--- More language at the library ---

                                                   [Schlessman Family Branch Library]

I have volunteered as a conversation partner for exchange students so I figured the Spanish conversation group, Habla Ya!, presented every week (currently on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 5:00), would be a perfect opportunity to learn what the students feel. Sure enough, it was interesting and profoundly tense. The conversation group is well moderated and everyone was friendly, but after 6 months of study, my Spanish is not nearly conversational.

This would be a great tool for my Spanish studies but it would require two buses, 45 minutes and a trip ticket each way and that's a little too much for a weekly activity.

The Denver Public Library system has other aids for picking up new languages. For instance, the library website provides access to Mango Languages, a learning resource for over 70 languages. The courses are taught entirely in the user's own language, and it provides learning through foreign films.

There are also a variety of popular series such as Pimsleur, Living Language, and Berlitz, and, of course, there are books (it is a library), eBooks, DVDs, and eAudiobooks.

Although I'm hardly a genius at foreign languages (I have a friend that is just a few months difference in age that has 15 language or more - but he's been doing it for a long time.), I'm getting to where I can understand the signs in Spanish around town, and slowly I'm getting to where I can read books in Spanish.

As for Schlessman Family Branch Library, it's in a residential area. The bus stop across the street is an artistic production called Flight Ride 7, created by Erick Johnson in 2002 as part of the Flight Ride series in the Lowry neighborhood.

                                                                      [Flight Ride 7]

Perhaps a school near you has a program to help foreign students adapt to local language and culture. Since those are likely your language and culture, that would be a great opportunity to help other people and to, incidentally, learn about their language and culture.

--- How complicated is language? Try speech synthesis ---

We take language for granted until we try to learn a new one. I don't think anyone would say that Spanish is more difficult than English, in fact, there are a lot of similarities. There's a lot more that you have to match up between nouns, verbs, modifiers and other word forms, and modifiers tend to follow the words they modify, unlike in English ("Little Red Riding Hood" instead of "Hood Riding Little Red") but the differences aren't huge.

I had little trouble in my 20s learning German and American Sign Language, but Spanish, I find unaccountably hard. But I'm having fun anyway.

Consider, though, the problem of computer language recognition and speech synthesis. They've come very far in the last 20 years. This century has seen some huge breakthroughs. In the 1990s, computer speech was still pretty much science fiction. What there was, was pretty clunky. But now, I routinely let my computer read books to me, a God-send given my dyslexia.

My computer still has a few problems though. Consider the word "read". Should it be pronounced "reed" or "red". It depends on it's context. Words exist in context. In fact, there are four things that have to be considered when you are parsing out words. It's amazing how easily a human does all that without breaking a sweat.

The meanings of any particular words are usually many. Just choose any word you thought you knew well and look it up in the unabridged Oxford Dictionary of the English Language. Then words exist in relation to the words around them. How you pronounce "read" has a lot to do whether you read a book yesterday or where you will read it today - tense determines the pronunciation. But "read" can be an adjective since a book can be a "read book" (or one that you have already read and, so, can mark off your reading list). Where words appear in a work also has meaning. One reason "It's was the best of time. It was the worst of times." is so well known is that it was the fist statement in Dickens "A Tale of Two Cities." Everything else being equal, first and last are most likely to make an impression. And other things can strongly influence how words are understood and pronounced. Intonation is one. Read "You are a fine one," out loud several times,placing emphasis on different words and see how the meaning changes.

I use a screen reader called NaturalReader, produced by NaturalSoft Ltd. It does a great job but, when I first started using it, I noticed a humorous snag. Frankly, I don't know if it was in the screen reader, the Windows dictionary or what but, when it came to the word "Nazi", it said "ne'er-do-well". "Appropriate" maybe, but not accurate. Today, my screenreader just boringly announces "Nazi". The older way was more entertaining.

--- Watching your language ---

A few notes on the choice of words........

Chameleons and the big word

I've never been punched because of something I've said. Amazingly, I've never been punched. A few times I should have been.

I'm a chameleon - you know, those lizards that change colors to blend in with their surroundings. I pick up accents, gestures, expressions.... I can't, say, affect a New Zealand accent if I try but sometimes one just comes out. I got that accent from a welder I worked with offshore.

I was driving around Montgomery, Alabama with a friend and we pulled into a fast food restaurant to pick up something to eat. The check-out person asked if I was from Australia and I said, "Yeah. I'm from Sydney." She oozed as I snagged my bag of food.

