Dark aubergine cover reading What Is a Language, with the line: a language does not build your world and does not merely wrap it; it is a stock of names for conditions that were there either way. A faint numeral 8.7 sits at the lower right.

What Is a Language

A language is pictured either as a neutral container you pour thoughts into, or as the thing that cuts the world into the pieces you are then stuck with. Both pictures assume the only two relations on offer are causing and doing nothing. The foundation I work from has a third one, and the ordinary business of learning a word is where it can be watched operating. … readWhat Is a Language