- LANGUAGE

Amer-Ind as a universal travelers’ language supplementing everyone’s mother tongue. On cultural ecology: its suffocation by corporate weapon culture and its growth on PeaceWorld.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- LANGUAGE -

“The close relationship between language and religious belief pervades cultural history. Often, a divine being is said to have invented speech, or writing, and given it as a gift to mankind. One of the first things Adam has to do, according to the Book of Genesis, is name the acts of creation:

‘And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name …’

“Many other cultures have a similar story. In Egyptian mythology, the god Toth is the creator of speech and writing. It is Brahma who gives the knowledge of writing to the Hindu people. Odin is the inventor of runic script, according to the Icelandic sagas. A heaven-sent water turtle, with marks on its back, brings writing to the Chinese. [Author’s note: Another father of Chinese writing is Fu Hsi, a legendary Emperor who ruled 5,000 years ago. He found the eight key trigrams that make up the supernatural I Ching, Book of Changes, based on markings he found on a tortoise shell.] All over the world, the supernatural provides a powerful set of beliefs about the origins of language.

 “Religious associations are particularly strong in relation to written language, because writing is an effective means of guarding and transmitting sacred knowledge. Literacy was available only to an elite, in which priests figured prominently. Echoes of this link reverberate in English vocabulary still, through such connections as scripture and script, or the reference to scripture as Holy Writ. And there are widespread sanctions for human action expressed authoritatively in phrases of the form: ‘for it is written’.” David Crystal, Editor, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 388. 

“… The name of the Sanskrit alphabet is Devanagari, which means ‘pertaining to the city of the gods.’ Hieroglyphic, used by the ancient Egyptians for their formal documents carved in stone, means ‘sacred stone writing’ (the Egyptians also had the hieratic and demotic scripts more generally used on papyrus). They believed that writing had been devised by Toth, the god of wisdom, and the Egyptian name for writing was ndw-ntr (‘the speech of the gods’). The Assyrians had a legend to the effect that the cuneiform characters were given to man by the god Nebo, who held sway over human destiny. Cuneiform was produced by pressing wedges into wet clay tablets (the name means ‘wedge-shaped’); it was used by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other peoples of the Mesopotamian region from about 4000 B.C. to the time of Christ. The Mayas attributed writing to their most important deity, Itzamna [god of wisdom]. The lost prehistoric writings of Japan was (sic) styled kami no moji, or ‘divine characters.’ As late as Christian Middle Ages, Constantine the Philosopher (another name for Cyril, apostle of the Slavs) is described as having had Slavic writing revealed to him by God.” Mario Pei, The Story of Language, The New American Library, New York and Toronto, 1965, p. 96.

We could conclude (despite the Bible or because of it?) that human intellect began with the word spoken out loud to the world. In this word spoken face to face, in its righteousness and wisdom, lay personal merit and honor. A lot more work would be needed to restore its luster once it had been tarnished with lies. 

Human corruption must have worsened with the written word that subtracts us from the world, whose lies and stupidities are just empty scribbles on a piece of paper or pixels across a computer screen, indistinguishable from truth and wisdom except by their long-term consequences. 

There may have been city dwellers pre-Deluge. Their last survivors may have been the first transmitters of the Hindu Vedas, imitated by subsequent Cretans. Their cultures of origin may have restricted the written word to accounting functions: inventories, astronomy, astrology and calendars, and only allowed sacred stories to be memorized in spoken format. Could this have been a form of cultural Darwinism, culling the dross and only preserving the inspirational? “Learn it by heart if it is beautiful, truthful and elegant enough to inspire the hard work of memorization and recitation; forget the rest.”

Now that we have not only speech and writing but also their recording and transmission in staggering quantities, even if on ephemeral media, what mode of expression would enhance both, place us before our deepest merit and truth and lend us the calm of sheep, like that found inside a wolf pack?

There’s a common expression for a tool that kills, “a weapon.” Take the phrase, “learning tool.” What a clumsy turn of phrase! And, of course, it has no popular contraction. 

Besides, picture a weapon. See it clearly? Now picture a learning tool. 

“A what?” You might ask, “There is no such thing. Did you mean a book?” Or maybe a smartphone? 

Did this mind-exercise teach you anything about our cultural bias? In a sensible world, we would call guns “fire harms, side harms and long harms.” Regular soldiers would belong to the “Harm Forces.” All this would be quasi-obscene weapon-talk, and superior Learning tools would be everyday items.

Info elites regulate the form and content of language. George Orwell concluded that this was the top priority of the info elite (my term, not his): regulating the info proletariat’s communications. Money, news, sports, cooking, war, education, crime: these are merely alternate forms of communication — info symphonies, choruses, dances and solos that each culture orchestrates. 

National sovereignty is the control that info elites exert over their host proletariat both inside and outside the national membrane. Such communications may range from the free intermingling of international info proletarians under minimal control, to a final, totalitarian exercise at info simplification during which popular discourse is reduced to the crash and roar of drumfire. 

