Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[TigerNinja]

The process whereby a certain group of symbols can come together to have a larger meaning, even in simply sentences without poetry or allusions such as, "What will we eat for dinner tonight?" In that sentence there was a near future tense with an aspect of uncertainty leading to the necessity of the "What" an there was also a widely understood imperfect time reference. Tonight can mean multiple things. It can mean at 7pm or midnight or 4am in the morning. Either one of them constitutes as tonight, but due to the context, the speak and the listener, we can all understand what is portrayed by tonight. They are symbols with a larger meaning, and when you go into poetry, the symbols have a large meaning which means that the large meaning has a larger meaning to it portrayed through the smaller meaning portrayed through symbols.

Is your mind not yet blown?

The sheer complexity and number of definitions to simple phrases from colloquialisms and the like show the extensive nature of language, all packaged neatly into a group of symbols. With this massive variety and how open it is to interpretation, would you constitute language as an art?

[SimpleGuy]

How about language dadaism like:

aldkjöfajdfökj

[A_Seagull]

Language is a medium for communication; and so is art.

[Steve3007]

OP:

The sheer complexity and number of definitions to simple phrases from colloquialisms and the like show the extensive nature of language, all packaged neatly into a group of symbols. With this massive variety and how open it is to interpretation, would you constitute language as an art?

Language is paint.

Imagine a piano keyboard, eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight and yet, and yet, new tunes, melodies, harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of keyboards every day in Dorset alone.

Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication:

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."

One sentence, common words, but never before placed in that order. And yet, oh and yet, all of us spend our days saying the same things to each other, time after weary time, living by clichaic, learned response: "I love you", "Don't go in there", "You have no right to say that", "shut up", "I'm hungry", "that hurt", "why should I?", "it's not my fault", "help", "Marjorie is dead". You see? That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

http://abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketche ... nversation

[3uGH7D4MLj]

Language is paint.

Imagine a piano keyboard, eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight and yet, and yet, new tunes, melodies, harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of keyboards every day in Dorset alone.

Our language, Tiger, our language, hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of possible legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication:

"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."

One sentence, common words, but never before placed in that order. And yet, oh and yet, all of us spend our days saying the same things to each other, time after weary time, living by clichaic, learned response: "I love you", "Don't go in there", "You have no right to say that", "shut up", "I'm hungry", "that hurt", "why should I?", "it's not my fault", "help", "Marjorie is dead". You see? That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

This bit of Stephen Fry is art. Language art is usually called literature.