I don't typically lie by nature, but it was just too tempting, and it made her happy.

I was in a check-out lane at WalMart when I was suddenly rattling on in an Hispanic accent, and I turned around to see a big Hispanic guy and his pequena espousa glaring at me. I apologized profusely.

Sometimes, I can't pull out the word I want to use. I combat that problem by having a big vocabulary so, if I can't retrieve one word, I'll just use a synonym. Unfortunately, the synonym might be a $20 word where a half dollar word would be more appropriate. It makes me seem to be trying to impress people with my erudition.

It's tough being a lizard.

But, all in all, I've gotten along pretty well with my language problems. Here are a few things that I've picked up.

Big sentences

The Teaching Company has a course called "Building Great Sentences: Exploring The Writer's Craft" presented by Professor Brook Landon. One of his points was that Strunk and White was wrong in their "The Elements of Style" when they counseled to always use short sentences.

I agree.

Long complex sentences can be awful - a misery to try to decipher, but they can also be beautiful and fun to read if they are well crafted.

It's a matter of style. I hope my style in this blog is enjoyable to read.

The way I try to ensure that my long, complicated sentences are well crafted is: I read them aloud (or I listen to my computer read them to me - I put each blog through a screen reader before I post it.) If a sentence doesn't flow well, if it doesn't sound natural, if it's hard for me to get it out, then I start looking for a problem.

The age of belle letres is gone and I lament it's passing. I read letters of Civil War soldiers writing home or pioneers writing to their families back east and, although the writer is obviously illiterate, to the best of their ability, I can tell that they are trying to make their letter enjoyable, readable, beautiful. Even scientific works were crafted to be read - not like the dry scientific writing of today.

I want these blogs to inform, but I also want them to entertain. I hope you enjoy my stories of adventures in learning.

What is vulgar?

"Vulgar" is dirty, right? At the very least, it's uncouth.

Actually, it's Germanic.

The word "vulgar" actually means "common". For instance, the Bible was written in vulgar languages. The New Testament was written in a form of Greek called "koine" which literally meant "common". And, of course, the Vulgate Bible was called that because it was written in the vulgar Latin.

Today, vulgar usually means Germanic. I'll try not to be too offensive but I will talk about "ass". Of course an ass is a donkey and when you are calling a person an ass, you are likening them to a donkey.

But the use of "ass" (a word of Germanic origin) to refer to the "posterior" or "gluteus maximus" (both words from Romantic languages) is considered obscene, or, at least, boorish. Why? They mean the same things.

Well, there is an answer. It's the same answer as to why we raise pigs, but we eat pork. We raise cattle, kine, bulls, and cows, but we eat beef. Deer run in the forest, but when we eat them, they are venison.

On Christmas Day 1066, William the Conqueror was crowned king of England. "Conqueror" is a bit strong for what actually happened. William might have been French, but he was also related to the childless king of England, Edward the Confessor, so when the king died, William became a valid contender for the crown. Many in England, in fact, supported William.

When William became the king of England, one thing he brought with him was the French language, and it became fashionable to speak the king's tongue.

So, just think about the vulgarities that I'm not going to talk about in this article. How many of the inappropriate words are of Germanic origin while their appropriate alternatives are from the French, or Latin, or Spanish, or Greek?

Responsibility for being understood

I've mentioned James Kilpatrick as one of my favorite linguists. He held that the primary purpose of language was to be understood, and if your hearers understood you, then your language was correct. (I might also heartily recommend June Casagrande's book, "Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: a guide to language for fun and spite".)

I would like to go a little further and suggest that people are responsible for being understood. Both the speaker/writer and the hearer/listener share 100% of the responsibility to be understood, for what other purpose is there for language except to be understood. Even double talkers carefully craft their language to be understood to be saying hilarious gobbledygook.

In speaking, the way you make sure that you are understood is by looking for nonverbal cues that you are making the right impressions on your hearers, and by flat out asking them if they understand you as saying what you meant to be saying.

When writing, well, you have to rely on the responses you get and those are not often forthcoming. But you use the same language speaking as you do writing, so you have some prior knowledge as to how others understand what you say. You should also be sensitive to the fact that persons from other cultures often use the same words differently, so, if your communications are to be consumed abroad, you should not be too surprised if you are sometimes misunderstood.

In that case, you should be the last person to be offended and the first person to be willing to correct misconceptions.

