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Tag Archives: linguistics

FTAC – Language, Islam, and ‘Cultural Metonymic Stability’

21 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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Islam, language, linguistics, metonymy, politics, religion, rhetoric

Re. Language — https://www.amazon.com/Language-Cultural-Daniel-L-Everett/dp/0307473805 The author, Daniel Everett, challenges a substantial basis or claim in Chomsky’s theorizing about language.

My kernel for how languages work would be metonymy with paired, primary, and secondary sound/other signal associations. N. may want to catch this because it’s one of the elements involved in conflict within Islam that make winnowing the issue down to the “God Mob” (such may not be restricted to Islam but may be archaic elsewhere) so difficult. If one asks, for example, what the term “homosexual” means in terms of its resonance — what else does it call to mind? — we have several approaches to analyzing that. The science community might want to know and then refer to the incidence in behavior in nature x species and fit that data and theorizing about it with similar data compiled for Homo Sapiens sapiens.

The bohemian-creative communities, long on hedonism, unconsciously selfish or deep down exploitive and willful, give it a glance, give it a go, paint, write, dance, sing (“Take a Walk on the Wild Side”) about it, include it, dismiss it as trivial, so many other things considered, and move right on to their next scene. Dig? 🙂

And the religious refer to holy scripture and the logic of edict that must follow, which mentality went hard on the witches of Salem, not too many hundreds of years ago, and has visited similar villainy to . . . gays in an Orlando nightclub.

Bored, confused, dead-ended, invisible, still energetic and searching for answers — and then comes imam or speaker Farrokh Sekaleshfar who explains that the Muslim response to homosexuality is death, and it would be merciful to get it over with.

Now we have an issue: how stable is that message in Islamic jurisprudence and scholarship?

That’s really asking a question about metonymy within Arabic and within Islamic thought.

Then: how authoritative and how deep goes the distribution of that thought through the Ummah?

The Dhimmi and infidel on the defensive before such a cultural and political program may approach the same thought with external ideas, and chief among alternatives authoritative secular governance founded on reason undergirded by science and research and wedded to compassion, humility, inclusion, and tolerance.

Counterterrorism is a complex field, but in the language part, many recognize aspects of the talk (e.g., invoking the term “crusader west”) that key into signature by way of talk x behavioral change x foreign travel / association with Muslim Brotherhood figures x media obsessions x planning x arming.

In the west, wild poets alter the meaning of elements in language on an experimental basis, at least, and the public picks up and sustains what it finds “cool” — and, for the most part, the culture, the whole shebang, recapitulates itself into the modern English world.

In the Ummah, one still meets Farrokh Sekaleshfar sincerely plying old and frankly monstrous thought with authority. He’s got his hands full today (as a person of interest to western authorities), but what he’s drawn from in language has “cultural metonymic stability” — i.e., he’s not the only one talking that talk and pushing it into everyone’s future.

Related on BackChannels

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/06/12/omar-mir-seddique-mateen-known-to-the-fbi/ – 6/12/2016.

-33-

FTAC – Metonymy – “Zaani” and “Rape”

05 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Psychology

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language, linguistics, metonymy, weighted symbolic relationships

Is everyone familiar with the term “metonymy”?

I use it in regard to “weighted relationships” between nouns such that the term “rape” calls also to mind “force” and that concept is reinforced in turn by its (potentially statistical) relationship with dominance and humiliation.

IF “Zaani” is intended to reference forced sexual submission (“rape”) but most closely relates to “adultery” and “fornication” (social conditions, not individual experiential concerns), it may then absent — with consequent legal and social realities congruent with this hypothesis — the consideration of humiliation, i.e., the erasure or taking of the victim’s dignity.

From the above, there may open a great conversation about the absence or centrality of the concept “dignity of man” — of each member of family, clan, tribe, and nation — as embedded in each of the world’s separable languages.

“Kavod HaBriyot” seems to be the Hebrew term — it’s new to me — but with the “People of the Book” recognized elsewhere, that too might be worth a visit.

