This seems to imply that Stone's real name is . . .
"I can't do it anymore."
Perhaps she would enjoy a song based on the alleged last words
of Picasso: "Ya no lo puedo hacer," or "Yanolo" for short.
For art fans, some images from the the above Mirador de les arts date —
The above "Take This Waltz" review is dated July 5, 2012.
Related material from posts of July 5, 2012 —
.
From this journal on December 7th, the first night of Hannukah 2023 —
|
Other "Styx"-related material posted here earlier today . . .
Note that the above Styx communications protocol should not be
"Right through hell there is a path . . . ." — Malcolm Lowry |
From zdnet.com two days earlier —
|
Linus Torvalds on the state of Linux today
" Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about
Torvalds — "We actually need autocorrects on steroids. — zdnet.com, |
Midrash —
Overlook/Duckworth, pp.48, £9.99
* "Language animal" is a phrase apparently
invented by Steiner in 1969 that he later
attributed vaguely to the ancient Greeks.
The conclusion of an elegy for George Steiner
in th Times Literary Supplement issue dated
March 13, 2020 —
"What distinguishes humans from other animals, Johann Gottfried Herder
suggested in his essay On the Origin of Language (1772), is not so much
their capacity for language as their capacity for arriving at general reflection
(Besonnenheit ) through language. Few thinkers of the postwar era can be
said to have pursued this reflection with as much range and rigour as George
Steiner.
Ben Hutchinson is Professor of European Literature at the University of Kent
and Director of the Paris School of Arts and Culture. His most recent book is
Comparative Literature: A very short introduction, 2018 ."
See as well . . .
March 28 review in the Times Literary Supplement of
George Steiner's new book The Poetry of Thought—
"If this new book opens with the concession that
language has neither the performative power of music
nor the elegant precision of mathematics,
it is language, for Steiner, that defines the human.
The survey accordingly begins from the ancient Greek
view of man as the 'language-animal.'"
A check of this phrase yields, in a 1969 Steiner essay,
"The Language Animal," a Greek form of the phrase—
In short, the least inadequate definition we can arrive at
of the genus homo , the definition that fully distinguishes
him from all neighbouring life-forms, is this:
man is a zoon phonanta , a language-animal.
— p. 10 in Encounter , August 1969 (essay on pp. 7-23)
After introducing "language-animal" as a translation of "zoon phonanta " in 1969,
Steiner in later writing went on to attribute this phrase to the ancient Greeks.
"The inception of critical thought, of a philosophic anthropology,
is contained in the archaic Greek definition of man as a
'language-animal'…."
— George Steiner, Real Presences , U. of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 89
"… the 'language-animal' we have been since ancient Greece
so designated us…. "
— George Steiner, Grammars of Creation , Yale U. Press, 2002, p. 265
Despite this, there seems to be no evidence for use of this phrase
by the ancient Greeks.
A Google search today for zoon phonanta (ζῷον φωνᾶντα)—
There are also no results from searches for the similar phrases
"ζωον φωναντα," "ζωον φωνᾶντα," and "ζῷον φωναντα."
Saxophonist David Sanborn reportedly died Sunday at 78.
He appears in this journal in a search for "Tequila."
* For a Hollywood version of this name, see the May 6 post
"Game for a Language Animal."
Example —
Background —
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
|
https://www.etymonline.com/word/dia- —
"… before vowels, di-, word-forming element meaning
'through, in different directions, between,' also often
merely intensive, 'thoroughly, entirely,' from Greek
dia 'through; throughout,' probably cognate with bi-
and related to duo 'two' (from PIE root *dwo- 'two')
with a base sense of 'twice.' "
A midrash for Heidegger —
Here "PIE" does not refer to food. It is an acronym
for "Proto-Indo-European."
See as well "Language Animal" in this journal.
George Steiner's phrase "the language animal" as examined by
Charles Taylor —
Steiner attributes his "language animal" phrase, in the transliterated
form "zoon phonanta," to the ancient Greeks. This attribution
is apparently bogus. See Steiner on Language (March 30, 2012).*
It is highly relevant that Taylor is a Catholic and Steiner is a secular Jew.
* More generally — See Steiner + Language + Animal in this journal.
