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Imaging you released all of your knowledge about language to make them whirling above your head, each word a star. At least sixty thousand shining spots of light (if you are an adult)—“Math,” “Computer,” “Tiger,” “Game,” “Mike,” and “Apple” ... — hang in the air over your above.
If you looking more closely at each star and you’ll see that each is not a single point of light but an flagrant cluster of all the things you know about that word. The “Rice” star includes bits of knowledge such as how the word sounds when you say it and how it looks when you write it. Perhaps a small image of a bowl of rice there, or maybe ten or twenty different prototypes (bag of rice shopping from grocery store, rice inside sushi, rice dropped under the dinner table, left over within the cook pot...), all of which help you connect “Rice,” the word, to the bloom of any color/smell/shape... you come across.
You know that rice, like most food, are delicious/smell good/can feed your hunger. This makes up physical knowledge. When you chew the fresh cooked rice, grains mixed with your tongue, your body has expectations about what’s going to happen next - swallow it. If the bowl of cooked rice smells rotten, you feel sick with it. You also have ability to knowledge. “Rice” has a special relationship with words like “color” and “taste”; they go together in a way that makes you really "feel" the rice.
In the "word sky" now twisting above your head, picture the connection between “rice” and “meal” as a wire running between the two stars. Other lines would run between “rice” and “white,” and “rice” and “chopsticks,” and “rice” and “bowl.” In fact, lines would connect “rice” and all sorts of words—words with similar meanings, words that make similar sounds, words that are the same part of speech.
If all the different things you know about “rice” and its connections with other words were present in your language universe, lines would rapidly spread out.
Now everywhere you look, fibers wind around words, drag them together, pulling the entire assembly tight. Some links might have especially significant relationships. The stronger the connection between words, the thicker the thread will be. (Consider “Math” and “Science,” for example.) There are so many lines you can hardly see the words for the relationships between them. What began with a few threads is now a massy language web.
It may seem as if the humongous mass above you maps the word. After all, the connections between words are like the connections between physical objects. People eat apples, for example, match to there is a word for people, a word for eating, and a word for apple. Actors act on objects in language as they do in life, and when we put words together, it seems as if the point of language is simply and correct way to describe the real thing. But language is not only a copy of the physical world. If you look closely, you’ll see there are holes in the web you have built, places where the world of words does not correspond to the physical world. Words align according to their own rules. Moreover, there is so much that happens in our daily lives for which there is no language. There is no verb for: "my little brother is performing an odd dancing by the music of <Gangnam Style>" , no specific name to describe that - "Eric' play-dough made special time machine".
Because language does not just copies the world around you, you can do things with it that are impossible under the laws of physics. You are a god in language. You can Ceate/Destroy/Re-arrange/Squeeze words around whatever you like. You can make up stories about things that never happened to people who never existed (本故事纯属虚构，如有雷同，纯属巧合). You can push a elephent into the fridge through the power of your arm (even though it is not posible). It’s easy if “elephent” and “fridge” are words.
In language, time and space does not stick related. You can imagine of yourself as in Mars. Or next moment, you jump and landed at Moon. And then jump again. You can jump, to Earth, jump, to Jupiter, jump, to Sun, Jump...
Now imagine what it’s like for the person nearest you. Look over and visualize everything he knows about language floating above his head. No individual’s language is ever exactly the same as another’s, but assuming he also speaks English, the basic size and shape of his word sky are similar to yours. Perhaps he has stars that you don’t, like “Oracle,” an pre-history Chinese characters. Maybe the connections that run from his “Meal” and his “Favorite” are different from yours. Because you two growing up differ, some words and grammar rules aren’t identical, even if you both using the same language.
But there is much that is the same between your language and his. Your “Apple” star maps closely onto his, as do “River” and “Fire” and “Mountain” and tens of thousands of other words. If threads ran from the words in your language network to the matching words in his, your heads would be simultaneously joined and draw a gigantic connection map.
If you add a third and fourth person, it’s going to start to look as if your heads are plugged into a huge, shining network consisting of billions of lines. Add some more speakers, and the number of connections becomes uncountable.
After you’ve included everyone who speaks English, imagine the 1.4 trillion people in the world who speak Chinese. Draw a different network for each of them individually, and then join it up. Bring in Spanish, and Arabic. Add Hindi, French, and Computer Languages.
Now add all the speakers of all the languages of the world. Step back. You can see that the whirling word universe above your is only as small as an atom in the linguistic matrix of all the human being. Everyone who has language is connected, and anyone who is connected lives in two worlds—the physical world, where one’s feet touch the earth, one’s ears capture sound waves, and one’s eyes seeing light, and the world of language, where one keep arranging symbols in particular patterns so as to connect with other word who also mix the same symbols in the same patterns.
For all the complexity of each world, first of all: the physical portion is the "must have" platform of the symbolic world. Because the two worlds overlap so much, people get to interact with other beings on both portions —with their bodies in the physical world, and within the language matrix. As I write these words—here at the Tim Huston's at Aurora Ontario —you, the reader, may be anywhere—China, USA, Europe—and I could be dead. It doesn’t matter. In language, you and I are connected forever.
