Comment on Is there a chart where particular cuneiform or hieroglyphics are actually matched with emojis?

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hakase@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

That depends on your definition of “language”, where some definitions are much more scientifically useful than others. Under the definition used by most linguists (for the kind of object we’re talking about here, that is - there are many other relevant objects of study that can be called a “language”), spoken/signed human languages have all of the characteristics of language, while “body language”/animal “languages” do not.

Sign language is language, since it has a grammar that meets all of the characteristics above, and writing is not considered language, since it’s just a means of encoding/preserving a language that already exists.

Another way of stating this is that writing is not itself the output of a mental grammar - it’s the output of a translation algorithm that acts on the output of a grammar, and so can’t be considered language itself (again, under one of the most common definitions of “language” used in the scientific study of human language).

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