Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

I'm sorry Hovik I didn't realize you wanted a response to this. Language is not a part of an individual, in fact it is pretty much useless within the context of individuality. There are many things about language that are not in clear "design" of language - like figures of speech, double-meanings, implied meanings, etc, and this is also a universal feature of language - even though you can't find it within a dictionary, and if you didn't know about them you wouldn't even expect them to exist in the first place. Language develops "outside of" humans, but is only used by humans. It's not a part of us, but we are a part of it. The rules and if you like "laws" of human interaction necessarily give rise to language - but language develops as its own entity quite seperate from the humans that are a part of it.

*rolls up sleeves*

This might be a good time to inform you that I'm a linguist, and I have quite a few problems with... well, basically everything you just wrote.

Language is a system that arises out of interaction between individuals within a cultural group, first of all.

Secondly, things like figures of speech, double meanings, implied meanings and the like fall under an entire sub-field within linguistics called pragmatics. I suggest you read into it. Pragmatics has quite a lot of literature about these phenomena, and all of them are pretty well understood. I'm not sure what you mean by saying that these phenomena are not clear in the design of language. Taking the example of figures of speech, are you referring to the fact that the meaning of a figure of speech isn't extant in its structure and semantics? The meaning of a figure of speech is found in what's called a conversational implicature, basically what is meant by a speaker's utterance and not what is explicitly stated. Implicature is very well documented. I suggest you specifically look into the work of Paul Grice and conversational maxims.

Now, to address your assertion that language develops outside of humans... I'm not really sure what that even means. Language develops when humans interact. It can't not. In an environment where language does not exist between two regularly interacting groups, language will develop. It is very much a part of us. There are no laws or rules to human interaction, but there are consistent and somewhat predictable patterns of interaction. Language most certainly does not develop as its own entity apart from humans. That doesn't even make sense.