Discrete Language

The quote from Jakobson about the discrete nature of language is interesting and not just because it name-checks Claude Shannon whose reformulation of the concept of entropy is indispensable to computational linguists.

Thus form in language has a manifestly granular structure and is subject to a quantal description.
–pg. 69

In my experience, most people who think about language end up coming to this conclusion. I remember reading something from Benjamin Lee Whorf in which he utilized some concepts from Hindu mythology to describe the way human minds break the undifferentiated stream of experience up into distinguishable chunks. I like to say that language is a discretizing process, which amounts to the same thing. The discrete/continuous distinction is of course a philsophical issue of interest outside discussions of language (and dear to anyone who grokked calculus), but language seems to make some definite choices in this region.