Choosing your words

Certainly, if you want to get a point across (or a concept, or an emotion, or a lesson) you should choose your words carefully and put them together in a may that will cause the consumer to be more likely to receive what you have to say rather than to wonder away, disinterested.

Humans have two advantages over all the other animals: excellent opposable thumbs and an exquisite technical language. It is entirely fitting that we should take the utmost care in crafting with both.

Develop a habit of listening to what you say and reading what you write. Don't be afraid to critique yourself and ask for others' feedback.

--- Language Resources ---

If people go by their experiences in school, "Language" is probably thought of as vocabulary, grammar, and. maybe, literature. Foreign languages would be included in all that. But there is a lot more to it than that. Those communications classes - those are language, too. How about etymology? That's one of my favorites. I almost enjoy being criticized for saying "Call a spade a spade," so I can explain where the phrase comes from and why it has absolutely nothing to do with race. Or, when I say that "It's all balled up," and some one looks at me like I said something dirty.

That's one of my favorites. When people relied on horses to get around, they would often ride, or take their carriages out on a snowy day and the snow would get packed under the horses hooves into tight snowballs, causing them to fall down.

Likewise, "to suck" derives from the beat generation when, if you were a good trumpeter, you "really blew" but, of course, the opposite was to "really suck."

There's more to why a particular person said /that/ than choice of words. Sigmund Freud actually did first describe the Freudian slip - saying something you really mean without intending to go quite that far. There is certainly a psychology of language.

And language is composed of signs. Words are signs, but people don't always associate all those other signs as language - but it is. Semiotics is the study of signs. There is  much more to language than people usually think and much of the most fascinating parts are often ignored.

Why does the English "father", the German "fader",  and the Italian and Spanish "padre" sound so much alike; and why doesn't the Russian "otets" and Aramean "hayry" follow suit?

Why do Americans gesture with the first finger and thumb of one hand in a circle to indicate that things are alright, and why will that get you into trouble in other parts of the world? Our nonverbal language is also language.

I mentioned two of my favorite authors of linguistics in the blog, "Language and me". You might also want to check out Desmond Morris' Peoplewatching. And if you want to check out the languages of other folks - horses, dogs, cats - he's also written Dogwatching, Catwatching, Horsewatching, and Animalwatching.

"Foreign language" is a relative term. German may be foreign to an English speaking person but not to a German speaker. English is a foreign language to many people in the world. Ironically, though, English is a langua franca, so it is understood by many people whose first language isn't English. I learned German in college because, at that time, a lot of research in psychology (my field) was published in German. There are a lot of reasons to pick up another language, but one is just that it's fun to do so.

If you want to devote a significant part of your time to the serious study of language, you will certainly need a reference library and you couldn't do much better than the online MIT reference library (https://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=176227&p=1160775).

And if you want to pick up a new language, check out MIT's OpenCourseWare offerings in foreign languages. For supplemental study, fun, and games, look at the Digital Dialects page (http://www.digitaldialects.com) and the BBC's languages page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages).

If you want to delve into sign languages, there are many resources for American Sign Language on the web. I recommend the excellent AMSLAN dictionary at Signing Savvy (https://www.signingsavvy.com).

I'll be looking into a lot of language while I try to learn Spanish this year. Maybe you'll get bit by the language bug.

Is there a foreign language you have always been wanting to pick up? Just keep in mind, the longer you wait, the harder it is to learn it. Don't let the opportunity slip by.

Walk around town and pay attention to what people  say. Do some of the phrases they use seem odd to you? When you really think about it, do many of the phrases you use seem odd to you? Why do people say those things?!? Most dictionaries have the etymologies of the words - explanations of where the words come from. You can usually find the origins of phrases on the Internet.

--- Spanish ---

A funny thing happened during my first session of Spanish. I suddenly became emotional. I'm not that kind of guy! Things don't usually move me that way. I hope it's a good omen. Watching the video felt...joyous.

One session for me is about three days. I start with the Class Activities list on the MIT website, watch the video episode, and then complete the textbook assignments. The next day I do the activities in the workbook. The third day I play around with the supplementary materials. I have all the resources in a single file - here's what it looks like in Windows explorer.

                                                                        [Spanish explorer]

And I keep all my notes in a LibreOffice spreadsheet one page to each session.

At this speed, I may be able to finish the first MIT course in a year. Hopefully I'll be able to talk with my Hispanic neighbors (with only a little good natured laughing.)

