By association only.

A word is nothing but a mental image or meaning. Make up a word, lets say Bikot and use it to replace Good. Soon Bikot will invoke the concept of Goodness in your head.

>>1388524
OK. You're right. but how are the initial words determined?

>>1388541
Feelings and experience create the value of words.

As each person's experience and feelings differ there will come a difference between word choices. However in society, people use standard dictionary to give rise to standard meaning based on generalized definition.

>>1388541
Check out The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

>>1388500
Language is not vocal.

>>1388541
Well that goes back to the dawn of humanity when certain sounds would have been very obvious, like SSSS for snake, mimicking the sound snakes make. But once the concept of language and humans ability to use it is well entrenched, sounds will change as they do forever and ever losing all of their original logical origins.

>>1388569
But the dictionary defines words in terms of other words. How are those words defined?

>>1388591
Its defined by a group of people working to find meaning. Aka people who are linguists and work for dictionary printing company.


Single person -> Group of persons -> Dictionary -> Mass consumption

>>1388500
This is a /sci/ question that happens to deal with a little bit of philosophy but more so psychology

The meanings of concrete words can be found out imperfectly by simply doing he action or pointing at the object in real life and then speaking the noun or verb
What happens for abstract words?

>>1388687
this is a philosophy of mind and philosophy of language question

>>1388541
completely arbitrarily

Reminder that your writing and thinking is in English, a particular language which has a long and complicated history and etymology. There's thus countless reasons why you would say "dog" to refer to a dog because you are immersed inside a language and culture which has interacted and developed from other languages and cultures.

Asking how words are selected in language in general is an all but incomprehensible question and asking the originary "what did the very first human to have a sound when they saw a dog choose and why" is even more so.