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Steve's draft version, and comments
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" Cuneiform is one of the first known forms of written language, but spoken language is believed to predate writing by tens of thousands of years at least. "
In humans, natural language uses speech, wherein words (encapsulations of concept) are communicated audibly by the usage of phonemes —mouth-created sounds assembled to represent words. Combining spoken words in accord with rules of language creates spoken expressions, constituting speech. Writing is a graphical symbolic representation of speech, representing either discrete concepts or phonemes.
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Communication through speech, along with historic geographical and cultural divergence, has generated a diverse number of differentiated "natural languages" —each being distinguished systems of expression that have particular rules and standards for pronunciation, word formation, and grammar, along with particular cultural traditions guiding expression. Words are assembled in accord with the semantic values and grammatical logic inherent to the particular natural lanugage (ie. lexemes, affixes, operators).
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Language usage has led to the development of greater conceptualization and problem-solving skills, leading up to the ability to reason and the ability to form complex rational arguments. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below. More commonly though, the English word "language", derived ultimately from lingua, Latin for tongue, typically refers only to expressions of reason which can be understood by other people, most obviously by speaking.
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I've generalized the concepts from the original text. -SV
Strictly speaking, language is considered to be an exclusively human mode of communication. Although other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language.
I tried once to edit this per method advised and did something wrong. I do not see the point of the unnecessary complication. Here are some comments, by sentence.
This does not distinguish itself from animal communication, except perhaps that the words intelligence and cognition are intended to help do this? I think relying on these two words fails. Intelligence and cognition are jargon words, but not not jargon words with a stable meaning. So they do not help.
While I don't agree that intelligence an cognition are "jargon words", and it would be interesting to see if others agree with this opinion, you're right in that the distinction between communication of human beings and that of biological organisms needs to be made a little more clear. Naturally, the difference between human and creature intelligence translates to language, and that part at least goes without saying. -SV
Again everything hangs on unclear terms "valid semantics and logic". I think it is not at all orthodox to say that comprehensibility is defined by the validity of semantics and logic. I would say the causation is the other way around. Also I see no clear distinction between comprehension and understanding. In any case, why would this sentence be the second sentence in an encyclopedic article about language?
I agree that there is an issue with that phrase, in that it tries to deal with certain distinct aspects of evaluation as a part of natural language processing. Your suggestion is actually fairly good, even though there is a problem with using the phrase "is defined by.. the validity of.." Natural language comprehension essentially deals with what happens when an expression gets into one's head? AIUI, it gets checked for grammar to see if meaning can be extracted from it, and the meaning itself is checked for semantics (compared to one's own understanding) to see if it makes any sense. If one listens to broken English for example, we can usually re-parse the expression to fix the grammar so that it is more better, and consider the reformed expression's meaning. I agree that in this context, "understanding" is a bit ambiguous with comprehension, which has more NLP relevance. -SV
Are you saying sign language is not a natural language? Are you saying words are defined as "encapsulations of concept"? I am not sure about these. But in any case again I wonder why this is one of the first things a person will read when they look up "language".
A sign is a concept-expression given in a form which we generally don't call a "word;" which is a unit in natural language that deals with grammar and semantics. Signs typically have semantics, but no grammar to combine them. Still, signs and words do much the same thing, and thus can be arranged in a way that draws upon much of what we call "language." Conversely, and to address your second issue, that is why we can say "words" are concept-expressions that conform to rules of language (grammar (logic), semantics (meaning)), and natural language conventions (speech (phonetics (audio))). Note also that sign a part of natural language. Example, the expression "I hate you" has a certain general meaning. "I hate you :)" on the other hand has quite another. :) -SV
...and so on. Really I think the overall style gives an impression that what you want to do is show off some ideas you have. I don't think the style is appropriate.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:43, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I tend to give lots of impressions, but you state the first part of the "problem" quite accurately: "[my] overall style gives an impression".. Which puts the concept in the proper domain, in that it is the style, not the substance, that raises a flag.
The second part, "that [I] want to show off some ideas," is an interpretation that criticizes the substance which doesn't really follow from your criticism of the "overall style" does it? I mean, if one has a problem with a matter of substance, they could say it had problems with component a, b, c, etc. You've generally tried to do that, even though in this comment you appear to be lumping substance in with the "style." An extreme example would be someone undoing a major edit simply because there were basic grammatical errors that they could have easily fixed but they just didn't want to because they were not behaving like an actual human being. They might criticize the substance or the policy aspects later, but in discovery we often find that their concerns were superficial, personally motivated, or based in a faulty understanding of the concepts.
We're also talking about "concepts;" which concepts belong in the lede, and why certain concepts and groups of concepts better serve the goal of introducing the subject. Your criticism of my "ideas" generally comes from a reductionist approach; less is more, fancy is bad, simple words are better, common concepts ideas are better. If you like reductionism we can apply this modality to how we approach organizing a better version, and I hope you outline your reduced concepts in the section below. Anyway, "style" has another meaning altogether. -Stevertigo 21:13, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
^"..expressions." This form follows Noam Chomsky (Reflections on Language, On Language, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind., Three Factors in Language Design). Instead of "word" or "symbol" it uses the more abstract term "concept". "Intelligent" indicates the domain as the mind.
