Eastern and Western Narratives of the Philosophy of Language

Language and linguistics are two interesting research areas that I’d like to focus. These interests were stimulated by the work I have done in natural language processing, like unambiguously interpreting instructions from user manuals. After resigning from my previous work place I had some time to restard blogging the things I’m interested. Here I summed few facts that I have collected time by time and I’m hoping to write more about language and linguistics often.

Language is one of the most expressive forms of communicating knowledge with rest of the world; a master of this expressive form could share his wisdom with others. Philosophy of language can be denoted as a systematic study/inquiry of the origins of language, the nature of meaning, the usage and cognition of language and the relationship between language and reality.

The curious fate of humankind.

Philosophy of language has its roots in final centuries BC and early centuries AD. VedicAge in Indian history made contribution to the philosophy of language in early stages of this quest, to be precise philosophical schools of Nyaya and Mimamsa gave rise to linguistic philosophy. For example Sanskrit GrammaticalTradition can be considered and one such contribution.

Ancient Greece covered most of work in philosophy of language from the Western tradition. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics made contributions in that era.

Plato believed that names of things are based on the nature where each smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning represents basic ideas or sentiments. Aristotle considered that the way a subject is modified or described in a sentence is established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. The Stoic philosophers separated five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives, conjunctions and articles. Their contributions are mostly made to the analysis of grammar.

In late 19^th Century language start playing a major role in Western philosophy. Publication like “Cours delinguistique generale” made an impact to that contribution.