This community is bizarre and probably the most genuine one I’ve stumbled upon. How do I consistently get more comments then updoots here?

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
    7·
    12 hours ago

    Professional academic linguist here. (Yes, that’s a thing.)

    Words have the meanings that communities apply to them. There is no governing body over word meanings. There can be a tension (e.g. two groups using the same term in different ways), but that doesn’t really mean that the word means both. Words mean different things to different groups. It has to be this way, for epistemic and pragmatic reasons.

    In that sense, meanings are not consciously assigned. So the answer to your original question could be “no”.

    But in another sense, all meanings are possible for any given meaningful sequence around the world. Which means, in principle, given infinite communities of practice, a word could have infinite meanings. A stretch, of course.

    Edit:

    There is no governing body over word meanings

    I’m speaking here in terms of global English. There are some languages that have governing bodies, or at least bodies that claim to be governing bodies, like French with the Académie Française. But this is not at all the norm.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      2·
      11 hours ago

      Or, to put it another way, (unprofessional academic linguist here), a word has meanings by what you mean by it, and what the listener understands it to mean.

      In a sense, it can mean anything you want it to. In another sense, it can mean anything the listener/reader interprets it as. Most useful though is when you mean the same meaning that the listener understands.

      And for “accepted/official meaning”, that’s just a community all agreeing on a meaning. Optionally with a recognised group (e.g. dictionary writer) affirming certain meanings as accepted in the community.

      • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        11 hours ago

        I think you’re getting at intended meaning versus received meaning. Which is totally a thing, but intended meaning is far less well understood than accepted meaning (not necessarily at the word level, but definitely at the sentence level).

        At the sentence level, companies pay big money to have tens of thousands of sentences manually annotated for intended meaning (to try and train AI to be able to discern it automatically).

  • Gremour@lemmy.world
    2·
    16 hours ago

    There’s a sci-fi movie from USSR, “Kin-dza-dza”. The natives of another planet in another galaxy were telepathes, but used language consisting of only a few words. “Koo” was for almost any word, “kiu” for swearing, “ketse” for matches (most valuable asset) and a few more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza!

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    2·
    19 hours ago

    In theory, yes. In practice, no.

    The association between meaning and word is arbitrary, but socially dictated. You’d need to have other people accepting that that word conveys that meaning in at least some context.

  • LostXOR@fedia.io
    2·
    20 hours ago

    Not really. A word with every meaning is meaningless itself, since it doesn’t allow you to narrow down the word’s intended meaning from the set of all possible meanings.