Mostly in reply to CB. >>CB: Calling it bizarre is bizarre, with your grunts and snorts version of early human communication. You are out of your gourd. Were they cavemen , too. You read too many cartoons.
Of course , the wheelwright uses stories to teach how to build a wheel. Duh.<< Actually these are early theories of how languages were developed. It's pretty standard stuff, typically cited in linguistics texts and dismissed in the same sentence. >>Carrol's vulgar materialist image of wheelwrights as only workers of the hand, and not of the brain, talking to their apprentices, showing them how to make wheels by dumb-speechless gestures and mime, silent imitation, leads to stupid versions of workers as mindless bodies performing like robots.<< The point is symboling can't transcend across generations unless real humans live in bodies and have in-body experiences, learning, working, working together. >>The hands-on experience that humans get is "mediated" by language. Language is interaction with dead ancestors. With language, there is always a "third person" ,an ancestor, involved in the conversation.<< First and foremost, it is interaction with living relatives and kin members. Also, languages change over time, your cross-generational process of symbolling apparently does not. >>The language is filled with symbols which are signs-symbols with an arbitrary relationship between the signifiers and the signified. The word for "tuber" in any of these languages has an arbitrary relationship to what it refers to.<< But that doesn't explain the origins of a language's vocabulary, which might well have started as a mix of the motivated and the arbitrary (with arbitrary always hemmed in by what is possible). >>CB: Are you saying when they first learned to do it, the Sgt. did not say a word to them in teaching them how to do it ? With manuals, you are talking about a period after _writing_ has been invented, not language. Could they _make_ from scratch a Browning automatic weapon without any language mediating ? Why try try to makeout that language doesn't mediate almost all of human processes since language began<< It's redundant and not illuminating to say language is symbolic or that language mediates language use. Could the current space program in the US, if given all the money in the world, reproduce the Apollow lunar missions? No. What has changed is the collective know-how and wherewithal of the living generations. The M2 is remarkable in that it is still being manufactured and/or re-built to spec. The US military never abandoned that design. Still, it only gets made or re-built because there is a group of living human beings who know how to make it. >>When we get to Moses, there is early writing in ...uh stone , on tablets.<< Actually most likely not, but are you really trying to refer to cuneiform incised in clay? >>CB: Here's a minimal pair : beige/base. the zh/ s binary opposition voiced/unvoiced distinguish the meaning between these two words.<< That would be a contrast of more than one feature. zh is voiced, continuous, fricative. It's closest voiceless counterpart is sh, as in rash, bash, etc. zh is typically an voiced, alveo-palatal fricative. The s of 'base' would be described as an unvoiced, alveolar fricative. Also, the internal vowel nucleus of 'base' would differ both qualitatively and quantitatively from the internal vowel nucleus of 'beige'. Or, in different terms of analysis, you could say that the nuclear diphthong transitions to voiceless in 'base' while the nuclear diphthong of 'beige' doesn't. At any rate, as I've said repeatedly before. It's circular to say that binary oppositions of units like 'phonemes' determine lexical meanings while using lexical meanings to determine what the binary units of opposition are. And UK's 'aeroplane' is a nice minimal pair with US 'airplane', but that doesn't mean the meaning contrasts. >>CB: Well, on this thread, I'm sort taking the opposite position. I say that language did play a critical role in original human productive and transformative activities, material culture. So, is your critique of structuralism here directed at Carrol 's comments ? I don't follow.<< I think what I'm saying here is saying something redundant and circular about language doesn't explain how language developed or how human culture developed. >>CB: We need something that "totalizes" and overlays the collective languagee community, otherwise people wouldn't be understanding what each other was saying.<< It's funny how for millenia people of this or that group have come into contact with this or that other group, couldn't speak each others languages, and subsequently, in three generations time developed into bilingual communities or communities with a new language. That didn't come from dead ancestors symboling. It came from living people interacting. >>CB; "Sexual selection" _is_ natural selection. Differential fertility is the main thingy in evolutionary biology, not differential mortality.<< I always thought in this scheme of things, sexual selection is a mechanism of natural selection, as is random mutation. Not sure where virus DNAs come into that. >>Then I ask why would identifying two things that are not identical arise ? That's where I get to the idea that symbols can cross the death barrier , whereas the bodily actions of the ancestor cannot cross the death barrier. The bodily actions of the ancestor cross the death barrier in the form of signs which are not the body, but which are used to represent that body and its many actions. In other words, the fact that the signifier is _not_ the "thing" or processes that it signified is the characteristic that allows it to get across the death barrier that the body of the ancestor faces.<< Well speaking is a bodily action. My point was nothing crosses the death barrier unless you have several generations of living human beings living, working, producing, communicating together in their environment. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
