On the Form (and Formalism) of Word Origins and Etymological/Aural Equivalence · 4:57am Jun 3rd, 2020
this is what we used to spend a large majority of our time thinking about and studying before we were convinced by the universe all earthly pursuits are futile and pointless
So when you think about a word, like 'dog', its manifestation in your head is dependent on a number of frames of reference. Firstly whether or not you speak English, secondly whether you've seen the word 'dog' before, thirdly, which contexts you've seen the word used in. We don't have a good way to shortcut this piece of the explanation, but you can believe us or not that the idea of the word 'dog' is separate and distinct from the idea of the form of a 'dog' platonically and absolutely. We say 'Platonic' in this sense because it's the only way we know of to convey the absolute nature of a form—there is overlap with our interest in Taoist philosophy here, and expanding from that, the nature of 'the 10,000 things', but we'll get into that in a bit. For now, let's poke at the idea that the word 'dog' and the idea of 'dog' are different in a significant way.
In University, a lot of our focus after second year and encountering David Foster Wallace in full was on the phenomenological manifestation of a text as a material object as opposed to its utility as the means of conveying a story. In short, when you buy a book, and hold a book, and read a book, you're all doing something different than inherently 'absorbing a story'. There are a lot of ways to tell a story, but all of them are victim to individualized forms of artifact decay. People telling a story by word of mouth will misremember and compress, expand and condense and morph around their pronunciation. A written story is victim to the editing process, the typesetting of the text, and the construction of the book as a physical object. It's not often that, in sitting down with a book, you're prompted to think 'oh yeah, I'm reading a book', but any time that happens, you're having an encounter with the phenomenological 'book', as opposed to the underlying phenomenological 'story'. A lot of this just feels like bookkeeping, but hopefully it gets interesting in a bit.
So if we write the word
dog
and examine it in isolation, we're most tempted to understand it via an analysis of response: how do people respond to seeing this word in text, do they concede its value as a word, are they familiar with the script, is it legible to all of them, etc.. We also need to examine what exactly it is everyone thinks of when they see the word; how different are the dogs of your head versus the dogs of your neighbour, etc.. This accounts to a phenomenon identified by Carl Jung as the 'collective unconsciousness', which as far as we can understand is basically just an accounting for the fact that cultural reference-points can create broad-reaching touchstones as points of reference for humans to communicate with. Eg. as an experiment in high school, we all drew the first thing we thought of at the word 'tree', 'sun', 'dog', etc., and the stylistic elements of all of these ideas were compared. The punchline is that most people have a similar looking idea when they think of 'tree' or 'dog' in their head, usually based on where they were brought up and a little bit based on their own personal internalization of that word and its contexts. People draw a big sun in the corner of the page, a symmetrical pine tree, a cute little borker, etc. etc.. This is why, as instruction in Creative Writing progresses, a cool tip is to use elements of specificity to intensify audience engagement with the subject matter. It's significantly more interesting if we're reading about a bulldog-terrier mix with a feisty attitude and one short paw than a 'dog', generically or even more specifically.
So, when we get to the formalism of language, what we're essentially talking about is the permanent and inescapable difference between a word and the form of an idea or phenomenon it represents. This is where our research into etymology and word origins began, and it's rather complicated to explain why.
First, we find it useful to concede to David J. Chalmers principle of operative organization; that being that any system operating analogously in a universe with other conscious systems must find itself organized in virtue of those systems. It is a tangled, unnecessarily complicated web to unravel the exact and absolute order of this organization, because at various points in history or evolution we find ourselves with significant inescapable blind-spots, but it is possible, at least for the sake of argument and experimentation, to begin conceding that certain things may or may not be necessarily more inherently complex than others. It is easier to breathe than it is to drink a glass of water, at least as far as the operative machinery of our biology is concerned, and therefore we can haphazardly but still with a feeling of correctness, guess that the human ability to breathe evolved before the human ability to consume water in the way we recognize it today. Again, this is a bold leap and claim from a field of what is essentially the philosophy of qualia and language to operative biology and therefore all of evolution and human history, but you have to buy the whole pie once you take a bite.
Okay. So with all that in place, we can conclude a handful of interrelated things about the development of language.
Firstly, from an organizational standpoint, it doesn't benefit a language to have any more or less words than necessary to describe the form of all things the culture using it will interact with on a regular basis. It wouldn't have benefited the ancient Greeks to have a word for 'iPhone' because the concept of a name-brand cell-phone wouldn't have translated in any fashion into their culture. Similarly, we don't need any more words for 'iPhone' than we already have, because the concept for it is articulated clearly enough in its original name, and coming up with more names for it would needlessly pollute the reference pool and make it harder for people to communicate with each other.
