Thursday, 24 April 2025

Edward Sapir, Language 1921. Revised

 

Edward Sapir, Language 1921.  Revised

Edward Sapir's Language, 1921 showed me the dynamism of language proposing the concept, drift.
Drift shows us the macro phase of natural language and I was hinted by Sapir's this concept and proposed the micro phase of natural language. The paper "Quantum Theory for Language" 2003 is my first total proposal paper describing the natural language's model.

Reference
Substatiality Dedicated SAPIR Edward / 27 February 2005

Tokyo
5 September 2014
Sekinan Research Field of Language 

[Additional Explanation]
17 November 2019
SRFL Paper

Edward Sapir's LANGUAGE AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF SPEECH 1921 gave me a moment for study in 1980s while I was roaming about the darkness of not- getting any aim to study on language. I ever wrote a short paper being influenced in 2005 and after also wrote a memo on his book in 2014.

Substantiality / 2005
Edward Sapir, Language, 1921 / 2014

A moment came from his famous concept drift. At the near-end Chapter 7 Sapir wrote "the three major drifts", that were the next.

"The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions"
"the correlative drift toward position as an accompanied"
"the drift toward the invariable word"


This "the three major drifts" are all apparently seen in Chinese, especially in the classical written language. At my age 20s and 30s I continuously had read Qing dynasty's classical linguistic books and papers. WANG Guowei, ZHANG Binglin, DUAN Yucai, WANG Yinzhi were the most reliable works for me.

This paper is unfinished.

The Time of Language Ode to The Early Bourbaki To Grothendieck

 

The Time of Language
Ode to The Early Bourbaki To Grothendieck



TANAKA Akio 




In early 1970s, I had think of language from the side of mathematics, that level of mine is very low and primitive, moreover I never had any talent to mathematics.
But my eager to trying the approach was going to overcome hard barriers before me. So the route had really fascinated my mind for long time.

At that time I had read Chinese classics almost every day. WANG Guowei*, DUAN Yucai and WANG Yingzhi. They were giants on Chinese language historically and modern.
On the other hand I had thought of language generally, not defined by Chinese.
But in front of the vast world of language, I had stood still lonely, not taking any method for approaching.
Mathematics was the only gleam of hope in the wasteland.

I never took the route of ordinary linguistics.
I really dreamt a dream that time.
There exists set theory before me.
Probably there was the influence of Bourbaki**, that several translations to Japanese, shared from Tokyo Tosho Publisher, were on the desk of mine.
My talent and endeavour were so low, so I had not any results at that time.
My desire was deep but my hand was so shallow.
The time passed by.

In 1979 the meeting again with CHINO Eiichi*** made me the chance to learn on language, the object was clear and direct.
Language universals by mathematics became the never-ending goal of the study hereafter.
Sergej Karcevskij**** gave me the courage to the research.
All the way to investigation were taught from CHINO, who was the genuine teacher on language.
In mathematics I took the route from geometry, especially by projection.
Now I stand at algebraic geometry.
Grothendieck is in the northernmost at the end of Bourbaki.

SAITO Takeshi said at the essay on Grothendieck***** that the object of mathematics for Bourbaki was the set of being attached by construction and the object of mathematics for Grothendieck was the object of category representing the presentable functor.
The time has come for describing****** on language by mathematics despite my poor ability.
Sincere thanks for the pioneers letting us make the fascinating route of modern mathematics.



1. *WANG Guowei
Encounter in life / A Letter /2005
Influenced paper / On Time Property Inherent in Characters / 2003 , Quantum Theory for Language / 2004
2. **Bourbaki
SAITO Takeshi. Bourbaki, Mathematics Seminar, vol.41 no.4 487. Nihonhyoronsha, Tokyo, 2002.
3.***CHINO Eiicji
First met in 1969, again in 1979. Fortuitous Meeting
4. ****Sergej Karcevskij
Note on Karcevskij's theme. Note for KARCEVSKIJ Sergej's "Dudualisme asymetrique du signe linguistique"
5. *****Grothendieck
SAITO Takeshi. Grothendieck, Mathematics Seminar, vol.49 no.5 584. Nihonhyoronsha, Tokyo, 2010.
6. ******describing
Note on Grothendieck's theorem. Vector Bundle Model



