Here’s something interesting. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean though. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a lot.
Consider this sentence: "Smoking is bad." The exact opposite of it, expressed by reversing everything except the subject (because the subject is what we are passing judgment on), actually means the same: "Smoking isn’t good."
Try it with any absolute statement and you will get the same result.
"There is no God," becomes, "There isn’t yes God," (ungrammatical, but you get the idea). “I will go home,” becomes, “I won’t not-go home.”
I keep wondering why it is so difficult to express delicate and nuanced ideas in simple language. No matter how I go about expressing the details of something largely intangible, I end up trapped in block-headed sentences. It’s always ‘either this or that’ or ‘either here or there’. Language simply fails at expressing middle ground logic and ideas.
Maybe language is flawed. Maybe it can’t be used for expressing anything less than absolutes. Maybe we can’t talk in nuanced ways. Or maybe this post is pointless and I am a nut.
I am merely ranting in frustration after something of a failure at expressing myself. If you don’t get it, feel free to ignore it.
You are right, you are a nut.
Thanks for settling the matter.
I am of the same opinion that its nearly impossible to communicate, for slightly different reasons.
1. like you said, language is a problem, every work is loaded. like consider fire, if i lived my life with campfires and picnics fire word takes me a to beutiful place, and if i saw a house burn down, fire would be a scary idea. Every word i use has a meaning that is unique to me modelled by my unique experiences in life.
2. we think in ideas and images in our head, we have a mental picture of something, and in order to communicate we have to take that 2d/3d thing and serialize it into a linear dialog/prose. this then has to be deserialized into the 2d/3d picture in the audiance, and leads to plenty of scope of loss, communication is inherently a lossy process unless standards are defined, and we dont even know if that is possible.
3. most of the time people dont want to understand, they dont want to change their position. of all the biases we have, the bias towards the familiar is the most powerful, a baby feels happy when it sees a known face, and we are comfortable at home than a new bar. same applies to ideas, no matter how better the other idea is it has the fight this primal bias.
I wish were all telepathic. 99 percent of the things worth saying left unsaid, not because we don’t want to say them, but because there simply isn’t a way to say them.
i meant *word in 1.
Interesting idea… I just finished reading ‘the pregnant king’ today morning by Devdutt Pattanaik, and he discusses similar ideas in the book. Worth a re-read to revisit the idea of limitation of grammar and language to express ideas/thought/emotions..
That is one of the few books by Devdutt Pattanaik that I have not read. Thanks for the reminder.
I’m confused with the intent of this article. Are you trying to say:
1.That in langauges “2 negatives make a positive” doesnt hold good. or
2.Languages do not support grey areas to be explored. It only supports White or Black.
Even I am not sure what I want to say with this post. As I said, it was a casual rant. But if I had to guess, I would say I am trying to say what you said in point number 2.
i know most European languages put a great deal of emphasis on symmetry and “mathematical construction” (e. g. the notion of a fixed set of chars for all words). i suspect this influences this “binary” view of the printed language.
i wonder if this is the same in all languages? if older languages (e.g. Sanskrit) are different in this regard. it also seems possible that pictogram languages of early civilizations would not suffer the same problem.
I once heard that in Sanskrit, the way you write “Rama killed Ravana” and the way you write “Ravana killed Rama” is the same! Worth looking into.
hmmm…. quite intriguing.
Human language and absolutes http://www.vmohanty.com/2010/human-language-and-absolutes/
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