Theme: Civilization

Q&A: WHAT IS THE INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE ON CIVILIZATION.

(worth repeating)

[I]n a word, ‘profound’. But thanks to Paul Ba’s advice, I need to start with a word of caution.

But my point of view is scientific and critical, rather than meaningful. Linguists care about the positive (or they wouldn’t study linguistics) and I care about the negatives: science and law. I don’t think we can improve on trial and error. I think we can only improve on testimony.

When we negotiate to come to agreement we seek positive affirmations of meaning. These affirmations signal to one another that our interactions might be fruitful.

When we seek to prevent error, bias and criminality, then we seek to constrain our utterances to those statements that are free of error, bias and criminality.

This conversation is another example of the obverse / inverse framing that I’m using. If you want to convey meaning, you have one set of preferences, and if you want to prevent error, imagination, wishful thinking, cognitive bias, and deception from utterances you view the world through different eyes.

We can use language to load, frame and overload. Languages themselves consist of frames, loadings and overloadings. In fact there are few words in any language that are not loaded, framed and overloaded: our most basic statements of operations (‘run’), existence (“there”) and perception (‘fast’). They constitute our most basic 300 words or so. Grammar itself frames by being more informationally complete (english and german) or less informationally complete (Chinese). Loading and framing in Language has profound impact on man’s minds. When we say the word ‘culture’ we are usually speaking about language, tradition, myth, and ritual. Traditions, myths and rituals contain heavy loading and framing and determine our most basic metaphysical value judgments. These metaphysical value judgements provide decidability where we assume pre-cognitively, by subconscious association, necessity or morality, where in actuality, we are merely providing some decidability that suited, at one time, some communication strategy, reproductive strategy, normative strategy, or other. (gender in french, romance in Italian – both of which we know the origins of: virgin worship in pre-christian times in France, and the effect of the troubadour movement in Italy.) So just as our genes get stuck at certain states because they cannot eliminate just ignore content, our languages get stuck at certain states and we just work past content we no longer find meaningful (french feminine references to nature). Some of these evolutionary records in language are helpful (martial germanic languages are truthful) and some evolutionary records are harmful (anything and everything in Chinese language is a burden). But worse, some framings are good (correspondence) and some are not (arabic respect without earning it, and fantasy of an extant complete truth).

So language is a bit like wetware-programming. There are things in the grammar(organization) and functions (meaning of terms) and sometimes in the structure of words (alphabets or pictograms) that help or hinder us.

German is perhaps the best language. I have to work on this a bit more. But others have said it in the past. German is loaded pretty heavily at this point with some bad things also: psychologizing of a sort. English is the language of science and it’s being progressively destroyed by progressives. Which is why I want to fix it.