A key issue for 20th century logical theory has been the thesis that one can design a symbolic language which expresses all that is cognitively significant within a conversational language. This paper will examine this contention of the "Carnapian" school of philosophy in the light of recent findings in the field of linguistics. It is impossible in this space to consider all the aspects of the problem,¹ so what we want to do here is consider the type of linguistic system required for the task of translating from conversational language (CL) into a symbolic language (SL) and then make a judgment as to the efficacy of the translations.