[Xmca-l] Vowels Are From Venus

[David Kellogg]

I've always been restless with the idea that language is a self-organizing
system, or that it has a "fractal" structure in the sense of
the "self-similarity" we find in a fern leaf--the same structure at every
level. I suppose my impatience is ideological: I believe language
organization is semantically driven (and semantic structure is a
realization/transformation of some of the structures found in contexts). So
I don't think that vowels and consonants organize themselves into syllables
without human intentions, nor do I think that syllables will form words
unless somebody makes them do it. As for grammar, it seems to me that to
expect that even the very limited grammar found in this paragraph you are
reading should somehow be "thrown up" by the words I am using and their
elective affinities is a little like expecting medieval cathedrals to be
thrown up by the mutual attraction of the stones that compose them.

Yes, I know. Consonants are what happen in the absence of vowels (at the
ends of vowel phrases). Vowels are what happen at the ends of consonants.
As soon as you have breath, vocal cord vibration, and a beginning and an
end to it, you have the primitive structure (Optional Consonant) Mandatory
Vowel (Optioinal Consonant), and from this we can derive all the possible
syllable structures of any language. You can do the same trick at any level
of language: If you have a morpheme like "work" or "play" you can add a
bound morpheme to either end ("re~" and/or "~ed"),and if you have a clause
like "Work!" you can add a bound clause to either end ("If you are so
willing~" and/or "so as to enrich yourselves!") and the existence of xmca
itself shows how this principle works on units above the clause--Mike's
last post is not really intelligible without my preceding one, and mine is
not really intelligible without James's, etc.

But I'm not talking about the various forms of language, potential and
real; these are of course the affordances of the stuff of which language is
made, just as the limits of what you can do on a canvas has something to do
with the consistency of the paint. I'm talking about what people actually
do and not just what they may or might do. So for example when we look at
"To be or not to be" or at the speeches we find in "Shajiabang" or even, as
Mike suggests, at the language of everyday life, we find that vowels tend
to carry the feeling of what we say (that's why they are elongated
in tonics and why they are directed in tonality). Consonants, on the other
hand, work better for the nuances of thinking. That's why we sing the
vowels, but spell with consonants; why Ophelia says "Oh what a noble mind
is here o'erthrone!" but Hamlet says "Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins
remembered!". And so once again we find that feeling and thinking are both
linked and distinct, to say the which is surely to say no more and no less
than to say that they are joined/separated by a dialectical leap.

David Kellogg