[lit-ideas] Re: Must the Word be Literate?
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2007 14:47:13 -0230
As somebody once put it very clearly (and in English), English is the ideal
language since in it the order of the words in a sentence is isomorphic with
the order in which they are thought.
(No wonder the Germans lost the war.)
Subject-predicate-object forever,
Walter O.
Director,
Minsk Translation Services
Quoting John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On 10/2/07, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Is this question not somewhat naively put?
>
> Perhaps.
>
> >
> > 1) A religion or superstition may or may not claim that its 'rites',
> > including linguistic 'rites', correspond to some "absolute Truth" - but
> what
> > kind of claim is this, or is its denial? It is surely a claim that is
> highly
> > metaphysical and indeed perhaps itself of a kind of religious or
> > superstitious character.
>
> Perhaps, again. But there is no denying that modern philosophers
> ranging from Leibniz to the early Wittenstein took quite seriously the
> notion that an ideal language could be constructed in which all and
> only true statements about the world could be uttered. Historically
> speaking, this effort seems rooted in quite common earlier beliefs
> about primordial words that when uttered by deity, priest or magician
> shape or reshape the world.
>
> >
> > 2) The idea of a performative utterance may be used here.
>
> Indeed it can. The thesis that magical incantations are, in effect,
> performatives was explored in the 1980s by Harvard anthropologist
> Stanley Tambiah. This was one of three approaches my paper explored.
> The others were James Fernandez's thesis that rituals are extended
> metaphors and metaphors ways of moving pronouns around in cultural
> manifolds and Maurice Bloch's proposition that the formalization of
> ritual language is a way of asserting authority by limiting variation.
> In the case of the exorcism whose language I examined, I discovered,
> first, that most of what was said was, in fact, a protracted
> negotiation designed to establish the conditions under which the the
> final "Begone" would be performative. But this was clearly only part
> of what was going on. Fernandez's thesis pointed to the ways in which
> the patient afflicted by demons, the demons, the scapegoat, and the
> Taoist magician performing the right changed places as the rite
> proceeded. Bloch's argument about formality pointed to close analysis
> of the range of registers involved in the rite: from highly informal
> to rigidly formalized.
>
> Cheers,
>
> John
>
> --
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
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