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No, that's a little inaccurate - everything amazes me about language because the ability to speak is inherently amazing. I mean, you have an idea in your head, and you make mouth noises, and some other person hears those mouth noises and now the idea is in THEIR head. And they make mouth noises back at you about your mouth noises! Automatically, without at any point pausing to translate, just as easy as breathing! And sometimes you make squiggles on a surface and other people look at those squiggles and connect them to mouth noises, just like if they heard you talking!
But there's so much more, and something else that amazes me about language is the fact that we're constantly making new conventionalized expressions and idioms and phrases. Every day we expand words from the literal to the figurative. Every day we take sets of words and start using them as units of their own, units that are somehow more than the sum of their parts. Every day it's like people wake up and say "Here's this thing that's been going on forever, and I need a way to talk about it without explaining it all the time" and then find a consensus on how to say that thing.
Obviously we need new words for new inventions like "computers" and "email", but who knew we needed the phrase "ripping the bandaid off" before it was a phrase? How did people even talk about that before they had that easy metaphor?
Every single day, there's a new phrase entering the lexicon, not as a one-off, but as another lexical unit, and people don't even know it's happening as it happens.
Language is freaking amazing.
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But there's so much more, and something else that amazes me about language is the fact that we're constantly making new conventionalized expressions and idioms and phrases. Every day we expand words from the literal to the figurative. Every day we take sets of words and start using them as units of their own, units that are somehow more than the sum of their parts. Every day it's like people wake up and say "Here's this thing that's been going on forever, and I need a way to talk about it without explaining it all the time" and then find a consensus on how to say that thing.
Obviously we need new words for new inventions like "computers" and "email", but who knew we needed the phrase "ripping the bandaid off" before it was a phrase? How did people even talk about that before they had that easy metaphor?
Every single day, there's a new phrase entering the lexicon, not as a one-off, but as another lexical unit, and people don't even know it's happening as it happens.
Language is freaking amazing.
( Read more... )
