Considering Language

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I was thinking about nomenclature recently.

I thought that in many circumstances the only difference between a lay person and a professional is the job-related nomenclature. I can keep up with scientific jargon to a point but I have to ask what is meant by this and that concatenated word. This slows down the conversation. I believe this is what students pay the big money to universities for - to learn the nomenclature of the respective disciplines. The ideas, in most cases, are simple enough for anyone to grasp. But the related words, studies and advances make discussion with a non-trained individual problematic. It is as if professions speak a very specific dialect that others do not know.

I agree with this idea of nomenclature. But sometimes I do admittedly think of it snidely, as "buzzwords". Just knowing those buzzwords can put one in the "expert" club, whether or not it is deserved. Just a little scratch below the surface can sometimes make it apparent that that emperor has no clothes! Perhaps some of the more elite professions are even designed that way intentionally?

One thing I have noticed as I get older, is that it is when I don't try so hard, but just let my thoughts flow out of my mouth (or fingers), that people actually seem to "grok" more. It is almost like a "work without effort" type of thing. This realization greatly surprised me!

[Ernie Nemeth]

when you "don't try so hard" you allow your authentic self to do what it does naturally - communicate without a vested interest

[Peter UK]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
when you "don't try so hard" you allow your authentic self to do what it does naturally - communicate without a vested interest

Very nice and hard to think other than it being absolutely true.

So I'll stop trying.

[EFO]

Considering language...and telling the truth...
1-Harald Haarmann
Danube Script from Old Europe 5000 - 3500 BC
"Harald Haarmann (world's leading expert on scripts and languages) states that the Danube script is the oldest known writing in the world. Much older than Mesopotamian writing. The Danube culture was an egalitarian civilization which existed 8000 years ago in Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia .....) and is indeed the cradle of civilization, not the Middle East."

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gyEcUR_wnsU

2-Micheál Ledwith
"Not Romanian language is a Latin language,but Latin language is a Romanian language"
The statement start from 12 sec. mark.It's only a segment of a longest interviews as I remember.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=duxk_EJAwo0

3-Carme Huerta
No translation.For Spanish and Romanian speakers
"We don't came from latin"

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a62k4iAPzjM

4-Marija Gimbutas
The Old Europe Lost Civilization Documentary Marija Gimbutas En Ita

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T8IZ6t40Lf0

and not to mention that the island of Achilles,Homer's hero from Iliad,Leuce,is localized by Pausania,Pindar,Euripide,Maximus of Tyr,Ptolemeu,Filostrat and others at the mouth of Danube which is proved recently by LiDAR satellite scans.

And these are only some examples of how worldwide the history is still twisted today...

[rgray222]

Thoughts are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively or destructively. Thoughts turn into words which have abundant and at times endless energy and power. Critical thought leads to precise words which can cause and end war. Precise words can cause pain and even death but that is not how most cultures want to move through the human experience. We desire to find love, search for joy, achieve satisfaction, mollify confusion and alleviate our fears. Communication makes the human experience worth living. Of course, communication can also be achieved without words.

"Words have magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair. They can transfer knowledge from teacher to pupil; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decision. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions."  Sigmund Freud

I love this quote by Freud but to make the words more precise................I would have said;

Thoughts lead to words which have magical power.

Now you have my thoughts on the subject.
R

[Cara]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
Thoughts are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively or destructively. Thoughts turn into words which have abundant and at times endless energy and power. Critical thought leads to precise words which can cause and end war. Precise words can cause pain and even death but that is not how most cultures want to move through the human experience. We desire to find love, search for joy, achieve satisfaction, mollify confusion and alleviate our fears. Communication makes the human experience worth living. Of course, communication can also be achieved without words.

"Words have magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair. They can transfer knowledge from teacher to pupil; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decision. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions."  Sigmund Freud

I love this quote by Freud but to make the words more precise................I would have said;

Thoughts lead to words which have magical power.

Now you have my thoughts on the subject.
R

Thank you rgray222. It's interesting that you bring up the magic of language.

Yesterday, EFO shared a fascinating video about John Dee and the magic Enochian language . It's really quite a tale involving Shakespeare, medieval spies, and the creation of a new hermetic world:

Posted by EFO (here)
Fermat's last theorem story sound like John Dee's alchemy formula story.