In Gaia: The Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos, Pocket Books, New York, 1989, p. 64, author Elisabet Sahtouris quotes Ivanovitch Vernadsky, a Russian geologist who called life “ … ‘a disperse of rock,’ … a chemical process transforming rock into highly active living matter and back, breaking it up and moving it about in an endless, cyclical process.” If life can be seen as a “disperse of rock,” then our civilization must be just another form of geochemical dispersal. 

In peacetime, the political membrane that encloses a society lets information (people, money, data and goods) flow through it more or less freely. In wartime, that membrane becomes inflamed with fire, blast, flying debris and radio static — or their latest, most lethal equivalents. No signal but murderous propaganda can penetrate it. Get caught consorting across this membrane in wartime and get punished. All cosmopolitanism is strangled. 

Once and for all, Learners will dissolve these membranes by providing diverse peoples with a common government, a shared language and a global culture that takes great pains to welcome them in their full diversity. 

Esperanto, Ido, Volapuk and a succession of verbal patchworks have been developed, which give undue advantage to dominant language groups. Glossa is a recent linguistic invention about which I know little beyond the name. 

Except for those whose passion it is, no one in the future will have to study any among a half-dozen languages spoken by a handful of travelers, (Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or English: it matters little which). Instead, everyone will learn one language as a supplement to their native tongue. Ideally, this language will differ from current languages in its linguistic neutrality. Today’s dominant language groups should gain no unfair advantage using it. 

Its grammar should include the best rules of all those known. Each language group has evolved its own solution to grammatical problems: some elegant, others complex. These complications are a compound of accent and grammar with many exceptions and irregularities to memorize. The tortured pronunciation and spelling of English, the arbitrary spelling and gender-differences of French and other languages, the musical intonation and endless written characters of Chinese: these difficult-to-learn features make good examples. 

Those idiosyncrasies are essentially defensive language barriers, shibboleths, linguistic placentas wrapped around the embryonic proletariat to shelter it from alien contamination. Anyone who speaks with an accent or writes with too many spelling or syntax errors, betrays himself to the locals as a foreigner thus a potential enemy.

Dogmatic schooling forces people to learn some trendy foreign language. The latest one is English — perhaps soon to be followed by Chinese. Hapless students are hammered for failing to master the dominant language, even after their window of linguistic adaptation has slammed shut. Few language students practice often enough (very often) the foreign language skills they need in the real world. Instead, they forget those valuable lessons because they were taught them once they’d grown too old to retain them. Precious Learning time is wasted: a major goal of weapon education. 

This problem could be worked around by teaching language skills to children during their most receptive infancy. In the future, preschoolers will learn an international manual sign language that extends to every corner of the globe. Students will practice it on a daily basis in their own communities, in and out of the classroom. Foreign travelers will find self-confident signers at every stop along their way. 

I have learned, since, that there are major variations between American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) much less between them and Chinese Sign Language (CSL) and others. These fully mature languages can transmit complicated, abstract information. I had in mind a much simpler form of communication that would put international guests and hosts at ease with a non-threatening code of familiar gestures. Say 500 to 1000 terms universally understood.

According to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Second Edition (David Crystal, Editor, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 1997, p. 227) this language already exists. It is called Amer-Ind, developed by Madge Skelly for use by the orally handicapped from a system of coded gestures common among American Indians. 

They had it to overcome many language barriers. Their brightest young Learners – setting out on coming-of-age quests, as the best have always done – made their way through five hundred other nations, each with its own dialect, (two thousand nations and languages if you count those in South and Central America). 

Modern Learners could adopt Amer-Ind as a basic traveler’s language. People could pick it up with relative ease, since almost half its gestures are understood without additional training. It would evolve into something more refined and subtle in its own good time.

Young kids pick up spoken languages during their window of linguistic adaptation that normally remains open from birth until around the third birthday. It doesn’t matter how many languages children learn during that period or how difficult they are. It’s amazing to watch most infants pick up proper grammar, extensive vocabularies and complex social conventions with relative ease. Not only does an overwhelming majority of children learn all the exceptions and irregularities of their native tongue, but also the deliberate deviations and accents of their local dialect in a flawless manner after a short while. Most children cannot repeat this performance later on in school when they receive instruction in foreign languages and native grammar.

When it comes to learning new languages, children with a relatively low IQ score can outperform the most advanced theoretical black box our best linguists could come up with. This finding should inspire Learners’ hopes for human genius — at least once some of humanity’s worst and most cherished routines have been cast off … like not teaching children languages when they would be most receptive to them: a typical failing of weapons education. Children are not sent to learn languages in preschool or prior when they’d be young enough to absorb them naturally. 

At the earliest receptive age, Learner children will appreciate many more matters of interest to them. Adult Learners will enrich young minds to healthy saturation. We will accelerate children’s flight from misery, promote affection and distribute survival necessities with openhanded generosity. In so doing, we will raise a generation of prodigies never seen in the past. They will get to the bottom of stacks of epic mysteries on our behalf. 

