1. "When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires." This is a quotation that Wittgensteinn has taken from Augustine (Confessions, I.8.). Visualize Augustine's picture of how language is learned and notice how natural and complete it sounds as a total explanation for how language is learned.
These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects--sentences are combinations of such names.--In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Now, Wittgenstein is beginning his commentary. The emphasis is mine. It is the deconstruction of Augustine's picture of language that is the focus of this entire book. (Although, I should say, that many others beside Augustine have shared this picture of language. As we will see, it is a cultural illusion) Once deconstucted, new and strikingly different ideas about language begin to emerge.
Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like 'table', 'chair', 'bread', and of people's names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself
