Episode 98 Linguistic singularities

Photo by Chrissy Jarvis

Counting… that’s maths, right? Actually, it’s language. And as we’ll discover through a series of absurd tasks (like, ‘count everything you can see’), you can’t count anything until you know what ‘counts as’ a thing. Language draws the lines around what counts, and it shifts and changes as it does so.

In this episode we celebrate the rich lineage of linguists and language philosophers who offer detailed, rational arguments against an objectivist paradigm of language. Language does not refer to things in the world, they explain. Language is not, as Wallis Reid (1991, p. 54) explains, a ‘mirror of nature.’

My own perspective on the objectivist paradigm resonates with these, but it’s less rational, more mystical and speculative. What if we experience the world in many dimensions, and language is the most restrictive of these dimensions, as I discussed in Episode 95, ‘Your name without language?’ What if language restricts us from fully accessing the other dimensions?

Here are my radical, irrational views in a nutshell: Language is a way of structuring information. Human language structures information according to a particular organising principle—the self. Human language presumes, constructs, projects a self. And we can see the process by which this happens by looking closely at the structures of grammar.

The structure of grammar we’re looking at in this episode is grammatical number. We’ll discover that different languages have different grammatical number systems. Many have singular and plural. Some have singular, dual and plural. Some have singular, dual, trial and plural. Some have singular, dual, paucal and plural.

One thing all these languages have in common is ‘singular’. Understanding how language structures the ‘singular’ can help us understand the structure of our own selves, and the beauty that might be found there.

The story I read in this episode is ‘Fairest.’

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Work cited: Reid, W. (1991). Verb and noun number in English. Longman.

Episode 97 The intimacy of denial

Photo by Drew Hays

What’s the weirdest thing about human language? We explore linguistic polarity and all its bizarre implications. Embedded in every human grammar is a way of turning a positive clause (I’m listening) into a negative clause (I’m not listening). Grammatical negation is one of the ways we can do denial. (‘I’m not scared of that dog,’ said the three-year-old whose body was telling an entirely different story.)

What would a language without negation look like? My story ‘Negative space’ refers to an (imaginary?) alien language where everything is expressed in the affirmative. Closer to home, we could speculate about the Earth’s own language.

If languages are ways of structuring information, then human languages are uniquely structured around selfhood. Negative polarity works to structure the relationship between self and other, which sometimes means denying the other, sometimes affirming them. Either way it’s a route to intimacy. If human language draws a boundary or a membrane around the distinct self, then the intimacy of negation can be a way of acknowledging and celebrating those boundaries.

The other story I mention in this episode is ‘Lessons in Latin’.

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Episode 96 The Earth’s language

Image by Elena Mozhvilo

We start the episode, as always, with a couple of questions:

1. What are the differences between spoken/signed language and written/printed/digital language?
2. Where are you?

There’s an answer to Question 2 that will be true for anyone who says it. ‘I am here.’ But if you write it on a piece of paper, and then leave the room, it stops being true.

Does that make spoken language more genuine?

Or is written language more reliable because it’s more durable, less ephemeral? (‘Put it in writing.’)

We explore questions around spoken/written language in relation to what French philosopher Jacques Derrida calls the ‘metaphysics of presence’. And also in relation to a quite touching France Télécom advert from the ’90s.

The discussion leads to a conversation about non-human language, specifically, the language of the Earth itself. Both human language and the Earth’s language are systems for structuring information. Human language is structured around the principle of selfhood, which leads us to the whimsical fancy that the separate, distinct self exists prior to the grammar that created it.

The story I read in Episode 96 is ‘The loneliness of the literate species’.

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Episode 95 Your name without language

Image by Reid Zura

What would your name be without language?

In this episode we explore the problem of names in truth conditional semantics, with a look at Gottlob Frege’s explanation of sense and reference, Bertrand Russell’s claims about the definite descriptors and Saul Kripke’s term for proper names, which is ‘rigid designators’.

What would it be like if you weren’t so rigidly designated?

Truth conditional semantics is concerned with making true or false statements about the world. But what if the world and language are on two different planes of existence? What if language is a one-dimensional phenomenon attempting to delineate multidimensional experience?

The most fascinating aspects of language (to me) is that it presumes and thereby constructs a self. But a one-dimensional language, it would seem, would produce very limited, superficial selves. Does inhabiting language keep us from experiencing the vastness of other dimensions? (If this question sounds familiar, you might be remembering playing with it in Episode 94, Language and the Afterlife.)

It turns out that the linearity of language offers possibilities not available in other dimensions. Language, being one-dimensional, can (and does) shape itself in constantly changing ways to create new selves. The selves form spaces from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in Episode 95 is ‘The brutal linearity of language’.

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Episode 94 Language and the afterlife

Photo by Christopher Windus

What happens when we die? Ideas about the afterlife (or the lack of an afterlife) requires theory building based on either faith or experience. What if you don’t have faith in stories about the afterlife and you’ve never experienced anything resembling a near-death experience (NDE)? In this episode I’ll guide you through a language-based exercise that might help you with your theory building about worlds beyond everyday experience.

