1
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- “… the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker
without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”
- —Søren Kierkegaard
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2
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- Search for the Perfect Language, part 2
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3
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- The Perfect Language of Dante
- The Ars Magna of Raymond Lull
- The Monogenetic Hypothesis and the Mother Tongues
- The Perfect Language of Images
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4
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- Realized that language changes (oc/sil)
- The difference between speaking and actual linguistic capability is
similar to langue et parole.
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5
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- Searching for Universal Truth
- Ars Combinatoria
- Ars Magna: could produce true or false propositions, but you need to
know whether it’s true or false; one root of linguistic roots
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6
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7
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- “From Origen to Augustine, almost all of the church Fathers assumed, as
a matter of incontrovertible fact, that, before the confusion,
humanity’s primordial language was Hebrew” (SFPL: 74).
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8
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- Guillame de Postel: Universal language would lay the foundation for
global peace; that language is Hebrew à French.
- Nostraticism: Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, etc, descended from a
common ancestor; idea originated in Russia; rejected in the U.S. for
(mostly) political reasons.
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9
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- Egyptian: Discovered Hieroglyphics & assumed Egyptian was the
perfect language; assumed 1:1 correspondence between meaning and
structure
- Hebrew: believed that Hebrew was the perfect language because the
writing system corresponds with how sounds are made in the throat.
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10
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- Chinese:
- “Chinese writing was considered perfect insofar as with idiograms every
element on the expression-plane corresponded to a semantic unit on the
content-plane. It was precisely
these one-to-one correspondences that, for Kircher, deprived Chinese
writing of its potential for mystery. . . An Egyptian hieroglyph showed
its superiority by its ability to summon up entire ‘texts,’ and to
express complex chunks of infinitely interpretable content” (SFPL: 161).
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11
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- “It was this conviction that, in the end, hieroglyphs all showed about
the natural world that prevented Kircher from ever finding the right
track” (pp. 156-157)
- Kircher’s mistake is not realizing that his hieroglyphs contained a
phonetic component.
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12
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- Proto-Indo-European Hypothesis: Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit share marked
similarities, therefore they descended from a common ancestor
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13
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- A written character, through its form is directly linked to the nature
of the universe. One to one
correlation between symbol and meaning.
Nothing arbitrary or conventional.
- Egyptian?
- Chinese?: language independent, a speaker of Chinese, Korean or Japanese
will understand Sino-Korean characters.
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