Tokyo
January 10, 2012
Sekinan Research Field of Language



[Note, 28 October 2014]
When I first learnt French in 1964, I was the second grade of high school. My aim to learning was to get the lowest readable situation for modern poems of French Symbolism represented by Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Afterwards in 1969 I knew the importance of Martinet's work at the linguistic class of university. Probably in the early 1970s, I bought Bourbaki's books at the old-book-shop at Kanda, Tokyo, when Bourbaki's fame reached to the poor-talented linguistic student like me. I was enchanted Bourbaki's works and I somehow would like to adopt their results to my linguistic study. But my mathematical level was too low to get near Bourbaki's world. From those days my wandering around mathematics and linguistics kept long long way like the Beatles song, The long and winding road. What I again met mathematics, especially algebraic algebra was already over the twentieth century. From 2003 I began to write papers being assisted with CHINO Eiichi's advice and Sergej Karcevskij's work. At that times Chinese Qing dynasty's vast linguistic works topically represented by WANG Guowei was also assisting my study. At the result my first satisfied paper, "On Time Property Inherent in Characters"1 was completed. The theme in my life, model making of  language universals was begun further later in 2008 at Zoho site 2 sekinanlogos 3. At Complex Manifold Deformation Theory 4 I started writing more clearer descriptive papers by mathematics especially according to algebraic geometry. And now I step up one more and entered in arithmetic geometry 5 for solving more difficult themes such as dimension, synthesis and fusion of meaning in word.
Refer to the next.
  1. On Time Property Inherent in Characters
  2. Zoho site
  3. sekinanlogos
  4. Complex Manifold Deformation Theory
  5. Arithmetic geometry 

To Winter RI Ko. 14 John Peabody Harrington, Roman Jakobson, FUKAYA Kenji, Maxim Kontsevich, ZHANG BInglin and Roger Penrose 14 Description of Language. 2015. Translated by Google translate 2020

 

To Winter RI Ko. 14 John Peabody Harrington, Roman Jakobson, FUKAYA Kenji, Maxim Kontsevich, ZHANG BInglin and Roger Penrose 14 Description of Language. 2015. Translated by Google translate 2020


05/05/2020 18:29


To Winter RI Ko 2015
14  John Peabody Harrington, Roman Jakobson, FUKAYA Kenji, Maxim Kontsevich, ZHANG BInglin and Roger Penrose

From author: This text’s translation by Google translate is a little hard to be accurate at the present, especially on mathematical explanation by usual writing.

You can see the whole city from the library on the hill. The east side of the third floor is a computer room. The internet was always connected there, and I could use any table freely. I often spend my holidays near the window. A group of tall blue-green buildings rises to the northeast of the left side of the window. Seen from here on the hill, it is much higher. Only there is towering above the sky. Immediately south, there should be A’s home. Did the bulbul hit a tall building like that? The glass walls were distant and dull, reflecting the light of the autumn afternoon. 

When I was cleaning the room where the birds were gone for the first time in a while, I found some furrowed flock in the corner. The soft wings floated in the air for a while when released. Have you lived in the city because of your childhood? I wished that I was now resting slowly in the grove of the hills. A created Web pages and Dreamweaver, but since the amount has gradually increased, I switched to Expression Web from the middle. I used Office for documents at first, but soon I switched to Zoho.

In this way, I was able to quickly write small mathematical expressions using La Tex. When Backup was run automatically using SugarSync, all traces of A were on Cloud. The document was written in English. Regular sentences other than mathematical expressions are relatively easy to write with a limited vocabulary. This could lead to someone seeing somewhere. I had little hope, but there was little response. 

Of course, I thought it would be nice if there could be one or two people in this wide world who could sympathize with me, but that didn’t bother me that much. I just keep writing. There is no guarantee that there will be someone like John Pepody Harrington, who continued to record the American Indian languages. 1920 The photographs in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection, which are doing field research around the year, look somewhat like the pioneers of the West. It’s okay to wait quietly for the future of Harrington in the corner of the city. 

It was a fun task to think of a language containing time as a possibility using a model. However, in reality, it is rarely something that can be created, such as an original one. I couldn’t exceed the conventional idea. He arranged the work procedure little by little. First create a simple model. Select the shape suitable for the model. How much is the figure written? 

