From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!tdat!swf Wed Oct 14 14:58:00 EDT 1992
Article 7152 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!uunet!tdat!swf
>From: swf@teradata.com (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Brain and Mind (was: Logic and God)
Message-ID: <1220@tdat.teradata.COM>
Date: 7 Oct 92 23:13:24 GMT
References: <1992Sep28.164828.2122@meteor.wisc.edu> <1992Sep30.205233.662@hilbert.cyprs.rain.com> <1992Oct5.174528.20148@usl.edu> <1aqirgINN5u9@smaug.West.Sun.COM>
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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:
|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.
|
This is, at most, a trivial, isolated exception.  Even the unquestioned
existance of a number of 'sounds-like' words ("woof", "boom", "moo") in
most languages does not constitute a significant contradiction to the
basic statement:

Words are, by and large, arbitrary, and even where not wholly arbitrary,
they are still partially so.  Even mimic words are filtered through a given
language's internal patterns and restrictions, and the exact form they take
is invariably highly conventualized.
-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com


