[Xmca-l] Re: dappled

Wed Nov 26 13:17:01 PST 2014

My poetic sense of dappled is that it is slightly incongruent with 'dappled
light', dappled suggests to me a softening, such as to damp down and it
seems to me that its not the light which is dappled but the leaf-strewn
path etc.  Etymologically it seems to originate from 'to spot' which I
understand to be to darken etc.   Conversely spangled refers to the
brighten with sparkles.  Possibly there's some affordance in the softening
from the "spa" to the "da"...

We've recently adopted a rather classic-looking lurcher with a coat
streaked with every shade from coal to an aged snow white.   Maybe theres a
term for that admist Hardy, Hopkins and Donne.

That's not much help for question, other than the action-based aspects to
the words.  With respect to the singularity of meaning, I usually simply
refer to these as technical terms.  It'd be nice to be equipped with a more
precise (technical) word though. :)

In respect of fuzzy threads, If you'd like to know what a zawn or a
jackstraw is, check out the landreader project:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27780066
http://www.thelandreader.com/

Best,
Huw

On 26 November 2014 at 20:09, Rod Parker-Rees <R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Greg to me, not me to Greg but yes.
>
> I would agree that sense is multisensory but I am not sure I would say
> that words evoke this sense. I would argue that it is speaking (and
> sometimes writing) that evokes this 'thick' sense so it is how words and
> other signs are 'performed' that is particularly telling.
>
> The difficulty with this medium (or one of them) is that most of us don't
> really know the person whose words we are reading. I am just beginning to
> develop a sense of who frequent contributors are - what you, Andy, Mike,
> David, Larry, Vera, Huw, Martin, Haydi, Annalisa and others care about and
> like to write about but this is a MUCH slower process than getting to know
> someone in face to face conversation and this can make it hard going to
> keep up with the asynchronous and semisynchronous twists and turns of an
> online 'conversation'.
>
> Evoking in writing, to strangers is MUCH more difficult than evoking with
> full use of a body (and with the ability to monitor the body responses of
> one's conversation partners.
>
> Rod
>
> Sent from my Windows Phone
> ________________________________
> From: HENRY SHONERD
> Sent: 26/11/2014 18:43
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: dappled
>
> Rod,
> A small point, but important for me, when you say to Greg:
>         Evocative, no?
> One could argue that the physical forms of language, the signs, in any
> genre, EVOKE meaning, whereby we, as language users, profile some facet of
> the cognitive, encyclopedic, “ground" which constitutes our semantic
> structure. I am guessing any effort to posit an actual structure in the
> mind will provoke concerns in the chat, arguing for dynamic processes. But
> you have to get nouny sometimes! Call it a useful illusion? What I was
> trying to lay out was an alternative to the “packages” of form/meaning to
> construe “word”, certainly not what Vygotsky had in mind. I see word
> “sense” as collateral activation of the word profiled. And, of course, it
> includes all of the sound symbolism inherent in your kids’ names. Written
> communication, it seems to me, when done with such care as I see in this
> chat, gives me an idea of how deep this language-based semantic activation
> goes with experienced readers and published writers.
> Henry
>
>
>
> > On Nov 26, 2014, at 10:26 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Rod!
> > We had the exact same realization - before we added a fourth child (she's
> > an outlier), our son pointed out to us that all three kids had the exact
> > same three vowels (a, o, i)! This was totally non-intentional on our part
> > as well. And no, there aren't a ton of a, o, i names out there -
> something
> > we discovered with our fourth. (with the fourth, we were running low on
> a,
> > o, i girl names since we had used up a third a, o, i girl name with our
> > third child's middle name; we contemplated "Fiona" but in the end we went
> > with an a, e, i name that has other poetic resonances with the others
> even
> > if it lacks the exact same vowels - that time we did indeed think about
> it).
> >
> > I think this points to an important quality of meaning - it is highly
> > non-intentional in its form and structure.
> >
> > A second point follows and speaks to Andy's question - the nature of the
> > structure is not always apparent to speakers but we can nonetheless
> > reproduce it. We were reproducing a, o, i in names without knowing it.
> >
> > It is for this reason that we can understand a passage such as this:
> > "“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian
> > generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her
> > luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and
> setting
> > by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of
> her
> > aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her
> > potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to
> > mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid
> > delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility
> of
> > her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and
> of
> > calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the
> > admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour,
> when
