Talk:What is language?

Notice to anyone stopping by

This article is an experiment; it might end up getting deleted later, but who knows yet? It's intended to test a developing policy idea about having multiple articles on the same, or similar, topics; and would thus run sort of alongside Language (general). I am avoiding putting up a disambig page yet, because I'm also doing some naming checks within the Linguistics workgroup generally.

Anyway, the point I need to make is, I'd like to take about a week (per John Stephenson's suggestion) to be the lead author on this article, while I do an initial mind dump (a very messy process), and after that, I hope to open it up for other collaborators to manipulate in ways they might want to, and we'll see what happens. In the meantime, John S. has put a whole bunch of sample "lead author" templates there for me to learn from.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:38, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

bullet list of things to work in somehow, maybe; baloney and brainstorming area (everyone else please ignore)

• Sign_language
• Writing, and writing systems
• Counting
  • rope knotting
  • semaphones and other signaling systems in technology or transportation
• Printing
• Braille
• what the Buddha said about animals understand human gestures and intention from human voices (science now backs this up)
• flowers signaling bees with pheromones
• claims that language makes us crazy (from Taoism?); Gertrude Stein; Eckhart Tolle, etc.
• smoke signals, bonfires, drumming, signaling
  • these were long distance communications systems before we had technology for that
• phonemes (linguistics), tokens (compilers) ??
• we get information from icons, logos, avatars, uniforms; are these part of a language?

It should be retitled

Either What Is Language (verbs are ALWAYS in caps, no matter how short).

OR

What is language, to go with the prevailing WP/CZ notion that the second and third words in article titles are NOT in caps unless they generally considered to be proper nouns.Hayford Peirce (talk) 21:56, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Hah, I WONDERED wot was gonna be done about this, and wuz gonna email you tomorrow. Now I see that it is a done deal!Hayford Peirce (talk) 01:20, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

Looks odd without question mark. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:58, 29 December 2021 (UTC)