streaming consciousness…

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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 ( 76 )   

  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 ( 76 )   

  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. 

   
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  hardie karges 2:02 am on January 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Tieng Viet 

  Vietnamese language is another of those languages with mixed origins.  It seems like the languages of the most successful countries are so, the hybrid vigor thing and all that.  Vietnam may not be so successful, but it is strong, as America found out.  The Vietnamese greeting equivalent to “How are you?” is literally “Are you strong?”  The language sounds like somebody playing banjo with a loose string.  Try to get a handle on it and it slips through your fingers like sand through the hourglass.  That’s a bad cliché, like ‘Days of Our Lives.’  Sounds and syllables fall from your hands like chopped vegetables spilling over the edge of a hot wok, dancing lightly over a surface of super-heated oil, an experiment in theoretical physics gone terribly wrong.  The words spoken are themselves chopped karate landing on the bearded surface of your white skin, little slaps in the face each of them, just begging for a response.  Give it to them.  When you prove you can be as big an asshole as they are, then you’re part of the club, a full member with honors.  There’s no age requirement.  Even little kids are in on it.  You sit reading the paper on a park bench in Hanoi and some kid just comes up and pokes you like you’re some animal in a cage that he wants to hear squawk.  Throw him to the ground and now there’s a bond between us.  Go figure again. 

   
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  hardie karges 10:53 am on January 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: hill tribes ( 3 ), language, Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Vietnam Hill Tribes 

  The Viets can’t believe that tourists go to Sapa to view the incredible hill-tribes, insisting it’s the French alpine atmosphere that draws them.  Maybe it’s a poor man’s Switzerland, but certainly no more than that.  The hill tribes are another story.  The little Hmong girls have been photographed and appeared on book-covers many times and could speak better English than a Thai bar girl by the age of six just by being copycats and hungry, Pidgin by parrot-chat.  The Dzao women are from outer space, heads half shaved and wearing outfits resembling the British Redcoats of three centuries back.  Rumor has it they’d get frisky with their male counterparts during the long weekend market.  It’s true.  They’d sing songs antiphonally, and then just wander off, I guess.  I was propositioned at least three times by various members of the group of varying ages, all wanting nothing more than my temporary membership in their apparently frequent openings.  I think their guys smoke too much opium.  Of course the young girl I fantasized about wasn’t available.  Photographers followed us on our only date, to eat Vietnamese noodle soup.  I wonder what it’s like now.  They’d started to refurbish the French colonial atmosphere that got badly smudged by the Chinese invasion of 1979.  China intended to teach Vietnam a lesson for invading Cambodia and putting an end to the Pol Pot terror.  They lost almost 20,000 troops in two weeks before withdrawing.  A Chinese friend insists Vietnam begged China to leave.  Right.  Countries do that all the time.  Just ask Slobodan.