Wise Words?

Concisenice

Some months back, I coined the word "Proverbose" and defined it as "Wordiness: many more with much more less."

And this has led my mind to thoughts of "Concisenice," defined as "Wordlessness: much more fewer with fewer many more."

Works for me, but what about you?

Spanish passage on my blog . . .

La botella sin fondo de la cerveza

Simple Spanish Spiel

I found this Internet scrap of information in Spanish about me and my work on Thursday:

El Dr. Jeffery Horace Hodges. BA 79, ha publicado su primera novela, La botella sin fondo de la cerveza. un cuento moral postmoderno fáustico naif de un joven que cambia su alma al diablo por una botella de cerveza sin fin, pero tiene un cambio de corazón. En alrededor de 150 páginas, el libro incluye muchas ilustraciones del artista conocido Terrance Lindall. Hodges tiene dos títulos de posgrado en Historia por la Universidad de Berkeley y vive en Seúl, Corea del Sur con su esposa, Hwang Sun-ae, y sus dos hijos . . . . Él es un profesor de la Universidad Femenina Ewha, una escuela cristiana fundada por misioneros en el siglo 19, donde enseña composición y la . . .

The passage just breaks off like that. I also see that my first and middle names got reversed. This sort of thing happens all the time with my especially difficult name, but I don't want to start whinging about that. I did wonder how this bit of information got onto the Internet, and I think I've figured that out. It probably comes from Baylor Magazine in the Spanish edition. It thus originates in the English version that I myself penned.

But I'm pretty sure I got my own name right.

Wise Words?

It doth suffice.

Man 1: A word to the wise is "enough."

Man 2: Some say "sufficient" is also the wise word.

Man 1: You mean, "sufficient" is "enough"? Absurd!

Man 2: No, I mean either "sufficient" or "enough" is adequate.

Man 1: You just go from bad to worse! Enough already!

The Tangle Dance?

Tangled

Google Images

It takes two to tangle? Or just one long one? (As in photo?)

Actually, the word is "tango," which is probably from the Niger-Congo language, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary (compare Ibibio tamgu, "to dance").

As for "tangle," it has an interesting history:

mid-14c., nasalized variant of tagilen "to involve in a difficult situation, entangle," from a Scandinavian source (compare dialectal Swedish taggla "to disorder," Old Norse þongull "seaweed"), from Proto-Germanic *thangul- (source also of Frisian tung, Dutch tang, German Tang "seaweed"); thus the original sense of the root evidently was "seaweed" as something that entangles (itself, or oars, or fishes, or nets).

Perhaps these two words can tango . . .

A Man of Few Words

The Four Ce's

Studio GC

It goes without saying: "Remain Unsaid!"

The exceptional "but"

BUT!

Are the two following sayings identical? (Yeah, the question is stupid.)

A cat may look at a king, but a dog is a man's best friend.

A dog is a man's best friend, but a cat may look at a king.

We see that sequence matters. In each of the two sayings, the term "but" renders preference to the statement that follows.

But you knew that . . .

The word "refute" is in dispute:

"I refute it Thus!"

Sculpture of Dr. Samuel Johnson

Bronze, h. 200 cm (2008)

Sculptor: William Fawke

In a recent post that touched on my memory of 9/11, I remarked on a brief moment of agreement I had seemed to have with Noam Chomsky:

I found myself nodding at Noam Chomsky's remark about chickens coming home to roost because I assumed that the United States had funded Bin Laden in the Afghan uprising against the Soviet Union, though I soon discovered that Bin Laden strongly refuted this, claiming never to have received any American money.

My cyber-friend Bill Vallicella commented on my use of the word "refute":

To deny a claim is not the same as to refute it. 'Refute' is a verb of success. But perhaps you disagree.

I responded:

The word "refute" is in dispute:

1. To prove to be false or erroneous; overthrow by argument or proof: refute testimony.
2. To deny the accuracy or truth of: refuted the results of the poll.

I prefer your use of the word (#1), but I used it that way once as an undergrad, and I was was shown a dictionary definition that corresponded to #2.

I should have chosen a different term, but I guess I'll leave the post unaltered - or maybe devote a post to the proper use of "refute" . . .

The proper use of "refute" . . . is in dispute, within the dictionary itself.

A Lesson in the Translation of Arabic Muslim Terms

Yigal Carmon
Google Images

In the MEMRI Daily Brief No. 106 (October 7, 2016), Yigal Carmon has published his article "Lost In Translation In The U.S. Media - Part I: 'Allahu Akbar,' 'La Ilaha Illa Allah,' 'Istishhad'," in which he corrects the routine mistranslation of Arabic Muslim terminology in the media:

Allahu Akbar, la ilaha illa Allah, and istishhad are routinely mistranslated in the American media.

