Posts by Joe Wylie
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English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
Can't argue with that. After all, Latin was spoken in England long before English.
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Patrinfikulo ;-)
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Dave Gibbons' artwork was an evocation of the artwork of 'silver age' comics, as the characters themselves were based on characters of that time. Rorschach is the Question, Nite Owl is the Blue Beetle (not Batman as most people think), Doctor Manhattan is Captain Atom and so forth.
Thanks Kracklite. While I always found Rorschach one of the more interesting characters, I wasn't aware of the Question/Steve Ditko connection until I came across it in a Moore interview some years after reading Watchmen. There's certainly a touch of Ditko's bizarre Ayn Randian Mr. A about Rorschach. He's a great portrayal of someone stuck in a sort of perpetual libertarian ideological adolescence.
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Insisting on meandering does, however, harm clear communication.
Well naturally, in a given situation, which is why I wonder whether you bother to mention it, unless it's something that you're advocating as some kind of general principal. In which case it comes across as 'Imagination leads to technical errors".
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Nor is it hard to ask for clarification of accidental ambiguity, which happens all the time, no matter how many rules you have.
How about when the writer is dead, or otherwise unavailable?
Good question. Although we've had a few decades of of academic thought dedicated to solving such problems by promoting the supremacy of the text, lately it seems to have gone the way of brutalist architecture.
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That's exactly the problem with oral history. You only have to try it for yourself for a few days to see the problems with it. The first time you forget something important, you'll be jotting things down again.
You don't say. Must give it a go sometime.
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What I took from Catherin Servant's account of Hokianga Maori practices of preserving whakapapa was that ceremony was essential to such techniques. The mention earlier in this thread about the importance of karakia in focusing attention to matters at hand is, I believe, a survival of this technique, and a very useful one, no less so in a literate world. Such things are more than mere piety, and offer a special insight into the nature of how we came to our present state of language.
Pre-literate practitioners of committing information to memory appear to have been critically aware of the pitfalls of "mis-remembering". For example, in the schools of the Hokianga people described by Servant, if a mistake was made in a recitation the session would be immediately cancelled, and only reconvened when conditions such as the moon's phase were appropriate. Without attempting an understanding of how such things may have been done we have no way of even beginning to quantify just how much may have been preserved or lost.
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Yeah, I'm not advocating Esperanto in any way. It's a fascinating bit of history, and until I'd taken the trouble to discover more about Zamenhof I'd assumed he was a well-meaning crank. In the context of his time what he achieved was remarkable. BTW my octogenarian mum still recalls a little of the language from classes she took in the late '30s, back when Esperanto was a means to avert world conflict.
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Here you go. A ripping good read, too,
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Benwilson:
The invention of writing itself served to immortalize words beyond the Chinese Whispers game that humanity had been playing for all the millenia before history.
A little more than a "Chinese Whispers game", perhaps. In NZ the pre-literate age has only recently passed, which I believe gives us a rather special opportunity for insight. The early missionary Father Servant's excellent Customs and Habits of the New Zealanders 1838-42 has a fascinating account of the methods used by Maori in the Hokianga to commit vast slabs of information to memory. The feats achieved by this now largely lost method of preserving Whakapapa were, by literate standards, truly prodigious.
The discussion earlier in this thread about karakia and the importance of ceremony more than hinted at the value of recalling our pre-literary heritage. I believe that an awareness of such things is essential to appreciate the real value of a written language.
I don't know if a universal language for general communication will ever actually take off. But I do believe that it would be a good thing if it did.
I assume that you have some familiarity with the history of Esperanto. Your vision seems to have a lot in common with that of Ludwik Zamenhof.