A new written language will annotate the hand-signed one. If possible, the time taken to learn it will be short and its transcription, speedy. Its calligraphy will be as beautiful as that of Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic and Khmer: every page should be a stunning work of art. We should replace paper and ink with a direct manipulation of light, a natural chemical transformation (for example, fingertip salts on a treated surface) or some superior recording medium (thus easier to use). Our devastation of forests for paper is horrific and must be stopped. 

An odd idea keeps surfacing in my mind. We must bring the media back to the message, and not the other way around. Whatever that means …

We may resume the writing methods of prehistory. I speculate that elephant-ear leaves, fresh-picked from trees planted along boulevards, were scribed with a fingernail  or a sharp spine, again picked off the same tree. Could the tree’s bark peal page sheets free like crust pastry? Could its black sap have served as ink?

Image ancient towns dotting river lines now sunk beneath the waves: their magnificent avenues, statues both divine and historic, lavish bazaars, fountains gushing unlimited volumes of sweet water, splendid parks, monster fish spilling out from the sea, and ambling landscapes as inviting as the best of ours today.

The more sophisticated a written culture, the more ephemeral its written medium. Note our pixie pixels. Few ancient writings remain because really old documents were written on delicate stationary. All except the tablets of bloodthirsty empires about which our military cultures love to obsess. Plain tablets of dried clay were baked into indestructible ceramic when hostile hordes overran the tiny libraries of imperial capitals and burned them down unexamined. 

Specially treated leaves could have been dried and pressed into archive-quality sheaves of legible text. After centuries, such documents turned into illegible dust. The scribes disappeared and their exotic wisdom became “prehistoric.” 

Could those leaves have been grafted onto smart trees to make copies or transmit the message to other plants? Draw me the limits of potential biotechnology once we fully understand how living things grow.

Organized religions were prototype corporations peddling their dogma by excluding other faiths. Nowadays, international corporations wipe out cultural diversity to peddle across diverse cultures their products of paltry value with respect to that diversity. 

In the future, user demand for high quality, custom-crafted artifacts will dictate their production, and graceful religions will reflect mass piety. Human culture will become diverse and varied enough to encourage Learners to pursue their topics of passion. 

During this Learner Golden Age, each language group will share its depths of significance and mystery. An army of expert translators will stand on-call from their own networks. Drawing on their expertise, other Learners will appreciate the finer nuances (new-awnss, subtleties) of other cultures. The cultural conformity that our corporations demand will come to an end. Diversity will become the Learner norm; cultural mediocrity will stop being used to loosen the consumer’s purse.

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. II, Chapter10.

Author’s note: If it bothers you to find a Hitler quote here, I apologize. Please consult my chapter Quoting Hitler out of Context.

“It is certain that in the future the importance of the individual states will be transferred to the sphere of our cultural policy. The monarch who did most to make Bavaria an important center was not an obstinate particularist with anti-German tendencies, but Ludwig I who was as much devoted to the ideal of German greatness as he was to that of art. His first consideration was to use the powers of the state to develop the cultural position of Bavaria and not its political power.” 

Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization, Pantheon Books, New York, 1998, pp. 7-8.

“Indeed, in this process of constant change, the most advanced nations may eventually enter, may indeed already be entering, that blissful state imagined in 1930 by John Maynard Keynes: a condition where we no longer need care about the basic economic problem of survival that has plagued the human race since its beginning, but are able at last to do only the things we find agreeable and pleasurable. 

“Keynes unforgettably wrote: ‘Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’. ‘But,’ Keynes warned, ‘none of us can look forward to this new and permanent golden age with any equanimity. For,’ he pointed out, ‘we have been trained too long to work, not to enjoy. It would be a huge problem for the ordinary person with no special talents, to occupy him or herself without work; if one needed evidence, one could merely look at the melancholy record of the rich minority anywhere.’ 

“We would need, as so few of us can, to ‘take least thought for the morrow.’ We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”

 “But with this interesting corollary that even Keynes could never have guessed at: these agreeable activities may themselves become sources of income and of economic growth, may generate new industries of a kind never known to earlier, simpler eras. Rich, affluent, cultivated nations and cities can sell their virtue, beauty, philosophy, their art and their theatre to the rest of the world. From a manufacturing economy we pass to an informational economy and from an informational economy to a cultural economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, cities across Europe – Montpellier, Nimes, Grenoble, Rennes, Hamburg, Cologne, Glasgow, Birmingham, Barcelona and Bologna – have become more and more preoccupied by the notion that cultural industries (a term no longer thought anomalous or offensive) may provide the basis for economic regeneration, filling the gap left by vanished factories and warehouses, and creating a new urban image that would make them more attractive to mobile capital and mobile professional workers.” 

Except that there won’t be “more advanced cities” and, by implication, “backward” ones. The Earth will be transformed. Nowadays, we live on Planet Mogadishu on a Bad Day, where each city is just another sinister stopover, perhaps containing a few tiny ghettos of privilege. Planet Mogadishu will become Planet (name your favorite city). Its worst towns will be rebuilt with Learner diligence or shifted to a finer setting. The worst will be turned into parkland, deep-forest or otherwise.

Every district will shine in its own way, like the most attractive neighborhood in your favorite city.

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net