streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 4:00 am on November 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, thought ( 15 )   

  The only thing universal to all languages 

  are symbols corresponding to things and actions, nouns and verbs utilizing consonants and vowels, whether explicit or implicit, in some prescribed order based on internal rules of logic. The only thing universal to all thought, human or not, linguistic or not, would seem to be things and actions ordered by chronology, and therefore tentative causality, Pavlovian stimulus-response-reward mechanisms. The act of perception itself must proceed through many phases from inception through its subsequent development, depending on the complexity of the organism being discussed, analogous to the capabilities of a nerve ending itself: pain, pressure, hot, and cold at the local level. In complex multi-celled organisms, this quickly expands into sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, a whole world of perception. When this swirl becomes categorized into actions and things, we cross over into thought, replete with chronology and causality. Once we abstract that thought with symbols, we have language. So mankind proceeds, from infant to sage, from past to present, from perception to thought to language.

   

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  hardie karges 5:41 am on November 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, thought ( 15 )   

  Causality seems to be intrinsic to human thought and by extension, language. 

  
  This would follow directly from chronology, the ordering of events by order of their appearance. The ‘mentalese’ language that underlies all formal language that Chomsky and his disciples are looking for is probably mathematical, as in logic, inference, the basic assumption that if one event precedes another directly and seamlessly, then it is likely the cause. While this may not be language in the strict sense, nor even always accurate, it may nevertheless underlie it at any level beyond the simple naming of objects. S-V-O word order may derive from this at the earliest stages of consciousness, empty minds hungry to be fed, form looking for content beyond the mother’s breast. But I doubt it. That ‘s merely our arrogance, assuming we’ve always been the rational animal, full of logic and reckoning. To assume that an object was acted upon by unknown actors with unclear antecedents for unknown causes would be to live in a world of magic and superstition, religion and showmanship. Bingo. Welcome to America, bastion of science and modern technology. Even more so the rest of the world, where the passive reflexivity heretofore described is intrinsic to much spoken language, especially in the Spanish of Latin America. Go figure. When combined with subjunctive moods and conditional aspects, you might even forget your own primacy in the equation, which is what a sentence is. In many countries the subject of a sentence can even be understood or assumed, not indicated or reiterated, and therefore weakened, a verb and object sufficing for comprehension.
   
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  hardie karges 11:25 am on November 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), language   

  Psycholinguistics vs. socio-linguistics, ultimately rests on one question: 

  could people think without language? Unfortunately there’s no way to test the proposition, because, even if you could locate people who’ve never had language, how would you document their thought processes without language? Okay, so the logic is circular and forms a tautology, so more importantly, without begging the question of ‘thought’ itself: Is intelligence a function of language? Certainly you can’t penalize bears for improper vocal chords anymore than you can punish dolphins for lack of an opposable thumb, so you look for behavior that might indicate abstract thought regardless of any symbols that might suggest language. A ‘mental’ language should require no symbols; it is pure code. I see much behavior that promotes survival, but not much more than that. Furthermore, back to the original question, any animal capable of sound is capable of language, whether it be clicks or whistles, giggles or gurgles; the more complex, the better. I don’t see it, any more than I see primitive tribes building cities. Furthermore, there seems to be a clear correlation between complexity of language and complexity of civilization. Bird’s songs and bees’ dances aren’t language. Traveling long distances does not count as intelligence. All animals do that, for whatever reason, most likely to get to the other side. If there is no better measure of intelligence, then let it be complexity, in behavior and symbolism. Still other questions arise from the issue: Would it occur to people to invent language if they hadn’t already been taught it? Why do children learn language so easily and so fast, which is the psycholinguist’s ace in the hole? Answer: They don’t. I have a better question: Why do most adults learn so slowly?

