Advances in linguistics make it ever more apparent that human language is not an ‘evolved’ system of ape talk, but rather a mysterious totality, the fundamentals of which may be common to all people despite the vast differences between individual languages.
(Serpent in the Sky, by John Anthony West)
Welcome to The Tree of Meaning
The Tree of Meaning website was designed with one purpose in mind; to spread the word about a discovery that at one stroke rewrites our understanding of the nature of languages and the role they play in human cognition.
The aforementioned discovery is the product of many years of research into an unsolved mystery in the field of linguistics, namely how the symbolic sounds of a language relate to the Meaning conveyed by those sounds. The question is not whether there is some kind of mapping between the two. That much is self-evident. The question unsolved by modern science is rather the nature of the linkage between two poles of a miraculous process that is able to jump-start an idea from my head into yours, and do so almost instantaneously.
My research into this fascinating conundrum led directly to the discovery—more accurately, recovery—of a hidden ‘language organ’ in the unconscious minds of all language users that functions autonomously in real time to encode and download Meaning into words in accordance with a few simple rules. In truth, I can’t claim to have discovered this language organ, because there is ample evidence in the historical record that ancient Egyptian scribes, and their counterparts elsewhere in the world at that time, were well aware of its existence.
The Tree of Meaning (TOM) seeks to recover or reclaim knowledge of this remarkable mental organ that has been ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ by a kind of species amnesia, and to bring it to the forefront of our collective attention. It is after all a significant legacy bequeathed by our forebears that both informs us about our cognitive capacities and highlights what kind of creatures we are. The accompanying schematic ‘What is a Language? A 3-Dimensional Model’ below is an attempt to formulate a new model of natural languages that is consistent with and reflects the discovery of this unique, and universal, human language organ.
I hope you will join me on a journey of discovery as TOM opens the door to an inner sanctum of Meaning in languages that, while locked away in a black box in the unconscious minds of individuals and not amenable to introspection, has begun to give up its secrets to science.
WHAT IS A LANGUAGE?
A 3-DIMENSIONAL MODEL
1. EXTERNALIZATION OF LANGUAGE IN THE FORM OF SPOKEN OR WRITTEN WORDS (CONSCIOUS)
2. AN INTERNAL MEANING SYSTEM THAT MATCHES
MEANING TO SOUND IN A NON-ARBITRARY MANNER (UNCONSCIOUS)
3. RELATIONAL: THE MEANING SYSTEM ENCODES AND DOWNLOADS MEANING INTO WORDS IN REAL TIME IN ACCORDANCE WITH SIMPLE RULES
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FEATURES
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Audible sounds, visible letters
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Artifact of culture
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Diversity and chaos
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Building blocks are words
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Communication system
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Words appear to be independent entities
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Linear organization
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Bound by spacetime
FEATURES
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Hidden (not introspectible)
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Genetic endowment (UG)
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Stability and order
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Building blocks are concepts
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System of thought
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Self-organizing matrix of meaning-sound relations
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Hierarchical organization
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Outside spacetime