The task is to ‘experience your world’, first through the filter of language and then without the filter of language.

The intention is to open up the possibility that there are at least two different (simultaneous) worlds, layered on top of each other—at least two different dimensions of experience.

If we accept that, why might there not be at least one more? Or even many, many more?

The other thing that we might notice is how the filter of language presumes and produces a distinction between self and other, which disappears when we remove this filter. Because the linguistic dimension restricts us to the experience of selfhood, it might be the most constraining of all dimensions. And we can speculate about the existence of a soul that survives death and lives simultaneously in many (or all) dimensions.

But before we get swept away in our excitement about this transcendent soul, we might allow ourselves to enjoy a certain fascination with living within a restrictive, linguistic existence and the creativity that might emerge from this level of constraint.

The story I read in Episode 94 is ‘Moving language’.

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Episode 93 Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi

Is there a distinction between you and the rest of the world?

Where do you stop and the rest of the world begin?

What’s the meaning of the word ‘now’?

The gift of language is that it shapes and reshapes the experience of separateness. It’s a gift because it’s fluid. It’s more a membrane than a wall—with every utterance, there’s a new configuration of separateness.

The gift of separateness is that it invites mystery. The word Carl Jung uses for this is numinous, which comes from the word numen, meaning divinity, god or spirit.

Language gives you access to divinity.

But it requires first that you disown the divine aspects of the self, so that you can experience the joy of reunion.

The story I read in Episode 93 is ‘Salesman to the gods’. The other story I mention in ‘Ghosts’.

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Episode 92 The grammatical shape of emotions

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge

When was the last time you lost language? And… how do you feel? The one time it feels like I’m losing language is when I let myself feel what I really feel. (We’re talking about weeping, wailing, keening—the dripping-nose ugly cry.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and language because I’ve just made a new course available, The Grammar of Show Don’t Tell: Exploring the Emotional Depths. It’s a love letter to my young writing self, who had no idea how to put ‘show don’t tell’ into my writing practice.

In designing the course, I discovered the ways that writers grammatically shape their characters’ emotions. I look specifically at fear, envy, grief, love at first sight, sensuality and rage.

In this episode we explore sorrow as a felt experience with a grammatical shape. (Ugly crying entirely optional.)

The story I read in Episode 92 is ‘Death of a grammarian’.

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Episode 91 The limits of language and selfhood

Photo by Shane Rounce

Linguistic interaction involves much more than simply sharing information. It requires shaping the information so that it will fit in to a pre-existing structure. This is where we might run into problems if we ever get the chance to chat with intelligent extra-terrestrial beings. To what extent can we communicate if there is no shared common ground? As it happens, we already live on a planet with intelligent non-human life, a world with its own language and even, as Paul Stamets points out, its own internet. If we were courageous enough to live at the limits of human selfhood and human language maybe we’d be able to communicate with that world.

The story I read in Episode 91 is ‘Nonna’s prophecy’.

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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Episode 90 Language, intimacy and narcissism

Photo by Niko Tsviliov

What’s the worst relationship you’ve ever been in?

What’s the difference between this and that?

There are at least three ways of understanding that second question, each of which reveals a different level of abstraction: metalinguistic, anaphoric and exophoric.

Our exploration of this and that (proximal and distal demonstratives, that is) reveals the gift, the risk and the challenge of human language.

The gift: Language creates selfhood, and with selfhood comes intimacy.

The risk: Language can also create an obsession with the self, disavowal of the other, narcissism.

The challenge: To recognise that our selfhood is a gift of our evolving human language, which is a gift of the evolving Earth. With language we’re offered the opportunity to recognise the limitations of the self, and to be open to the mystery of the other.

The translation of the quote from Buddhist sutras about the finger pointing at the moon is from:

Ho, Chien-Hsing (2008). The finger pointing toward the moon: a philosophical analysis of the Chinese Buddhist thought of reference. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 35 (1):159-177. https://philpapers.org/rec/CHITFP-2

Check out jodieclark.com for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course. Sign up for the Grammar for dreamers newsletter here: jodieclark.com/newsletter

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Episode 89 Grammar as a gateway to mystery

Photo by Brooke Lark

‘Dreams, it turns out, are like clauses. They can be configured and reconfigured in an infinite number of ways. They are quanta of information about what could be transformed in the world, whether it’s your own world or a bigger social world, or both.’ (from my new book, Refreshing Grammar, p. 127)

Can something be both practical and dreamy?

Mysteries involve holding two seemingly incompatible our irreconcilable truths. The thrill of a genuine mystery is when it cracks you open to something new. Can grammar be a gateway to mystery?

We explore this question by thinking about out of body experiences. And what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow.

The mystery of being human is that we exist grammatically, which means we constantly shift our point of reference outside of our own body.

How can the self exist outside the body?

How can experience exist outside of the world?

This is the mystery: grammar is creative—and what it creates is space from which new ideas can emerge.

The story I read in this episode is ‘In plain sight’, and it’s available at grammarfordreamers.com.

Check out my new website, jodieclark.com, for information about Refreshing Grammar, the book, and Refreshing Grammar, the course.

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