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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
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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