Urban Design Language

Abstract

One of the most important developments in the contemporary social and human sciences is “the turn to language”. It is becoming more and more common in a vast variety of fields and disciplines, to use the term language to imply different meanings and to serve a wide range of purposes. There are two basic elements necessary to constitute a language: A vocabulary (lexicon) and a grammar (syntax) . Each of these elements, in turn, should cover certain requirements such as the ones suggested by Morris for signs. It is quite logical to expect that a language has the same characteristics of the knowledge that it is representing and vice versa. This is part of the intrinsic nature of a language. If we could identify the two minimum elements of vocabulary and grammar in an area of knowledge, we could easily form the language of that particular area of knowledge. Any product or creation in an area of knowledge with an established language must be a composite of symbols with resultant new meanings. Therefore, language must have permanent units of meaning which are combinable into larger units, must have fixed equivalences that make definition and translation possible, and finally, must have connotations that are general.