2-2 Natural Language and Documentary Language.
Language arose from the human need for expression and communication in their relationship
with the world and with others. It is a system of signs, or signals, used to express ideas, values,
and feelings that can be translated through words. When humans use them, they use oral or
written language, specifically verbal language, as the code used is the word. This code shapes
thoughts, and the greater the mastery of this code (or the greater the vocabulary), the greater
their reasoning capacity.
In the dimension of language and reasoning capacity, it is important to emphasize that the
Greeks used two terms to refer to words and language: logos and mythos. The first term
synthesized three concepts: speech, thought, and reality, or consecutively: word, idea, and
being. It was the rational word that defined the understanding of reality, being equally
discourse, or argument, and proof, thought, as reasoning and demonstration, and reality.
Mythos, also understood as language, was seen as the resource humans used to organize reality
and interpret it through words.
Understood from this perspective, words and verbal language represent a possibility of
mediation that humans have constructed to represent the social world and the individual world.
Verbal language, specifically, is a form of communication present in human daily life. Through
spoken or written words, people share ideas and thoughts with one another, as each word
relates to experiences and values constructed sociohistorically. This code is present in speech,
reading, and writing.
Verbal language, therefore, is the means through which people participate in a process together
regarding the meaning of the objects that surround them or the actions they perform, aiming
for an understanding that can be accepted or challenged, and in the latter case, a new process
of communication can begin. This language uses metaphors and analogies and seeks to give
meaning to activities related to family, work, religion, the arts, studies, and other aspects of daily
life. The main characteristic of this form of language is that its words can be loaded with multiple
meanings and have more than one meaning.
Natural Language can be associated with verbal language. Depending on the context in which it
occurs, its level can be academic, poetic, or technical. It can include, for example, terms that are
synonymous or not, as well as terms that can be generic or specific. These possibilities illustrate
the richness of constructing different NLT schemes. The use of NLT, despite not being rigorous
in the monosemic aspect of words, makes the process of understanding and communication
viable.
NLT, however, still has a limitation regarding its ability to pluralize the meaning of words, since
human language can be characterized by vocabulary polysemy, that is, the possibility of words
taking on different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. By context, it is
possible to consider the connection of a word with others in a sentence, as well as the situations
in which a sentence can be uttered. In this regard, one of the most emblematic biblical passages
that addresses the problem of language use—and monosemic understanding among human
beings—is the story of the Tower of Babel, according to which God created confusion among
humankind, causing them to lose their common language and begin speaking different
languages, which prevented a common work, opening the door to all kinds of
misunderstandings. The only aspect not addressed by this mythical-religious story concerns the
idea that the misunderstanding did not only persist between the different human languages,
but also persisted within the language itself that was spoken in common. It fell to the
information professional to escape this confusion and to produce a language that would avoid
misunderstandings during the communication process.
To achieve this, they had to simultaneously use the NSL (as a common language) and produce a
controlled language, which allowed for rigor and efficiency in the classification of information
on the one hand, and its retrieval on the other. It's important to emphasize that these languages
are tools that meet the information needs of people—or clients—of Information Retrieval
Systems. Broadly speaking, Information Retrieval Systems, or IRSs, aim to guarantee access to
data contained in documents registered and systematized within them. The type of retrieval
language—established as a parameter for an information system—must fulfill its function well:
ensuring the effectiveness of the search process.
