Do
Hyun Lee
Professor
Richard Menard
Western
Philosophy
31
March 2013
Languages
Languages are one of the very
important factors that make human-beings as human-beings. Through languages
people can easily communicate with others with less possibility of
misunderstanding by listeners than communicating with body languages. Basic
concept of communication via languages is that people should agree and know the
terms of languages. It means that people should agree on the substance that
each words represents regardless of the fact that the substance is a real
existing material or just a simple imagination. For example, one day, one of
our ancestors saw things that are sparkling on the night sky, and he just
announced to others to call those sparkling things as stars. If other people
did not agree on the term “stars,” the “stars” cannot be use as a word. Or a
person just imagined a big reptile creature with three heads and wings, and
called that creature a dragon, a thing that does not exist in the world. And
other people in that era just agreed on this term and used “dragon” as a word
that represent a creature with three heads and wings. Languages themselves are
just symbols that indicate something, not the essence of substance.
I do not agree with the point that Parmenides
made: words are valuable and meaningful because the words indicate something
real. I believe that words do not always need to be meaningful because the
words do not indicate something real. To specify, I rather believe that the
words recollect and represent memories that each people have on substance. For
example, if I say “dragon,” it indicates the dragon that exists in my own
memory, a memory that I have through reading an Ancient China myth. But when
one in Greece hears a word “dragon,” he will eventually think the dragon that
is mentioned in Ancient Greek myth. Like this, although most of people in
different countries have and thought about the concept of dragons, each of them
have different types of dragons as they earn the concept of dragon in every
different references. This fact infers that the words do not represent
something real, but they are just a means that brings up a part of memories. The
words are symbols, and people create their own symbols base on their memories
as they listened to the words.
Another thing that Parmenides overlooked
about the characteristics of languages is that languages change as time pass. In
each language, there are some words that extinct and there are some words that
are created newly because there are things that are useless and there are
things that are created newly. For example, “gay” meant “excited” before, but
now it is used as to mean homosexual. According to Parmenides’s logic, gay
should not change its meaning and remain to indicate “excitement.” But it is
real fact that meaning of gay changed to homosexual and represent homosexual. It
is a fact that there is a possibility of change in meanings of words. And it is
also a fact that some words’ definitions have changed through history. We can
infer from these facts that words do not always represent something real and
unchanging because change of the definitions is equal as change of substance by
the logic of Parmenides. And if Parmenides really wanted to state that
everything does not change, the definitions of the words should not change.
One limitation of languages is that
languages are very different from one another. In other words, there are
several different languages that represent same idea or material. Chair, 의자,
sillon, and other things represent same material although the languages are
different. According to Parmenides, different languages represent same one
reality. How can it be? Different languages mean different cultures, and there
are various types of chairs in the world divided by different cultures. So the
imaginary that comes into people’s mind if they hear “chair” will be different.
That’s why Parmenides’s thought is not logical.
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