According to Kenji Fukaya, the geometry was “a group of groups and the space in which it acts”. It was Fukaya’s charm that he was able to briefly confirm and look at the fundamental things. By referring to Jacobson’s “semantic minimum”, a new geometric “minimum of meaning” is set, and the time t is included as a meaning by moving the time t in the closed interval. Defined the geometric word.

I repeated this direction many times with different levels of geometry. The universality of language was thought to be closely related to the invariant of mathematics. In Fukaya’s book, I learned that the quantum cohomology ring can be obtained from the Gromov-Witten invariant and the Gromov-Witten potential can be obtained. Language approached mathematics and physics. It has become possible to logically check the symmetry that has long been a concern. Under certain assumptions, the character of various languages can be inspected as a model from, for example, one figure or manifold. One of the centers was homological mirror symmetry, which was proposed by Kontsevich.

When I got tired of working in the library, I went out to the rooftop. The city, which spreads under the dark maroon autumn sky, conveyed the grandeur of human activities. The sounds of distant cities echo like a chord. Are people flying in this city as birds are flying in the sky? Just as birds sometimes crash into the ground by colliding with the turquoise glass of tall buildings, will people crash into the ground and crash somewhere?

 I once read a story about birds in the book Shorin no Fubun. “According to the poem of the 3rd year of the Emperor Hansho, a bird of five colors, it passes over the prefectures in which it belongs.” It seems that 10,000 birds of five colors flew in the sky. As for the beginning, I continue to cite Chinese books. According to the poem’s third year of honor, he gathered New Year’s lords, Otori, Emperor and Kanro to the Kyoto teacher, and according to the flock of birds, the findings of the Han book were true.

The contents of this Chinese book, in which 10,000 birds gathered in search of it, are true. It is unknown whether Shorin believed in these statements. However, according to Shorin’s habit, he might have believed it as a natural thing. 

Autumn flowers were dancing in the strolling garden on the roof of the library. White autumn Ming chrysanthemum, yellow Maru chrysanthemum, Nozoku chrysanthemum Soothing Hottogigisu and the white and white Arissum flowers crawling on the ground. Sky blue salvia, red cherry sage, purple rosemary and light blue basil. Dark blue Saintpaulia, white sapphinia, crimson geranium bowls and hanging. Huquera, Drachina consenna, Sansevieria houseplant. Spatti is also rich in green, and the red sea urchin is already red. Various sasanqua that began to inflate the buds, the last cosmos flowers that sway in the wind Winter clematis that has been quite tall, large leaves on the grape rack with few remaining, and a large red or white large ball swaying occasionally in the strong wind . 

If you look closely, you can also see the pink bokeh flowers that change the season. Shala beautifully turns red, and dogwood turns the leaves brown. On the other hand, rhododendrons had already inflated the buds considerably. Autumn was getting deeper. 

You can hear the sound of the city line riding on the wind. How is K doing? Well, let’s make a dedication to the document. For familiar days with K. I continued to write documents when I got home. The linguistic space including time gradually expanded from a straight line to a plane and from there to a sphere. Attracted by the work of Roger Penrose, I made a projective model. 

As I was thinking about it at midnight, I thought it would be beautiful if the language danced in the sky like an aurora. A complex plane is created by mapping all complex numbers to planes, as if all real numbers were mapped to straight lines. A complex number defined by two real numbers is placed on the plane as a language unit, and it is called a language point. Establish a vertical third coordinate axis from the origin of the plane and make a sphere with a unit radius centered on the origin. The spheres intersect at a radius of 1 on the new coordinate axes. If that point and a linguistic point on the complex plane are connected by a straight line, when the linguistic point has a distance of 1 or more, it intersects with the sphere at one point. When the distance is less than 1, the linguistic point is inside the sphere and does not intersect the sphere. 

This shows the limits of the language. Ordinary language points are projected on the spherical sky when the distance exceeds 1. The projection is called aurora. Language points at infinity converge on a sphere on the Z axis. You can capture an infinite number of languages in a finite way. A straight line connecting two points on the complex plane draws an arc in the spherical sky. The two straight lines form two arcs in the sky, and connecting four points creates a distorted quadrilateral in the sky. 

