap of idealism.

I would like to begin by examining a statement I made in the previous article:

Using language (to write or to speak) is a process of the thought becoming aware of itself, or rather, the materialization of thought,

To any person familiar with Marxism, this statement reeks of idealism: it presuppose the existence of an independent “thought”. However, to many people, this statement sounds natural, and contains no perceptible errors in concept. This is because, the idealistic society, which remains the majority of human society, assume the existence, and the primacy, of such nebulous concept as “mind”, “thought”, “consciousness”, “God” (or any of its derivative).

The question here is not whether they “exist”, but rather, do they exist independently, and form the origin of our perception of our world, or, do they exist as a result of such a perception and cannot exist without the material world surrounding us. To a Marxist, it’s always the latter. But what’s more, Marxism assumes not only the material world, it also assume a social world, and it is within a social context that the superstructures: thoughts, mind, ideologies, consciousness, conscience, eventually evolve. These superstructures cannot exist for one human. They presuppose a group of humans socially related to one another.

That is to say, superstructure, a collective terms for functions of the mind like ideas, imaginations, ideologies, beliefs and the such, requires not only a material foundation, but also a social foundation. This is evident in the studies of feral children. When found, they almost all could not use language, and their acquisition of language remained impaired. (Side note: the problem with feral children reports is that many of them are hoax. Be careful of the cases you read about.)

How then, is the phenomenon of what we commonly referred to as consciousness emerged?

Consciousness emerged at the same time symbols emerge as the form of “language”. When we start to name things, assigning the sound of “rock” to the object rock, a few things occurred all at once.

The first is the emergent of a symbol.

The association between the sound “rock” and the object rock is arbitrary. It is a complete social function: a collective consensus of associating a certain sound to a certain object, and it probably emerged over a long period. In different cultures, the same object could be referred to by other sounds, like “Shi”

These sounds function as symbols, in that they are not the objects they referred to, but represent them nonetheless. This act of creating symbols immediately result in the emergent of “meaning”. By associating two different matters together (in this case, a sound and an object), the concept of “meaning” is created. Because contained within the the word “rock”, is not the real object rock, but its meaning.

A collective of these symbols eventually became the foundation of “language”. Although language as we know it today is a much more complicated phenomenon, including not only symbols of object, but also a structure of relation between symbols and the rules of symbol evolution (what commonly known as grammar).

By assigning sounds to objects and actions (which was the foundations of nouns and verbs) collectively, we achieved the ability to create dialogues. A dialogue is only possible when two humans use the same sets of sound associations. Incidentally, this is also where meaningful language emerges. The way I wrote this article seemed to suggest that dialogue requires the foundation of a language, which is not really the case. They emerged together. Primary language is inseparable from its function in a dialogue. A language that cannot be used for the purpose of communication is not language at all.

And it is dialogue which becomes “thinking” (I realize at this point that the term “consciousness” can also refer to “awareness to the surrounding”, which is a sort of animal consciousness and not what I am discussing, so I’ll stick to the term “thinking” from now on). If you put some attention to it, you’ll realize that all our thinking activities are carried out in such a way that resembles a dialogue, or a monologue which presume an audience. We think in a language which can be understood by other people. We do not create a language for our own thinking purpose. We are also only capable of thinking in terms which we’ve heard or read before, and to some extent, our thinking is limited by our actual experience (I qualified this statement, because we are capable of thinking in fictitious situations by juxtaposing different scenarios among our experiences. This is a topic reserved for freewill and choices). All these (self)evidences point to thinking as a result of language, not the cause of it. The form of thinking activities (common language, assume an audience, even if that audience is self), also indicates that thinking is a social function, and cannot exist independently without social experience.

So what conclusion can we draw if we follow this line of thought? Well, for one, “independent thinking” is a paradox; Our thinking is the result of the accumulation of our social experiences. It is formed, and ultimately bound by our social experiences. In a sense, it is a microcosm of our social identity, distilled from all the social interactions we’ve ever had. Therefore, be aware (NOT beware) of the social situation you put yourself in, including the passive situation like reading a book or watching a movie, because they invariably become part of your thinking.

What about free will? The ability to discern and choose? Well, that is the topic for another article.

It took me a long time to begin writing this article. The hesitation resulted from attempting to write about a topic as fundamental as “language”. I’ve read a lot on this topic, Vygotsky, Saussure, Voloshinov, Marx, and other literatures commenting on their works. The more I read, the more I feel like the very nature of the topic is eluding my attempt to make any coherent expression. It wasn’t until I read the following lines in Marx’s German Ideology that I decided that I should begin writing, without too concerned about appearing coherent:

“The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life.”

