the_death_of_language neesh by this i definitely don't mean the destruction of language as happens daily with important words being rendered meaningless societally or by political encroachment. i mean the complete death and abolition of language as a form of communication. ok, well this wasn't my idea, and as far as i know it's an original idea, the only ever purely original idea i've heard. it arose when i mentioned to my friend charlie a tribe who have no concept of time, i'd read about them in a book by winterson, and found out they do truly exist. they're called the Hopi Indians. as a prelude to the book, she writes: "The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present or future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time? Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?" and later when Jordan is telling Dog-Woman of his travels, he says: "On my travels I visited an Indian tribe known as the Hopi. I could not understand them, but in their company they had an old European man, Spanish, I think, though he spoke English to us. He said he had been captured by the tribe and now lives as one of them. I offered him passage home but he laughed in my face. I asked if their language had some similarity to Spanish and he laughed again and said, fantastically, that their language had no grammar in the way we recognise it. Most bizarre of all, they had no tenses for past, present and future. They do not sense time in that way. For them, time is one. The old man said that it was impossible to learn their language without learning their world. I asked him how long it had taken him and he said that question had no meaning." and in his typical style, charlie contended this was entirely impossible and demanded i give foolproof evidence that they could exist free from a comprehension of time. how do they explain ageing? what are their hunting habits? do they harvest their crops in winter then? do they sleep at night? i can't answer those (but i don't think they harvest crops, i think they live in a jungle). i drew an analogy of being governed by gravity but nevertheless having no concept of it, as surely must have been the case before isaac newton, so he said it is just ignorance then. i said i nevertheless envy them, and he said if i were to be like them i wouldn't be able to know any different, so it would be a pointless thing to wish for. and in any case he was still dubious as to if it was possible. by this stage i was getting pretty sick of his pedantry, and after he said "i'm not even convinced they have no time concept. how do they hunt without some knowledge of when animals will be places" i wittily retorted "what if they eat fruit which grows off trees around them and don't hunt animals? what if they live without food? who the fuck cares?" then he completely astounded me with his uncharacteristic response of "me. i find it v interesting." then feeling slightly mollified he wasn't grilling me for nothing, we started discussing our old latin teacher, who'd asked us what came first, language or thought, and told us that only primitive thought in the form of mental pictures is possible without language. which i totally disagree with, since having started tarot cards i found myself thinking in a totally alien way, in thoughts, with no words attached. which means i have enormous trouble explaining a reading to someone else, but it makes perfect sense to me at just a glance, just the kind of feeling of each card. i was about to tell this to charlie when he said: "i don't know how to explain it, but can you not think in just ideas, eg, the first cavemen are cutting some wood with a stone, one realises that he doesn't have stone. he decides to grunt to his friend, the grunt later becoming the word for stone, but before he grunts he is thinking, i need a stone to hit this wood, thinking in pure ideas, not any medium." couldn't have put it any better. we found little evidence to argue that because words aren't pure thoughts we'd be better off without them, until charlie suggested we redefine better, and measure an advanced society by moral standards. i joked that we could say society would become so stupid it wouldn't understand crime, and he said "thats not what i mean, i mean a society would have to be called advanced, even if they were absolute apes, if they showed clear moral attributes, which you could easily develop without a language, but that would require sympathy and understanding, quite complex thoughts." i tell you, charlie's never amazed me like he did that night, such ideas! without words people would develop a deeper emotional and intuitive understanding of each other. what do you think? charlie may have had some incredible ideas, but he's the laziest man alive, and while it's his passion, he asked me to research it and write about it for him, so i'm open to any/all discussion on the matter. 