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epitome of incomprehensibility
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Doesn't seem the one whose papers I'm editing was
a) sarcastic
or
b) trying to hit on me
when he said I was a good editor. I don't know why I'd think either thing.
Just because I fell for a different philosopher? Not myself, though. I fall by myself, not for. But am *I* a philosopher? A little bit, albeit with few forms of formal education on the topic - just two courses -
1) Medieval Islamic philosophy, my classy_choice two years back - I found it surprisingly interesting, with a lot of Arabic philosophy informed by ancient Greek sources, plus the surrounding history showing a less rigid hold by religion on abstract thought than in some of the Christian "West" back then.
2) Not quite back then, but when I was 18, I took a CEGEP course called Philosophy of Education taught by a man named James Joyce. Genuinely! I don't feel wrong saying his real name because I have good things to say about him...even if I remember a bored classmate saying he counted how many times the teacher said "you know" and it was over a hundred times (which made me feel Slightly Superior, thinking, "Ha, *I* can handle communications philosophy at 8:30 AM on a Friday"...not that I was exactly diligent about arriving on time). Anyway, the prof went by Jim; I saw him after that at the Twigs and Leaves poetry-reading series. I never got to know him well, but his partner was a poet with an amazing voice - Claudia Morrison. Sadly, she died a few years ago.
But the philosopher I began with: I called him today about the conference paper he's writing, which is based on the larger project. He clarified a few things, although at first I wasn't sure if he was saying that people had to have written language before they had spoken language - does that mean people who speak a language without a writing system aren't speaking a real language? That would seem a little prejudiced against non-literate societies. But no, not exactly; it's that he thinks drawing was the beginning of language - it gave people an idea for words, which they then could adapt to vocal systems previously just used for expressions of emotions, sensations, etc. Still. Did every isolated people group have a means of drawing? If this occurred less that 100,000 years ago, people would already be moving across the globe. Does he envision one originatory event?
(Apparently "originatory" isn't a word. It SOUNDED like a word, dammit.)
...But that's my problem with Chomsky as well: not the universal grammar idea but the idea that people developed language all at once, suddenly. It doesn't seem evolutionary enough. It doesn't seem to reflect how things actually happen, at least with people - we're not talking about the big bang here.
(After I wrote "big bang," I tried making puns about - in succession - sex, hair, and nuclear bombs, but I couldn't do that thing where I relate my new topic back to the original topic. But Sex, Hair, and Nuclear Bombs should be the title of a book about the cold war era.)
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