Angel Alphabets-John Dee and Shakespeare by Vincent Bridges, Stars and Stones
(1:20:23 hrs.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ef0OKbT70bY

[shaberon]

Posted by EFO (here)
The Danube culture was an egalitarian civilization which existed 8000 years ago in Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia .....) and is indeed the cradle of civilization, not the Middle East."

I believe there is something to this, i. e. Bosnian Pyramid.

However it seems to me we are better off saying "a" cradle of civilization instead of "the" cradle.

Baalbek, Lebanon, and Dwarka, India, are somewhere in that age.

The oldest carbon-datable sign I would say is wine and beer from around the Yellow River in China around 12,000 years old. That shows surplus agriculture, jugs in houses, and a bit of knowledge.

The Romanian words I remember are galben and albastru. I learned some at one point in time and it seemed similar to Italian with more "u" than "i", but some of it seemed non-related or not like Italian.

However if it is correct that zero is called zero, this comes from Arabic sefr, or cipher. Therefor even if Latin derives from Romanian, the concept or writing or word for zero has come from the same source as anywhere else in Europe. It is likely that India was the first to write or use the numeral zero, but it is called sunya or bindu, which is plainly the Yoga doctrine. If cipher is also a code and Sephirah is counting which "pluralizes" to Sephiroth, that would be Kabbala.

Here are what I find of Romanian numbers, and will add Sanskrit and we can see how close these are to other Latin or Greek languages:

1 unu.............eka
2 doi...............dvi
3 trei...............tri
4 patru........chatur
5 cinci.........panca
6 șase...........shad
7 șapte........sapta
8 opt............asta
9 nouă..........nava
10 zece............das

Greek seems a little closer at five, penta, but not at six.

English then has two unique words, eleven and twelve, before it starts saying thirteen or three-ten. Romanian and Sanskrit both appear to go one-ten, two-ten, etc., like Greek, whereas French has several unique words and then does it backwards at ten-seven. Although there is variance, Indian numbers are mostly intelligible to western languages, except for the Arabic zero.

[silvanelf]

I would recommend the thin book:

LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, and REALITY
Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6197...HT_and_REALITY

An excerpt from the foreword:

As a writer, I have long been interested in semantics, sometimes defined as "the systematic study of meaning." It does a writer no harm, I hold, to know what he is talking about. Whorf, using linguistics as a tool for the analysis of meaning, has made an important contribution to semantics. No careful student of communication and meaning can afford to neglect him. One might add that no philosophical scientist or scientific philosopher can afford to neglect him. Linguistics, he boldly proclaims, "is fundamental to the theory of thinking, and in the last analysis to all human sciences." He is probably right. Every considerable advance in science, such as quantum theory, involves a crisis in communication. The discoverers have to explain first to themselves, and then to the scientific world, what has been found.

Whorf as I read him makes two cardinal hypothesis:
First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependent of language.
Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.

see link above

[silvanelf]

About the difference between random text and meaningful language

Just wait, it will get much more interesting ... even frightening. At first we will take a look at random text, thereafter we will introduce a few concepts which can improve the signal to noise ratio tremendously.

Step 1: random text -- the infinite monkey theorem

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. However, the probability that monkeys filling the observable universe would type a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero).

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913,[1] but the first instance may have been even earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infini...ent_generation


Step 2: random text -- but restricted by a vocabulary and grammar rules

"... even human readers might be taken in by the effective use of jargon ... a reliable gibberish filter requires a careful holistic review by several peer domain experts"

More sophisticated methods are used in practice for natural language generation. If instead of simply generating random characters one restricts the generator to a meaningful vocabulary and conservatively following grammar rules, like using a context-free grammar, then a random document generated this way can even fool some humans (at least on a cursory reading) as shown in the experiments with SCIgen, snarXiv, and the Postmodernism Generator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infini...ent_generation

SCIgen

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (check out the very broad conference description on the WMSCI 2005 website).
— About SCIgen[3]

Computing writer Stan Kelly-Bootle noted in ACM Queue that many sentences in the "Rooter" paper were individually plausible, which he regarded as posing a problem for automated detection of hoax articles. He suggested that even human readers might be taken in by the effective use of jargon ("The pun on root/router is par for MIT-graduate humor, and at least one occurrence of methodology is mandatory") and attribute the paper's apparent incoherence to their own limited knowledge. His conclusion was that "a reliable gibberish filter requires a careful holistic review by several peer domain experts".[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen

The Postmodernism Generator

Beware the note at the bottom of the text: "The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by the Postmodernism Generator."

