Babel's Children
The Economist,
Jan 12, 2004
Fans of Star Trek are familiar with the Tamarians, a species that speaks entirely in metaphor (for more, see the The Darmok Dictionary). We use metaphor in English, but the bulk of our communication is of the noun-verb construction. This, too, is the form of metadata languages such as RDF. But some languages, such as Riau Indonesian, do not distinguish between noun and verb. The question raised in this article is whether our forms of linguistic contruction inform how we think. Or does how we think determine how we form languages? To me, this question is interesting because I postulate that multi-media is a post-grammatical language. If such a language in fact is possible, then if the first theory is correct, then it should change how those fluent in multimedia think. But if the latter thesis is correct, then it is much less likely that a multimedia language could exist at all.
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