| ▲ | a115ltd 11 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
This is just one micro-instance of a much larger thing. Brain encodes structural similarity across modalities. Corollary: language is far from arbitrary labels for things. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | andrewflnr 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
No, language is still pretty close to arbitrary labels. The handful of tenuous common threads like the bouba-kiki effect don't change the overall picture that much. The simple fact that language varies as much as it does is sufficient to prove that it's only loosely bound to anything universal. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | downboots 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | suddenlybananas 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
>language is far from arbitrary labels for things I think this is a misunderstanding of the arbitrariness of the sign. Arbitrary doesn't mean "random" or "uniformly sampled." The fact there are systematic tendencies among languages in how things are called doesn't negate the arbitrariness of the sign, they could have been called other things. We can also decide to refer to things by another name and we can use any arbitrary name we like! There is no limits on what names we can use (besides silly physiological constraints like having a word with 50 000 consonants). But, of course, there's much more to language than just labels! For me, the interesting thing in this paper vis-à-vis language is that it shows how much innate structure in cognition must shape our language. | |||||||||||||||||
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