Coding with Ordinary Language
Foreign languages are sometimes used just to restrict access to information.
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Ordinary language provides many (linguistic) devices for representing all kinds of things and events. That's why we can write stories and story games.
We use language to encode information, which expresses meaning. A sentence is meaningful when it expresses information of some kind. Otherwise, it is meaningless. A sentence may therefore be true, false, or meaningless. These are traditional logic values.
Each sentence or paragraph or document is merely a list of letters and other characters of grammar, including blank spaces, like those you see on this page. The meaningful parts of the list refer to phenomena that interact and behave in specific ways. The things and events needn't be real -- many times, in fact, they are only imagined. (There is also a logical value called imaginary, and also a kind of number called imaginary, things you don't just imagine!)
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The key is representation. There are no everyday things or events on pages. The most you can find are symbols that stand for things and events. Representation is nothing more than code. Using it, we're able to simulate human behavior; as in stories or games. Clusters of linguistic characters express in linguistic code (linguistic conventions) what the author acknowledges to be happening in some time and place. As models, they describe places and things and relate events -- dynamics. For those who know the author's language and are familiar with its representations, the code is perfectly clear and the story can easily be read, or decoded (interpreted).
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Most encoding, as I'm sure you realize, isn't universally comprehended. Not many of us can understand German, for example, or French -- or even English, for that matter. For this reason, foreign languages are sometimes used to restrict access to encoded information. Indeed, some languages -- the so-called secret codes -- are specifically designed to serve this goal.
Spies, for instance, use messages that are encrypted. In order to "crack" the code, you have to discover the key that unlocks it; you have to learn how its encoding elements relate to elements of some other language whose encoding you can read. In other words, you must be able to translate the code into a known language. You have to know its "signature." You have to have the key to the translation. Only then can a message written in the secret code be understood.
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