Xorkoth said:
Obyron, what you're basically saying is that in the same way that binary can represent anything, the sounds a human can make can as well, except that instead of base 2 it's base 26 (or base 5 if swilow is correct - either way it's much higher than base 2). This is because the E sound, for example, only means "E" because we assigned it that meaning, but it could be assigned any meaning. The meaning we gave it is arbitrary.
More than this. Human language can express anything that can be expressed in binary, but my point was that in many cases it can do it much more concisely. For example, binary code for 114 is 1110010. Expressing English sentences in binary (by, for example, converting each letter into a 7-bit "lower" ASCII code) is horribly cumbersome. By that standard, if you compare English to binary, English is clearly ahead. In fact, one of the big drives in programming language design for years has been moving to a more "natural language" style of programming, away from the grueling specificity of ASM and C.
Computers are not amazing because of their ability to express complex ideas. They instead excel at "understanding" incredibly basic ideas (1 or 0) very very very quickly. By comparison, the flaw in human communications isn't an inability to express complex things (in fact, I don't think such an inability really exists), but rather an inability to comprehend what the person is trying to tell us. This stems from lack of experience, and a lack of "chemical understanding" rather than "linguistic understanding."
A combat veteran can tell you in agonizing detail and with amazingly effective prose what it's like to be in combat. (look at Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est"about his experiences in World War I. "GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- / An ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; / But someone still was yelling out and stumbling / And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
/ Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.") Yet, even though we have a linguistic understanding of what they're saying, we can never comprehend chemically-- the emotional and physical experience-- the smell of burning cordite; the agonizing heat of the desert, the reflexive roil in your gut as people are dying around you, and other various things.
I think this is the kind of thing swilow is alluding to when he talks about the shortcomings of language? The fact that there are whole categories of experiences-- the psychedelic among them-- that our language and vocabulary aren't really good at conveying. The best prose and the most well-written trip reports can convey quite a bit of it to someone who's never tried hallucinogens before, but they're never a substitute for actually TRYING it. I don't think this is any failure of language or human vocal ability, but rather I think it owes to the limitations of our abilities of comprehension.