2. Discourses of futility

The primary theme of the works of Tarantino is the role of the poet as
reader. However, Finnis[6] implies that we have to choose
between rationalism and the postmaterial paradigm of expression. Lacan promotes
the use of capitalist deappropriation to analyse and read language.

“Society is intrinsically impossible,” says Sontag. But many discourses
concerning the fatal flaw, and subsequent futility, of neomodern class may be
discovered. The main theme of Drucker’s[7] essay on
Foucaultist power relations is the difference between class and society.

In the works of Stone, a predominant concept is the concept of capitalist
art. However, an abundance of theories concerning rationalism exist. Bataille’s
analysis of subsemioticist nihilism states that sexual identity, perhaps
paradoxically, has intrinsic meaning.

http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/


Step 3: AI which is able to produce a fully plausible news article given a two sentence input from a human hand

Some kind of human input is necessary as a "seed."

In February 2019, the OpenAI group published the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) artificial intelligence to GitHub, which is able to produce a fully plausible news article given a two sentence input from a human hand. The AI was so effective that instead of publishing the full code, the group chose to publish a scaled-back version and released a statement regarding "concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale."[28]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infini...ent_generation

Researchers, scared by their own work, hold back “deepfakes for text” AI

-- snip --

Given present-day concerns about how fake content has been used to both generate money for "fake news" publishers and potentially spread misinformation and undermine public debate, GPT-2's output certainly qualifies as concerning. Unlike other text generation "bot" models, such as those based on Markov chain algorithms, the GPT-2 "bot" did not lose track of what it was writing about as it generated output, keeping everything in context.

For example: given a two-sentence entry, GPT-2 generated a fake science story on the discovery of unicorns in the Andes, a story about the economic impact of Brexit, a report about a theft of nuclear materials near Cincinnati, a story about Miley Cyrus being caught shoplifting, and a student's report on the causes of the US Civil War.

Each matched the style of the genre from the writing prompt, including manufacturing quotes from sources. In other samples, GPT-2 generated a rant about why recycling is bad, a speech written by John F. Kennedy's brain transplanted into a robot (complete with footnotes about the feat itself), and a rewrite of a scene from The Lord of the Rings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-...s-for-text-ai/

[Anka]

I don't know if that would help thinking about Language ...

I think language is the fundamental imprint in the broad evocation of freedom, intransigence, conviction, philosophy, courage and love, experiencing feelings beyond any imagination, if not least our way of being at the base of the Source Soul in the essence code of a single word.

I have written over 500 poems only about spirituality, ether, civilizations from the Great Universe, the evolution of the Universe and the transformation of human consciousness and in my case, the sensation, the intuition, the nourishment, the emotion, cut off the meaning of the language I wrote in the first reality most of the time and gives me different skills in the second reality in a subordination of simple separable capacity naturally and
proportional to the moment of production, to actually experience an interaction with other cultures from other worlds.

I am the human being, who saw the power of living words in the light through what I experienced in writing and asked for mercy in understanding that language, I asked for and received only the meaning in exchange for the words ... what a translation ..., for
I shouted the meaning without a word, I shout and now hears me the Mother of the Earth Spirit who knows me and maybe an entire Universe through that language. Is it the language of my heart or something else?

I am human, however, and through the experiences that the human word cannot effectively pronounce, I suffer that I cannot reveal, I cannot tell a word or an expression exactly as they are, for the two are actually the Universe in a single experience that I can only experience.

It is not that I did not see them with my eyes, it is not because I did not feel them with my heart, it is not because they are preambles or unknowns, it is simply the mismatch of living under the human meaning to this ability to be able to transfer the visions that I see hearing them, in a language appropriate to our meaning.

The language is my absolute support in a silence that speaks and authenticates me in writing, my solar construction, my spiritual awakening and I will serve it in his conclusion meant to sink further into the depths of my soul from his own place of codified behavior, forever for any kind of language that can decode any good meaning.

[Ernie Nemeth]

In comparison, the numbers in Hungarian are unlike any other language:

egy keto harom negy ott hat het nyolsz kilensz tiz (pardon the spelling, and missing squiggles)

zero - shemi

There are no special words for eleven and twelve.