[The] word istishhad ["martyrdom," "death of a martyr," or "heroic death"] . . . [denotes] a religious act of faith in which a believer strives to kill as many perceived enemies as he can, at the price of his own life as a means of getting closer to Allah, with the prophets, the righteous, and the martyrs in Paradise. The goal of this act of faith is to make Allah's religion supreme on Earth, in what the perpetrator believes to be an imitation of the battles of early formative Islam of the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the four righteous caliphs. This is often recklessly and inaccurately translated as "suicide," which is an act motivated by personal desperation, and for which a different word – intihar – is reserved in Arabic.

Allahu Akbar and la ilaha illa Allah – both statements of faith that embody the religious concept of the supremacy of Islam and of Allah – are mistranslated . . . . [The] rendering of Allahu Akbar in the U.S. media as "God is great" omits the aspect of superiority in the word Akbar (which . . . means "greater" or "greatest," not merely "great") and blurs the specific reference to Allah rather than to another deity. In the same vein, la illaha illa Allah is often translated in the U.S. media as "There is no god but God" (rather than "There is no god but Allah"). Omitting the supremacy of Allah over all other deities is a mistranslation.

Thanks are due to Carmon for these translations. I was aware of the true meaning of Allahu Akbar and la ilaha illa Allah, but istishhad was new to me, in that I didn't  know the Arabic term.

Anyway, Western media should take note - or better, take notes, as this is some necessary schooling for them.

Poetry Break: Weak Power of Words

Ice
Brainless Tales

As we gain insight into language, we come to recognize its intrinsic ambiguity

Sounding Words

"Have a nice day" might be "Have an ice day."

Or vice-versa . . . but if we adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion, we'll know which way to read . . . until our hermeneutic of suspicion spirals inward upon itself, questioning turtles all the way down . . .

Is "multiguity" a word? "Megaguity"? I'm looking for a word that means more than "ambiguity."

Animal 'Communication' across Species?

Taxidermied Robotic Northern Pygmy Owl
Jeremy Roberts for The New York Times

In an NYT article, science writer Christopher Solomon reports that "When Birds Squawk, Other Species Seem to Listen" (May 18, 2015), or so he's told by Erick Greene, professor of biology at the University of Montana, who studies animal 'communication.' Professor Greene showed Mr. Solomon what happened when a 'robotic' owl was switched on and began to survey an area for prey:

Greene . . . stepped away from the stand [with the hidden robotic owl] and stood by the home's backdoor. He pressed the fob of a modified garage-door opener. The curtain dropped, unveiling a taxidermied northern pygmy owl. Its robotic head moved from side to side, as if scanning for its next meal. [At that moment, the] yard hushed, then erupted in sound. Soon birds arrived from throughout the neighborhood to ornament the branches of a hawthorn above the mobbed owl and call out yank-yank and chick-a-dee . . . . [Later at] his laboratory on campus, Dr. Greene plugged the recording of the pygmy owl fracas into a computer that he likened to an "acoustic microscope." The calls appeared as a spectrogram - essentially musical notation . . . . One call lasts only a second or three, but can have up to a dozen syllables . . . . [And size matters:] black-capped chickadees embed information about the size of predators into these calls. When faced with a high-threat raptor perched nearby, the birds not only call more frequently, they also attach more dee's to their call. [But not necessarily big size:] Raptors tend to be the biggest threat to birds nearest their own size because they can match the maneuverability of their prey. So a large goshawk might only merit a chick-a-dee-dee from a nimble chickadee, while that little pygmy owl will elicit a chick-a-dee followed by five or even 10 or 12 additional dee syllables . . . . [Moreover,] "squirrels understand 'bird-ese,' and birds understand 'squirrel-ese.'" When red squirrels hear a call announcing a dangerous raptor in the air, or they see such a raptor, they will give calls that are acoustically 'almost identical' to the birds.

I'm not sure what this adds up to so far as animal language in general is concerned, but I am surprised that squirrels mimic bird calls - and vice-versa, I suppose. This article at least shows that some sort of communication is embedded deeply in various 'lower' species, so the possibility that 'higher' species - such as dolphins, orcas, sperm whales, and elephants, not to mention various apes - might engage in relatively complex language is all the more likely.

Why, this might even support the otherwise incredible possibility that human beings can communicate intelligibly, though the preponderance of evidence is much against it.

Starbucks: King Konglish!

Starbucks Wet Wipe
Two Views
Photos by Hwang Sun-Ae

I thought I'd be soonest to blog on the baffling 'Konglish' you see in the two images above (click to enlarge), but two other bloggers beat me to the punch! The first is a blog by David Harbinson, a UK expat who's teaching English in Korea and blogging under the title "A new day, a new thing," and he has this to say:

Well, today, I learned that the people (maybe person) behind Starbucks Korea's Twitter account really are a helpful, friendly, multilingual bunch (individual?). It all started when I got to my regular branch today. I was hungry, so ordered a sandwich with my coffee. It came with a hand wipe, you know for cleaning your hands afterwards. But it's what was written on the outside that I found most amusing/bewildering.