See Steiner's phrase "Language Animal" in this journal
and the corresponding authentic phrase from a webpage
by a Benedictine monk —
See pato.jpg and Venn's Cuernavaca.
* A reference to the British publishing company
in the previous post.
Background— George Steiner in this journal
and elsewhere—
"An intensity of outward attention —
interest, curiosity, healthy obsession —
was Steiner’s version of God’s grace."
— Lee Siegel in The New York Times ,
March 12, 2009
(See also Aesthetics of Matter in this journal on that date.)
Steiner in 1969 defined man as "a language animal."
Here is Steiner in 1974 on another definition—
Related material—
Also related — Kantor in 1981 on "exquisite finite geometries," and The Galois Tesseract.
Force Field of Dreams
Metaphysics and chess in today’s New York Times Magazine:
Joss Whedon, creator of a new TV series —
“I’m a very hard-line, angry atheist” and
“I want to invade people’s dreams.”
Garry Kasparov on chess —
“When the computer sees forced lines,
it plays like God.”
Putting these quotations together, one is tempted to imagine God having a little game of chess with Whedon, along the lines suggested by C. S. Lewis:
As Lewis tells it the time had come for his “Adversary [as he was wont to speak of the God he had so earnestly sought to avoid] to make His final moves.” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1955, p. 216) Lewis called them “moves” because his life seemed like a chess match in which his pieces were spread all over the board in the most disadvantageous positions. The board was set for a checkmate….
For those who would like to imagine such a game (God vs. Whedon), the following may be helpful.
George Steiner has observed that
The common bond between chess, music, and mathematics may, finally, be the absence of language.
This quotation is apparently from
Fields of Force:
Fischer and Spassky at Reykjavik. by George Steiner, Viking hardcover, June 1974.
George Steiner as quoted in a review of his book Grammars of Creation:
“I put forward the intuition, provisional and qualified, that the ‘language-animal’ we have been since ancient Greece so designated us, is undergoing mutation.”
The phrase “language-animal” is telling. A Google search reveals that it is by no means a common phrase, and that Steiner may have taken it from Heidegger. From another review, by Roger Kimball:
In ”Grammars of Creation,” for example, he tells us that ”the classical and Judaic ideal of man as ‘language animal,’ as uniquely defined by the dignity of speech . . . came to an end in the antilanguage of the death camps.”
This use of the Holocaust not only gives the appearance of establishing one’s credentials as a person of great moral gravity; it also stymies criticism. Who wants to risk the charge of insensitivity by objecting that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the ”ideal of man as ‘language animal’ ”?
Steiner has about as clear an idea of the difference between “classical” and “Judaic” ideals of man as did Michael Dukakis. (See my notes of September 9, 2002.)
Clearly what music, mathematics, and chess have in common is that they are activities based on pure form, not on language. Steiner is correct to that extent. The Greeks had, of course, an extremely strong sense of form, and, indeed, the foremost philosopher of the West, Plato, based his teachings on the notion of Forms. Jews, on the other hand, have based their culture mainly on stories… that is, on language rather than on form. The phrase “language-animal” sounds much more Jewish than Greek. Steiner is himself rather adept at the manipulation of language (and of people by means of language), but, while admiring form-based disciplines, is not particularly adept at them.
I would argue that developing a strong sense of form — of the sort required to, as Lewis would have it, play chess with God — does not require any “mutation,” but merely learning two very powerful non-Jewish approaches to thought and life: the Forms of Plato and the “archetypes” of Jung as exemplified by the 64 hexagrams of the 3,000-year-old Chinese classic, the I Ching.
For a picture of how these 64 Forms, or Hexagrams, might function as a chessboard,
Other relevant links:
“As you read, watch for patterns. Pay special attention to imagery that is geometric…”
and
"The inception of critical thought, of a philosophic
anthropology, is contained in the archaic Greek definition
of man as a 'language-animal'…."
— George Steiner, Real Presences
A schoolgirl in 1961 —
"Non, rien de rien…"
— Edith Piaf
"I get a kick though it's clear to see,
You obviously don't adore me."
— Cole Porter
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 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
George Steiner, Real Presences , first published in 1989—
The inception of critical thought, of a philosophic anthropology,
is contained in the archaic Greek definition of man as a
'language-animal'….
