Re: file searching/vista help

["David B. Kronenfeld" kfeld@xxxxxxxx]

I don't know what's in her head, but my then 19 month old
granddaughter happily toddled around the house on her last visit
checking out the words for everything--proudly asserting the ones she
already knew and avidly learning those that were new. No proper
nouns--real names--yet, and she did not always have the scope right,
but these words did appear to be tied in some really basic way to the
objects (including people and pets). The reason I mention it here is
that, while watching her and interacting with her, I could not get
out of my head the Biblical image of Adam running around giving
everything its proper name.
    Our gut feeling that there is some intrinsic connection
between words and what they refer to--that the labels for things
almost seem just other attributes of the things--maybe goes back this
toddler period when the words out of which language would be created
were being learned, but when language itself (while maybe beginning
to be understood) was not yet really there. Such words do sometimes
seem to have a kind of Protean quality--and maybe, too, are the stuff
of the "basic vocabulary" that some linguists have used for
historical purposes.
And, to make it maybe more fun, she lives in Russia with a Russian
nanny, while her parents mostly speak English to her. So far, I
gather, overlapping words--Russian and English--are no different for
her than other overlaps--as "doggy" and "Izzy" (our dog's name, but
not that specific for the tot).

At 01:25 PM 4/25/2008, you wrote:
> Paul wrote:
> > Eden may have been the last place where the dream of the
> > correspondence of words and things had any reality,
> Did anyone but me see "The Apple Tree"--a combo of three one-act
> plays? It has a memorable riff on Genesis, in which Adam is naming
> the animals, as God told him to do. He's naming them things like
> "four-legged down-under-hangerer" (cow). Enter Eve. She casually
> refers to the animal as a "cow."
>
> Adam: Why do you call it a "cow"?
>
> Eve: Because it looks like a cow.
>
> Extra funny for philosophers.
>
>
> Harry Binswanger
> hb@xxxxxxxx