Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Language and
Symbols
“The Book of Nature is
written in the language of
mathematics and its
characters are triangles,
circles and other geometric
figures.”
- Galileo Galilei
What is language?
• A systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds
or conventional symbols (Chen)
• A non-instinctive system of communication using symbols
possessing arbitrary (conventional, learned) meanings and
shared by a community (Esty)
Importance of Language
To understand the expressed ideas
To communicate ideas to others
Components of Language