I’ll copy this to my blog as the conversation so perfectly fits “conflict, culture, language, psychology.”

When I reach this point in specialization, the foaming fringe of an ocean featuring for currents engineering and related research interests in artificial intelligence and cybernetics and humanist interest in linguistics and poetry, I find I long for both independent funding and project integration.

🙂

While I may wait to hear the echo on that, possibly forever, as much would seem a critical corner within the intellectual space in which I live.

This is the realm of art, the “glass beads game”, the continuous manipulation of symbols and mind to beautify and ennoble experience and, as a natural behavior, to channel through expression a glimpse of the divine in nature and the universe.

Every human does this a little bit in self-concept and organization; poets may do it a little more and with reach to others.

Not all conflicts live so in the head — some really do have to do with natural and industrial resource allocations — but cultural and religious wars do as they would seem inseparable from “habits of mind” formed of particles drawn in language and repeated and inculcated throughout each culture-and-language system community wide.

# # #

FTAC – Culture and Language – On the Power of a Fairy Tale

27 Tuesday Nov 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology

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ears, fairy tales, hearing, language, linguistics, literature, mind, mouth, psychology, sound, templates, uptake, voice

I had mentioned the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”* as a favorite template in talking about conflict and power, and the person responding wondered about how quickly young minds were manipulated even by the design of children’s literature.  One might call that a power-centered view, i.e., that adult authors have set out to subjugate the next generation of children (God willing), albeit perhaps to best suit the dictates, whims, and sadism of an autocrat (God forbid it).

🙂

I don’t think that’s how language works through our species — my inclination is to view language universally as a natural and naturally evolving behavior fit to essential ecological and larger environmental conditions.

In regard to that, I cannot say it emphatically enough: read Dan Everett!

Here’s the post from The Awesome Conversation:

+++

I would dismiss “manipulation” out of hand as regards language uptake. In the way of words, or what I refer to as “language metonymy” (I feel awfully alone Out Here, lol), it calls up unnecessary associations, e.g., paranoia, victimization, dominance. Basically, the term may collide with a more instinctual tendency toward autonomy and confidence in human’s sense of “locus of control”. 

In that one may regard, and should, human language as part of the natural expression of the species, I happen to believe that “uptake” — the learning of a system of sounds — starts when the ears become active in the womb. We’re that smart! 🙂:) Sounds in that experience may not have association with objects, much less complex ideas, but the important repeated ones may be remembered (eh, mama? papa?) and further associated with their emotional affect. I’m suggesting, not telling, I don’t think anyone knows how it feels to be minus three months old. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable that our common, species-wide, language experience starts with the onset of hearing.

Let’s skip a lot of ground and go to those first legends. In that every culture is first and foremost a language culture (there’s something to argue right there, but stay with me a moment), each has a way of composing its existence and in both practical and teleological realms and through its language, by which I refer to all human symbolic expression, the culture passes itself through to its children. I believe that’s as simple as it gets and partially sustained in “uncontacted peoples” and the most isolated of the world’s remote tribal peoples (who have used their mouths and ears to make themselves more comfortable — or to survive — in their own world invented partially in mind in the carving out of their own way compatible with their environment and pleasing or sensible to themselves).

About “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Andersen’s tale is based on a story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor, 1335),[2] a medieval Spanish collection of fifty-one cautionary tales with various sources such as Aesop and other classical writers and Persian folktales, by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena (1282–1348). Andersen did not know the Spanish original but read the tale in a German translation titled “So ist der Lauf der Welt”.[3] In the source tale, a king is hoodwinked by weavers who claim to make a suit of clothes invisible to any man not the son of his presumed father; whereas Andersen altered the source tale to direct the focus on courtly pride and intellectual vanity rather than adulterous paternity.”

(Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor’s_New_Clothes)

1335!

A European writer, probably familiar, doubtlessly, with Aristotle’s dictum to “educate, entertain, and delight” pulls from an older Spanish tale some components to create a little entertainment, so says the author of the Wikipedia piece, about “courtly pride and intellectual vanity”, which is not far from themes involving narcissism and “malignant narcissism” associated with autocracy and conflict. I would chance that the magical element — invisible clothes — goes farther back in the Spanish experience and may have an interface with the “Golden Age”, but I would need more library, lol, and possibly Spanish to get that trace.