Mr. Harbinson saw what I saw, the Konglish, and he set about posting a Tweet on Twitter:

I get the keeping you clean bit, but for the life of me, couldn't make any sense of the first sentence. So, I did what any social media loving person would do, and took to Twitter, with a somewhat sarcastic comment before settling down to do my work:

OK Starbucks Korea, I see words. I'm not sure what they mean, but I see them.

Within a couple of minutes, Starbucks Tweeted in response, asking Mr. Harbinson for a correction, and you can read more about that on his blog post. Let's move on to the other blog, Wandering Seouls, which another expat maintains - call her "Tierney Teacher" since the kids at her workplace do - and she has this to say:

Jumping to a totally new topic, but one that still brings me joy, a Starbucks just opened literally two blocks from our work. Talk about luck! It is as if the coffee gods heard me moaning about how there seems to be a Starbucks everywhere, except between our home and our work, and decided to take pity on me. But at first I didn't know the location was new, in fact I was walking around before class one day and just sort of stumbled upon it. I thought to myself "how have I never noticed this here before?" and concluded that it was because it is across the street from a Baskin Robbin's that has posters of Shinee in its windows, and each time I walked by I must have been so enthralled with the pictures I didn't even glance across the street to see my little slice of home . . . but then Taylor told me that the Starbucks opened on the 24th (and this picture was taken on the 25th) so I felt much less silly :] In addition, I don't know if it can be read from this photo, but the wet nap I received with my chunked pineapple reads as follows:

Everyone can use relieved as made safety. Keeping you clean!

The Konglish (Korean's version of English) is frequent and prominent here. And brings me barrels of laughs! I'll post more terrible translations as I find them. I just couldn't believe that Starbucks, a Seattle-based, American company, had such a wild mistake! Ah, the humor still brings a smile to my face even as I write about it a week later!

Konglish is definitely frequent, and often funny, but I usually ignore it. This example, however, caught my eye, mainly because I think of Starbucks as an American company. I guess it's gone native, and for the nonce, it's the King of Konglish!

By the way, just one more shot, this one by a student of mine, Kim Young Ji (김영지):

This photo was taken in the English Lounge, where I have my office hours, and those are my grubby fingers holding the badly needed wet wipe . . .

Update: There's a third website dealing with the Starbucks Konglish, but the site is in Korean, so I can't read it, and my wife is too busy this morning (getting ready for a two-day trip to Jeju), so she had no time other than just to glance at the site, and she said it looks like a grammatical analysis to determine the meaning of the 'English' on the packet, seemingly as if the statement, "Everyone can use relieved as made safety," were grammatically correct!

Perhaps one of my readers has more time and can take a closer look?

Etymology of "Trafika"

Interbrand Blog

I learned yesterday what "trafika" means in Czech (a sort of corner-store kiosk), but I still wondered about its etymology, and I managed to find those roots in time for today's blog entry!

Helmut Satzinger and Danijela Stefanović trace "trafika" from Serbian back to the Bavarian feminine noun "Trafik." Since Trafik is a word used in Bavarian German, it probably entered the Czech language directly from Austro-German (and its meaning is consistently a sort of corner-store kiosk).

But the Germans themselves got the term from the Italian word "traffico," which is a masculine word meaning "traffic," "trade," or "activity" and "rush."

As things turn out, my guess that the word was related to the English word "traffic" -- as in "trafficking" (i.e., "trade") -- was not so far off, after all.

And since the Italian word also means "rush," Kevin Kim's guess of "a 'drive-by' convenience store" was also not so far off the mark!

Enormous Cadaver Shattered by North Korean Knife!

North Korean Flag

Google Images

I mentioned the other day that I receive the Korea Open Source Digest weekdays. Well, yesterday, Volume VI, Issue 31 (Friday, 15 February 2013) arrived with a wonderfully unbalanced article by a certain Tong T'ae-kwan for North Korea's Rodong Sinmun (2/14/13). Titled "Time Will Prove," it argued that North Korea was right about conducting the recent nuclear test, and the rest of the world wrong in condemning it, because the United States was misleading every other country by pretending to speak for the world through the United Nations. The best line was this one:

We can raise the knife of justice and break into pieces the enormous cadaver that tries to hide its true identity concealed underneath noisy twisted logic and its blood-smeared face borrowing the face of the UN. (page 1-24)

To write a sentence like that one -- in which a dead body uses twisted logic and a UN face mask to hide its true, bloody-faced identity until shattered by a juridical knife -- requires a special literary sort of linguistic genius! The South Koreans can only manage a poor substitute for tortured English, as with the caption from this photograph for the JoongAng Daily, "Better than tractors":

Young students stomp the ground covered

with barley sprouts yesterday in Ulju County, Ulsan,

as fresh spouts have come up with the warmer weather.