   
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  hardie karges 1:57 pm on November 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), language, love ( 49 )   

  We view the past with a microscope from the present, 

  city fuckers viewing the ‘primitives’ with disdain, as though our fat bellies and haute coiffures were the essence of civilization. Even worse would be to glorify the primmies, of course, as though their stargazing was somehow superior to Hubble’s simply on principle. At one point, it wasn’t even clear that the ‘Indians’ were real people, and that chimpanzees weren’t. Things that just seem so patently obvious now weren’t necessarily obvious at all in the past. It wasn’t even obvious that men should seek sexual pleasure in the arms of their wives until the Greeks experimented long and hard, and played both sides of the fence. Of course then the Romans cultivated the art. They’re so romantic. The subject-verb-object word order of modern English and all analytic, isolating languages is a system that is found to work, not something innate or obvious. In a mysterious world of supernatural events, things are acted upon without clear antecedents, yielding an O-V-S order with no apologies. If the S-V-O word order was obvious to the Chinese, then that may be as much to their credit as, and ultimately related to, movable print, paper, and sweet-and-sour pork. They never had a zero, of course, nor positional notation, until they got it from the Hindus via the Arabs just like the rest of us, all except for the Mayas, that is. The Mayas apparently even had something else that very few great civilizations ever had: an appreciation of great ceremonial centers as places to congregate and corresponding disdain for large cities as places to live. Apparently it doesn’t occur to most modern historians that mega-cities are not only not the archetype of civilization, but are downright unhealthy.

   
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  hardie karges 8:50 am on August 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, sex ( 39 ), Thailand ( 75 )   

  Thai is the mother tongue; English is the father. 

  
  Thailand is pragmatic, hot molten pragma oozing from the pores of poster girls and wanna-be models. A million pragmatists walk the streets tonight, looking for succor from some sucker, sympathy for assorted devils. Millions of women are waiting there to smother you, love you to death, kill you with kisses. They smother you with the black hole of ignorance, so you stab them with a prick of your aggression. I think that maybe I’m sexually attracted to ignorance; I guess that’s Nature’s way of getting even. It all balances out. They’re a throwback to an earlier time when men were men and women were women and the twain only met undercover. The fruits of this labor might not even know the push and pull of history that led to such a consequence. They might not even care.

   
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  hardie karges 11:01 am on July 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ENGLISH ( 7 ), language, THAI ( 5 )   

  THAI LANGUAGE 

  Thailand enters the modern world with multiple role models, as the cultural DNA of language readily shows, like not-so-parfait with American English on top as the current business-role model. Below that is Indian Sanskrit in its own and Khmerized forms as the religious and pre-modern model, corresponding to the French/Latin influence in English. Deeper still is the Chinese and Thai tribal past, the racial and linguistic underpinnings of the entire race, overlaid on a Mon pre-history, analogous to the Anglo-Saxon and later Danish incursions on a Celtic/Pictish sub-strata. Somehow it all gets mixed and mashed into a fairly uniform system of pronunciation that is recognizably Thai regardless of the origin. For a modern newcomer to the stew, sometimes the hardest part of learning the language is learning how to correctly mispronounce English. I wonder if Indians feel the same way about the manipulation of Sanskrit into forms unrecognizable. I’m sure that French feel the same way about English, but that probably says more about them than language considering what they themselves did to Latin. I know it’s hard to learn the language of a people that you don’t especially like. That’s for sure.

   
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  hardie karges 8:09 am on June 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: DNA ( 46 ), EVOLUTION ( 21 ), language   

  DNAANDDNA 

  This is not writing; this is word processing, processing words to infinity in some sort of differential calculus. Word corresponds to thought corresponds to perception corresponds to reality. Did thought create language or did language create thought? The only questions remaining are those concerning reality itself, the field of reference. Language itself is only a medium, certainly neither rare nor well-done, high nor low, and an overstuffed one, spilling tracks and traces of ancient transgressions and future possibilities. I doubt that language can actually create reality, but then you wouldn’t expect that of DNA until you see the results. Does DNA create evolution or does evolution create DNA? To find some creative principle in evolution would be the greatest discovery of the 21^st century. If bacteria can create enzymes to combat antibiotics from scratch without the slow motion process of mutation and natural selection, then what else might be possible? Even if a bacterium is merely dialing up DNA at random to try and come up with a winning combination, still it is doing so in response to a need. While the needs of humans are far more complex than those of microorganisms, and an average generation twenty-five years, not twenty-five minutes, still the effects might be cumulative. The finest paintings of history are made of individual brush-strokes, as is the finest literature, even closer by analogy to DNA.