031019 ... a let's say the first caveman's grunt came not from 'pure ideas', but from a more animalistic instinct. say he - or, why the heck not, she - is cold. not thinks of being cold, but is physically cold. and so lets out a bit of a shuddery grunt, invluntarily. caveman/girly 2 looks up. boom. communication. reading over that, it's not really clear enough. let me try again. what if the first 'language' was a result of instinct, not reason? is it not possible that innate reflex reactions have accompanying sounds (think of sneezes), and from this comes an understanding of self and others? ugh, words fail me. I am going to try to get this out, so do bear with me. if language could - at least initially - be a result of primitive instinct, doesn't that mean that language could predate thought? oh, I despair. I really do. I think I'm getting the tarot-esque 'I can see the meaning, but how to find the words?' - um - thing. hurl some insight at me. please? actually, while I'm here, I'll digress a little (conscientious digression, great start...). do you honestly believe that the better yardstick for societal advancement would be morality rather than language? isn't there an argument that a society could be greatly advanced, and indeed morally aware, but savage, consciously savage, or perhaps hedonistic's the better word, deliberately choosing to do the immoral thing? and isn't immoral relative anyway? that sounds a little immoral in itself, like a criminal's justification. but doesn't charlie's idea presuppose an innate goodness in humankind. or at least, a motivation to reach this moral highground (cliche-tastic, I know), even if not born 'good'. getting back to the point (which point...?) morality doesn't necessarily equal advancement - after all, deceit, jealousy and that general bundle o' nasties are pretty complex thoughts, too. and, besides, I for one love language. it beats me, confuses me, frustrates me...but it challenges me, too. I know so much of what I feel is indefinable, but the struggle to try fascinates me. I spend half my time hating owrds for being so inadequate, but then something will cross my path and restore my faith: Byron 031024 ... a> sorry a, stole your name there - was feeling a tad apathetic. forgive. 031024 ... a> and oh for the love of all that is holy where the blazes did that Byron quote go? here 'tis again, in glorious blathe-colour: . done. 031024 ... a> oh what??? last try. 'l'amitie est l'amour sans ailes' is utterly, utterly confused and feeling like a right lemon (meringue pie...mmm) 031024 ... neesh you're absolutely right. or at least make a lot of sense and give a fantastic insight into the nature of communication, thought and language. hurl some insight back? i'll definitely think about it and try later. btw i presuppose an innate goodness in people too. as you might know i'm very strongly moralic, so naturally i would say that moral advancement is societal betterment. and i'm not denying the complexity of such thoughts, i'm embracing it. it's not like 1984 where people don't have the tools to think outside of orthodoxy. the hope would be that people develop a better understanding of feelings, from which current society seems so divorced, and i suppose this would include negative feelings. and then, through this understanding would arise... i don't know, compassion is perhaps the word, consideration. i just feel understanding would lead to harmony. sounding like a naive schoolboy, perhaps? well that's probably because i am. people ARE inherently good. they are. so there. shh. off on a slight tangent, i think anarchy would work in a vaguely similar way, except first there would be quite a masochistic period where people released their repressed id nature. but then people would simply have to change, they would have to adapt and build an inherent moral code and understanding simply to survive. there would be no repressive dangerous side to them anymore. (them=us) and the byron sounds suspiciously familiar, hmm? anyway, i'll definitely think some more about this, and please blathe more! it's a pleasure to read. 031024 ... a> just one little thought, but I should be back to dispense some more later. once anarchy reaches the point where a moral code is adopted, doesn't it cease to be anarchy? isn't that just societal progression, moving from anarchy to - help me here, I should know this, politics and all...well, I know you know what I mean. It's like people calling what happened in china/russia and so on (sorry to generalize) communism. that's not communism. that's oppression under the facade of communism. after all, as peachy as communism is in theory, it cannot work in practice because people are just not like that. given mandatory lobotomies, maybe. but then, who'd order them to be done...? and once again, digress-o-rama. enjoy 031024 ... a> and in response to the rest of your blathe...give me time - 'the answers are coming' ;-) contemplates 031024 ... neesh but the point of anarchy is that there are no rules externally imposed, and no positions of power. this is self-control, behaving because it is how you believe is right to behave (while most people think that anarchy is behaving how you want to behave, which could not last). ponders deeply 031024 ... oldephebe okay i gotta first confess that i didn't read this..yet..but as i was scrolling down today i fixated upon the whole dissemination of virtue through language..or language being used as the communicative vehicle to endow our beknighted race hardwired to antipathy and avarice with an enobling, enlightening moralism..interesting estuary of contemplation..there are reams of parchment pages piled from antiquity riddled with the crenellations and vexations of that premise..from