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations , first published in 1991—
Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old
as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age,
Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math
into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy
potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid
does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding
any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes
him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign.
He has the sub, Levering the congealed mac and cheese.
Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins
sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an
algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness
Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code
can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick
in the head?"
Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy.
But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar
ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the
mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us.
Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too
complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox
is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to
demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes
up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded
in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more.
He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking
Lovering politely for the insight.
Edith Piaf—
See last midnight's post and Theme and Variations.
"The key is to find some formal symmetry…."
"The inception of critical thought, of a philosophic anthropology, is contained in the archaic Greek definition of man as a 'language-animal'…."
— George Steiner, Real Presences , U. of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 89 (See also Steiner on Language.)
"To some, Inception is a film about the creative process, specifically filmmaking, with Cobb as the director, Saito the producer, Ariadne the screenwriter, Eames the actor, and so on. To others the entire movie is a dream in that the film supports Carl Jungs' dream analysis; with all of the supporting characters acting as classical archetypes to Cobb's multiple personalities (which would also justify the lack of development in the supporting characters). The fact that Inception , in the few months since its initial release, has already given rise to so much discussion and critical thought is much more revelatory than whether or not Cobb is still dreaming."
— Russell Espinosa at FilmFracture.com, Jan. 1, 2011
See also Piaf's "Rien de Rien " in a Log24 post from Jan. 19, 2012.
A link in the previous post to Delos in this journal mentions physicist John Cramer.
His daughter Kathryn's weblog mentions the following story—
Graffiti in the Library of Babel • David Langford
—from her forthcoming anthology Year's Best SF 16 .
From the Langford story—
"'I suppose we have a sort of duty…' Out of the corner of her eye Ceri saw her notes window change. She hadn't touched the keyboard or mouse. Just before the flatscreen went black and flickered into a reboot sequence, she saw the coloured tags where no tags had been before. In her own notes. Surrounding the copied words 'quarantine regulations.'"
Related material from this journal last Jan. 9 —
"Show me all the blueprints."
– Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Aviator" (2004)
DiCaprio in "Inception"
In the "blueprints" link above, DiCaprio's spelling of "Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E" is of particular interest.
See also a search for Inception in this journal.
A post on a spelling bee at the end of that search quotes an essay on Walter Benjamin—
This blissful state between the world and its creator as expressed in Adamic language has its end, of course, in the Fall. The “ignorance” introduced into the world that ultimately drives our melancholic state of acedia has its inception with the Fall away from the edenic union that joins God’s plan to the immediacy of the material world. What ensues, says Benjamin, is an overabundance of conventional languages, a prattle of meanings now localized hence arbitrary. A former connection to a defining origin has been lost; and an overdetermined, plethoric state of melancholia forms. Over-determination stems from over-naming. “Things have no proper names except in God. . . . In the language of men, however, they are overnamed.” Overnaming becomes “the linguistic being of melancholy.”7
7 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and On the Languages of Man,” Edmund Jephcott, tr., Walter Benjamin , Selected Writings , Volume I: 1913-1926 , Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 73.
Compare and contrast with a remark by a translator mentioned here previously —
I fancy, myself, that this self-consciousness about translation dates approximately from the same time as man's self-consciousness about language itself. Genesis tells us that Adam named all the animals (just as in Indian tradition the monkey-god Hanuman invented grammar by naming all the plants in the Garden of Illo Tempore). No doubts, no self-consciousness: "Whatever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." (Genesis II, 19). But after the expulsion from Paradise I see Adam doubting the moment the possibility occurs that another name might be possible. And isn't that what all translators are? Proposers, in another language, of another name ?
— Helen Lane in Translation Review , Vol. 5, 1980
In the beginning
was…
the recursion?
"Words are events."
— The Walter J. Ong Project,
quoted in Log24 on Aug. 25, 2003
"Words are events."
— The Walter J. Ong Project,
quoted in the Heckler & Coch weblog
on July 17, 2004 as part of a section
titled "Recursive, Wide, and Loopy"
Walter J. Ong was a Jesuit. The Feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, is celebrated on July 31 each year.