--- Language and me ---

Me and language? Language and I?

(Head slap) It's not even a sentence! Forget it!

What do you expect. I'm an animal. (Movie reference)

I'm dyslexic, I think in images, I stammer, I occasionally can't pull out the words I want to use, and, yes, I talk to my self.

Verbal language is not my first language.

But, then, my contrariness has served me well more than once. I have always been fascinated with and have enjoyed those things that I am not supposed to be able to do. That's why my favorite x-sport is rock climbing (or, it was until I clocked up so many hand injuries that my grip has gotten weak. A rock climber climbs with their hands, not their feet.) and rappelling.

I was not good at language so I was in two gospel groups and two advanced church choirs for many years, have two minors in world literature, joined the speech troop in college, and have spoken publicly....a lot. If you can find the Auburn Circle from the 1970s, I have stuff published there. The Circle is the Auburn University literary magazine.

I can tell you stories...and I probably will.

I'm not much for board games (they bore me), but if you can drag me into a game of Scrabble or Pictionary I will be ecstatic. I love crossword puzzles, Cryptoquotes, puns....people say that puns are low brow. They're wrong. Puns are perpetrated by people who love language and, consequently, love playing around with it.

Double talkers slay me - luckily there aren't that many around any more. The last two I can think of are Archie Campbell (if you haven't heard his "Rindercella", you must find a copy and listen to it.) and Norm Crosby. I'm sure there are others around, I just dropped TV when they went to high definition.

My favorite linguists are James Kilpatrick and Bill Bryson. Kilpatrick was actually a journalist. Wikipedia calls him a "grammarian" - I beg to differ. A grammarian would never say, "If you understand what I'm saying, then I'm using correct English." A linguist, on the other hand, would. He had a popular newspaper column on the English language for many years.

Bill Bryson wrote a book about an attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods). He's a professional author. He also wrote The Mother Tongue, Made Here in America, and Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words.

I can speak a little German (a very little and very slowly) and can read considerably more. I still have a little American Sign Language left. I'll probably brush up on them some day. Just now, I've started a last ditch attempt to learn Spanish. The MIT OpenCourseWare course I'm using is fun - I'll see if it's effective.

As you get older, it's harder to pick up new languages. I have a friend who is my age that makes it a hobby. I think he's got 20 or more that he can speak conversationally, but he does it constantly and has been learning languages for many years. I still have hope.

How about you? Are you a "language person?' What's your story?

--- Spanish ---

Well, I have my Spanish textbook and workbook and am ready to embark on this year-long (and maybe more) adventure. I'm starting with MIT's Spanish I course, which is available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare site (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/global-studies-and-languages/21g-701-spanish-i-fall-2003). The online course tells you which materials they use (you have to buy your own but they're not expensive) and provides a syllabus, calendar of activities, assignments, related resources, and in-class activities (which has handouts as PDFs).

I have set up a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet as a notebook and I have other resources that I will be using including the exercises and games on  the Digital Dialects website (http://www.digitaldialects.com). There is also a (fairly) nearby branch of the Denver Public Library (the Schlessman Family Branch) that has a regular Spanish conversation group. I may attend that once I become a little conversant.

The MIT course uses a Spanish TV series (which can be accessed through the Annenberg Foundation website http://learner.org/series/destinos) as a core learning experience and a companion textbook and workbook. There are 26 episodes and 52 class sections. The course is designed as a semester course but I will be taking more time with it for additional exercises (and because I'm old).

I think I've mentioned that I've tried to pick up Spanish twice before and failed. As you get older, it's harder to pick up new languages. German and American Sign Language were easy and Spanish looks like it should be easy also, and I would like to be able to converse with my Hispanic neighbors.

There are many ways to pick up a new language - commercial and free Internet resources and community programs. It's fun and you can spend as much time and money as you want. Especially check out the MIT OpenCourseWare language courses.

--- Language and mathematics ---

This year my dual focus will be language and mathematics, but are those really two different things?

There is an ongoing philosophical debate as to whether numbers have an independent existence "out there" in nature. Is there a property of nature called "one"? Is there really a such a thing as a fraction?

Part of my graduate training was in research methodology. I've done a little research myself, mostly as parts of student teams, but I've mostly been involved with helping others develop their studies. Two of the biggest problems I've seen in studies are reification and reductionism.

