the Center of the Heart

    The following will be a way of approaching culture from the discourse of LL by looking at some specific language examples of how people do things, which will be important to approach understanding LL. Okay, let us begin with English. And the example is that of giving. If you want to give your coworker a stapler, you would take the stapler with you and hand it to her. But you would also say, "Here is the stapler." And, hopefully, she would say, "Thanks!". So I have just described the process of giving in a real world example. The word 'give' designates the above action by summarizing all other related activities of giving by the word: 'give'. But a better way to put this is to say that the two-word compounded infinite verb is 'to give', which shows the above activity. Does not all of this seem obvious? Not to someone who just knows Spanish for example. That person would not have a complete understanding given that his primary language is Spanish because he would need English to understand ' to give'. So the objective has been met with one example, and others could be multiplied if I was willing to do so. But for now, let's summarize the two following ideas: one is that of spoken and written language and the other is situational communication such as giving a 'thumbs up' which cannot be analyzed by means of the phrase itself but by understanding how it is used in a situation.   

   I will leave the above paragraph unedited except for obvious spelling errors and added punctuation to show that a human process has taken place. Can a machine learn language? We speak of learning things like Java, Python, and C#, which are computer languages, however, these are not human languages because they lack situational content, which cannot be represented in their coding. If you are interested in those languages, there are other places, where you could learn those, but part of LL is the acquisition, which is messy and does not always look good on paper. We acquire lang haphazardly, but we take care of our dialect.  Lang is the ideal state of language where everything is perfect, while our dialect is how we use language in everyday situations. This distinction is important because it shows the difference between what should be and how things actually are. So maybe next time I will talk more about the difference between lang and dialect. And if you want to explore the distinction on your own, I recommend thinking about how the words you use are applied to everyday life situations.