[lit-ideas] Re: Amanuensis
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 16:43:14 EST
Nice Sunday Poem by M. Geary. He writes:
>phonemes.
>Let loose your plosives, voiceless
>and aspirated,
>bring me your labials, sibilants, stops,
>send forth your fricatives,
>no sound can escape.
I am reminded of a note by a biographer of H. P. Grice. On examining the
unpublications of this Oxford English philosopher, the biographer (a linguist)
found some working notes that Grice had made on the phonemes and phonology:
As this linguist rather derogatorily puts it,
"[Grice] also dabbled in phonetics, making notes to remind himself of words
representative of the various vowel sounds, and drawing up a table of the
distinctive features of the consonants [p], [t], and [k]"
And if you think of it, that is *all* a philosopher needs to know, if not
less. This linguist is aware that Grice would have considered the label
'linguist' pretty *offensive* --.
In any case, for the philosopher (i.e. the 'thinker') it's the phonological
system that matters.
Geary makes it sound as it's all a "Chaos" ("In the beginning was ...
Chaos").
>phonemes.
>Let loose your plosives, voiceless
>and aspirated,
>bring me your labials, sibilants, stops,
>send forth your fricatives,
>no sound can escape.
This is part of his programme to demystify the priority of the "Word" (in
eschatological terms). For Geary, "it's the basicness, the physicness of the
word that we (as amanuenses) can only attain -- never mind God's message" (N.
Fotion, _Geary_ -- Cliff Notes).
>phonemes.
>Let loose your plosives, voiceless
>and aspirated,
>bring me your labials, sibilants, stops,
>send forth your fricatives,
>no sound can escape.
A running commentary
>phonemes.
This is a sacred word for me. It's an -eme. It's an -emic. McCreery will be
overfamiliar with this; since Pike tried to broaden the scope of Daniel
Jones's distinction (between the 'phone' and the 'phoneme') and apply it
notably to
anthropology ('etic' versus 'emic' descriptions of behaviour).
The 'phonetic' features that Geary lists (name-drops):
>plosive, voiced, aspirated,
>labials, sibilant, glottal stop,
>fricative
Are thus _never_ -- other than in The Tower of Babel -- perceived as a
hotch-potch, but various languages will select what, after Grice (following
Jacobson), we call 'distinctive features'.
The distinctive features make up for a list of phonemes which is _finite_
and out of which a language grows. Mind, it's not _static_. Something that may
have been a phoneme in Old English (the 'ch' of "Loch" ness for example) is no
longer (not even Scots?).
The idea, it seems to me, is to have a minimal list of 'meaning-bearing'
elements -- for that is what distinguish a phoneme from a phone -- so that we
can construct larger units (the second articulation as Saussure called it; and
the third articulation of syntax).
Sounds in itself are meaningless -- 'barbaroi' --. It's the ability to
recreate them in meaningful sequences that matter.
Geary continues:
>Did God really say: "Let there be ..."?
Perhaps he did say it with _flowers_. "Say" is _such_ an ambiguous word.
Perhaps it was just a 'thunder' which, as Socrates says in _Clouds_ is just a
divine fart.
The Vulgata for Geary's phrase is:
"Fiat lux" (My God speaks Latin).
It was possibly just a thunder -- but the priest -- or wizard of the tribe
-- had to communicate the message to fellow human beings. So he would use the
subjunctive of 'essere' ("fiat") and an archaic nominative ("lux").
The message is not what matters -- but the medium -- the divine thunderbolt.
Phonetics is not the _end_ of linguistics. It's the start. So the next step
is to recreate the _logic_ (semantics_) beyond what the tribe witch thought
was the message:
"Let there be light" (Fiat Lux)
The wizard would tell the tribe that the use of the subjunctive indicates
the tacit presence of a divine subject:
"Et Deus dixit, Fiat Lux"
-- where the 'dixit' is not as important as the 'coming into being' ("fiat")
of the antonym of darkness (chaos) as something WILLED by Deus. (That's what
a subjunctive mode expresses in the languages that have them).
Of course English is different:
"Let there be ..."
Who let?
We let?
We let who?
We let us? Silly!
_There_ be -- as opposed to *here*?
The whole construction becomes nonsensical in English, both phonically and
semantically -- and the sad thing about it is that, as Geary forcefully puts
it, we are thinking of ourselves as the amanuensis!
Cheers,
JL
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