It is common practice to pack the ground

as the soil unthaws after winter.

Let that ground 'unthaw' as much as it wants, it'll never match the logic-twisting cadaver!

A Terminal Deferment . . .

Jorge Luis Borges

In a Hotel of the Universe of This Curse

Wikipedia

Eli Park Sorensen has written another interesting column for The Korea Herald: "The gigantic, confusing library of the universe" (December 24, 2012). This time, he meditates on a writer who has fascinated me since I first read "The Library of Babel" at age 19, though I could, at that tender age, scarcely grasp its meaning. It is a rich text, as Sorensen reminds us:

Jorge Luis Borges imagines the universe as a gigantic library, consisting of an indefinite number of hexagonal rooms, each filled with rows of books. "Each book," writes Borges, "is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are in black color." Most of the text inside the books, however, consists of sequences of letters utterly incomprehensible and unreadable to the people inhabiting this mysterious library. Occasionally, some have made valuable discoveries of fragments of meaningful text; but "for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherence."

Who created this library -- let alone authored the books -- no one knows. For a long time, the inhabitants believed that these enigmatic books were written in old, forgotten languages. But since some of the books consist of only one or two letters, the language theory is eventually rejected. Finally, a librarian makes the deduction that the library is total - that everything which can possibly be expressed in any language at any time throughout history, every possible linguistic combination, is contained in these books. "Everything," writes Borges; "the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue" -- and so on.

This library is a confusing farrago of the senseless and the meaningful, the stochastic and the orderly, the chance and the regular -- a bibliographication of the atoms and their swerve! Everything seems to repeat almost as though Nietzsche's eternal recurrence had congealed from temporal to spatial -- a point that one can ambiguously take, pausing either before or after "almost."

Sorensen himself goes on to make a number of interesting points, but I want to focus on his initial couple of points, which follow his above summary on Borges's story:

Borges' hilarious story illustrates an uncanny dimension of language; that our language has a limit, which in effect limits what we may say and think about the world. That is, language is essentially a vast, but finite, system of different signs and codes which in various combinations generate meanings, albeit not by referring to something outside the system, but rather from within the system itself -- between the different signs. Using a dictionary to understand the meaning of a particular word, for example, will lead to other words; these words, in turn, lead to new words, and so on. Somewhere between these words, meaning temporarily resides. However, the meaning -- of things, objects, phenomena -- is never permanently fixed, but constantly slides, or is deferred, along an interminable chain of signifiers.

First, Sorensen catches me by surprise by affirming that the story implies a finite universe of discourse. I had thought that by "indefinite number of hexagonal rooms," he meant an unbounded number, indicating that there is always 'room' for one more section of books, a bit like Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel, a hypothetical building with an infinite number of rooms, each of them occupied, yet the hotel always accommodates more guests by moving the guests residing in the first room into the second room, those in the second room into the third room, those in the third room into the fourth room, and so on endlessly (suggesting that Mary and Joseph ought to have tried Hilbert's Hotel in Bethlehem).

But perhaps I've not quite understood. Maybe Sorensen means that language is finite, but the universe is infinite because every book occurs infinitely many times. Yet, if I recall, Borges doesn't state quite that, for he speaks of books that differ only by a letter or a comma, not books that are identical, nor does Sorensen say this either. Perhaps I'd better re-read Borges . . . or talk to Sorensen.

Second, Sorensen makes a point often found in Continental philosophy and Critical Theory, namely, that the meaning of a word is interminably deferred because checking a dictionary leads only to further words, which lead to more words, leading to other words -- in other words, endless deferral of meaning. But I think that there's a problem with this picture of how we seek meaning. Allow me to explain by drawing upon a point made by Jennifer Robertson in her article "Robots of the Rising Sun" (The American Interest, Volume VI, Number 1, Autumn (September/October) 2010):

What distinguished Japanese robotics early on -- and now almost all roboticists have followed suit -- is the concept of embodied intelligence or embodied cognition. Roboticists point out that intelligence cannot exist in the form of an abstract algorithm, but requires a material body. The emphasis on embodiment recognizes that the body (whether human or robotic) is actively and continually in touch with its surroundings. Moreover, cognitive processes originate in an organism's sensory-motor experience. Only dynamic interaction between a robot and its environment can generate emergent autonomous behavior; behavior initiated by some external control system cannot. Advances in artificial life, including nanotechnology and self-evolving genetic algorithms, have led to the development of new sensory, actuation and locomotion components for robots that, in turn, have enabled the actualization of artificial embodied cognition. Central to the emphasis in robotics on embodied intelligence are qualitative studies in the field of child development.

