re origins

Hi Folks,

Further explanation.

My humble hypothesis is that one cannot find the origins of language by
peering at words just as one cannot find the roots, let alone the seeds of
language by peering at the branches and leaves, unless one makes some across
changing forms connections or links.

This boils down to, [collapsing a few years work into one paragraph]

A: an Epistemology ie How can order be imposed?
B: an Ontology ie who does what to whom how - a grammar of action
C: a Psychology because our knowledge uses man as the measure of all things;
and measure does not mean yardstick here.

Standard knowledge since Kant, and he copied much from Aristotle, assumes an
already organised and constituted world order, which, as "god created the
Universe". This no longer applies as we are into evolution, change and all
that of: Form. Rupert Shelldrake's ' that form has memory' applies such
that in the case of culture it becomes custom, tradition and habit patterns.
"Logic" so called, has now been converted into data crunching.

Just as happens with the child in growth, it starts as a given,somewhat
fixed ritual which, with experience & practice, we supply with variant and
variable twiddlypoms such that it turns more complex, and, in the case of
language we find a world distribution of those variants as language families
This implies a superpositional generic formula [see above] one first has to
reduce in order to trace its evolution, just as did Darwin, although he
missed a few. Thus, for origins one has to ask: what are the forms of
representation and how did they change one into the other untill it arrived
at language.

Take a simple example. St Paul was a bigot, at first against Xianity and
after conversion equally rabidly for it. if now we focus on the content we
fail to find a reason for how he acted at he did. In the case of knowledge
we'd have to look for higher order abstractions as, so to speak, the grammar
of how language actually works. This concerns 'mind' more than the
so-called physiological substratum of the brain. It won't turn logical,
except in hindsight, and we first have to find and make the connections
because all logic does is establish connections to make up a pattern as a
whole.

Order may be defined as a selective distortion of "chaos" with chaos being a
poly-modal set of interlacing orders. But that applies to art as well. And
art came before words. So it is there we should look for how it is
organised or shaped into order, and in a non-linear way which, nevertheless,
has a given recipe in common. In short what Chomsky calls a Deep Structure
is to be found in the communally shared mind of a given culture.

Specialisation defeats us all.

Adrian