Long answer: it’s not “manipulation” with fairy tales, so much as the practical demands of extant realities and related aesthetic and intellectual conclusions and preferences. Working within Hans Christian Anderson’s talent and love was some transmuting process accessing, in essence, a literary base larger than the one with which he was born. By way of his experience and inspiration, we have a long-loved, long-lived story about power and vanity, and it has wide and continuing and natural resonance in those it reaches.

+++

How may conversations about language affect language?

Heisenberg’s principle has been well acknowledged.  With language in particular and its relationship to three fundamental elements of mind in conflict psychology — consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience — it has special significance: observations about language and language behavior, much including criticisms as well as the most clinical, objective, and theoretical ideas, needs must be entertained in language by minds engaged in conflict and processing what they hear through their own arrangements of symbols.

An illness that starts with a microbe at least recapitulates itself for a while, generally long enough for research to tackle with fair predictability the behavior and pathways taken on the way toward weakening and destroying in whole or part a living system.

By contrast, a conflict planted and generated within the mind and both nourished and sustained by language culture through its arrangement of nouns, legends, tales, stories, reports, poems, plays, songs, dances, paintings, etc. — package it up and call it “language metonymy” — stays a moving target with many ways of responding to challenges posted by new information.  In perhaps an evolutionary way, some changes may be entertained and embraced while others remain  favored and either functioning or pleasing by way of the symbolic arrangements and constructs so maintained.

Perhaps language is the music of the mind, founded on repeated sounds memorized, parroted, reinvented, and endlessly expressed.

We employ language functionally, of course, but perhaps we enjoy it most, I think, for how it works on the heart, colors our lives, and lends or shares with each a little bit of what is great and legendary within and within potential.

Related Internal Reference

*“FTAC – A Great Mission”.  Conflict Backchannels, November 26, 2012: “The fairy tale I’ve played up in relation to contemporary conflict has been “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which gets at the essential components involving corruption, power, and speech. http://deoxy.org/emperors.htm Those who follow my themes will recognize in it the “malignant narcissist” and the related and fearful pandering and toadying involved as well as the innocent bravery of the child who says what is plain.”

FTAC – The Human as Signal System

18 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation

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Tags

anthropology, behavior, culture, language, linguistics, psychology, systems

Off-the-wall question: what role does radio play as regards informing non-English speakers?  We may read and type a lot (those online) but, in essence, we are each naturally a mouth –> ear –> emotion / mind –> mouth system.  🙂  When aggregated, the resulting culture or cultural mix seems to become its own transmitter distributing conventions and fashions in thought across some space and over some period, including intergenerational periods, of time.

FTAC – A Remark About Language

17 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology

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language, linguistics, metonymy, philology, poetics

What holds us together, improbably, may be probability in relation to language behavior that involves essentially repeated sounds that  develop shared symbolic meaning and exhibit more or less stability across the life of a language culture.

For me, all avenues in linguistics lead back to metonymy and the update, development, weighting, and evolution of clusters of behavior involving words, functional grammar, and, most important for our interests here, social grammar.  We’re not stuck with either the Red Queen or Humpty Dumpty, i.e., the development of meaning may have predictable and stable qualities, but there seems much that is accidental and arbitrary in the development of culture and, by way of language, shared cultural perception.

Near unquestioned familiarity with a primary language affords a depth in humor and intuition generally unavailable in a second language. As instruments playing with words, we may be incredibly fine tuned, but that tuning depends on the continuation of conventions, habits, and practices — the more deeply held the assemblies, the less energy required to revisit and re-validate their adventageous qualities — any part of which may be subject to cultural and linguistic evolution.

I’ve never had much respect for the deconstructionists, their drift demonstrated so much more actively by poets who, depending on their mien, for better or worse, rearrange symbolic language relationships in the heads of those reading or hearing their inventions.

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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