I have already written a lot about the concept “milieu” … and yet I feel I need to point out that the way the word is commonly used seems rather misleading (at least to me). The common understanding of milieu is rather static, I think. It seems like people map into particular milieus in a… Continue reading One Milieu vs Many Milieus
Tag: natural languages
We need to figure out what’s going on
This is something a Silicon Valley celebrity said recently — and I’ve decided to “steal” it because the meaning is actually rather ambiguous and depends a lot on context. The person who said it, simply said it in passing and didn’t contextualize what was meant at all — I actually have a vague “gut feeling”… Continue reading We need to figure out what’s going on
Mainstream and / or Main Stream?
Modern English and Modern German are closely related languages. Generally, when linguists say something like this, it mainly means something like “there once existed another language which was neither Modern English nor Modern German, yet which is common ancestor of both languages”. Of course something as complex as a language can hardly be described in… Continue reading Mainstream and / or Main Stream?
Lifetime Guarantee for How Natural Languages Scale
In the last episode, we looked at a few different scales — implicitly, from technology and product life cycles, through writing, biology and genetic information all the way across the universe back to the Big Bang itself. Seen this way, the irony of seeing writing and written langages as something permanent becomes crystal clear. Perhaps… Continue reading Lifetime Guarantee for How Natural Languages Scale
Rates of Evolution
Evolution is often thought of as a single thing. Yet’s it’s not even a thing at all — it’s a phenomenon, a figment of our imaginations, one way that we interpret the world we live in. It is perhaps one of our most abstract scientific concepts. At the same time, no one even just somewhat… Continue reading Rates of Evolution
Linguistic Empathy & Community Boundaries
Languages are abstractions — they pretend to actually exist, but in reality they are more like amorphous relationships between the language’s speakers (or users). When one person uses a word and another person interprets that word’s meaning, there is no guarantee of absolute congruency — meanings can be laden with all sorts of connotations, there… Continue reading Linguistic Empathy & Community Boundaries
Community — Compared to What?
There’s a sort of “pop jazz” song named “Compared to What?” and that’s the tune I have sort of stuck in my head as I am having these thoughts… — which thoughts? When we talk about community, it usually creates an intellectual divide between “Us and Them”, ingroups and outgroups. Yet these groups are not… Continue reading Community — Compared to What?
Socio Business blog 