Data from studies of infants are also used dialectically, and Japanese scientists have taken the lead in both. In June 2007, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency unveiled the Child Robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, that will teach researchers about sensory-motor development in human children. The androgynous CB2 moves like a human child between the ages of one and three, although it is disproportionately large and heavy at 1.2 meters tall and 33 kilograms. Its 56 actuators take the place of muscles, and it has 197 sensors for touch, small cameras working as eyes, and an audio sensor. CB2 can also speak through a set of artificial vocal chords. With this robot, researchers hope to "study human recognition development" such as language acquisition and communication skills. (page 68ab)

My point is that the meaning of words does not ultimately derive solely from the meaning of other words. Continental philosophy is too fixated on the abstract level of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic theory, thus ignoring the concrete manner in which language learning is embodied. Language learning initially begins with the child learning rather concrete things through interacting with its environment and learning language by hearing what things are called -- though I don't mean that language is fundamentally a matter of learning nouns, even if, as Gertrude Stein noted, "A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time" -- but if meaning were really constantly deferred, the child would never learn to communicate.

I could of course -- as an adult -- prepare a lecture in which I offer a sequence, arbitrarily long, of words that I don't know defined in terms of other words that I don't know. But eventually, the words would lead to a word that I do understand, and deference to deferment would terminate. I could defer termination for an indefinite term only artificially, but not interminably, for "language is essentially a vast, but finite, system of different signs and codes," as Sorensen notes, and I thus must eventually encounter a word that I do know. I therefore differ on deferment . . . unless I simply don't yet know what this word means.

Now where did my dictionary get to . . .

Word of the Weak: "Weepers"

Erin McKean

Wikipedia

Erin McKean, who writes a column on language for the Boston Globe, has a recent article, "New words from noncelebrity neologizers" (January 22, 2012), in which she introduces a new term that beer lovers can use:

You may not have reason to refer to pint-size liquor bottles that often, but if you do you'll appreciate knowing that Jemaleddin Cole calls them weepers: "the sad, drinking-alone counterpart of a growler of beer." (A growler is an older word for a pail or pitcher of beer, now used for a half-gallon jug.)

I said "beer lovers" due to the 'etymology,' but liquor lovers of all kinds can use the term. Cole thinks that this word "weepers" meets the conditions set by Allan Metcalf's acronymically named FUDGE scale:

Neologism expert Allan Metcalf, the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, gives five factors by which to judge the success of a new word: what he calls the FUDGE scale. FUDGE stands for "frequency of use" (more use means a higher chance of success), "unobtrusiveness" (is it too jokey?), "diversity of users and situations" (is it used by a lot of different people?), "generation of other forms and meanings" (can you verb it?), and "endurance of the concept."

McKean might be right, but I wonder if "weepers" is just a mite too jokey in its acute cuteness.

Readers' opinions?

The Polyglot Alexander Arguelles: Living on "unemployment checks and Korean translation work"

Alexander Arguelles

Wikipedia

In a book review by Peter Constantine for the NYT, "The Art of Mastering Many Tongues" (January 20, 2012), we learn of Michael Erard's search for true language virtuosos, genuine polyglots who have mastered multiple languages, a quest that Erard writes about in Babel No More and that led him to Berkeley, as Constantine informs us:

One polyglot . . . [whom Erard] meets, Alexander Arguelles, who lives in Berkeley "on unemployment checks and Korean translation work," shows that anyone who hopes to achieve fluency in more than six languages must dedicate himself to the task rigorously -- in fact almost exclusively. Arguelles keeps his languages in shape by subjecting himself to an unforgiving schedule, keeping spreadsheets that record the hours and minutes he spends on each one. Arguelles "tracks his linguistic progress through the hours as saints once cataloged their physical self-sacrifices," Erard writes. Of 4,454 hours of language study Arguelles did over a period of 456 days, he spent 456 hours on his native language, English, and also 456 on Arabic, and then a descending number of hours on the remaining 50 languages on his spreadsheet. Though his learning techniques may seem strange, they also appear to be effective. In one, called "shadowing," students listen to language recordings on a portable player while briskly walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically as they shout out the foreign words and phrases they are listening to. Though one is bound to make a spectacle of oneself, this technique seems to help the beginner shed some of the self-consciousness connected with speaking a foreign language.

