Subject: [cybalist] Re: Mitanni, Hurrians, etc.
> Gerry here:
> Just because you "know" what the image means doesn't mean your idea is
> the only correct one. Sounds very authoritarian to me.
> Gerry
You might well be right Gerry, but I try to be as brief as I can without
adding all the ifs, maybes and buts. Please, don't mistake the Baconian
style for its intent. I hope this is not "cause" for offhand rejection or
non-examination of the ideas proposed. Should I write as I think it would go
something like this:
At this specific location of awareness and thought the folllowing
hypothetical possibilities accrue, after feeding in some assumptions
examined first, rather than just say "I". Gets a little tedious, it do.
Point is: can you falsify my reasoning? If so is it done by comparison with
known methods? If so, may I point out a very long term dissatisfaction with
"applied Linguistic methods" used in order to "solve" the riddle about the
origins of language. In a first place it ought to be the origins of the
means to representation which comes before one can communicate at all. In a
second place since language, as word uses, evolved out of something wholly
else, since a "cause" seldom resembles its product, I went that way.
Instead of working backwards I started at a beginning, with the question
"HOW can order be imposed" and allowed for human minds as they did just
that.
Somehow out of hominid communication, which comes naturally to the beast,
evolved human word style language, which took off around 6,000 BCE odd. The
Hominid took off around a million years, speech is now accepted as around
300,000 BCE and thus there is the matter of a small gap in evolutionary
changes between those dates. Next, man was a hunter form much long than a
farmer and most of our ideas are based on the way farming evolved into a
social system we now in-habit. The two styles of cooperation and interaction
differ somewhat and if one percolates the origins of communication through
that lot certain notions pop up in the head other than readily available. I
only spent forty years working at it, of which you now get a rather
abbreviated summary.
Would you like to read my book "The Glue and Solvent of the Universe" NZ
.98, Word 97, .rtf, 570 Kb zipped? Although it may well seem I pop up out
of the woodwork with some eclectic notions does not mean I fantasised them
up. The History of the acceptance of new or other ideas is filled with
initial rejections later revised. There's one such change going on right now
in science and not an easy passage is had of it either, as it embodied ideas
framed last Century and blithely ignored until now.
When I migrated from the Netherlands to New Zealand I lived for around 5
years in a totally ambiguous "universe" which, it was rather obvious to me,
was quite unambiguous to them. This changed once and after I absorbed the
totality of the total culture, which, one might say, left a lasting
impression.
By the same token communication evolved from body language, into art thence
into words by synechdochal ways. It also began with but three main branches
of knowledge which evolved into our now manifold specialisations and to work
one's way into that implies the acceptance that archaic languages had but
around 40,000 words where ours has a million and therefore were a shade
more ambiguous and pictures are even more ambiguous in the making and
interpretation.
I researched, for the Tax Dept, now many decades ago, the origin of taxes
and found that tithes came before that and sacrifices before that, which
matches how history has it and no textbook or dictionary or encyclopedia
made that one clear. Check it out if you like, the Linguist.org site lists
dictionaries and the Langenberg site it mentions is very good. Tbooks, Dict
and Encyc all rely on what I name as "rubber wall" definitions with portend,
in general, "don't search any further", which is exactly what I then do.
For one of them, proverbs, I discovered they hail back to once oracular
sayings oft repeated, also not found mentioned in any textbook I know of.
In fact your post points up one clear modern habit and a long term bone
of contention with me, namely, that once nominalised it is categorised and
the category decides how to react. But this way to react, now commonplace,
took millenia to evolve. I am interested in what forms it passed through to
become as it is now. Lyall Watson in "Dark Nature" makes some interesting
points anent that one. IT summarises as: that all too many of our charming
habits reach back into even the pre-mammalian. The syntax of your sentence
is the more interesting to me. Did you read the PS? Do you actually know
what polymodal synaesthetic and non linear thinking is like?
Adrian