Looks around.
Answers disembodied voice.
It's going very well. Thanks for asking. A bit of a slog. I'm changing my ways as I go, because, what the heck. There aren't any rules, and no one is here to boss me around.
The thing is, it's all between these little pictures and me. But all of the professors, all the pros, the writers, the ground-level instructors, stick themselves between the pictures and me by making it about their in-between language of code that they use to talk with each other about them. They're talking in code, about a code. They already devised a code for each character to organize them. It's perfectly serviceable and specific. So there's that.
* Manuel de Cordage. It's French. Can you tell? It's based on the System devised by British anthropologist.
All these fer'ner all over the place.
* Then there's another code for their presumed sounds and their symbols of meanings. But a good number of them are not sounded.
* Then the linguists devised a way to copy the sentences they understand from looking and by overlaying their own meta-languge about languages in such a way that Egyptians would not do. They describe what the Egyptians were doing using their own metalanguage that does not include their silent symbols. So they move away from the raw language to impose their own conceptualization of structure. And whenever there is deviancy, there's a metalanguage word for that too. They seriously stick to their intellectual guns, and they argue about what they see using their metalanguage wholly separate from the subject under discussion. They force-fit the early language into their all-encompassing language.
But now they're doing this by keyboard so their ersatz code is jury-rigged further for letters to stand for phonetic symbols.
I can see why programmers do very well at this. It's right up their code-writing alley. I'm getting very good at this myself. Very good. Because I've imposed so much code-writing on myself.
Here's an example.
In JSesh I can type without stopping this string: p-G41-A-S-f:d-w-V12-sDm-m-s-t-mi-i-D:d-A1-s-t-m-z:n-N18-Y1-M15-A-Y1:3-Hr-1-M8-A-A-t-Y1:3-wn:n-i-n-s-n:3-!
Then hit "enter" and, boink, get this:
And now I can go through and name them all with presumed sounds without looking up anything.
So I already have a very strong handle on the codes, and I have all the possible sounds, what I need are the words and the phrases, the idioms. That's how this whole thing will bloom.
And I honestly don't care how linguists speak to each other. I have no intention of writing to them. I'm less and less interested in their language superstructure. It's similar to people discussing incredibly crap art in elevated terms that imbues the slop with greater importance than it deserves. I'm reminded of the time I went to a graduate art show at D.U. a sort of debutant ball for student artists. It's how D.U. introduces their graduates to the art world, and overhearing their conversations I kept thinking, "you're all out of your g.d. minds. These people have no talent whatsoever. And you cannot intellectualize the art into it. This is all an incredibly expensive hopeless indulgence Every last bit of this stuff is pure crap." Last night I read a sentence characterized as "gnomic." The definition of gnomic fills an entire page. It's a tense, a mood that English doesn't have, but literary Swahili does, and we capture the mood anyway by other means. (A pithy statement that's difficult to understand, with no connection to the speaker, or his attitude toward the subject and not pegged by time. Then the examples given are easy to understand, "rabbits are fast" and "curiosity killed the cat.") It's ridiculous.
It's intellectual onanism. So I'm changing my approach. Now, I'm finding that I'm using the book to simply learn more words and phrases, with a lot less emphasis on the in-between ersatz bridge-language that linguists use to describe it. So right now I'm living in the dictionaries. This is what kills me. If I took a class it'd be all about their linguist's phonetic half-assed barely useful language, getting it just precisely so, and the Egyptian language would be incidental to their superior conceit. When you look at the raw signs, the language is actually quite clunky. Yet the linguists wrench it into eloquent English, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Japanese sentences.
Maybe the significance will hit me as I get into it more deeply. I'm kind of hoping it will. Maybe I'll learn to appreciate them, but right now I don't. I'm thinking like an Egyptian child, not as a modern linguist. My new approach is a much more difficult slog. But I'm seeing what they actually said, not what seriously erudite linguists living on clouds say that they said. An example tonight is I'm seeing, "all taste gone." There are two determinatives, a animal tongue and a man with his hand to his mouth. The sentence is translated, "all senses are gone." It makes sense that way. It's a very nice translation. It does follow, "eyes dimmed, ears deaf," translated "The eyes have shrunk, the ears have gone deaf." There is no "shrunk" and there is no "gone" in the signs. And there is no "senses" here, just "taste." Allen is adding his own eloquence after being very specific about such things nominative, and stative construction and adjectival third person plural particles that place "gnomic" statement in the past. Where gnomic is defined as timeless.
*squeaky voice* "Can you show us what you've been doing?"
Sure.
I thought you weren't going to ask.
1 comment:
http://www.vu.centrumethos.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/derrida-white-mythology.pdf
"Almost at the end of The Garden of Epicurus,1 there is a short
dialogue between Aristos and Polyphilos on "the language of metaphysics."
The interlocutors are concerned precisely with that sensible
figure which is sheltered, and worn out to the point of seeming to pass
unnoticed, in every metaphysical concept. Abstract notions always
conceal a sensible figure. It seems that the history of metaphysical
language is commingled with the erasing of what is effective in it, and
the wearing out of its effigy. We may detect here the double bearing of
the French word usure (though Anatole France does not actually use
this word), of which we may offer the following accounts, although
they remain inseparable: first, obviously, the word means that "wear"
of which we have been speaking-erasure by rubbing, or exhaustion,
or crumbling; but secondly, it has also the sense of "usury"-the additional
product of a certain capital, the process of exchange which, far
from losing the stake, would make that original wealth bear fruit,
would increase the return from it in the form of income, of higher
interest, of a kind of linguistic surplus value.
POLYPHILOS: It was just a reverie. I was thinking how the Metaphysicians,
when they make a language for themselves, are like [and here
we have an image, a comparison, a figure to signify the figurative] knifegrinders,
who instead of knives and scissors, should put medals and coins
to the grindstone to efface the exergue, the value and the head. When
they have worked away till nothing is visible in their crown-pieces, neither
King Edward, the Emperor William, nor the Republic, they say: "These
pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them;
we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth
five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely." They are right in speaking thus.
By this needy knife-grinder's activity words are changed from a physical to
a metaphorical acceptation. It is obvious that they lose in the process;
what they gain by it is not so immediately apparent.
It is not our task here to capitalize on this reverie, but to discern
through its implicit logic a drawing of the outlines of our problem, of
the theoretical and historical conditions under which it emerges. At
least, we discern two limits: first, Polyphilos, it seems, wants to preserve
the capital intact, or rather, to preserve the natural wealth which precedes
the accumulation of capital, the original virtue of the sensible
image which is deflowered and spoilt by the history of the concept.
In this way he presupposes-and it is a classical motif, a commonplace
of the eighteenth century-that at its origins language could have
been purely sensory, and that the etymon of a primitive meaning,
though hidden, can always be determined. Secondly, this etymologism
interprets degradation as the passage from the physical to the metaphysical.
Thus Polyphilos is making use of a distinction which is
entirely philosophical, and which itself has its history and its metaphorical
history, in order to pass judgment on what, as he alleges, the
philosopher unknowingly does with metaphor."
1 Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, tr. A. Allinson, The Works of Anatole
France, ed. F. Chapman and J. L. May (London and New York, 1908), III,
205ff. The same work includes a sort of meditation on the figures of the alphabet,
the original forms of certain of its letters ("How I discoursed one night with an
apparition on the first origins of the alphabet").
Post a Comment