Reductionism, in this instance, is the tendency of specialists to see their world from the narrow viewpoint of their own area of expertise. A medical issue will always have psychological, social, and environmental elements so a physiologist looking at diabetes might focus on the blood and pancreas and forget all about these other elements, and that can be useful as long as it is kept up front that his results are only part of the story. But if you have to deal with the reality of diabetes, you'd better not forget the other things.

Reification is much more insidious and difficult to guard against - often, it's just ignored.

Science doesn't give truths. It provides models that allow us to understand things that happen in the world and make predictions, but no model is perfect. All models are approximations of reality. A good model preserves as many of the important features of reality as possible so that it's outcomes can be said to be accurate to within certain specified limits. The error can be specified. But there is always error.

We keep models in our heads about how we think the world works. And, hopefully, our models are pretty close to reality. But philosophers and research advisers are there to warn us that the word is not the thing and that the model is not the reality.

And I think that is why some people mistakenly believe that numbers are "real". You can point at a number on a page but that's just ink that's been allowed to soak into paper and dry. To be grammatically correct, "1" is not 1. Fractions are even more problematic. If you break a stick in nature, you don't have two fractional sticks. You just have two sticks, and the "two" only exists in people's heads.

Mathematics is a language, just like English or Spanish or AMSLAN. It has been developed to help us come up with technically correct descriptions about how the world around us works.

In a way, numbers do have a kind of existence, as information, but that existence isn't independent. If there were no minds around to appreciate a zero, there would be no zero. But zero revolutionized our world by allowing us to make very precise "words" to describe very large and very small quantities.

Some machines have parts that must be accurate in size to ,say, 0.01 millimeters, or else the tiny space between the parts would allow enough motion to shake the machine apart. Try expressing 0.01 in Roman numerals (which have no zero).

Our technical understanding of the world, and therefore, our exquisite technology, relies on the language of mathematics, but language it still is.

We have many languages - literary language that allows us to communicate complex messages across both space and time, nonspoken body languages that allow us to communicate exquisitely our emotional intentions, aesthetic languages that let is communicate beauty (and sometimes ugliness)to multitudes. The sciences use the languages of logic and mathematics to communicate ideas with great precision.

Now, as I begin to explore the hard sciences, my first stop will be the "hard language" of mathematics and the softer human spoken languages.

Does mathematics exist "out there"? Well, in fact, it does. As long as there are thinking people "out there", there will be mathematics and I will be carrying it out into the field more and more to explore the intricacies of the world around me.

--- Social and language education at the library ---

The Denver Public Library is scattered all over the Denver area with 24 branch libraries in addition to the big, castle-like central library in downtown Denver. In addition to providing books, movies and educational materials to their patrons, they offer many educational experiences.

The end of the year is a transitional event for me because I am changing topics for my adventures, but it's more of a blending than a sharp change. I've been studying social sciences, but now I will turn my attention to language. Obviously, language is social.

When I visit Mi Pueblo Market, I wish I could talk to the checkout person in Spanish.

Unfortunately, the last two attempts to learn Spanish has been frustrating. I didn't have this much trouble learning German or AMSLAN. I realize that new languages are harder to pick up as a person gets older, but I can tell from my past attempts that Spanish should be an easy language, so next year will be one more (last?) attempt to learn Spanish.

The Denver Public Library offers many tools for learning new languages and I will be using it. Specific to Spanish, not only are there books, books on tape, and movies in Spanish, but they have bilingual events. Looking at their online calendar  for next year, I see weekly bilingual guitar lessons offered by the Valdez-Perry Branch and the Schlessman Family Branch offers weekly Spanish conversation groups. And there have been many single events in the past.

I will have to develop a basic conversational grasp of Spanish before I can make much use of these learning tools, but they're something to look forward to.

Does your local public library have a website? Check it out. You may be surprised about how much your library offers.

--- Talking to strangers ---

                                  The Ross-University Hills branch of the Denver Public Library

This fellow was "cussin' a blue streak" at the dogs below him...or maybe he was just laughing at them. I don't understand squirrel. After all, he could just hop over to the fence next to him and run off.

                                                                         Squirrel

We are raised being told not to talk to strangers and I'm afraid that we maintain that attitude long after we have become adults.

To be sure, it's sometimes dangerous. I used to walk down mountain dirt roads, see someone on a porch, and strike up a conversation with them. That's not always the safest way to meet people.

But there are plenty of safe ways to interact.

