Terence McKenna phrased this wonderfully, by saying “It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.”
The full quote is more psychedelic, in the context of his experience with so-called ‘jeweled self-dribbling basketballs’ he would encounter on DMT trips, who he said were made of a kind of language, or ‘syntax binding light’:
“You wonder what to make of it. I’ve thought about this for years and years and years, and I don’t know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently seems to be what is happening.
I’ve thought a lot about language as a result of that. First of all, it is the most remarkable thing we do.
Chomsky showed the deep structure of language is under genetic control, but that’s like the assembly language level. Local expressions of language are epigenetic.
It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.
We have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust. But the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced and projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent. A very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other. Intense compression.
It occurs to me, the ratios of the senses, the ratio between the eye and the ear, and so forth, this also is not genetically fixed. There are ear cultures and there are eye cultures. Print cultures and electronic cultures. So, it may be that our perfection and our completion lies in the perfection and completion of the word.
Again, this curious theme of the word and its effort to concretize itself. A language that you can see is far less ambiguous than a language that you hear. If I read the paragraph of Proust, then we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing, what did he mean? But if we look at a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore, we can discuss, what did he mean, but at a certain level, there is a kind of shared bedrock that isn’t in the Proust passage. We each stop at a different level with the textual passage. With the three-dimensional object, we all sort of start from the same place and then work out our interpretations. Is it a nude, is it an animal? Is it bronze, is it wood? Is it poignant, is it comical? So forth and so on.”
This post feels like the beginning of that concretization.
> “It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.”
I would include this all the way up to higher intelligence itself, language is but the force carrier for intelligence. We've been developing muscles and balance for hundreds of millions of years, but our intelligence that communicates in advanced language is pretty much brand new.
Fascinating comment, that articulates the point of TFA better than TFA did.
I've always been highly articulate, and also frustrated by the limitations of spoken language. This is a common (maybe even the dominant?) theme in 20th century theatrical writing. People like Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Genet, and Churchill all struggle with it in their own ways. People like Beckett and LePage and Sarah Kane ultimately kind of abandon language altogether.
Or, though poetry's not as much my field as theatre, you could go back to TS Eliot:
... Words strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
My own speculation, along your lines, is that it's because sound is transient, hearing imperfect, and memory fallible. Even apart from ambiguity, two people will never quite agree on what was said. (Most of my arguments with my wife begin this way!) Even court transcripts, intended to eliminate this limitation, don't capture non-verbal cues.
As someone who's been marinated in the written and spoken word for all my life, research like this is fascinating, and slightly creepy: will all of the ghosts in the machine be exorcised? If those are blown away, and the bare mechanism of language exposed, what comes next?
The full quote is more psychedelic, in the context of his experience with so-called ‘jeweled self-dribbling basketballs’ he would encounter on DMT trips, who he said were made of a kind of language, or ‘syntax binding light’:
“You wonder what to make of it. I’ve thought about this for years and years and years, and I don’t know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace. That certainly, consistently seems to be what is happening.
I’ve thought a lot about language as a result of that. First of all, it is the most remarkable thing we do.
Chomsky showed the deep structure of language is under genetic control, but that’s like the assembly language level. Local expressions of language are epigenetic.
It seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings that is not finished.
We have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust. But the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced and projected English or French or German or Chinese is still a poor carrier of our intent. A very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other. Intense compression.
It occurs to me, the ratios of the senses, the ratio between the eye and the ear, and so forth, this also is not genetically fixed. There are ear cultures and there are eye cultures. Print cultures and electronic cultures. So, it may be that our perfection and our completion lies in the perfection and completion of the word.
Again, this curious theme of the word and its effort to concretize itself. A language that you can see is far less ambiguous than a language that you hear. If I read the paragraph of Proust, then we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing, what did he mean? But if we look at a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore, we can discuss, what did he mean, but at a certain level, there is a kind of shared bedrock that isn’t in the Proust passage. We each stop at a different level with the textual passage. With the three-dimensional object, we all sort of start from the same place and then work out our interpretations. Is it a nude, is it an animal? Is it bronze, is it wood? Is it poignant, is it comical? So forth and so on.”
This post feels like the beginning of that concretization.