[lit-ideas] Linear B is a bit fine
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 12:51:40 +0100 (BST)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/10158135/Riddle-of-the-script-how-the-worlds-most-difficult-puzzle-was-solved.html
Among the philosophically interesting aspects of the story is that it
illustrates that 'language' of this sort is both (a) an abstract code (b)
something that may involve World 3 principles for its decoding; and it
illustrates (c) that decoding language is inescapably a matter of guesswork -
though some guesses turn out better than others.
What we may tend to forget, perhaps because of over-familiarity with it and
because our guesswork is now so well-tested by use we may overlook there was
ever any guesswork involved (as we forget how a child learns, by guesswork, the
sense and 'grammar' of its language)*, is that the language we have learnt is
also a language of this sort.
Donal
*The grandchild, who will be three at the end of the month, is developing his
sense of language, and in 'logical' ways that will in time be corrected away,
as is the child who says 'I is' or 'They is' or 'We is' and who here may be
working 'logically' from having grasped 'He is' and 'She is': one of his traits
is putting qualifiers in - so when something is 'scary' he will say 'a bit
scary', meaning what an adult might mean by this but something which also might
be described by an adult as 'somewhat scary' or 'quite scary'. Of course, he is
too young to understand that while 'a bit scary' is good adult English, the use
of 'bit' as a qualifier cannot be used always in this way in adult English to
convey an equivalent sense - and so when asked 'How are you today?' he often,
and to him 'logically', responds 'A bit fine', by which he means 'quite fine
thanks', without any of the negative connotation that might be conveyed if an
adult were to respond
'somewhat fine'. (Currently he is in Italy with his mother and grandmother:
before they left his grandmother said to him 'Next week we all go on holiday -
mummy really needs a holiday' - with a nod of agreement he responded, "I really
need a holiday too, nanny".) The grammar of language is here condensed into a
drop of child's speech.
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