That's the very man in the photo above. Our globe-trekking paths have crossed, apparently, both of us having spent time in Berkeley. Arguelles is probably joking about the unemployment checks, for Wikipedia shows him more gainfully employed than that. He may have good advice for language learning, but I don't intend to take him up on shadowing. If I tried that technique here in Seoul to work on Korean -- "walking in a public place, gesticulating energetically . . . [and] shout[ing] out . . . [Korean] words and phrases" -- I'd be committed to an asylum . . . by my wife! Not that such a fate would necessarily be much different than the mad life I already lead, confined here in the bedlam called Seoul.

I wonder if Arguelles used his shadowing technique here in Korea. Wikipedia refers to his "his years of residence in South Korea," during which he studied "a wide range of languages." A citation is supplied that leads to a biographical entry by Dr. Arguelles in which Wikipedia's information is confirmed:

In order to live . . . [in Korea], I obtained a faculty position at Handong University on the eastern coast of the country. This university had only been founded the year before, and they needed somebody to develop and lead a foreign language program, so my initial duties were to teach French, Spanish, and German . . . . [To] get down to serious language study . . . . Handong . . . was exactly what I needed . . . , for the campus was on an isolated hill amidst pine and bamboo forests and rice fields with a view of the Pacific Ocean from my back porch. Furthermore, it soon became clear that, while the university was recruiting foreign faculty to give it international stature, we were viewed as outsiders and thus completely shut out of the administrative decision making process. Other people found this intolerable and soon left, but I turned the situation on its head by reasoning that as my sole duty was to teach languages, I could devote myself entirely to their study on my own . . . . Initially, of course, I focused on Korean and, after I got grounded, on Classical Chinese and Japanese in a comparative context. However, I also ranged very widely through the world of languages . . . . This period came to a close when I belatedly sat down with a calculator and did some serious time management projections. Developing structural knowledge and conversational ability in a language and refining and maintaining that ability can be achieved with just 15 or 20 minutes a day, each and every day, over a period of years. However, developing deeper knowledge and above all enjoying reading the literature of a language requires more like an hour a day, and there are all too few of these . . . . I . . . began to allow myself to simply enjoy reading in my more familiar ones. I also began to "get a life" by getting married, siring a son, and paying more attention to my career by writing and publishing more . . . . [I know many languages, but] in a class all by itself, there is Korean. I lived in its land for nine years, and when I left I took it with me personified in my wife. I have published numerous reference works about it and produced scholarly translations of it, and I have proven time and again that I can handle any situation life throws at me in it, and yet -- there is still so much I do not know.

Our paths truly have crossed! He seems to have been more successful, however, particularly in learning Korean. If he used his shadowing technique in Korea, I suppose Handong's isolation made that practice more comfortable.

But I'm almost motivated to again attempt learning Korean since Arguelles insists that mastering the tongue is mainly just a matter of hard work.

Almost . . .

Bruno Littlemore questions the double-blind experiment

Clever Hans

(Wikipedia)

I'm still re-reading Ben Hale's novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, and I once again see that Ben knows about "Clever Hans," a horse that picked up on visual clues in responding to oral questions, for he has Norm Plumlee -- the behaviorist research director who's attempting to teach Bruno 'language' -- try to prevent any exchange of cues from experimenter to Bruno by hiding Lydia's face and hands:

Norm had recently added an extremely unsettling detail to this procedure. Lydia wore a flat black metal mask that completely obscured her face, with a rectangular window of opaque green glass for her eyes. I am told that this was a welding mask. She also wore a pair of oven mitts on her hands. Dressed in this insane costume -- like a baker in Hell -- she would ask me to perform the pointless tasks with the objects strewn about the floor of the playpen. I did not know what could be the reason for these new details that had been added to the ritual. Lydia looked slightly terrifying in this costume. Still, I knew it was her under there, and so I gamely complied with the requests coming from the tinny echoey voice buried beneath the black metal mask. (Ben Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, pages 140-141)

Though Lydia can still see Bruno, this is similar to what scientists call a double-blind experiment, the sort eventually used with Clever Hans to determine if that horse were really responding to language, and it is intended to assure the skeptical that Bruno was receiving no visual clues and noting no body language. Bruno is skeptical of that skepticism:

But why, I ask -- why Dr. Norman Plumlee, did you decide that external bodily elements of communication do not count as part of language? Is language not comprised of an entire flexible interface of both spoken and visual interaction? No human mother speaks to her infant only while wearing oven mitts and a welding mask! Spoken language is but a single component of communication. We speak as much with our hands and our eyes and faces as we do with our lungs and throats and tongues -- namely, principally, with our brains. Analog gestural communication isn't "cheating." Removing words from the interface of the body only removes them from their natural environment, like putting an animal in a cage. (Ben Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, page 141)

