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by mjburgess 2205 days ago
We get "around" this by ostentation: words in a spoken (natural) language refer to the world.

I point to examples of trees and say "tree", etc.

"New" ideas are acquired by example -- language is not a closed system.

1 comments

Which is harder than it sounds if you are trying to do it from scratch. Even pointing is a part of language, and trying to convey that concept is far from trivial. I think a big part of language learning in children involve the child seeing other people react to language and imitates. E.g., father points and mother gaze in the direction of finger, child follows mother's gaze.
To further this idea, dogs intuit the meanings of commands, some more easily than others, but teaching a dog to understand a human pointing at something is hard. My own dogs seem to interpret it as "just keep looking"