Words Mean Things.

Jamie Stick wrote: (yes, linguistic purism is rooted in elitism)

I've established elsewhere that I don't inherently have a problem with elitism. Its existence has a profound effect on every community where it can be found, for better or worse, and that makes it useful.

Jamie Stick wrote: But I think what bothers me most is about linguistic purism is that it pretentiously holds up the importance of linguistic integrity while failing to recognize that historically only about 1% of the world's population has even had the luxury of being educated. It's an intellectual position of power and privilege to preside as judge, jury, and executioner over trials of linguistic purity.

One might argue that if you feel so strongly about the situation, you should be out advocating literacy instead of arguing its merits with someone who does. But I could be mistaken...

steamboat28 wrote:

Jamie Stick wrote: (yes, linguistic purism is rooted in elitism)

I've established elsewhere that I don't inherently have a problem with elitism. Its existence has a profound effect on every community where it can be found, for better or worse, and that makes it useful.

Profound effect makes it useful? To what end? Plenty of terrible things have effected just about every community on the face of the globe, yet I'm disinclined to say that because they had a profound effect on those communities that they were beneficial.

steamboat28 wrote:

Jamie Stick wrote: But I think what bothers me most is about linguistic purism is that it pretentiously holds up the importance of linguistic integrity while failing to recognize that historically only about 1% of the world's population has even had the luxury of being educated. It's an intellectual position of power and privilege to preside as judge, jury, and executioner over trials of linguistic purity.

One might argue that if you feel so strongly about the situation, you should be out advocating literacy instead of arguing its merits with someone who does. But I could be mistaken...

And who says I don't? In fact, it's something I'm pretty passionate about, but rather than take the view that it's an either/or problem, I prefer to take a two-pronged approach. I believe in arming children with literacy while consciously subverting hierarchical standards (I'm not going to get into my pedagogical approach).

Jotting down some thoughts here since giving them a bit of pondering yesterday...

I've been watching a pianist on YouTube play Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, and Mozart. Upon glancing in the comments, I notice an assortment of people who negatively criticize her playing for being "inaccurate" in performance, based on accuracy of notes and "feeling" of her playing. Most of them are rather unforgiving, seeing it in a very black and white fashion (since she didn't have it 100% accurate, then she completely sucks at playing them). Then others will come along in reply and remind them of something that may be very important: Her performance is her interpretation of the piece. Many original composers of those works wrote those pieces in the intention that they would be interpreted differently by others in the future. Every piece is like a vessel through which the performer expresses themselves and their perception of what feeling it gives them.

The parallel here between language and music is vivid to me in this regard, since, different languages use words and phrases quite differently, and the meanings and intentions of them are anything but exactly the same. Every language has a different interpretation of most ideas as expressed through its language. More importantly though, the same thing happens on a personally individual scale. One's perception of many philosophical terms, for example, can be quite different than another's perception, but is it necessarily wrong?

So, can "communication" properly happen between two or more people who have different interpretations, definitions, or perceptions of various words that are exchanged between them?

Yes. In fact more communication can happen in this case than if they all agreed upon the definitions of said words and terms.

What do we find happening here at TOTJO? Something rather significant I feel....

"Hey guys! I see this mountain here! It's so covered in snow here! Is it all covered in snow? Do you guys see it? How does it look from where you're at?"

"Oh yeah! I see it! It's not very snowy to me. Over here, there's hardly any snow on it. But WOW does it have a lot of trees!"

"It has trees on it too?? I didn't know that! That's great! Hey, you other guys over there, how does it look to you?"

"Us? Oh, well it looks very rocky and bald over here. But the colors of the rock are really interesting!!"


So is the mountain a snowy peak? Or is it a tree-filled slope? Or is it a bald rocky wall? All three people learned more about the mountain upon giving and accepting their perspectives upon that one mountain, and suddenly the mountain has so many more characteristics to it than each individual originally thought.

This is what we do here at TOTJO, through our Journals, and the IP takes important advantage of this. It is why there is no "right" answer to any of the lessons but is rather a matter of reporting "what do you see from over there!" for the rest of us to hear about and go "oh wow! I didn't know that! cool!"

That is true communication - communication that allows everybody to learn and grow by being introduced to perceptions and concepts that expand our awareness of any topic, phrase, and word.

The day we all begin agreeing on the meanings of words and ideas, is the day we stop communicating.

Proteus wrote: The day we all begin agreeing on the meanings of words and ideas, is the day we stop communicating.

Bollocks. That's the day we start.