To be precise, what I have learned about language, have repeatedly told me to avoid the trap of using the “correct” language, because there isn’t a Ding an sich as a correct language. There is only the language that we, as the speaker and the hearer construct during the process of seeking understanding, and in this case, the language that emerge from you trying to understand this passage and me attempting to make sense to an audience of an assumed nature.

Using language (to write or to speak) is a process of the thought becoming aware of itself, or rather, the materialization of thought, and the externalization of an internal dialogue. It is necessary, for without a social context, a thought does not exist. As such, this article should be read not as a product of a thought, but as part of the thinking process. It is at the same time, the result of a thought, part of the thinking process, and the creation of a new thinking.

Before we attempt to understand the phenomenon that is language, it is necessary to make the following distinction: Language is not speech. Speech is a form of language, but language contains other non-verbal component (what is commonly known as body language), and in the case of sign language, it is possible to have a completely non-verbal language. This distinction must be bore in mind throughout the discussion.

The simplest way to understand language is via its purpose and origin. Language was created to fulfill the need for communication between two social entities. This is both its purpose and its origin. In its very first instance, language assume a social environment, where a group of people live together and have needs to regulate their activities via communication. Language is the natural result of such a social environment. This is the first nature of language: it is social. It only exists between (in the case of a verbal language) a speaker and a hearer. But wait a minute, don’t we use language as a single person? To think, or to write? Isn’t it possible to learn a new language on one’s own? These two questions correspond to two important relations of language: that of language and mind, and that of language and grammar.

The relation between language and mind is one of the most important relation for language. One could say it is the fundamental relation. The simple version is that language IS mind. Hitherto, we have always assume that there is such a thing called “mind” that resides with or within a person, and it exists for each individual and is the origin of all of the person’s activities, including the acquiring and using of language. This view of mind is commonly accepted and widely assumed, and contains some truth in it, if too simplified and incomplete. I prefer to explain human mind as the sum of all a person’s social interactions. In that sense, every individual possess a unique mind, because the social experience of every person is different, and this experience does inform the person’s subsequent behavior. However, it is inaccurate to assume a mind precedes language. It is more accurate to say that through social interactions, a mind/language develops. Think about all activities which you associate with the mind; in all instances, you cannot disassociate language with these activities: When you think, you carry out an internal dialogue. When you write, you assume an audience. When you see an object, feel an emotion, you immediately associate it with words: that object is round, small, red, looks heavy. I feel happy, sad, scared. But wait a minute, are you saying we need language to feel? That is simply not true! Here, we need to have a quick foray into the relation between mind and the senses.

It is true we feel before being able to articulate the feeling. Senses are the pre-lingual root of the mind. It is our biological mechanism which enables the formation of language. Senses allow us to perceive the material world, but they by themselves do not allow us to “make sense” of the material world. To “make sense”, language is needed, which presupposes a social environment. In short, senses form the biological circumstance and pre-condition to our social achievement, but by themselves, they don’t equate the mind, which is a social construct.

But if a mind doesn’t precede language, how then do we learn about language? How do we learn about a language’s grammar? To answer these questions, we must look at things from a few perspective. The first, is looking at language and grammar as generic concepts. Logically, which occurred first? The “language” or the “grammar”? Intuitively, can you imagine a set of “grammar” which existed before the emergence of “language”? Grammar presuppose language, not the other way around. Grammar is simply a set of rules and characteristic particular to and common for a language. Grammar is embedded in a language, with or without formal theorized expressions, since it is the internal logic of a language. Grammar exist as an integral, inherent component of language. We label them differently to illustrate their differences, but it is wrong to treat them as two separate entities which can exist independently.

With that firmly in mind, we should briefly examine the topic of language acquisition for a person, which is a whole field of study in its own right. When a person acquire language, especially the first language, he does so socially, i.e. via interacting with the people around him. At that stage, language is learned based on functionality and effects, not the grammar. To be sure, grammar is also acquire as part of the language, but the person is not aware of grammar as a separate concept. It is only later when the person study about language or another language that grammar becomes apparent. In fact, grammar can only become apparent when a language comes into contact with a foreign language.

Many topics within this article warrant further study, but for now, we should pause and review what we have examined thus far. First, we examined the relation between language and mind, and propose that language IS mind. Second, we examined the relation between language and grammar, and propose grammar as internal and inherent to language, and rather then language being bound by grammar, it should be the other way around.

Many of these conclusions have further implications in how we think about the world, and we will examine those in subsequent articles.