Leo

Well-known member
one of my best friends has an mother from France and father from Spain, and they moved to the states when he was about 2 years old, so he grew up in a household with three languages. he said they would occasionally switch languages in mid-sentence sometimes if one of the other languages had a better way to express something. that's insane and pretty cool.

oddly, he moved to Barcelona about 25 years ago and found it a challenge to speak Catalan, because for the first time he had to translate things in his head before speaking. and people in BCN (back then, anyway) weren't always so welcoming to those speaking Castilian, so he'd get the side-eye when using the wrong word or expression. eventually he got to "think" in Catalan, so no problem after awhile.

I wish I spoke multiple languages, although I can sort of make out a menu in a Spanish or France restaurant. can barely speak English sometimes.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Girlfriend speaks Japanese, English and Danish in that order. Says she doesn't think in language. I can't begin to understand that.
I once lost the ability to think in terms of words or even concepts. I was tripping very, very hard at the time. Only occasion it's happened.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
And a fondness for fungus
If you could have got coherent words out of me half an hour prior that point, I'd have had very mixed things to say about fungi.

But after I'd "let the fear pass over me and through me", it was glorious. And eventually the word came back to me (or reinfected me, in WSB terms).

Has anyone here ever understood why 'The Word' is a synonym for God in Christian scripture? That one's always escaped me.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i speak dutch, english and german but all of them quite poorly i think. i was thinking the other day how restricted you are when you grow up speaking a language that isn't spoken by that many people (dutch or danish) cos there simply isn't the same literature available as there is in english and french. i can't even think of a single dutch poet.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
on the other hand. i fucking hate it how everything is english now. i'm embarrassed even to speak it when i'm outside.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Isn't it just because the Word is the divine life-giving breath in Genesis?
But why the Word, not the Sound or the Shape or the Number?

I mean it's the Sound in Hinduism ("om") and was it was the Number for the Pythagoreans...
 

version

Well-known member
Nature, in her evolutionary and morphogenetic richness, has offered a compelling model for us to follow in the shamanic task of re-sacralization and self-transformation that lies ahead. The totemic animal image for the future human to model is the octopus. This is because the cephalopods, the squids and octopi, lowly creatures though they may seem, have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic - an inspiring model for the human communications of the future.

An octopus does not communicate with small mouth noises, even though water is a good medium for acoustic signalling. Rather, the octopus becomes its own linguistic intent. Octopi have a large repertoire of color changes, dots, blues, and travelling bars that move across their surfaces. This repertoire in combination with the soft-bodied physique of the creature allows it to obscure and reveal its linguistic intent simply by rapidly folding and unfolding the changing parts of its body. The mind and the body of the octopus are the same and hence equally visible; the octopus wears its language like a kind of second skin. Octopi can hardly not communicate. Indeed, their use of "ink" clouds to conceal themselves may indicate that this is the only way that they can have anything like a private thought. The ink cloud may be a kind of correction fluid for voluble octopi who have misstated themselves. Martin Moyniham has written of the complexities of cephalopod communication:

The communication and related systems of . . . cephalopods are largely visual. They include arrangements of pigment cells, postures, and movements. The postures and movements can be ritualized or unritualized. Color changes presumably are always ritualized. The various patterns can be combined in many and often intricate ways. They can be changed very rapidly. Since they are visual, they should be relatively easy to describe and decipher by human observers. There are, however, complications. . . .

Read or not, correctly or not, the patterns of cephalopods, like those of all other animals, encode information. When and insofar as they are messages, intentional or not, [they] would seem to have not only syntax but also a simple grammar.


Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeus - a Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows:

A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things. In other words the antithesis of seeing and hearing argued by Philo lies as a whole within the realm of "seeing" - that is to say, it is no real antithesis but a difference of degree relative to the ideal of immediate intuitive presence of the object. It is with a view to this ideal that the "hearing" here opposed to "seeing" is conceived, namely as its deputizing, provisional mode, and not as something authentic, basically other than seeing. Accordingly the turn from hearing to seeing here envisaged is merely a progress from a limited knowledge to an adequate knowledge of the same and within the same project of knowledge.
 

version

Well-known member
raw
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I know, I googled the first line and found it online. Sorry, was just being a dick. And it really *is* great stuff.

(Although, pedant that I am, it irks me to see the word 'octopi' used by an otherwise obviously erudite writer.)
 

woops

is not like other people
anyway about the Word/God thing it struck me that the tribes of Israel were the people of the book, and illiterate, so the transmission of the bible and the tablets meant god = word to some extent so it makes sense but i am not a theologist
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Is it something akin to language and Habitus?

structured structures, generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices – what the worker eats, and especially the way he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinions and the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrial proprietor's corresponding activities / habitus are also structuring structures, different classifying schemes classification principles, different principles of vision and division, different tastes. Habitus make different differences; they implement distinctions between what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so on, but they are not the same. Thus, for instance, the same behaviour or even the same good can appear distinguished to one person, pretentious to someone else, and cheap or showy to yet another

ideal for Saturday mornings, apologies, Saturdays as structured structures, self-organising, with lots of commas.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
But why the Word, not the Sound or the Shape or the Number?

I mean it's the Sound in Hinduism ("om") and was it was the Number for the Pythagoreans...

I'm not sure i can articulate this very well, but i think maybe it has to with the shift to monotheism, away from creation myths that more closely resembled human interactions, towards a single divine Father who creates without the need for a maternal figure, or even procreativity. So this represents a big advance in abstract thinking - maybe for the first time creativity is symbolised as a name, an abstract concept - God said "let there be light" and there was.

Later God bestows the secondary creative power of naming onto Man, who names all the living creatures, giving order and meaning to the world that God breathed life into with the Word.

So maybe the primacy of the Word as a symbol in the biblical scriptures, rather than a shape or a number, has to do with the power of naming that came about through this historical development in abstract thought.

Does that make sense?
 

version

Well-known member
Cormac McCarthy published something on the origins of language. Apparently there are a bunch of issues with it, but might be of interest regardless.

 
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