Hope this fits alright with Shaberon's and EFO's posts about The Romanian culture and the Bosnian language. Hungary, of course, is in that same region...

[Ernie Nemeth]

I forgot, there is one special word for numbers - husz - twenty. Why twenty? No idea.

So huszonegy, huszonketo...

then back to normal harminsz - thirty, negyven - forty, etc.

[Anka]

Contrary to the claim that the most beautiful conversational art is said to be silence, given the circumstances or values of knowing humanity and in a society in which we wake up and fall asleep talking through the huge offer of digital and non-digital intercommunications available and finally we are still alone, we are waiting for those words that have been shouting their names for too long to come out of us, and then we have reached the edge of our own consciousness, where we have long been enveloped in the individual language of our soul.

I lay here in the light of my soul the joy of rediscovering myself with you, the passion of traveling through the written lines to join you.

I hope you will be with me on this road, all lovers of light and development of good and beautiful and urge together to love everything around us for language really binds us all.

Allow me to give you all the gift of my language below, at the will of my Source, and to wish you all the good of the World with all my soul!

The word of life alive in the earthly soul I write
I transfer from the outside to fill the inside void
From inside to outside I look for the next wave
I transfer from writings that flow into eternity
The word in living matter becomes too difficult for me here
The value in the letter to a clean future soul who speaks
I accept the refrain in an accumulated truth of communication
In writing after writing you write them with your value
You leave pledge of living life in another form of living consciousness
There is nothing more useful than a word or thought that has gone
And the words flow quietly through me in radiation as from where in code language
And they come to reinforce meanings by far and nowhere
I live in the living exaltation in which energy take me when
The words make me a coat heavier than light
Against the background armed with expressions, I light up in peace
In dreamy sleep in old pleasure through resonance of a voice
I dream of oscillating transmissions in the balance of this translation
The earthquake in me that shook slightly from you
I plunge into the mountains that rise above me
I rise higher in the drop above the plane after the slightly interposed plane
I gather in drops I ease into an ephemeral flight of falls
With the clothing of the nature of language the power of being light, earth and water
My soul is too thirsty to speak for a way too short in such a long time.

(It is a poem without a rhyme because it is translated from my native language but the meaning has kept it and I send it to you with the greatest love,for the sake of any language communication tip that is different from what we know!)

[wnlight]

@AutumnW - Thank you about bringing in Leonard Cohen. He came to my mind while reading this thread. I simply had not yet found the right words. :-)

[Bill Ryan]

I stumbled on this just now, and it truly delighted me.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

Terry Pratchett

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I stumbled on this just now, and it truly delighted me.

I've remember pondering on that word actually, de-light, when I read this quote:

"You have delighted us long enough."― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Not sure I want to be de-lighted.

[Mike]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I stumbled on this just now, and it truly delighted me.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

Terry Pratchett

huh? what am i missing?

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Mike (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
I stumbled on this just now, and it truly delighted me.

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvelous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

Terry Pratchett

huh? what am i missing?

Ha! (Made me laugh. )

Well, all those words (marvelous, fantastic, glamorous, enchanting, terrific) have changed their meaning. (A few years later, Pratchett might have added 'awesome'. )

I even looked up 'terrific' myself, in case Pratchett had that wrong. But he hadn't. We regard something that's 'terrific' as being extremely positive. But it originally meant 'causing terror'.

I have my own version of this with Lagunas Encantadas, the Spanish name for the mountain lakes where I had a weird experience, my dog Mara was shaking with fear at something totally invisible, and was the area in which Ecuadorian mountaineer Wilson Serrano totally disappeared last year.

It translates as "Enchanted Lakes", which sounds like a very lovely place to be. But it really means "Haunted Lakes", because of the history of spooky, paranormal events there.

So, elves are (literally) "marvelous, fantastic, glamorous, enchanting, and terrific". But they're still not very nice.

[Anka]

The language of all living beings has a multitude of methods of expression developed over the centuries, a kind of soundless communication in a multitude of transmission of this close and over culture, over centuries, is simply too broad, and very handy.
For example, the dance of bees announcing a source of nectar or the beautiful behavior of whales and dolphins in the splendor of communication, is an edifying form.

The development of the alphabet, long-distance communication, printing or writing on a material medium, telegraph, telephone, radio and now image communication, can be a whole study treatise on origin, essentiality or techniques, maybe.

