Language is Transcription

Nidhu Bhusan Das :


We humans think, feel and imagine. This is all internal and personal unto each of us. Until and unless we have the urge to articulate to share our thought, feeling, imagination and attitude we have not the need for language – phonological or orthographic. When we think we should share these with others, we require the equivalent to deliver what is in our mind. So, we encode our thought, feeling, imagination, etc. in such symbols and signs as our intended or target audience is familiar with.
Plato said long ago art or poetry is imitation of imitation (mimesis) and, therefore, far from Truth. For him, in this context, Truth is abstract. When we identify a fruit as ‘mango’, the naming word is the imitation of the truth or reality which is ‘mangoness’.The same argument and notion apply to the word ‘fruit’ which is the imitation of ‘fruitness’. In language a word is a phonological or orthographic realization. The question arises- realization of what? The answer is – realization of thought, feeling, imagination and attitude. This argument leads us to the admission that ‘fruit’ is the imitation of ‘fruitness’ and ‘mango’ is the imitation of ‘mangoness’. If ‘fruitness’ and ‘mangoness’ are realities, ‘fruit’ and ‘mango’ are appearances. Language, then, represents appearance, the outpourings of the psyche.
There is speculation that language is echoic i.e., onomatopoeic in the sense words imitate sound. This idea is not found to be conclusive. We may here try to apply the idea in a different sense. Does language echo the mind, the fountainhead and storehouse of thought, feeling, imagination, etc? Mind is active within itself. Yet an individual mind may have the desire to share its store with others, and vice versa. Since an individual mind is not the cosmic mind, it cannot share universally as the linguistic equivalent of the store is not universal in the reality of multiplicity of languages and their many manifestations in the form of dialects. Hence, arbitrariness is taken to be a characteristic of human language.
It is found geographical dispersion is a major cause for multilingual situation and wide variations in the same language. Besides, class distinction also contributes to the variation. This reality tells us language is the code which we use to tell what is in mind. Being a code and from of the fact that we can use it to coat or color what we want to share or make public, or, in other words, can manipulate it, it may safely be said that language is artificial. George Bernard Shaw in his play ‘Pygmalion’ shows how linguistic training can turn a flower girl into an aristocratic woman. Language is acquired; it is not innate, although the capacity to acquire it is innate. This also points to the fact that language is artificial, not fundamental like the mind. Even when it is the equivalent of sincere expression, language is at best a medium, a transcription of what is in mind and what we seek to share.