Good questions, Bruno. Such thoughts are never far below the surface of Bruno's tale. An apparent allusion to Clever Hans surfaces in a direct reference to the drama Woyzeck, which Bruno later directs and 'stars' in, for he mentions the role of the Showman, who "has a horse that he claims can tell the time and communicate it by stamping his hooves" -- though, interestingly enough, Bruno calls this Showman "a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman" (page 91). I would have expected Bruno rather to defend the horse's linguistic skills. He doesn't tell us directly what he really thinks about the horse's sense of language, and he never mentions Clever Hans directly, so far as I recall (but correct me if I'm wrong), even though he eventually befriends a fellow chimp called "Clever Hands" -- so-named because he has learned the rudiments of sign language (an added allusion to "Nim Chimpsky") -- which should have given Bruno entry into further explicit musings about the nature of language. Perhaps Bruno doesn't know the story of Clever Hans and for that reason has nothing to say about it, in which case, the allusions are all Ben Hale's, never Bruno's.

I would be interested in knowing Ben's particular views on the Clever Hans story, for it's usually told as a triumph of science's double-blind experiment in the uncovery of the truth that the horse was not really responding to language but merely to visual cues, the moral of the story being that science has to work this way. Ben -- or maybe just Bruno -- seems to imply that it shouldn't.

Noam Chomsky was right about Bruno's discoursability!

Noam Chomsky

(Wikipedia)

I have to eat my words. That fabulous ape Bruno Littlemore is utterly -- or should I say unutterably -- incapable of language! Just look at Bruno's description of the interest that students on the University of Chicago campus showed in him:

When they saw Lydia and I strolling hand in hand across the campus, they would approach us and try to speak to me, and want to touch me. (Ben Hale, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, page 79)

Gnome Chompy can have Bruno now, for all I care! In fact, Chompy can eat my words for me -- and Bruno's failed words, too! J'accuse -- that chimp doesn't know the difference between accusative and nominative!

Some impeccable linguist Bruno be!

Ben Hale and Bruno Littlemore on Milton's Paradise Lost

Ape with Skull

(Affe mit Schädel, 1893)

 Hugo Rheinhold
"How cam'st thou speakable of mute . . . ?"
(Wikipedia)

A few days ago, when I asked Ben Hale about the influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost on his novel, he replied:

[T]he Milton connection [initially] came from the PL quote that's at the beginning of the third section . . . "Sated at length, ere long I might perceive strange alteration in me . . ." Satan's beautiful, eerie description, to Eve, of what it feels like to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . My interest in PL came from studying it a lot in college with this guy: ["Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism"] -- Bill Shullenberger is a brilliant guy, and knows more about Milton than anyone I've ever met.

I've heard of him, naturally, but I've not read that article. In Milton's works, I'm self-taught, self-raised. Speaking of which, Bruno the Loquacious Chimp offers his autodidactic thoughts on Milton's epic poem in dictating to Gwen Gupta, his amanuensis:

Have you ever read Paradise Lost, Gwen? I stumbled across a battered copy of it in the course of my wanderings across this blighted earth, by which I mean I once stole a copy of it from the University of Chicago library. And God, did I fall in love with the Devil. Could it be more fitting that Lucifer is a master orator? Demonic rhetoric, Satanic language!

I have heard, Gwen -- spoken, as can be expected, in tones of dreary admonition -- that self authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence, as in Milton's Satan: "Who saw when this creation was? . . . We know no time when we were not as now, know none before us, self-begot, self-raised." But why condemn the rebel angel for the fantasy of self-invention? Who could help feeling seduced by Satan's poetry when compared to the dull, paternalistically castigatory abashments of God? As Blake points out, the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. Well, I too am a true poet, but unlike Milton and more like Satan, I know it! And also like Satan, I made myself with words. I wrote myself into the world. With my own hand I reached into the cunt of the cosmos and dragged myself kicking and screaming out -- HELLO, WORLD. HELLO,YOU BASTARDS. HERE I AM. IT'S ME, BRUNO, THE BOURGEOIS APE.

(And also like Satan, I'm a beautiful loser.)

It is impossible, however, to write a poem, or anything for that matter, about an unfallen Adam and Eve, because I cannot imagine them as having language. In Paradise there is nothing to say. Eden was sacrificed not for the pleasureof a fruit, but for the pleasure ofthe word. Now we have shame and pain and knowledge of death and whatnot, but at least we can talk about it. And talk and talk and talk! And maybe -- I think -- it was even worth the trade. Sometimes the things of this world are less beautiful than their shadows. What is poetry but the shadowplay of consciousness? (pages 37-38)

Bruno's views are fascinating, but as misbegotten as those of Satan, insofar as Milton is concerned. He needs to read Stanley Fish and discover that Milton intended for Satan to seduce us because we ourselves are fallen. Bruno is perhaps a bit more fallen -- Satanic even in his fallenness -- for he fails to see Satan for what that fallen angel has become, a vaunting shadow of his former self who purely from spite uses his rhetorical skills to remake others after his own fallen image, an insight that Milton expected his readers to share as they grow disillusioned with Satan through reading of his decline in Paradise Lost. Doubtless, Ben understands. We shouldn't conflate author with protagonist!

