[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 25

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JA = Jon Awbrey
JP = Jim Piat

Re: SR-COM 31.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/003332.html
In: SR-COM.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-December/thread.html#3325

JP: Interesting.  Couple of questions.

JA: Our biologically evolved natural languages are apparently
    not yet evolved enough to handle relations in general with
    any facility.  They avail us with forms of syntax that can
    be patched together more or mostly less well to handle many
    particular situations, to be sure, else we would not have
    evolved far enough to reflect on the issue, but there is
    the tendency of these languages to focus our attention
    on the single case rather than the systems ruled, and,
    what amounts to their greatest aberrancy of continged
    coloring and distorted shaping, the liability to which
    they expose us of confounding the forms of objects with
    the forms of syntax.  

JP: My sense is that the syntax embedded in natural languages conforms
    (at a deep level) very closely to the grammar of the real world --
    but I'm not quite sure if this is the issue you are contesting
    or just what you mean by the "confounding the forms of objects
    with the forms of syntax".  Please tell me more, I'm interested.

Of course, you could hardly help but to think otherwise.
I said "hardly", I did not say "not possibly" -- that'd
be a thesis of linguistic entrapment that I do not make --
I'm just pointing out that it's a very hard task indeed
to push the comfort zone of our nurtural languages, our
humm'n'hallowed mutter tongues, far enough to peek over
the verge and beyond the pale of their fine confinement.
It is the brand of thing, to get a new tongue catalyzed,
that might get you branded a poet*, if not branded more
hot than that, for the sin of irrigating common fluency.
So it's likely to take, not just the help of others for
you to hardly help yourself, but helpings of protection
to help you help yourself through the helpings of farce.

Yikes, is it time for lunch already !?

Jon Awbrey

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