"Recursive, Wide, and Loopy 2", a Heckler & Coch entry dated July 31, 2004, leads to the following:
|
How humans got
Why do other primates
lag behind in language? "New research may help scientists dissect just what it is about the human brain that endows us with language. Researchers have found that tamarin monkeys have some distinctly languagelike abilities but that they can’t quite master the more complex rules of human grammar. The findings appear in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the non-profit science society. The grammatical toolkit 'A relatively open question concerning language evolution is, "What aspects of the language faculty are shared with other animals, and what aspects are unique to humans?" ' said study author Marc Hauser of Harvard University. To investigate, Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, devised tests for cotton-top tamarin monkeys and human volunteers. Tamarins have been evolving separately from humans for approximately 40 million years –suggesting that any shared machinery in human and tamarin brains is old enough to be relatively common among primates. Instead of trying to teach the monkeys real words, Hauser and Fitch generated strings of one-syllable words that followed various grammatical rules. According to linguistics expert Noam Chomsky, the simplest type of grammar is a 'finite state grammar' or 'FSG,' which dictates which types of words go near each other in a sentence. In English, for example, an adjective like 'fast' must go directly in front of 'car,' the noun it's describing. Building on previous experiments, Hauser and Fitch recorded word-strings that obeyed a specific FSG, in which any syllable spoken by a female voice was automatically followed by one from a male voice.
Audio: Listen to an FSG word-string. After listening to a series of word-strings, the monkeys were able to distinguish between those that followed this rule and others that didn't. Human test subjects could tell the difference as well, implying that tamarins and humans may share at least some components of what Hauser called 'the universal toolkit underlying all languages.' Mastering this type of grammar represents the ability to compute some simple statistics, something human infants accomplish early on as they learn to speak. This ability may not be specific to language, however. 'Either the same mechanism or some approximation of it is used in mathematics, vision, music and other activities,' Hauser said. Upping the Complexity The grammatical rules of real languages govern more than just the placement of neighboring words, as anyone who had to diagram sentences in English class may remember all too well. One of the more complex types of grammar is known as a 'phrase structure grammar,' or PSG. These grammars involve relationships between words that aren't next to each other in a sentence and thus allow for a more complex range of expression. The 'if … then' construction is an example of a PSG. The researchers generated a second set of word-strings that followed a PSG in which a pairing of syllables spoken by a female and a male could be embedded within another pairing. This grammar produces structures like [female [female, male] male].
Audio: Listen to a PSG word-string. After playing these recordings repeatedly to the monkeys, the researchers found that the animals didn't seem to notice the difference between word strings that obeyed the PSG and other strings that did not. In contrast, the human volunteers did notice the difference." — Kathleen Wren |
"The grammar or syntax of human language is certainly unique. Like an onion or Russian doll, it is recursive: One instance of an item is embedded in another instance of the same item. Recursion makes it possible for the words in a sentence to be widely separated and yet dependent on one another. 'If-then' is a classic example…. Are animals capable of such recursion? Fitch and Hauser have reported that tamarin monkeys are not capable of recursion. Although the monkeys learned a nonrecursive grammar, they failed to learn a grammar that is recursive. Humans readily learn both."
— David Premack (Science 2004 303:318, quoted in ScienceWeek)
These citations by Heckler & Coch show that inability to understand complex language is not limited to monkeys.
The examples given by Wren in the audio samples are of alternating female (Hi) and male (Lo) voices, thus —
FSG: Hi Lo Hi Lo Hi Lo
PSG: Hi Hi Hi Lo Lo Lo
As these examples show, neither monkeys nor humans heard the sound of parentheses (or square brackets) as Wren describes them:
"structures like [female [female, male] male]."
There of course is, in ordinary language (which does not include the monologues of Victor Borge), no such thing as the sound of parentheses.
Thus the research of Hauser and Fitch is not only invalid, but ridiculous.
This point is driven strongly home by the following two articles:
Greg Kochanski, Research Fellow,
Oxford University Phonetics Lab:
Is a Phrase Structure Grammar
the Important Difference
between Humans and Monkeys?,
and
Mark Liberman, Professor,
University of Pennsylvania
Departments of Linguistics
and of Computer Science,
and co-director of the
Institute for Research
in Cognitive Science,
in his
Language Log,
January 17, 2004:
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