This is an overview of Susanne K Langer's contribution to our understanding of language. It's one with which I am largely in agreement. "Language is built up bit by bit, word by word, through slow, metaphoric accretion... Thus, to perceive, for our ancestors, was to conceive: to see one thing (the sensory onrush) in another (the perceptual shape given by the mind and primordial cultures). That is, our predecessors were already abstracting... By abstraction she means the process of recognising something in common, something shared, in more than one thing."
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