Replying to LO26486 --
Dear Organlearners,
Jan Lelie <janlelie@wxs.nl> writes:
>As you might know one of our Dutch ministers of foreign affairs
> - Luns - once remarked that of all the animal sounds, the Dutch
>resembled a language the most. He barely survived in the parliament.
Greetings dear Jan,
Thanks for the great laugh. It is occasionally said of Afrikaans too.
But on a more serious tone -- are there not some archetypes in the sounds
made by all animals? Sometimes when I laid at night in some desert and
listened to the sounds made around me (yes, a desert is very much alive,
especially at night), the chorus of sounds became immensely pleasing even
though I could not understand any message in any particular sound.
>I once heard a theory that Afrikaans might have been
>created by children. The adults had trouble understanding
>each other - and still have, by the way - and had no a common
>tongue. The playing children assimilated what they found into
>a simple communication tool, no meaning intended.
Some people now even claim that Afrikaans was the language of the people
of mixed origin while the white Dutch spoke Dutch up to the beginning of
the 20th century. Then it became fashion for the whites to swop their
Dutch for Afrikaans!!
We will never know for sure because there was not even one linguist
studying the actual emergence of Afrikaans, although serious linguistic
studies of many languages (living and extict) were already going on in
Europe for two centuries since the Renaissance. I myself suspect that the
language Afrikaans was created by young and old, rich and poor, free
people and slaves, European, Xhoi and Malay. The languages available did
not match up to the requisite complexity of culture and nature in the
close confinements in and around the Cape of Storms (Cape Town).
I suspect that Internet which enables transdisciplinary thinking greatly
will be causing once again a similar kind of emergence in science and
technology. Every subject in science and technology has its own "language"
(terminology, modes of expression, etc.) However, more and more surfers on
the net will begin to notice "corresponding patterns" (or "coordinations
of coordinations") among many of these subjects. In the one subject an
"corresponding pattern" will have the name ABC, in the next subject it
will be DEF, etc, etc. Eventually people will try to express that
"corresponding pattern" with so many ABC, DEF, GHI, ... to call it by in a
way which makes sense to as many surfers as possible in the confinements
of Internet.
Making sense is indissolubly connected to experiencing. Thus more and more
people will become tacitly aware of corresponding patterns" (the form) in
human experience (the content). Perhaps the term "archetype" will survive
in refering to these "corresponding patterns" (or "coordinations of
coordinations"). But be prepared that it may be also an unexpected word
like for example "groundforms".
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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