Institute of Semantic Restructuring

Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.

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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious

2004:06:07

991 - Campfire Linguistics

HTML isn't a language because it lacks iteration, for one thing. And according to Harris another thing it would need is self-reference.

Fred and Barney must have had some way of talking about talking or, what they were using wouldn't have been language.

I've read in the occasional programming text the bit about HTML; it lacks iteration, it lacks iteration in particular and control structures in general. But a quick google did me no good in terms of learning the full list of what a language can't do without if it still wants to be a language.

Now, just winging it, I'd say the bit about self-reference is close, but reference in general, and more, the capacity for combining, willy-nilly, one-to-one references with one-to-many references and many-to-many references...within a single modality. Which is to say vision is a representational system but is not a language because it needs recourse to other sensory systems to establish...

Nope, not right. I'm thinking it's more to do with the interrelation of different reporting systems. And, maybe the first step is some kind of extra-somatic information storage (I like the idea that rythm might have been the trigger; drumming and coordinated movement before actual words.)

Well, I hope I get more about what it takes to be a language in the first place.

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