Moreover, Bruno misjudges Paradise, for it has words in Milton's account, a language superior to our own. Bruno imagines that he made himself with words, that he wrote himself into the world, and even the Skinnerian Behaviorist, Norman Plumlee concurs at the end: "You created yourself" (page 553). But it was actually the woman whom Bruno loved who 'created' him: "she sought me out, and found me, and began to bring me out of my animal darkness" ('page 17). Bruno admits: "I went with language. I went with Lydia" (page 43). Bruno thus re-imagines Milton's Paradise in his own prelinguistic image and even forgets that he didn't create the language that helped make him who he is, and that self-deception is perhaps a feature of his peculiar fallenness.

Fallen Language: Falsely Defined Terms in Paradise Lost?

Abdiel

(Image from Comic Book Religion)

Some students at Christs College, Cambridge have put together a high-quality site on John Milton called Darkness Visible, and I've come upon a page there titled "Milton's Language" that might be useful for thinking about 'fallen language' in Paradise Lost, for the page offers a section on "Dark Satanic Language" -- which later on the same page is characterized as "fallen language" -- and this section informs us:

Satan is an inveterate liar who abuses language for his own evil purposes. Satan's language is 'Ambiguous and with double sense deluding' (Paradise Regained, I.435), whereas the Son's language (and by extension God's) enforces a kind of linguistic harmony where 'Thy actions to thy words accord' (Paradise Regained, III.9). In Paradise Lost, Satan's 'ambiguous words' (V.703, VI.568) act as 'persuasive' traps, 'replete with guile' (IX.737, 733). He utters 'high words, that bore / Semblance of worth not substance' (I.528), and it is worth bearing this in mind should you be tempted to succumb to his enticing rhetoric, as Eve or, more recently the poets Shelley and Blake have been known to do! God's words are necessarily congruent with their meaning (God is unable to lie). But while Satan lacks the power of speech acts, he has the sophistical ability to dissemble.

Satan uses ambiguous words in Paradise Lost to mislead, but in many cases, the two different meanings of a word are both correct, and such a word is not necessarily 'fallen'. Rather, it is being misused by Satan, "who abuses language for his own evil purposes" and plays upon one meaning to legitimate acting upon the other meaning. For instance, if Satan were to urge Eve to cleave to God but persuade her that this means cutting herself off from God -- playing on the word's two meanings, "cling to" and "sever from" -- then this would be an example of using a word's double meaning to deceive. Both meanings are legitimate, however, or at least arguably so. They merely need to be kept distinct.

But what of Satan's famous redefinition of evil in Paradise Lost 4.108-112, which he states in his famous speech upon Mount Niphates after briefly considering repentance but deciding that he cannot be forgiven because he cannot truly repent:

So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear,
Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav'ns King I hold
By thee, and more then half perhaps will reigne; (PL 4.108-112)

Note the redefinition: "Evil be thou my Good" (PL 4.110). As C. S. Lewis notes in his Preface to Paradise Lost (page 95), such a statement is about the same as saying, "Nonsense be thou my sense." This is a special case of linguistic ambiguity, for evil cannot be its opposite, the good. Thus, one of the two meanings is manifestly false, so perhaps one can say that in this sense, a postlapsarian language can be fallen. The language in this case is not merely used to deceive; it is, in part (or parts), intrinsically deceptive.

Which leads me to a point raised in yesterday's post, where I noted the following about that angel loyal to God, Abdiel:

Speaking of Abdiel's words, when he meets Satan on the field of battle and says, "This greeting on thy impious Crest receive" (PL 6.188), and then brings down upon Satan's helmeted head his righteous sword, isn't he using the term "greeting" in a sense so ironic as to be contradictory, in that it contains two meanings that contradict each other, as in some puns?

And I inquired:

Does Abdiel thus speak in a postlapsarian, 'fallen' tongue?

Today, I can press this a bit further, for one could argue that a "greeting" defined as "a blow on the head" is a false definition and that Abdiel is using fallen language. This would be not so dissimilar from Satan saying, "Evil be thou my Good." On the other hand, and unlike Satan, Abdiel is speaking ironically, even sarcastically, so nobody is deceived, nor is any deception intended.

But the question then to be raised is this: would there be any use for irony in language in an unfallen world? Perhaps not, but there might be a legitimate use for it by unfallen beings confronted by fallen beings and a fallen world. What do readers think, is Abdiel a little bit fallen . . . or not?

He certainly looks somewhat fallen in that image above.