  Joram Arentved is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    Joram Arentved 1:56 pm on June 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    If there has to be any certain obligation of mine©, it’s This Time Travel Phenomenology, on which issue you & your nearest Lawyer, Police & even Any Judge are a.s.a.p. for whatever why please welcome to receive any of my further & most relevant information, i.e. most accurate, so that I can later on & the sooner, the better, of course tell & e.g. help You All & myself etc. find out, What’s Common Sense & e.g. All About: to be continued.
    Greetings from Yours, faithfully,
    Joram Arentved, The Universe’s
    legal & official owner©,
    (there are 2 more).

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  hardie karges 11:49 am on June 6, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), language   

  HAVE PEN WILL TRAVEL 

  I’m a language junkie, a lingo jockey. I need language the way others need dollars or drugs, but mostly I need meaning, my life sentence w/o parole nor punctuation, just the same letters over and over forming the same words over and over, but with ever-changing meaning. The gift of words came upon me like a thunderbolt from heaven, and got stuck in my throat, lost in self-reflection. Pen in hand, I’m ready to slay demons and fellow travelers, heal the sick, change the world, and other assorted odd jobs. Heroes are hard to find in a world gone to heroin, short cuts and cheap thrills. No one wants to take a risk, tempt fate, stick it out just to get it whacked off. America is the last bastion of the belated hero, simultaneously reviled and celebrated. America creates the world for those too busy to do it for them selves. Space is money; Europe is just too expensive for its own good. They can’t afford to waste time in idle speculation. We can do your dreaming for you, design that prototype, and then contract out the final production.

   
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  hardie karges 7:55 am on March 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Europe ( 19 ), language, mathematics ( 3 )   

  Cultural Relativity 

  Europeans are internalized, Americans external.  Multi-lingualism leads to useless complexity and introversion.  Uni-lingualism allows mental space to be devoted to other things, like science and technology, without devoting so much effort to translation and bad grammar.  There are two broad fields of knowledge in the world from which all others derive: mathematics and linguistics, on the surface at polar extremes from each other, mathematics revealing knowledge of the other, linguistics revealing knowledge of each other.  In reality the two are not so different from each other, linguistics with a strong logico-mathematical basis, math also capable of a distinct relativity of perspective.  They both thrive on the little stick-men of culture that live in the pages of books, on the pages of experiment.  Numbers and letters are not so different, really.  Everything else is derivative knowledge, recipes for fulfillment and short histories of nearly everything.  The thing is in the name, a convenient substitute for the thing itself, virtual reality in graphic symbols.  It’s like my movie scripts.  Nobody wants them; they just want the titles: “Good Day to Die”, “Virus”, “Reality Check”, and “Lost in Time”, my names just hung on any old shit piece of work. 

   
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  hardie karges 12:17 am on February 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), language, lingua franca, Thailand ( 75 )   

  Lingua Franca 

  Cheerleading is an art form in Thailand; no football, no marching bands, no white lines or referees, just cheerleaders, like acrobats in a Chinese circus, forming human pyramids and human waterfalls, flipping and tumbling like human jumping beans.  I’m not sure if they cop the language or not, though I’m sure they emulate the actual cheering aspect.  Something is always lost in translation whenever one culture apelike imitates another, as if some benefit might accrue by sympathetic magic.  The English word ‘cheer’ has long been adopted into the Thai language, coming to mean much more than the original, though in the American, not the British, sense.  Loanwords don’t follow land borders.  Logic would make you think that words would filter across borders selectively finding additional cross-cultural use among its border crossers.  Thailand is not logical.  Thailand follows the hand that holds the money.  Nowadays Thailand borrows words from English, and English only, also known as ‘pahsah Farang’, literally ‘lingua franca’.  It’s as if the only thing that had changed internationally over the last eight hundred years was that Pig Latin had somehow morphed into Pidgin English and the people were still essentially the same, Crusaders of the Lost Ark.  Maybe they’re right.