aristotle to the overtly metaphysicality of platonic variations and expansions on a socratic theme..xenophon..plutarch et al. and no i haven't bothered to read through that stuff either..exept for a cusory perusal i guess..but still my appetite has been whetted..i'll have more to say once i actually read this page.. 031110 ... oldephebe well..i finally finished reading this..i wouldn't say that the question of whether morality or a codified communicative apparatus (language) constitutes anything resembling the prosaic or pedestrian. this question is still being sorted out every day in our advesarial system of justice. I guess outside the realms of medicine and other disciplines normal colloquial english is a slow dying flower, shorn of its shimmer. We are a passive, voyeuristic society that spends its time injesting the swill emblazoned across the screen, while injesting prohibitive mounds of viscuous carbohydrates and gallons of carbonated sugar. Our language is like the enamel on a tooth being slowly winnowed away by caramel carbonic acid. Sure, i believe we are inately endowed with a sense of justice. Whether or not we feel obliged to elevate our actions in equanimity and fealty to those lofty ideals is another thing entirely. Is the body the tomb of the soul and should we be beholden to the body or the soul? it's late and my mind is drifting, i guess i'll get back to this sometime later ... 031115 ... oldephebe oh and ah about the whole thing about trying to reconsile the mores of an indigenous culture with our western construct of life is bound to be an unwieldy an onerous undertaking. By trying to impose or house such an obviously proto-spiritual world view in the carriage of western ideals is to pursue unattainable definitions. I suspect an indigenous culture such as the one postulated..i mean referred to in your inaugeral paragraph probably is aligned intuitively to the natural rythyms of nature and therefore respond more out of a fluidity of instinct rather than the ordered construct of Time as we apprehend it. More on this later..maybe..great discussion though.. 031115 ... relentless inner critic rythms? sp? 031115 ... oldephebe correction i wouldn't say that the question of wether or not language or morality is what elevates a society constitutes a blunt or cliched mind-set at all..what takes precedence? hmm..a fascinating metaphysical morass..i await your learned elucidation neesh.. ... later 031115 ... oldephebe "the animus in my heart hewn out of the history of this family is like ancient oceanic deposits.." The preceding quote is an excerpt from one of my journals,hastily scrawled in black ink into a small spiral bound note book. Besides the disconcerting artifact of dysfunction and not to mention the discomfature of being the recipient of such an intimately personal revelation, it is an indice of the endless evocations and conclusions that can be inferred and surmised from such a statement. What I am saying by this is that the language, our heterogenous spawn of bastardy and the subsequent protean elasticity bequeathed unto it by endless eddies of immigration, industry, and of course the impudent incursions of ever younger and precosious pubescent generations is while it may be at times inert..is definately not dead. By any means. Even in the most pedestrian and prosaic of exchanges, social transactions the language exacts and exorcises objective standards of meaning and compliance to tacitly and yet mutually agreed upon implications and convention(s). Explicitly spoken language is only the representaional tip of the everest or vast underlying apparatus and structure. Of course in our linguistic, social transactions, exchanges beholden to the concerns and exacerbations of ego we do not merely follow conversational conventions we manipulate them. And no I will refrain from erecting the didactic edifice of learned recapitulation as I am sure as reasonably accomplished speakers of English there is no need for me to. Thus sparing everyone a bout of protracted anal chaffing. heh heh Please excuse my scatological asides..it is difficult for me to remain so dry and didactic for any reasonable period of time w/o resorting to execratory or orificial referances. So yes maybe it can be said that our language is afflicted with the tumult of each successive generation hewing out a new cultural and referential tract of identification and hence appositional space. (if I could place my argument in the syntactic carraige of orality..okay so out of the key of orality..I will continue)..and yet these among others are the mutinies against semiotic and cultural orthodoxy even in the ostensibly vaunted heteroganaeity of the good ol' pie devouring and flag flagellations of America..the neccessary pitch and keel of the syntactic, conversational consensus of accepted implications and modes of cooperative coversational exchange. So no, I'd say the language is definately not dead. Inert, perhaps but again definately not dead. And ah yes we can erect our barricades against these percieved anti-confluential and or deleteriously pernicious eddies that precisely endow our hybrid of hybrids with its protean quality. Ours is a pliable and protean construct, and perhaps the only viable modus of communication for the new and increasingly intractable arenas of economy, security, etc wherein in disparate poeples and agendas find themselves intertwined in cooperative, global endeavors. Now I'm beggining to sound like a USA today article..but..okay I think its okay if we allow ourselves to stray away from the bastions of order and orthodoxy. What is whelped out of these linguistic excursions and cross cultural pollination is sometimes invigorating, rescucitating a staid syntax galvanizing and imbuing each party with a new clarity. These are oppurtunities to exploit the inherent synergies of competing commonalities. The English language has the potential to rise over and over again from its sepulchral bed. Hey this just one guys opinion.. later.. 