Wednesday, 25 December 2019
Universality of Language
DEDICATION 2
The universality of language
-There was only one chance. I thought I had discovered a law. About the frequency of occurrence in language. I researched it for a few days. But I had already found the law. C stopped talking. Although he was older than A, he taught A all he knew about language, without considering the difference in age or experience. Language has facts and laws, that was all he had. C stated that he had not discovered any of them himself. A had no words to reply at that time, so he just accepted it in silence. I had been wondering about this law ever since, but one day I read Kuramoto Yuki and it became almost clear to me. I think what C was talking about was an empirical law discovered by the American linguist George Zipf or something related to it. According to Kuramoto, Zipf's law is that the ranking of the frequency of occurrence of words in literary works follows an inverse power law. According to the graphs presented by Keiichiro Tokita and Haruyuki Irie, there were striking similarities in works from different fields, such as Shakespeare, Darwin, Milton, Wells, and Carroll. In particular, the curves of Walls's "The Time Machine" and Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" were so completely overlapping that they seemed to be the same work. Tokita and Irie confirmed this excellent empirical law, discovered in the first half of the twentieth century, as an unshakable scientific law by analysing and graphing the frequency and rank of words appearing in the sampled works from 1 to 100,000. In other words, it was beautifully shown as a quantitative achievement of modern science that all words that authors seem to have freely selected to express their thoughts are almost identical in correlation to the number of times each word is used, according to this law. When K once asked A what poetry was, A answered at a simple level that poetry was about trying to deviate from the norms of language up to that point, but now it seemed to me that A instinctively knew that literature as a whole was governed by the strong laws of language that humans must have created, and that he had been fighting a long and courageous battle. It is also true that the works of different people, not Galileo, will continue to follow Zipf's law and always have nearly identical curves. However, C did not like A's excessive conceptualization of language, and spent his whole life pursuing the facts of language and the laws extracted from them, but did not find them. Then one day he suddenly fell ill and passed away. He left behind several books that showed his love of linguistics. The title of his last book was "Janua Linguisticae Reserata, An Open Door to Linguistics." As he said, the door was open to everyone. If you just keep chasing it. If C were alive, he might ask A again now. What are you doing now? And A would answer in the same way. I pursue universality, not fact, without giving up. If you were alive, would you have climbed that steep staircase and talked to me again at the low-ceilinged table, C? In the cross-border connection of research on transference, the valuable manuscript of the transference theory was rediscovered, and the discoverer himself flew to deliver it to me so that it would not be damaged. How encouraging it was for me, C, who was so poor and lost. The name of that shack-like shop on the left just after entering the alley in front of the station was California. Let's write it down now in the memorial of our oblivion, which was by no means miserable.
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