First off, I'd recommend you to watch ViHart's "Twelve Tones". It is rather long and its mostly about music, but she does make the comparison to language and illustrates the difference. Music is an art, language is an instrument of communication. If you look at da Vinci's Mona Lisa, you may see a lady who is looking somewhat happily, or perhaps a little tired. Others may see how close she is to start crying while yet others will start speculating what kind of things in her hypothetical life she is contemplating or being fond of. Maybe all of these interpretations are viable, maybe none of them are. If however anyone starts describing the portrait as a landscape scenery with the central object being an apple tree in winter with a rogue cat sitting on one of its branches looking scared of the height she brought herself into, not only do I know that we are not talking about the same painting at that point, I am in fact perfectly confident in asserting that that person is wrong saying that he is describing the Mona Lisa.
The example ViHart gives is one where one would make a sentence and then replace every word in it with a random different one (of the same kind, of course, such as to keep the grammatical structure). The resulting sentence is more likely going to be nonsense than not, and even granting that this judgement would be by the listener's standard, still the one who made the sentence has quite objectively failed at communicating his message.
I don't know what da Vinci had in mind when he painted his Gioconda and I doubt anyone can say what it definately was. But I'm pretty sure it was quite definately not a cat on an apple tree, and no, nobody would learn anything from that "interpretation" except perhaps that there is something horribly wrong with the interpreter's eyes at that point.

Gisteron wrote:

Proteus wrote: The day we all begin agreeing on the meanings of words and ideas, is the day we stop communicating.

Bollocks. That's the day we start.

First off, I'd recommend you to watch ViHart's "Twelve Tones". It is rather long and its mostly about music, but she does make the comparison to language and illustrates the difference. Music is an art, language is an instrument of communication. If you look at da Vinci's Mona Lisa, you may see a lady who is looking somewhat happily, or perhaps a little tired. Others may see how close she is to start crying while yet others will start speculating what kind of things in her hypothetical life she is contemplating or being fond of. Maybe all of these interpretations are viable, maybe none of them are. If however anyone starts describing the portrait as a landscape scenery with the central object being an apple tree in winter with a rogue cat sitting on one of its branches looking scared of the height she brought herself into, not only do I know that we are not talking about the same painting at that point, I am in fact perfectly confident in asserting that that person is wrong saying that he is describing the Mona Lisa.
The example ViHart gives is one where one would make a sentence and then replace every word in it with a random different one (of the same kind, of course, such as to keep the grammatical structure). The resulting sentence is more likely going to be nonsense than not, and even granting that this judgement would be by the listener's standard, still the one who made the sentence has quite objectively failed at communicating his message.
I don't know what da Vinci had in mind when he painted his Gioconda and I doubt anyone can say what it definately was. But I'm pretty sure it was quite definately not a cat on an apple tree, and no, nobody would learn anything from that "interpretation" except perhaps that there is something horribly wrong with the interpreter's eyes at that point.

Now... what is happening here with this reply?

Proteus wrote: Her performance is her interpretation of the piece.

The difference between music and language is that if you perform a different arrangement of a song, it's still recognizable because of how we, as people, process music. If you do that with language, you get a different dialect, and if you don't think that's a big deal I want you to learn Cantonese and go to a place where they only speak Mandarin.

I'm currently learning a little bit of French. Through the experience, the words, phrases, and ideas that I learned in English have been given an even wider (and more clear) meaning through the alternate language due to the differences of the language. There are many aspects of the French language that are very similar to English due to the origins of the two languages (I can recognize some French words and phrases through this fact), but when learning the French interpretation of an idea that I learned in English, I'm given a bigger understanding of what I thought I already understood well enough in English. The exact same thing happens when I listen to different performers play Moonlight Sonata for example, or Ava Marie. I once posted a metal version of Katy Perry's E.T., which I both recognize and have a whole different understanding of due to the guy who re-mixed it in a different genre. Interesting, and ... musically enlightening!

Proteus wrote: I'm currently learning a little bit of French. Through the experience, the words, phrases, and ideas that I learned in English have been given an even wider (and more clear) meaning through the alternate language due to the differences of the language.

Except that French is a Romance language (descended from Latin), and English is Germanic. The French words we stole came from the period in time when it was the literal lingua franca, much like the Latin words we stole come from a time period in which the majority of educated men spoke Latin rather than English, because it was considered vulgar and crude. Honestly, it's only gotten worse.

While we can thank these historical and cultural events for our rich non-Germanic Germanic language, the problem is that we've stopped being influenced by great cultural events outside of the rampant dumbing-down of American society, which is why the majority of our current linguistic shift isn't for any reason of historical import, but rather, because we're too stupid to speak our own language properly.

Is that the footnote you want these generations to leave in history?

steamboat28 wrote: The difference between music and language

And yet, as soon as one divides with "differences", conflict of understanding and acceptance occurs. Notice how I'm talking about parallels that connect instead of differences that divide. In the case where the three people were looking at the mountain, a forth comes up and says "That can't be a mountain your looking at, because I don't see one. I just see a lake!"

Where is this person at? Not at the mountain apparently.

Proteus wrote: Now... what is happening here with this reply?

I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what it is you wish to know. If you could ask a more specific question, please, I'll gladly try and answer.