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Augustine focused explicitly on the acquisition of oral language, but
we can discern some influence from written literacy, particularly in the
word to object relation. Words are not necessarily distinguishable units
of oral utterance, in their aspect as signals, even when those utterances
are influenced by written language. The culturally significant artifact of
the monolingual dictionary both reinforces and undercuts the concept
of language as nomenclature. Rather, it reinforces the concept by repre-
senting relations of equivalence between defined words and their defini-
tions, although characteristically between verbal forms rather than word
and image; it also undercuts the concept, particularly in more extensive
dictionaries, by revealing the variety of signification that can attach to
defined terms. Even extensive and historical dictionaries might still imply
stable synchronic states of a language, showing clear transitions between
historical uses of words and sharply differentiated, definable senses while
assigning uses to specific single categories.
Construction of an equivalent to a nomenclature—a deliberately made
language—has been a recurrent response to the perceived inconsistency of
the relation between word and object or meaning in ordinary as well as
scholarly and scientific discourse. In philosophy, Wilkins proposed a real
character—intended to “signifie things, and not words”—that aimed to
achieve clarity in argumentation (1668/1968, 21). In indexing, controlled
vocabularies are intended as terms with stable meanings that label con-
cepts more consistently than the language of discourse. Less commonly,
a search for a nomenclature has become embedded in the language of
discourse. A common but not universal assumption in the construction
of a nomenclature argues that concepts and objects can be known inde-
pendently of language and that agreement exists regarding fundamental
notions. The excluded multivalency and indeterminacy of ordinary dis-
course tends to reemerge in the complexity of deliberately constructed
language and also in the difficulty of assigning objects to categories. The
theoretical sophistication of discussions about deliberately constructed
languages has varied (Gardin 1973, 142), particularly regarding the gran-
ularity of isolation of concepts and the relation of concepts isolated to the
language of discourse.
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