ACCOUNTING AS A LANGUAGE.
There seems to be some question whether the vocabulary of the accountant has reached such a degree of understanding that accounting per se can be considered an art or a department of scientific knowledge. Before accounting can be recognized as a language it must develop a positive system of communicating ideas and a sound means of expressing its symbolic doctrine. Many errors and much confusion in accounting are a result of the misapprehension of the language; and one means of correcting this fault lies in a better understanding of a common mode of expression. What are the requisites of a language? Are these precepts followed in the construction of a foundation for the language of the accountant? Wherein does accounting fail to meet the requirements of a common language in its particular field of record keeping? Can these faults be corrected? The purpose of this paper is to throw some light on the problem, to endeavor to answer these questions briefly, and to make suggestions wherein accounting as a language will have a much greater significance. Accounting language must recognize the following characteristics: (1) Accounting is a specialized field of philosophy and mathematics; (2) Accounting is a means of measuring the functions of business enterprise, both profit and nonprofit organizations, in dollar-and-cents expressions; (3) Accounting measures the growth of capital, or the expression of property and property rights, in value terms; (4) Accounting has only the limitations of any other abstract science, namely, the ability of the human mind to grasp and solve the problems resulting from the discovery of the facts or arrived at by reasonable presuppositions based upon arbitrary premises.
- DOI
- 10.2308/tar-7087626
- Volume
- 28 (1)
- Pages
- 83-87
- Language
- en
- Export
- BibTeX
- Sources
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