Philosophy of Language: 4. Incompatibility of Language Systems

#philosophy #metaphilosophy #philosophyoflanguage #lingualsystem #sign #word #meaning #reference #frege #gadamer #wittgestein #donalddavidson #earlywittgenstein #laterwittgestein #formallogic #logicpositivism

To better illustrate the picture which we drew during our last session of this series on Philosophy of Language, one can make a comparative analysis between words considered to be synonymous in different languages.

Take, for example, the German word “klatschen,” which in Russian can be translated as «хлопать» (“to clap a.o.” in English)

The coincidence of the conceptual fields, despite the relative proximity of the Germanic and Slavonic languages, is incomplete.

The German analogue means, in addition to the Russian «хлопанья» (“clapping,” that in turn has a lot of other different semantic connotations in English), also the process of “chatting” a.o. with a tinge of the figurative meaning of the Russian verb «стучать» (“to knock”) – that can be expressed by the German idiom “einen Prozess an den Hals klatschen.”

In order to narrow the selected German scope to the Russian, one can express the implied process by describing a specific hand movement, but then, however, the following difficulty arises:

The Slavic “hands” denote both the Germanic “Hände” (“hands”) and “Arme” (“arms”), and in order to understand this, one will have to resort to other words, which again express different conceptual fields, etc., etc.

Another example: the statements in Russian «Он просидел час» and «Он сидел час» do not have separate analogues in Western European languages, but are translated by one common statement – “He sat for an hour.”

It is not the case that concepts related to specific phenomena within different language systems are simply “sliced” differently;

The concepts are not just different variants of the same semantic concept, they are different semantic concepts within different language systems and this also applies to basic logical concepts like “and,” “a,” “but,” etc.

We have just mentioned a few simple examples, and the total number is not just countless, but even not subject to precise definition, due to the fact that the meanings of all the concepts of the language depend on the meaning of the rest of the concepts within each specific semantic context, which does not allow the formation of a fixed group of concepts.

So, what, at first glance, appears to be an easily eliminated difference, upon closer examination, is an unraveled thread of the entire conceptual fabric of language.

Changing one concept of a language system is like shaking a footbridge;

No matter where the epicenter of the incident is, the course of everyone crossing the bridge will be corrected.

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##philosophy ##metaphilosophy ##philosophyoflanguage ##lingualsystem ##sign ##word ##meaning ##reference ##frege ##gadamer ##wittgestein ##donalddavidson ##earlywittgenstein ##laterwittgestein ##formallogic ##logicpositivism

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