To me, the new URL "Songlines.space" suggests both the Outback
and the University of Western Australia. For the former, see
"'Max Barry' + Lexicon" in this journal. For the latter, see SymOmega.
The new URL forwards to a combination of these posts.
A Letterman introduction for Plato's Academy Awards:
"Cunning, Anna. Anna, Cunning." (Rimshot.)
But seriously . . .
"This work [of Wierzbicka and colleagues] has led to
a set of highly concrete proposals about a hypothesized
irreducible core of all human languages. This universal core
is believed to have a fully ‘language-like’ character in the sense
that it consists of a lexicon of semantic primitives together with
a syntax governing how the primitives can be combined
(Goddard, 1998)." — Wikipedia, Semantic Primes
Goddard C. (1998) — Bad arguments against semantic primitives.
Theoretical Linguistics 24:129-156.
Related fiction . . . Lexicon , by Max Barry (2013). See Barry in this journal.
For Dan Brown enthusiasts, a sequel to the previous post, "The Tombstone Source."
As that post notes, the following symbol is now used as a story-end "tombstone" at
T: The New York Times Style Magazine. The Times uses style-sheet code, not
the rarely used unicode character below, to produce the tombstone.
Related material — The novel The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus
that was reviewed in January 2012 by Commentary magazine :
Fiction, Fiction, Burning Bright
D. G. MYERS / JAN. 19, 2012
Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).
304 pp. $25.95.
According to the Jews, the world begins
with speech. God says, “There is light,”
and so there is light. But what if something
happened — it doesn’t really matter what —
and speech turned lethal?
That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet ,
the third novel by Ben Marcus,
a creative writing professor at Columbia
University….
A much better novel along these lines is Lexicon (2013) by Max Barry.
"If I am to have a meeting it shall be down,
down in the invisible,
and the moment I re-emerge
it shall be alone.
In the visible world I am alone, an isolate instance.
My meeting is in the underworld, the dark."
— D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo , Chapter 7,
"The Battle of Tongues."
The web edition of this book says it was
"Last updated Tuesday, June 18, 2013."
This was also the publication date of Max Barry's
2013 novel Lexicon . (See that date in this journal.)
From the LA Times online obituaries today:
|
Michael Feran Baigent was born in Nelson, New Zealand,
From 1998 he lectured on and led tours of the temples and Elliott Reid Longtime film, TV actor with a comic touch
Elliott "Ted" Reid, 93, a longtime character actor in films |
From a post last Saturday, June 22, and the earlier
post last Friday, June 21, that preceded it:
|
The Eliade passage was quoted in a 1971 Ph.D. thesis Some context— Stevens's Rock in this journal. Friday, June 21, 2013
Lexicon
|
|
"… a fundamental language
"… the questions raised by R. Lowell |
See also, in this journal, Big Rock.
From today's earlier post, Stevens and the Rock—
"Rock shows him something that transcends
the precariousness of his humanity:
an absolute mode of being.
Its strength, its motionlessness, its size
and its strange outlines
are none of them human;
they indicate the presence of something
that fascinates, terrifies, attracts and threatens,
all at once."
— Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958)
An object with such an "absolute mode of being"
is the plot center of a new novel discussed here previously—
Max Barry's Lexicon . From a perceptive review:
I believe he’s hit on something special here.
It’s really no surprise that Matthew Vaughn
of Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class fame
has bought the rights to maybe make the movie;
Lexicon certainly has the makings of a fine film.
Or graphic novel… Whatever.
From the final pages of the new novel
Lexicon , by Max Barry:
|
"… a fundamental language
"… the questions raised by R. Lowell |
"… the clocks were striking thirteen." — 1984
This journal on May 14, 2013:
"And let us finally, then, observe the
parallel progress of the formations of thought
across the species of psychical onomatopoeia
of the primitives, and elementary symmetries
and contrasts, to the ideas of substances,
to metaphors, the faltering beginnings of logic,
formalisms, entities, metaphysical existences."
— Paul Valéry, Introduction to the Method of
Leonardo da Vinci
But first, a word from our sponsor…
For those who prefer Trudeau's
"Story Theory" of truth to his "Diamond Theory"
Related material: Click images below for the original posts.
See as well the novel "Lexicon" at Amazon.com
and the word "lexicon" in this journal.
A predecessor to the Max Barry novel Lexicon .
(The latter will be published on June 18.)
See, too, an MAA Spectrum book:
Click on images for details.
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