Maybe the language of some emotions, or the body language is just as important, or maybe just a new language behavior can easily lead to the innocent play of the authenticity of human nature.
Communicating in a kind of honest paraverbal language, in simple and good intentions, focused in the moment of action, brings me the certainty of something new all the time as if the behavior gained, deserves the presence of both interlocutors or interlocutors deserve the conclusion further.

I had a discussion some time ago with a friend. In short, I said: "Here is my new address in case the internet and telephony" fall "globally" .. it was fun that I did not take into account the hypothesis of malfunction of the post either, and at the friend's suggestion: "I think we will have to manage to communicate telepathically then ?! I smiled, but I felt the importance in this difference ... it was wonderful, I will not forget that

We feel like we are mandated to communicate, but we always manage to do this in fragments, maybe we need to understand the tactics of an entire process of encouraging the one in front of us first of all.

Maybe language should also be a stimulating event and not necessarily a technique, but a form of empathic intermediate natural reflex which is within itself much more, and maybe the coordinates are related to scaling into components of just giving, not in the form of programming, but in the form of a preconception in the conclusive hypothesis of having care and respect for the one to whom we offering the language.

The language in syntax often used, becomes a kind of objectively accessible hybrid, but the word can become very important if used in the most constructive positive sense, to help mankind.

For me, the universe of the "word" has brought fabulous "lexical awakenings" in terms of feeling, a fund of endless interpretability essential in diction and tonality of what we might call consciousness, but for anyone, language can also be an exercise in particular aptitude in the perfect sincere hypostasis of just being himself.

There can be no mistakes in the enthusiasm to express something sincere, this can be, at least for me, an uninterrupted communion of pure essential dialogue.

[DeDukshyn]

 
Language is a tool, and a rather limiting one - which is what it seems Bill has been alluding to in this thread. It is highly subjective and far more like an art, where your artistic tools are but simple and coarse.

I believe that language is an attempt to conceptualize understanding in a mutual way, but it seems a crude echo of real understanding that actually cannot be conveyed fully in any language, but perhaps can be mutually felt through a different type of communication system - namely one that relies on instinct, knowing, trusting -- one that utilizes our emotional centers. I suppose one would call this "telepathy", but without the limitations of language and linguistically structured thought.

I recall as a small child becoming upset about the vast limitations of my language. I remember being quite often misunderstood, trying to convey concepts, ideas, emotions, etc, that just could not be conveyed easily in linguistic terms, let alone the small amount I had learned up to that point. "Its not supposed to be like this!" I recall breaking down crying front of my mom, "Were supposed to be able to understand each other with our minds! Then we would understand!" I shouted at her.

I have learned and contemplated enough on the mechanics of language and its ability to limit the human mind to know that I had already known it well, intrinsically, as a child.





I present an excerpt from one of the books in my collection, that more eloquently describes the historical (ab)uses and limitations of language ...

"The term spelling is used to describe the mechanics of language. And spelling, in the sense of casting or projecting forth a binding illusion, has been the chief activity of historical languages.

Language is the mechanism of matter's spell, the means through which the spell is maintained from one generation to the next. Those who slumber beneath linguistic illusions limit themselves to the deficiencies, blind spots, and biases of a particular method of symbolism, which even at its best can convey no more than the consciousness of those who invented it. They imagine that without verbal, conceptual understanding there can be no understanding.

Understanding can be symbolized and to some extent conveyed through words, but understanding itself requires language no more than a bird requires a cage. Understanding comes only through experience. And for experience, there has been -- and never will be -- a substitute.

Instead of serving as a tool of your creative expression to help you sculpt and mold sound and light into forms of beauty and grace, your Babylonian primate tongues have defined you, limited you, and kept you in the narrow definition prisons of the cultures that gave them birth.

Belief systems are illusions of linguistically structured thought. They have been the means through which these guttural languages have limited your perception. They are cages created by words, imprisoning their makers. Even insights that accurately reflect reality cannot be preserved effectively by a belief system.

The very attempt to hold onto the Truth destroys its living nature. The same fruit cannot be both growing on the tree and preserved in a jar; it must be one, or the other. The garden of living information that surrounds those who open their hearts in love is so prolific, its fruits so abundant, that there is no need for individual, organizational, or cultural preservation."