- And the meaning of the symbols are infinite, Lyra,” Farder Coram said. “No one can learn them all. But **where you are pointing the needles, you are focusing the whole complexity of all those meanings down to one: the meaning that is present at the time, or the meaning that you are wanting to ask a question about. - His Dark Materials
- “It’s like climbing down a ladder at night, you put your foot down and there’s another rung. Well, I put my mind down and there’s another meaning, and I kind of sense what it is. Then I put ‘em all together. There’s a trick in it like focusing your eyes.” - His Dark Materials
- categorical abstraction of vocal signals — i.e., whether acoustically variable sound events are recognized as members of the same abstract class (varṇa -class), and whether that class reliably maps to the same meaning across individuals.
- वर्ण = An abstracted sound-class recognized as ‘the same’ despite acoustic variation, with stable communicative value
- The hardware component of language resides in neural circuits and is transmitted genetically. The software component of language resides in the “data” part of neural networks and is transmitted mainly through speech(वाक).
Bootstrapping of language – by definition – started without वाक inputs and then built on वाक inputs through a process mimicking evolution.
Features common with Great Apes or Old World Monkeys are the hardware portion at bootstrapping. All else, including subsequent brain anatomy changes potentially triggered by software, are that – subsequent to bootstrapping – and needs to be stripped off if we want to understand the environment of emergence of language. We need to shed distinctions of पुरुष, वचन, लिङ्ग , आत्मने-परस्मै, उपसर्ग-धातु-प्रत्यय, काल, भाव-क्रिया, सूप – तिङ् and conceive them in a state where they can morph in each other.
6.