On Sat, 21 Oct 1995, Angel M.Y. Lin wrote:
"...Merleau-Ponty's first point is that words, even when they finally >
achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual >
levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly >
phonemic, level of "affective" meaning which is not translatable into >
their conceptual definitions. There is, he argues, an affective >
tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought, >
beneath the level of the words themselves , which is contained in the >
words just insofar as they are patterned sounds, as just the sounds which
> this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are much >
more like a melody--a "singing of the world"--than fully translatable, >
conceptual thought. Merleau-Ponty is almost alone among philosophers of >
language in his sensitivity to this level of meaning. It is a level of >
affective communication which seems to belong to processes that, in >
themselves, are nonverbal but are a necessary part of the formation and >
production of words." --James M. Edie, 1973, Foreword to Merleau-Ponty's >
Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. >
This is also why, in my academic prose, I spend hours editing out Greek
and Latin derivatives and replacing them with good old Anglo-Saxon roots.
(In writing classes students laughingly call this "the four-letter word
rule.") At lest for native speakers (and readers) of English, these seem
to carry a more direct affective charge.
Are there layers of mediatedness? And are these less dense (in English) with
Anglo-Saxon roots?
Marie