#semantics & pragmatics & semiotics are entire fields of study for a reason! people can and do spend years talking about this very issue.

[peregrineggsandham]

But that’s wrong? Someone can say “Its raining”, but that doesn’t mean the other person hears or even understands them, even if they speak the same language. It means nothing.

I mean, we can just talk about the sequence of sounds that we can write out phonetically as /ɪts ˈreɪnɪŋ/. And yes, those are inherently meaningless. It's just a bunch of noises! As I said, nothing iconic, or even remotely evocative of rain.

But meaning is formed around that sequence of sounds by those who create and hear it - speaker and listener alike. And that meaning is predicated on a wonderful mix of speaker intention, listener bias, historical context, shared cultural knowledge, and a host of unspoken conversational maxims and patterns.

I was definitely focusing on the meaning as interpreted by the listener in that last post, so I'm sorry if that confused things. And I was sort of assuming that the listener and speaker were in an ongoing conversation and understanding each other. But even if they weren't, even if the listener couldn't understand the speaker, that doesn't mean the utterance itself "means nothing". If said with the intent to communicate, then it definitely means something at the very least to the speaker! Like you said - someone can say it! And there lies a full half of the meaning.

Conversation is inherently a collaborative act, but it starts with the speaker's intent behind an utterance. They're taking a complex idea - the concrete "rain", the more abstract "-ing" and "'s", the somewhat idiomatic "it" - and turning that combination of ideas into the movement of a stream of air, following a strict set of patterns and rules that developed organically over thousands of years. That's neat!

If the listener doesn't speak the language, or mishears, then they may not pick up on that meaning. It could just be sounds, to them. Or they may even misunderstand, and pick up an unintended meaning. If they lack some of the required context (e.g. by not knowing a word), or if the speaker is flouting one of those unspoken maxims (e.g. by being sarcastic) and the listener doesn't realize it, the meaning may be warped.

The utterance of the sounds /ɪts ˈreɪnɪŋ/, the writing of the phrase "It's raining", you're right that these aren't inherently meaningful. If the sequence "itsraining" happened to appear in a randomly-generated string of letters, I wouldn't personally assume any meaning to it. And since this train of thought did start on the topic of magic, I'll say I find nothing particularly magical about a string of random sounds or letters either.

(Now, if you did see meaning in that random string, I think you'd effectively be practicing some kind of divination, by believing that there was intent behind the randomness. That the universe or whoever or whatever produced the string was actively trying to communicate with you. That's a pretty common idea when we talk about certain kinds of "magic". I think it's interesting that words, symbols, and communication from some unseen "speaker" are so integral to our understanding of it, and I think there's something to be said there for seeing language itself as an inherently "magical" thing regardless of whether your interlocutor is just your next-door neighbor or... whatever you personally believe is at the other end of an alectryomancy session. But dammit Jim I'm a phonetician, not an occultist.)

Point is, in conversation, in the context of a person speaking to another (regardless of whether it's understood), an utterance (or any sequence of symbols) is meaningful because of the intent behind it. Not the sounds themselves, but the very act of turning ideas into symbols - and back again.

...

I apologize if I'm repeating myself a bit - it's quite late and the question of "what does it mean for a utterance to have meaning" is actually a really interesting and complicated one, anon!

I'm admittedly being more flowery and less technical about it here because in the end my other main point is just "Isn't language really astoundingly neat?", but this is the stuff from which journal articles are written. (Usually involving a surprising amount of predicate logic.) It's an important line of inquiry because it can help explain a lot of where communication goes right and wrong, how misunderstandings happen, and how to effectively convey ideas to others.

That said, to be fair this isn't my specific area of expertise - I'm in the phon/phon corner where we ask people to make noises and stare at spectrograms all day, this is more the sem/prag corner where they put lambda calculus and philosophy in a blender.

@cryptotheism Ach, look what you made me do, I'm rambling about sounds.

#linguistics #semantics & pragmatics & semiotics are entire fields of study for a reason! people can and do spend years talking about this very issue. #I took a great pragmatics class once - the first week of which was titled ''what does 'mean' mean?'' #for instance - if a speaker says ''it's raining'' aloud to -themself- without intent to communicate with a separate listener #is it still a meaningful utterance? #it doesn't add things to any kind of conversational common ground #but it may still serve a specific purpose to the speaker in helping them organize their thoughts #and it isn't a random string of sounds said for the sake of making sounds #so we can argue that it does indeed still have meaning #magically speaking I'd jest that the speaker is casting a one-person spell of 'remind myself why I picked up that umbrella a second ago' #now... could a random string of sounds said by a person with the sole intent of making meaningless sounds... have meaning? #it may convey information! that information being ''I am making some meaningless sounds.'' #it's not really -language- but does it -mean- something? #does it -mean- something in a different way from how 'it's raining' -means- something? #and from there you get into a couple different definitions of the word 'mean' #the specifics of which I don't remember though now I sorta want to track down the paper we read that first introduced it #it was super interesting and a bit of a mind-bender #sam says stuff sometimes #sam says... a lot of stuff apparently - whoops #I'm sorry anon I didn't intend this to turn into a small essay