031129 ... oldephebe wow..see how blithely and yet inadvertantly i just switched polarities of position..w/o even acknowledging it..good ol' compartmentalized thinking.. and its' wonderfully delusional..bicameral mind and the illusion of sincerity..no not sincerity for human consciousness can profess and conditionally/provisionally believe in its endeavors while existing in a spectrum of conflicting ideals and agendas..thank god i'm not a lawyer or a politician, or an ecclesiastical or secular con-man snickering in his sacerdotal cloak..the penumbra of the sub-conscious and its' uniquely (..)endowments are the preserve of the savant, the simple and the merely ambivalent..what does this have to do with the death of language? It's not up to me to impose upon the reader any kind of conclusion or dertermination..let your own sovriegnity be arbiter..later.. 031129 ... phil I make points in the game and go silently back to the third quarter. Losing track of the time, of the rules, of the score. is time rotation? Now and then, then and now, action and reaction and order of events, is their no spontinaity, originality, only an order to events? 42 Can't we feel happiness in an object's presence, feel regret from it's destruction? Communicating without response. Communicating without mind, communicating without excistence. For it to say "i have been plucked from a tree" "i have been cut from the bone" to go hungry and search and for the food to say "I am not here, you cannot find me" And without hunger, does this thing not excist, shouldn't we respect it's possibility? 031129 ... oE Janus 031130 ... marked . 031201 ... Lemon_Soda Interesting...very interesting. I feel like I'm floating over the halfway line in the pool that marks the five feet down between the shallow end and the deep. Words don't mean anything. We simply think they do. I'm not saying that a common denomination(not definition) exists behind each series of connected sounds, because this or any other blath would be pointless if there wasn't. What I AM saying is that all creatures think in concepts and it is our ability to exchange concepts that places our verbal symbolism above the yelps and growls of "lesser" animals. We are, however, fooking ourselves if we think that our language is either complete or correct. By complete, I mean that for every word we've devised to describe a facet of our thoughts, twenty million other thoughts have been had. Language will never be complete. As for correct, well, I'm not really sure how to get this across but basically, no person has the same conceptual denomination on any statement, phrase, or word as any other person. Our "definitions" on a personnal level are created by the experiences we've had with the terms in question. Consider that because noone is anyone else we've all experienced things differently. Because of that when people say the word "car" I think of a corsica, because that is what I happen to drive. But someone else will think Cobra, or Toyota, or Matchbox, who knows. We get the concept when another person talks, but not their definition. Our language will thus never be correct. Communication still takes place, however, but many people make the mistake of assuming that when we speak our only tool is our words. This is not true. the tone or circumstance of the words is a contributing factor, aswell as past relations, posture, environment, society, and so on. Don't forget that the message is also dependent on the listener. They can either hear you or listen to you and there is a differance. Not ony that, everyone comes with their own built in filter on incoming messages that dips whatever may be said in the color of what we're expecting it to mean. I cannot tell you how or when we developed the ability to exchange concepts, nor whether it is good or evil, but in my opinion, these are inconsequential in the shadow a larger picture. We have it. it is there. It is used for ill and for good purpose, and for as long as we're here, some form of communication will take place. Ultimately, it is what we choose to do with it that will give it its significance. Many animals survive and even thrive without the ability to debate or caucus. We could learn a lesson about life in general from them. So long as new ideas are had, new concepts will follow. New concepts demand new words, or atleast a reordering of words we've had before. Language is not dying or dead. Merely changing. Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. 