If we model the points in the sky as words, arcs as sentences, and quadrilaterals as sentences, the language will emerge there. The language becomes Aurora and dances in the sky. Language is aurora dancing above us.

 

1970s' Dream and Realised by CHINO Eiichi

 

1970s' Dream and Realised by CHINO Eiichi

 

1970s' Dream Note and Note 2 added 2019

1970s' Dream

1970s' dream, writing clear description on language universals by mathematics

The Days of Ideogram
​​​4. Time property in characters

In Autumn 2002 I got pneumonia and was hospitalized about 2 weeks, where I thought of 1970s' dream, writing clear description on language universals by mathematics. The theme was as hard as ever. So, at the bed I thought the basis of language from a side of Chinese character's classical approach which had vast heritage till Qing dynasty.
I directed my attention to the character's figure which had compound meanings containing time elements continuing from Yin dynasty's hieroglyphic characters left on bones and tortoise carapaces some 2400 years ago.
I thought that Chinese characters had containing time and its structure could be written by geometric approach once I had abandoned for difficulty. After leaving hospital, I wrote a paper titled On Time Property Inherent in Characters*3-1.   

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note 
13 October 2019
SRFL Paper

1970s' Dream is a part of Paper titled The Days of Ideogram,
which is a paper of  Ideogram Paper.

Ideogram Paper

TANAKA Akio

1. Ideogram 2005
2. Egyptian Hieroglyph Exhibition, Journey through the Afterlife Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead by The British Museum 2012
3. 
Macro Time and Micro Time  2013
4. Essence of Language 2016
5. The Days of Decipherment 2016
6The Days of Ideogram 2017
7. The Days of Ideogram 2017
8. The comparison between 2003 and 2017
From Chinese character's meaning structure to Homological algebraic model of language universals
 2017 
9. Letter to Y.  Toward geometrization of language 2018
10. Letter to Y. Of Broad Language 4th edition 2018
11. Determination of the concept, Broad Language 2018
12. 
Ars longa Seeing Masterpieces o f French Landscape Paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow 2018 


Tokyo
26 May 2018
8 June 2018 Paper 9 added
​12 June 2018 Paper 3 added

Sekinan Zoho


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Note 2
13 October 2019
SRFL Paper

1970s' Dream was realized by the reunion to CHINO Eiichi in 1979 at my return to the university after faculty graduate in 1971.
The first meeting with CHINO is in 1969 at his Russian language class.

Fortuitous Meeting
What CHINO Eiichi Taught Me in the Class of Linguistics 


TANAKA Akio 

CHINO taught me the core of linguistics in the class of structural linguistics.
The most remarkable thing is what he explained the paper of KARCEVSKIJ to us.
The title is “Du dualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique”. It became a miracle of my life.
 I summarize the essence of the paper from one of CHINO’s most major book,Gengogaku eno hirakareta tobira, Janua linguarum reserata in Latin. Language has the dualism.
One is firm structure. The other is flexible variability.
This is a very revelation in the roaming of study.
At first I selected the firmness of language for my research target.
It overlapped with the research of Chinese characters.
Thought of KARCEVSKIJ fructified the quantum of language.
The theory I reached is Quantum Theory for Language.
The starting point of the theory was given from CHINO.
I deeply appreciate him for teaching me almost all the things on language. 
CHINO Eiich died March 19, 2002.
At age 70.

Tokyo 
December 5, 2004
July 16, 2014 Added
Sekinan Research Field of Language 


​Linguistic Circle of Prague 

                                       
The Linguistic Circle of Prague was taught from CHINO Eiichi in his class of Structural Linguistics in the late 1970s. We first met at the university in 1969. He was young, probably the age 30s. I was 21 years old.

Now referring his chronological record, CHINO was born in 1932, graduated Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1955, entered Carrel University at Czechoslovakia in 1958 and returned to Japan in 1964. So we met after 5 years from his returning. 


