Lazy

 In this dream, with my ex, we had a conversation in which she was insisting on how hard working she was, in comparison with me, I guess. Because I remember my response:  "So I'm lazy, and you are hard working, but we have had equally successful careers... How do you explain that?"  

Suppose

 Suppose you had perfect hearing and mimicking ability in a foreign language. You could hear every syllable and transcribe it in IPA, and repeat it with a native accent. Then you could understand everything except the semantics.

 Then you could memorize vocabulary by associating sounds with meanings.  

Language learning would be easy, then.  

***

Leaving aside grammar.  

We are squeezed

 We are squeezed from several directions at once.

There is the right-wing distrust of the humanities. There used to be right-wing supporters of the humanities, and, much as we despised them, there was at least a sense of something of value in the humanities appreciated even by those whose motives we distrust.  

There is the left-wing attack on the humanities. This is worse, in some ways, because it comes from within and thus is harder to resist. I remember people in my department saying they felt guilty about teaching literature. I recently saw a book that was pure position-taking, with no substance at all. 

Then there is AI, and the like.  We can manufacture new texts just by combining fragments of other texts in a plausible way. There is be no there there, as Stein would way. 

Then, there is just the relegation of teaching to adjuncts, making the entire work force of the humanities precarious labor.  

Between all these forces, the humanities don't stand a chance. 

Singapore

In this dream I was in Singapore or somewhere like that. I had no idea about the local currency, and found an ATM and withdrew, but I wasn't sure how much, so I did it again. I didn't have the address of my hotel, so getting in a taxi wouldn't do me much good. I was unsure of the language, not at all confident of my Mandarin.   

That last post was probably wrong

Language is not coterminous with reality itself, but with human cognition of reality. To the extent that languages coincide with how they construct the "map" of reality, this is what the human cognitive map of reality is.  Spacial and temporal relations; everything that language is good at doing.  

Where language is bad at something, or not as good, then it because there are parts of cognition that are linguistically efficient.  For example, you could describe a musical score with words, like saying: the sopranos have an E# quarter note, then a dotted C# eighth note.  

I guess language is not experiential, in the sense that it depends on the experience with which it coincides. It cannot convey new experiences to someone who hasn't felt them before, or convey qualitative things in their full immanent presence, or transcendent experiences.  It is an abstract system. But then, there is poetry, which makes experience palpable by using the sound and presence of the Word.  The poem itself is an experience. 

Language is coterminous with reality

 We think of language as inadequate in some ways, but really it is pretty great.  We can describe things in great detail, as much as we want.   

Borges's story, "Del rigor de la ciencia" imagines a map that coincides with the territory it covers. It is absurd, but we can imagine that, say, a description of an item can be extensive. Say, an analysis of a poem that is 100 times the length of the poem itself.  Or a 500 page novel about the events of a single day in the lives of two or three people.  Maps co-extensive with the territory defeat the whole purpose of a map, which is the scaling of it.  But we have no compunction about scaling with linguistic descriptions.  

The trope of ineffability, from this perspective, is really more about our high expectations of language.  We have to hold language in great esteem in the first place to even see its imperfections as disastrous.  

It can do almost anything we want it to do.  If there is something we want it to do that it can't, that is because our expectations are distorted by how much it can do in the first place.  

"En aquel imperio, el arte de la cartografía logró tal perfección que el mapa de una sola provincia ocupaba toda una Ciudad, y el mapa del imperio, toda una provincia. Con el tiempo, estos mapas desmesurados no satisficieron y los colegios de cartógrafos levantaron un mapa del imperio, que tenía el tamaño del imperio y coincidía puntualmente con él.

Menos adictas al estudio de la cartografía, las generaciones siguientes entendieron que ese dilatado Mapa era inútil y no sin impiedad lo entregaron a las inclemencias del sol y los inviernos. En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas ruinas del mapa, habitadas por animales y por mendigos; en todo el país no hay otra reliquia de las disciplinas geográficas."

"…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a

single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety

of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the

Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and

which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so

fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map

was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the

Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are

Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is

no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."  --Andrew Hurely, trans. 

The ornithologist is a better linguist than he is an ornithologist

 By this I mean that supposing an ornithologist has an extensive vocabulary in her field: names of birds, words used in a specialized way to describe them, scientific terminology in general.  This extra vocabulary runs to thousands of phrases. But the ornithologist will never know more bird words than words in general, because the bird words are part of the vocabulary, and are added to the total.  The ornithologist also know how to form phrases and talk about other things, can follow the rules of phonology and morphology and syntax and speech prosody. He or she is an educated person, also, since learning ornithology was part of an education into many things.   

You never know more of any other category of things than you know words, since you are likely to use words for those other categories too. If the ornithologist know 5,000 birds words, they will still know 20,000 non bird words as well.   

I'm using "linguist" here in a novel sense, because I don't know what other word to use for this. 

There  could be counter examples, I guess. People not very good with their words. Usually, though, we are comparing those people to people who speak more adeptly. They are below average, but still fluent in their own language.