Language Means Directed Attentions
The mind, along with the body’s needs, chooses and directs attention. I think we can start there. Our culture, our idiom, our language, all direct our attention. Questions direct our attention.
How we move our attention, either supports or distracts us from our intentions. Our ability to talk about a task easily, makes it easier to finish it, and finish it in line with our intentions.
Every field of endeavor has its own jargon for this reason. Different fields of science may have their own grammar; some even involve entirely different languages than English (such as algebra). Think of David Bohm’s quest to create the English-based “rheomode” (verb-only English) so he could easily talk about quantum phenomena.
Building pyramids, as I’ve mentioned oft before, required the innovation of professional classes. Societies without strict roles simply don’t build pyramids. What do wandering free families need with a pyramid?
If you want to accomplish something in a sustainable fashion (i.e. with grace and ease), you need to learn its language. To hunt a deer, you must learn Deer language. To navigate the ocean in a kayak, you must learn Ocean language. To revivify traditions of Family, Village, and Land, you must learn the languages of these organisms. Speaking the language used for building pyramids, in the context of building family, will make this work harder, sow confusion and distraction, and constantly drag against a task for which it has no functional language to talk about.
An example - if you descend from a long line of English speakers, does anyone in your family ever talk about “frith”? Frith comes from Old English, and indicates the deep peace and security that comes from healthy social and kin companionship.
Trick question, sorry. Frith died out in use as Middle English emerged. But let me reask that - do you even have a word for such a thing? Do any heavily acculturated modern peoples even think about such things? Perhaps the lucky ones. For most of us, we lost the word as we lost the value for this peace that we feel in the secure bonds of a joyful gathering of kin, blood or not.
What you have no words for, you will rarely think about; and when you do think about it, you will have long-winded attempts to encapsulate your meaning. I haven’t even really plumbed the depths of “frith” - I regard my above definition as a rather shallow and brief one. These long-winded attempts to talk about something mean that you can’t easily do anything about it.
Idiom can impact this too. You don’t always need words, sometimes you just need idiom to keep an idea alive. Our replacement idiom for frith, however, pales in comparision: “blood is thicker than water”. I don’t entirely know what that means, actually. However, think of the Gypsy Roma and their animate idiom towards killer cars, water, alcohol and electricity.
To reviviy traditions and technologies, we must create the language tools to speak of them: idioms, words, and grammar. We can start anywhere, though.
Sometimes it only takes a word - like “frith”.
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
Speaking of Old English, have you seen this website?
http://fred.wheatonma.edu/wordpressmu/mdrout
March 2nd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Frith! I love it, I am going to look into this more. I am working on a vague consept, which I hope to be more defined as I go along, I call Sacred Etymology - which the basic jist thus far, is looking at the root and origin of the english language to reclaim a depth of meaning which may have been lost. Some of this even delves into the speculations of Proto-Indo-European language. Frith describes a sensibility I have used the word kinship for.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Fishbowl:
Good luck - that project sounds like a wonderful adventure!
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Funny (as in interesting) — my friends who have played the game Werewolf (self included in this) adapted some of its language to describe things that normal English doesn’t. From bane (small spirit that fills one with bad intent) to Wyrm (larger negative spiritual force) to caern, sept… nouns, I know, but they’ve been verbed among my friends as well. Hm.
Best
Bill Maxwell
March 2nd, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Y’know, when I was off tonight … errm, in Altoona, doing nothing in particular? Ahem. Anyway, I had occasion to dwell upon the nature of words and music. I derived great meaning from a story told in a language I don’t speak. It reminded me of this thing that Tim Ingold wrote: “For all music, viewed in this light, is on its way to becoming speech, and there is no Rubicon beyond which we can say that it is unequivocally one thing rather than the other. Conversely, all speech has its origins in vocal music, that is in song.” All words simply come from songs sung so often, we refer to them by a vocal gesture now. A path laid over and over again, with so many tracks that we can see it clearly now, because so many have gone that way before.
To revivify a life in a new direction simply means striking up a new tune. I don’t know if we need to jettison our current language and learn a new one; that may just make the whole thing harder. But if words come from songs sung over and over, then that seems to me to present a different solution. Rather than borrow someone else’s songs to replace our own impoverished collection, we need to set about immediately singing new songs. I mean telling new stories. Just jam with them at first, and do it often enough and long enough that a tradition emerges, and in time, watch that tradition compress into a language. Before you know it, we’ll stand like Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
March 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Bill:
Yes! Exactly. I’ve had that experience to, where Story Games have given me language to talk about things that matter, that I’ve never had words for before. Werewolf actually has a lot of good stuff in it; I always wondered if former Earth First!ers wrote that. Your comment leads really well in Jason’s…
Jason:
Beautiful - “song moves into speech”. And human song echoes, and mimics the song of the Land. I especially like what you have to say about singing new Stories. Darmok and Jalad indeed! Though I don’t see it as an either/or…I see it as a both/and. Both work on new language, and work on new story.
I know that creating new language sounds awkward and difficult at times, but with the nuclear-powered (err…think the Sun, not bombs) language fluency game “Where are Your Keys?”, learning language overnight becomes a snap.
In fact, I don’t see why a person wouldn’t learn and know many, many languages - all the languages of their ancestry (for me, Danish, Irish, Tocharian), the languages of their modern geography (Spanish, Chinese, etc.), and the emerging languages of their anthropology of the future, helping them navigating through the cracks of the closed map into invisible worlds that we can’t even “see” with English.
Both/and! Both/and! I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to live in this Dickensian world, the worst of times, and the best of times, for cultural change artists such as ourselves. We’ve lost everything, so now we need to gain it all back. Someone like me probably annoyed the hell out of Village elders when last I belonged to an intact indigenous culture. I always wanted to change everything, question everything. But now…boy do the ghosts of those old folks slap me on the back and thank me for doing the work that few others will do.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Didn’t mean to imply an either/or. In fact, I meant to suggest that singing new songs makes one of the best paths to speaking a new language.
March 3rd, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Oh. Oops. Of course. Well how about, “yay!” instead.