Sometimes we conversed at the coffee shop near the station we used. California, it was the name of the shop, up the rattled stairs, under the dim light. It was the youth time of mine and probably with him.The greatest thing he gave me was teaching me the existence of KARCEVSKIJ Sergei in the Linguistic Circle of Prague. My latter half life was almost determined by KARCEVSKIJ's one paper, " Du dualisme asymetrique du signe linguistique" .
One day on the train after school, he calmly but definitely said to me that he never was linguist because he never discovered any new language or law and he only was the introducer to general linguistics.

Now I really think that I am also never linguist nor introducer. I only love language, so have written on language or its around  till now. CHINO taught me the the study or rather more deep attitude  to the life itself.
Regretfully he died in 2002, age 70.

He wrote several books on linguistics. The masterpiece that I confirmed is Janua Linguisticae reserata, 1994, that is the general invitation to linguistics for further studying of wide and deep view.

The title was determined by the famous book of Jan Amos Komensky 1592-1670Janua Linguarum reserata 1632Here I feel CHINO's deep love to the history and culture to Czechoslovakia where he studied for Czech in 7 years. 

[Note added]
I frequently heard on Linguistic Circle of Prague (LCP) from CHINO. But now standing in the twilight of my learning, I have not understood anything about it essentially, that had probably much more heritage for contemporary language study than my thinking. I already old and  can never start to cultivate the new frontier on LCP  or its successive study. Only saying is what I really recognise that LCP and Russian philology is the heimat of my language study. It is and will be  the heimat of my soul evermore. 19 July 2012 

Tokyo
13 July 2012
19 July 2012 Note added
Sekinan Research Field of Language



My Heimat of Learning, the Linguistic Circle of Prague   

TANAKA Akio                                          

My heimat of learning is the Linguistic Circle of Prague on which I was taught from my teacher CHINO Eiichi.
Sadly he died almost suddenly by disease in 2002 at age 70.

After a decade, I am now already 65 and near his later year days. When we met and told at the university or station-front old coffee shop, he had been a researcher and I had been a student all the time, and maybe sometimes been a younger friend.

If we meet again,  we will be the researcher-student relation same as old days but or this time only become friends that are absorbed in language problems under the dim light of a narrow coffee-shop.

3 October 2012

Refer to the next.

Coffee shop named California
Linguistic Circle of Prague
Prague in 1920s
Under the Dim Light 



Since 1979 I again learnt from CHINO on Linguistics especially on Linguistic Circle of Prague and Sergej Karcevskij.


Under the Dim Light

TANAKA Akio
               
                         
I frequently talked with CHINO Eiichi at the coffee shop near the station we used to get on. The shop was at the second floor and the steps upstairs always sounded squeaking. Under the dim light the topics of conversation was on language or linguistics after all. He was already the university professor but I was a poor research student. But he was always showed me the general tenderness.
The subject he gave me were impressive and useful for me, in which the most important is the history of The Linguistic Circle of Prague and the excellent pioneers of language study. He had of course the unique approach to the study but I had never any conspicuous one except boundless interest on the study.
In his wide and precious telling for me I gradually determined my course to proceed. It was the making of basic and radical foundation on natural language by searching the structure of language through simple and clear description. For keeping this difficult aim I had a decision that there was only way to use mathematics that I had abandoned at the past for its hardness.
In my age 20s, I had read Ludwig Wittgenstein and Nicolas Bourbaki in concentrating. I did not clearly understand  Wittgenstein's approach. But I borrowed his writing style that was simple and clear. So my early work's descriptions were nearly at him. But I decided that I never adopted strongly-intuitive thinking.
I always considered mathematical basis or analogy. My aim was the independence from the intuitive description. Keeping on this course, there was seen the mathematical basis that I must adopt the model in which language universals are clearly described. I entered to the mathematical description of study that was confirmed premises of my way.

Tokyo
1 August 2012
Sekinan Research Field of Language


Related papers with About 2
  1. Sergej Karcevskij, Soul of Language
  2. Follower of Sergej Karcevskij
  3. For KARCEVSKIJ Sergej
  4. Linguistic Circle of Prague
  5. Half Farewell to LCP with References
  6. Prague in 1920s
  7. 40 years passed from I read WANG Guowei
  8. The Complete Works of WANG Guowei
  9. For WITTGENSTEIN Ludwig Revised
  10. The Days of von Neumann Algebra
  11. The Days between von Neumann Algebra and Complex Manifold Deformation Theory

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