"In any communication system the receiver must be able to decode something of what the transmitter coded or no information gets to the destination at all. If you speak Chinese to me, I must know Chinese to understand your words." 7
"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life"
"Language isn't a picture at all. It's a tool; an instrument. There isn't just one picture of the world. There are lots of different language games. Different forms of life. Different ways of doing things with words. They don't all hang together."
"These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects--sentences are combinations of such names.--In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands."
"Imagine a script in which the letters were used to stand for sounds, and also as signs of emphasis and punctuation. (A script can be conceived as a language for describing sound-patterns.) Now imagine someone interpreting that script as if there were simple a correspondence of letters to sounds and as if the letters had not also completely different functions. Augustine' conception of language is like such an over-simple conception of the script."
Guy de Cointet's Ramona (1977) contains invented language where sounds become words, gestures are sentences; where the actors mostly understand one another not because they use words as we do but because it seems they have agreed to agree. Agreed to agree on unknown meanings shifting conventions and altered states. 8
"Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word 'red' is independent of the existence of a red thing."
"We learn to use words because we belong to a culture; a form of life; a practical way of doing things. In the end, we speak as we do, because of what we do. And all of this is a populi public affair."
"When you want to know the meaning of a word don't look inside yourself! look at the uses of the word in our way of life! Look at how we behave!"
