On Sep 17, 2012, at 5:44 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > Could aesthetic stasis have something to do with high culture?:
When I was in college and becoming interested in linguistics, I was surprised to be challenged about what I thought were two firm, incontrovertible ideas: (1) phonemes were clear and fixed; and (2) every time I said the same word, I exactly duplicated the sounds of that word. I soon realized that word sounds were mutable and slid around, and that even within phonemes there could be variant pronunciations that could easily be heard and that did not affect the meaning of the spoken word. It never occurred to me until I started thinking about these matters that regional accents were abundant evidence of the "truth about phonemes." Some years later I realized that when I encountered a difficult accent or speech inflection, at some point I could figuratively drag the spoken sounds onto the paradigm phonemes I had internalized (the "right way" to pronounce sounds) and the meaning would "snap" into my awareness and be quite evident. I was well aware of this kind of "representational latitude" in painting and drawing. I had learned it from my early years and knew it intuitively. There is no stasis. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
