MAP OF LANGUAGE / v0.3
Map of language
Language is a network that binds people, cultures and societies, and gives the world its shape.
Every essay laid out as one tree — the roots hold the foundational questions, the trunk the history of the field, the leaves the concrete texts. Follow a node to its essay.
L/LAB · Words Connect Worlds 01 — 05
Roots — foundational questions — philosophy, linguisticsTrunk — the history of the field and its methodsLeaves — concrete essays — literature, textsFallen — dead languages
Roots
- Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar (1660) — the Wager That the Shape of Language Copies the Shape of the Mind
- Will There Be a Sea Battle Tomorrow? — Future Contingents and Determinism
- Affirmation and Negation, Universal and Particular — the Origin of the 'Square of Opposition'
- Truth Lives Only in the 'Assertion' — a Prayer Is Outside Logic
- Noun and Verb — the Verb 'Co-Signifies' Time
- 'By Convention' — Aristotle's Answer to Cratylus
- Reading Aristotle's De Interpretatione — Words Are 'Symbols by Convention,' and Truth Lives Only in the Sentence
- No Truth Is Learned from Names — the End of the Cratylus and the Theory of Forms
- A Name Is 'Vocal Imitation' — ρ for Motion, λ for Smoothness
- The Flood of Etymologies — a Name Carries a Theory (and Is This a Joke?)
- A Name Is a 'Tool' — the Shuttle, and the Lawgiver Who Makes Names
- Physis or Nomos — Two Positions on the 'Correctness' of Names
- Reading Plato's Cratylus — Is a Name Natural or Conventional? The West's First Philosophy of Language
- A Typology of Languages, and the Problem of "Ranking" — from Humboldt to Sapir
- The Organ That Forms Thought, and the Speech That Lives in Dialogue
- Infinite Use of Finite Means — the Source of Generative Grammar
- Worldview — a Language Draws a Circle Around a People
- Inner Form — a Language's "Shape" Is Neither Its Sounds nor Its Rules
- Energeia — Language Is Not a Thing but an Act
- Reading Humboldt's On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) — Language Is Not a Product but an Activity
- Following a Rule, and the Private Language Argument
- Family Resemblance — "Don't Think, But Look!"
- Language-Games and "Meaning Is Use"
- "Whereof One Cannot Speak" — The Limits of Language
- The Picture Theory — "A Proposition Is a Picture of Reality"
- Wittgenstein on Language — From the Picture to the Language-Game
- Value and Difference — "In a Language There Are Only Differences"
- Synchrony and Diachrony — a Language as a Present-Tense System, or as a Current
- The Arbitrary Sign — Why a Tree Can Just as Well Be Baum or Arbre
- Language and Literature — What Translates and What Does Not (Sapir, Chapter 11)
- From the Sound Pattern to the Phoneme — Sapir's Chapter 3, and What Came After
- Language, Race and Culture Are Separate — Sapir's Argument
- Sapir's "Drift" — a Language Moves Down Time and Has Its Own Slope
- Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 2: Form, Meaning, and Why Languages Have No Rank
- Sapir's Language, Explained — Part 1: Is Speech an Instinct, and What Is a Sound?
- Reading Edward Sapir's Language (1921) — Speech Is Neither Instinct Nor Race
- Langage, Langue, Parole — Why Saussure Split "Language" in Three
- Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 2: How the System Works, and How It Changes
- Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Explained — Part 1: What Language Is, and What a Sign Is
- Saussure's Course in General Linguistics: An Overview
- What Are Words?
Trunk
Leaves
- Japanese Fundamentals in the Opening of Kawabata's Snow Country
- Learning Long Japanese Sentences Through Mori Ōgai’s The Abe Family
- Learning Japanese Prose from the First Sentence of Sōseki's Kokoro
- Basic Japanese Grammar in Three Sentences from Mishima's The Sound of Waves
- Reading Japanese Narration in the Opening of Mishima's The Sound of Waves
Fallen
- (none yet)