In general, people don't like to talk to strangers in public. I've learned recently that, if a person on a sidewalk or trail is wearing earphones or ear plugs, they may not be listening to anything. It's just a sign that they don't want to interact with you. I didn't know that. I grew up in a time when people greeted each other.

Of course, there are many social groups that are there to bring strangers together, and I do include churches. The church I presently attend is big on bringing strangers into their group. I've been to some where members wouldn't talk to outsiders but that's the exception.

There are groups dedicated to discussion here in Denver. The Socrates Cafe meets on a night that I've already devoted to family activities, but it looks like it would be fun.

I volunteer for a discussion group for international students who are trying to get used to English as a second language. It's one of the highlights of my week. I learn a lot about diverse cultures, hear a lot of world languages, and compare a lot of different ideas and philosophies.

Several of the libraries have a day that they offer coffee, donuts, and conversation. They vary considerably. For one, it's mostly coffee and a newspaper without much conversation. The local library tends to have more discussion. The last time I attended one of these, there was a lot of discussions about local resources, a personal interest of mine.

On the trail, birdwatchers will talk to you anywhere, but most of the random conversations start around rest stations. People who are walking, jogging, or running for exercise won't want to stop and most of the others are trying to get somewhere.

Are there any local discussion groups in your area? If you find yourself looking for a job, services, or some other resource, they might be good places to connect and find out more about your community.

Does a local school, college or community center offer classes for students learning English (or some other language) as a second language. They may also have discussion groups that you can attend. If you are planning to travel, you might find students from that area that could give you some tips about etiquette, attractions, or food.

--- Notes on logic and mathematics ---

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.

Ivan Turgenev

Well, maybe not quite so negative. I don't think Nature is waiting out there to crush us under wheels, but I have said that I don't believe that Nature's primary purpose is  our convenience, so you should watch where you step.

But I don't see logic "out there". Logic characterizes reality to some extent but I've said over and over how "the word isn't the thing" and it's dangerous to forget it. Logic (and mathematics, concepts, models) is a language that we use to understand how things work in the world, and it is a very useful tool as long as we keep a firm hold on it's limitations. It is not the be all and end all of analysis. It will not allow us to formulate all knowledge (as the logical positivists hoped).

Our binary Western logic isn't even complete. There are things that doesn't fit into a nice, neat dichotomous scheme - true/false, extant/nonextant. For instance, my favorite example - the circle (Plato preferred the right triangle - whatever). It doesn't exist - it cannot exist. It's a curve which is everywhere equidistant to a single point, but such a curve would have no width. But so much of our society is built on a circle. Architectural designs, machines, symbols (anybody ever been in the winner's circle or sat in a support group?), so many circles! They don't exist but they certainly affect society as if they did. Circles exist powerfully in our minds. They exist as information, something that is nonexistence-in-existence. Eastern logic recognizes many categories of existence and can deal with categories such as information better than we can in the West.

Logic and mathematics are languages composed of words. They don't exist out there but are powerful tools of the mind to span the dimensions of reality.

--- Notes on language ---

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher.

William James

One of the greatest traps for thinkers is forgetting that words are not the things they refer to. Is language the patterns you see on a page or the concepts they engender in your mind?

Unfortunately, language is both but they are not the same and it's devilishly easy to forget that.

A word like "knowledge" does not have "a" definition. Take a minute and look it up in a dictionary, or just type "define knowledge" into your Internet browser and see what comes up. The very extensive Oxford Dictionary of the English Language will give you plenty to read. If you've never seen it, there is probably one at your local library. Ask your reference librarian about it.

Most words are like that. There is no single definition but a family of definitions - all the definitions are related but there are going to be subtle but important differences. In order to parse out what someone else means in a conversation, you have to figure out, with some precision, how they are using the words they are using, and it is very common that, what you think they mean is not quite, maybe not at all, what they actually  mean.

Language, like philosophy, is an adventure and it can be just as dangerous. In order to understand what others are saying, you have to avoid the natural assumption that you know what they  mean. The devastating thing is that, in order to really understand yourself, you have to let go of the assumption that you know what you mean. If you have ever read Plato's Dialogues, you know that the very heart of most of them is Socrates demonstrating to people that they really don't know what they are talking about. And if you haven't read them, you really should. It's a powerful  medicine to realize that you don't know what you're talking about. That's always the first step toward knowing (as Socrates advised) yourself - "the unexamined life is not worth living."