Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site decwrl.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-lymph!arndt From: arndt@lymph.DEC Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang Subject: The Soapy-Woof theory of talk. Message-ID: <4162@decwrl.UUCP> Date: Thu, 8-Nov-84 09:24:37 EST Article-I.D.: decwrl.4162 Posted: Thu Nov 8 09:24:37 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 10-Nov-84 03:24:50 EST Sender: daemon@decwrl.UUCP Organization: DEC Engineering Network Lines: 43 It seems to me that there is a whole at the bottem of the bag. I mean, does language really have THAT much control over how we think? "Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available." ". . . what language can hardly do at all, and never does well, is to inform us about complex physical shapes and movements. Hence descriptions of such things in the ancient writers are nearly always unintelligible. Hence in real life we never voluntarily use language for this purpose; we draw a diagram or go through pantomimic gestures." "Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more thatn one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strickly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is unilinear as time. Hence, in narrative, the great difficulty of presenting a very complicated change which happens suddenly. If we do justice to the complexity, the time the reader must take over the passage will destroy the feeling of suddenness. If we get in the suddenness we shall not be able to get in the complexity. I am not saying thta genius will not find its own ways of palliating this defect in the instrument; only that the instrument is in this way defective." "One of the most important and effective uses of language is the emotional. It is also, of course, wholly legitimate. We do not talk only in order to reason or to inform. We have to make love, and quarrel, to propitiate and pardon, to rebuke, console, intercede, and arouse. The real objection lies not against the language of emotions as such, but against language which, being in reality emotional, masquerades - whether by plain hypocrisy or subtler self-deceit - as being something else." From: C.S. Lewis, STUDIES IN WORDS, Cambridge University Press, 1960. Chapter 9 "At The Fringe Of Language, p.214-5. Comments??????????????????? Regards, Ken Arndt