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Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
"If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable. Unless, of course, one wishes to locate that origin in the unconscious and spiritual domain of subjectivity and postulate the existence of an unconscious and spiritual language as well as an unconscious and spiritual being separate from the actual and present being. Here the conflation between subjectivity and language is perfect; a conflation that appears to confirm the history of language, subjectivity and knowledge. If this were the case the expression ‘non mi viene la parola' would mean nothing more than ‘my unconscious self is not coming to my conscious self, bringing forward the unconscious and potential language that is stored away for my own use.’ But if this were the case, how would it be possible for an unconscious language to be called into existence and actuality at any given moment? The existence of language in the realm of utterance and its situatedness in actuality denies the representation and interpretation of the origin of language as the locus of the spiritual and the unconscious. The surreal, the ‘unconscious,’ the magic language is not the one that appears, uncontaminated and pure, straight out of its original home, it is not the origin. Rather, it is a word and a language that arrive on the plain of presentability via a different route than ordinary language.
http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-2/bartoloni04.html
-Paolo Bartoloni, The Paradox of Translation via Benjamin and Agamben
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
The English language is being augmented every year by about 400 new words. We cannot cope. We are drowning in the plethora. It’s far better to possess a small vocabulary that you use properly rather than a big vocabulary with which you’re a bit impressionistic. There’s a danger for the English language to be known rather inexactly.
Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
The vanishing of languages, like those of living species, is an event that has been repeated many times in history. Localized disasters such as a volcano eruptions, great floods or warfare have played a part, but in the modern era the spread of Europeans--and European diseases--has greatly accelerated the pace of destruction. Local or regional language communities may be overpowered by a dominant metropolitan language, which increases the pressure to neglect the ancestral tongue in favor of the new one and is seen as the key to prospering in the dominant culture. Children may be forbidden to use their mother tongue in the classroom, as has occurred to many groups, including the Welsh, Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians. Speakers of minority languages have been forcibly relocated
and combined with speakers of other languages, as happened when Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. Practices such as these have made Native American languages the most imperiled of any on the earth.
The death of a language is not only a tragedy for those directly involved but also an irretrievable cultural loss for the rest of the world. Through language, each culture expresses a unique worldview. Thus, any effort to preserve linguistic variety implies a deep respect for the positive values of other cultures.
“... I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no pattern of words and sentences, however rich, however subtle, can do justice to the interconnected Gestalts with which experience presents us. Consequently the phenomenal forms of our name-conditioned universe are "by nature delusory and fallacious." Wisdom comes only to those who have learned how to talk and read and write without taking language more seriously than it deserves. As the only begotten of civilization and even of our humanity, language must be taken very seriously. Seriously, too, as an instrument (when used with due caution) for thinking about the relationships between phenomena. But it must never be taken seriously when it is used, as in the old creedal religions and their modern political counterparts, as being in any way the equivalents of immediate experience or as being a source of true knowledge about the nature of things.
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
-David Lodge, "The State of the Language," "Where It's At," 1980. [Defending Californian slang, or "psychobabble"]
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
Language is a field of battle, the media is the artillery, and vocabulary is the ammunition. The NWO has taken the field by storm, and is proceeding with coordinated attacks on several fronts, using all the latest high-tech vocabulary ammunition. They've laid a bed of land mines that cripple us when we try to stand on them: 'liberalism', conservatism', prosperity', 'democracy'."
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
Every man is a part of each and our senses are attached to both. So when a man speaks of himself as a man, he is in matter; but when he speaks a scientific truth, he is out of matter and so far equal to god. So man's investigations are but an imitation of wisdom's experiments for his own happiness. And man not wanting to be outdone by his father tries to imitate what he sees and hears; this makes man a kind of progressive being. Man invents language from the fact that he cannot be satisfied to let God or wisdom dictate his acts, so he invents language to explain his wisdom. It has been said that language was invented to deceive others. In some cases I have no doubt but the world thinks it does but wisdom gives it another direction; or language acts to undeceive and it often exposes our ignorance.
The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: "I came, I saw, I conquered." Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, "That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle—or so it seems to me. Usually the items on a list are different but related things: eggs, butter, cheese. Sometimes they achieve a unity in which their distinctiveness is lost to all but the analytic mind, a good cheese omelet. Or perhaps we might even decide that they are but manifestations or expressions of the same thing. Lincoln would have us see these three aspects of government as constituting an inseparable whole. The asyndeton helps him do this.
Of course, these two distinguishable usages of asyndeton are not mutually exclusive. Lincoln's asyndeton contributes to the striking brevity of his address. And the psychoanalytically subtle among us will point out that at some level seeing is organically connected with conquering (and many other things as well).
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Sweedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Books about Language
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