Log24

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.

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.

Kitty in Uncanny X-Men #168 (April 1983)

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.