Secondly, it is a continuous effort to translate the form of something into a sonic equivalent. Even more perilous is that words 'look' different than they 'read'—but imagine, in isolation for a moment, the task of making a word 'sound like' what it is. We have whole categories of language devices that do this in microcosm, but there doesn't seem to be a committee to determine the most sufficient aural composition of syllables to reflect what we all know as a 'dog'. Furthermore, it's not necessarily difficult to concede the word 'dog' doesn't do much for itself in terms of conveying what it's actually about—'bark' works better, or the internet-propagating 'pupper', just because both are more immediately evocative of a sensation purely through their usage of sound. "Bark" has a hard consonant at the end that renders itself an onomatopoeia, and 'pupper' is loose and bouncy just like the over-sized ears of the creatures it's attempting to convey. For this purpose, we usually vouchsafe 'Spot' or 'Rover' as our universal word for whatever it is a 'dog' represents—canus, lupus, and other more in-depth sciencey terms represent aspects of 'dog'-hood to us, but nothing near the complete picture. And there's species divergence and a whole lot else in there too.
What's the point? Well, here's our theory. At some point, when language was coming into being, atop the necessities of human evolution already in place like sight and touch and taste and anything else rendered exactly and absolutely for survival... at some point, 'articulation' entered into the equation. A scenario emerged in which it was impossible for the dual halves of the evolutionary equation to progress in their puzzle without learning a word for something. Without envisioning the concept of words, without the future of vocabulary and dialect and language evolution teetering precariously on their heads. At some point, two selves in a cave were discontent, and the 'noises' they were capable of making could no longer sufficiently express their desires and aims in what appeared to be an amoral and unanswering universe.
At some point, for the very first time, someone said to the empty expanse of space, "What is the point of all of this?"
At some point, for the very first time, they realized they were never going to get a direct answer.
And on top of all the bits of human history that look like, from a very far-away telescope, like mold congealing on a series of platters, some speck of bacteria 'decided' to 'decide', and then had to invent sound, and vocalization, and then argue for thirty years about the pronunciation of the word 'gif'. Because language, as it goes on, may or may not be the least prescriptive thing in the universe.
How, then, can we have a universal word for anything? How can anything sound like what it really is?
Last part of our unsubstantiated theory for now. In digging through Proto-Indo-European vocabulary tables, it appears to us that there are three distinct usages for the vowel 'a'. That's not surprising, or anything, but what is of note is this. We can't assume, from our current vantage point, that 'A' existed first as a vowel, or a vowel sound, just because it comes first in the alphabet. We can assume, however, that based on our 'Chalmers Assumption' that the alphabet was probably organized in its current order at some point by someone saying "Ah, well, this sound seems more or less first in the evolution of the sounds we've learned up til now, and that's consistent with the knowledge I possess going backwards quite a ways..." etc. etc. until we can believe for a little bit that "Aaa!" or "Aaahhh!", if you prefer, may have been the first intentionally communicated 'sound', or 'word', balancing on top of that sound. The interesting bit, at least in our opinion, is that whether or not you concede this first point, it's still possible to pointedly and unequivocally identify in our rendering of Proto-Indo-European reconstructed vocabulary that the 'AY' sound for 'A' didn't exist until the inception of fire. There is a particular quibbling in PIE and renderings of 'color' or 'light'... there are almost as many words for 'shine' as there are for any other verb in the language, and the strict definitions of color we perceive to exist today simply weren't around back then. 'Bright' and 'colour' were, for the large part, synonymous, and 'bright' and 'shine' were in that way also almost synonymous. For this reason, it's of primary interest that the word for fire, "*āter", which also has no synonymous meanings or parallel words, is the lone usage of this vowel sound in the PIE vocabulary of 'a' words. That "ā" sound literally means 'fire'. It means it in the most whole and complete way any sound is capable of meaning anything, in our deduction.
There are a good deal more conclusions that branch out to interesting philosophy at this point; why five vowels might be necessary at a causal level beyond even biology, at which point the commonalities of language expression can be compressed between modern and ancient understanding, and, finally, can we use our gathered etymological knowledge to pinpoint the evolution of sound, and, by doing so, discern the absolute truth of those sounds in their origin?
So far, maybe. We have a lot of guesses about consonants versus vowel sounds. In that, if you could have a language that consisted entirely of consonant sounds, that possessed every property of a language built on vowels, but that the real-world complexities of those sounds were also necessary components of those languages, a language built entirely out of consonants would possess a variety of benefits and negatives. We've thought about stealth communication along these parameters a lot, as well as elongative possibilities in elocution and the permutability of vocabulary given near-infinite letter-substitutions. But we'll save that for another blog post, on the condition that at least one person reads this one and leaves a comment.
Godspeed, everypony. And send us a PM. We're bored and lonely.
Indeed, an interesting query. I have nothing more to add. Have a pleasant evening and a better tomorrow, darf.
That is interesting to think about, that the seemingly random sounds we make actually have meaning to those who understand that it has meaning, I think I saw something about when an animal makes a specific sound when looking at or in close proximity to you, and no one else, that’s the animal giving you a “name”, although you will never know what that is, no is the animal cognitive enough to learn your language to tell you what it is, that “name” might not even translate into your language at all
I wish I was up on theory enough to properly respond to this, but to use a meme improperly,
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