031201 ... notme "Consider that because noone is anyone else we've all experienced things differently." well said lemon 031201 ... oldephebe yes..I can see how you arrived at your conclusion or position..nonetheless, our own solipsism will tell us that the only thing revelant is our own empiric indices of cooperative, conventional exchanges within the linguistic apparatus defined and agreed upon by a large or small consensus. We have the arrogance to impute meaning and believe in it's primacy and the efficasy of a an ordered linguistic system..a rubric..even a basic or remedial syntactic construct requires collaborative cooperation for it to exist. The english language is alive and it is expanded, rescucitated by the contention of ideals and orthodoxies and the hubris of limited or peremptory, or class based or scholarly perspective. I am of course not attributing hubris or limited perspective to any of the assertions in this blathe, it is merely a convenient carriage to expedite the quasi-pedantic parroting of this particular linguistic statement. See..we can all opine sagaciously and then nod our head perfunctorily at one anothers assertions. is there a final arbiter? hmm..not for me..and I would disencourage anyone who would want to enshrine my words as something sacrosanct or inviolable. But I am enjoying the permutations of positions asserted on this blathepage..my props to neesh for giving us something provocative (interesting at least to dreary auto-didacts like me..here's me looking for a life..OKAY? ... 031201 ... oldephebe yes LS "everything changes"..a world in one breath..how deinely apropos... 031202 ... oE should be "how devinely apropos" 031202 ... Lemon_Soda Upon careful consideration I must confess that my limited understanding of your narrative above has left me feeling that your own opinion coincides with my own...atleast as far as the need for cooperative belief in the masses to allow the manifistation of totalities in the linguistic appartatus of communication. Perhaps you may gift me with more specific accounts or understandigs to better difine your position? 031208 ... zeke Who are the masses? Define totality. 031208 ... tyger 1) Hopis do not live in a jungle. They live in the American Southwest, in a high desert region. And they do harvest crops. Fruit trees are fairly rare in this part of the world, so it is unlikely that they "pick fruit off the branches at all times of the year" or whatever it was that the original poster argued. 2) It is true that the Hopi language does not use tenses as we understand them. However... 3) This does not mean that they do not have any conception of time at all, either as individuals or as a society. As I understand it, the notion that learned language influences conceptual thinking patterns to an extent this strong has been disproven by linguists and cognitive researchers. You can look it up if you don't believe me. 031208 ... zeke it oozes under, over and around into the smallest retorical spaces and the interstices of denotative intention. it mutates, merges miscarries discursive clutter and brings joy, hatred, arousal and sometimes intamacy but does not die. 031208 ... oE zeke - that was brilliant! LS - let me get back to you on that. I'm a little pressed for time right now. 031208 ... zeke oE - Thank you. 031208 ... neesh i'd love to look it up tyger, it's why i posted it, can you tell me where to look? 031208 ... oldephebe LS - Can't really distill it any further. Read what I wrote again if you want. Somthing about cooperative consensus..or the mere act of argumentation is a linguistic, communicative transaction that relies upon a whole series of tacitly agreed upon rules. Yes we break them, and manipulate them and add to them to make our point, to refute, to win, to be peremptory, to manipulate others.. I think that's part of what I intended to convey. You don't have to agree. That's cool. No one has to agree with anyone else. No one has to hide behind the hubris and implicit inferiority of an inept and facile argument in order to "convince" her/himself of the primacy of their position. Like I said for me there is no final arbiter. Maybe that sounds arrogant, maybe it is. So paint me peremptory and pretentious. Language can be used as an overt or insidious system of coercion or an endlessly nurturing fountain feeding the flailing spirit. Language can skew the neuro-chemical soup. Language can help to restore a bruised and embattled psyche. Yeah..not really being oracular here just..riffing. Hmm that bleak rustic image is beginning to..Nevermind... Have we begun to discuss the imputation of music, and power conveyed through intonation and inflection. That which breathes fire into dry artifiacts laying upon the page? I am really trying to extract myself gracefully from this tangeant...Done.. 031209 ... epitome of incomprehensibility YOU are the epitome of incomprehensibility, oldephebe. However, I thought of the name first. La la la la la. I decided to blathe here since the topic of my last essay (it was in Media Studies) before graduating from highschool was "The death of language" in M.T. Anderson's book "Feed". Yum yum yum. Coincidence or quantum interconnectedness? I am a quantum particle. By the way, nice discussion. 060118 ... () () 150105 ... e_o_i (Of all the ridiculousness... Sometimes I look at what I've written years ago and I'm embarrassed. This is one of those times.) 150106 what's it to you? who go blather from