From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!charnel!rat!usc!news.service.uci.edu!unogate!stgprao Wed Oct 14 14:58:56 EDT 1992
Article 7239 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: stgprao@st.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind (was: Logic and God)
Message-ID: <1992Oct12.192751.20160@unocal.com>
Date: 12 Oct 92 19:27:51 GMT
References: <1992Oct5.174528.20148@usl.edu> <1aqirgINN5u9@smaug.West.Sun.COM> <1992Oct12.165931.9154@news.media.mit.edu>
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>In article <1aqirgINN5u9@smaug.West.Sun.COM> dab@ism.isc.com (Dave Butterfield) writes:
>>mhf4421@usl.edu (Flynn Matthew H) writes:
>>>Derrida and De Sausare (sp.?) argue rather convincingly that language is
>>>arbitrary, and there is no real reason why any particular word, letter, or    
>>>phoneme need mean what we accept it to mean.
>>
>>The origin of the word "mama" (and its close relatives in other languages)
>>appears to contradict that statement.  "Ma" is one of the easiest syllables
>>to utter, and is one of the first spoken by infants.  The first entity that
>>an infant wants to refer to is his mother.  The association of that word to
>>that concept was not arbitrary.  Reference the OED for more detail.

A long time ago I read an article claiming a pattern of vowel sounds
in words conveying strong emotion.  I recall the author was either
the philosopher B. Whorf (sp?) or some collected commentary on his work.