> > visible: her attraction, when invisible.” "
> >
> > Or a phrase like this:
> > “The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
> >
> > Evocative, no?
> >
> > David?
> > -greg
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Rod Parker-Rees <
> > R.Parker-Rees@plymouth.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> >> This conversation has been playing on my mind - Henry's comments about
> >> language in the other thread (Fate. Luck , Chance) tied in closely with
> my
> >> own ideas about the ways in which language is dappled with varieties of
> >> knowing. There are meanings which we can be pretty confident most
> speakers
> >> of a language will know and recognise but then there are also
> etymological
> >> remains which nuance the meaning of some words and word families and
> then
> >> there are the 'Bouba' and 'Kiki' effects of connections between the
> >> physical act of speaking and the felt meaning of sounds/words. What
> >> particularly interests me is the middle ground of word families which
> have
> >> a resemblance which most speakers will recognise but which very few will
> >> 'Know'.
> >>
> >> Dapple belongs to one such family - words which suggest repetition by
> the
> >> addition of the '-le' suffix (spark - sparkle, crack-crackle, drip
> >> -dribble, dab-dabble) and this family includes words like dapple and
> >> freckle, drizzle and giggle which are clearly members of the family but
> >> whose lineage has faded (who knows what a dap, freck, driz or gig might
> >> be?). I suspect that perished might also belong, at least in part, to a
> >> family of 'dying fall' words which share the 'ished' ending (finished,
> >> demolished, extinguished, famished). I tried to think of more positive
> >> examples but could only come up with 'nourished' (I'm sure I will be
> proved
> >> wrong on this!).
> >>
> >> The point is that words have many shades of meaning and association but
> >> ALL of these depend on the fact that these shades are shared. Some may
> be
> >> shared only within a very small group (and than gives them a special
> >> cachet) such as those which a family preserves from the mis-speakings of
> >> children. It is the fact that we know that we share our knowledge which
> >> converts knowing into understanding and I would argue that the knowing
> >> together aspect of con-sciousness is absolutely essential (our thinking
> is
> >> an internalised form of our social interactions and we learn to think
> >> together in our 'own' heads).
> >>
> >> I was honestly surprised when I realised that all three of my children
> >> have names which include the same two vowels (my daughter is Sophie)
> and no
> >> others. This was not planned, in fact Sophie's name was chosen by her
> >> brothers (which might explain their preference for a name similar to
> >> theirs) but this has constructed a family resemblance which doubtless
> gives
> >> these vowels a different 'feel' for us.
> >>
> >> I have to say how much I love the thinkles which dapple this forum!
> >>
> >> All the best,
> >>
> >> Rod
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> >> xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Ed Wall
> >> Sent: 26 November 2014 03:41
> >> To: ablunden@mira.net; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: dappled
> >>
> >> Just a note, the term 'perished silk' is reasonably common term (and
> >> possibly older than 'perished rubber') although not given space in the
> OED.
> >> It refers, it seems, to a sort of worn and faded look.
> >>
> >> Ed
> >>
> >> On Nov 25, 2014, at  8:36 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:
> >>
> >>> David, thank you very much for your patient and extended response to my
> >> question. At the very great risk of even further humiliating myself, I
> want
> >> to say that you have nonetheless failed to give a satisfactory response
> to
> >> my enquiry.
> >>> Firstly, all the stuff about my name is misplaced. Although there are
> >> several Andy Blundens around, "Andy Blunden" is a proper noun and is
> >> therefore not listed in the dictionary any more than David Kellogg or
> Seoul
> >> are listed. In the sense in which Vygotsky rightly said "All words are
> acts
> >> of generalisation" "Andy Blunden" is not a word; its referent is an
> >> specific entity. But in any case, my enquiry was meant to be about
> >> adjectives, not nouns proper or otherwise.
> >>> As to "dappled" I was gloriously wrong there, but it was "perished"
> >> which set my mind going  in the first place, and I cast around for other
> >> examples, and our lovely back garden which has far too many trees for
> its
> >> tiny size reminded me.
> >>> But let me try this single instance, which is after all, all I need.
> >>> Meaning 2b in the OED of "perished" is "*b.* Of rubber or a similar
> >> material, or an article made from it: having lost its characteristic
> >> elasticity and become weak, sticky, etc." dating from 1922. Admittedly,
> >> meaning 2a is "*a.* Of a material object or organic substance: decayed,
> >> rotted; damaged, in a poor physical state" dating from 1587. So
> etymology
> >> aside, the writers of the dictionary recognise that in 1922 "perished"
> was
> >> given a new, specific meaning.which generalises only to the extent that
> any
> >> rubber or rubber-like object may "perish."
> >>> So I fully accept that being a word of the kind I am asking about is
> >> never going to be a cut-and-dry matter, but it still seems to me that my
> >> enquiry was not entirely nonsensical. :) It was great how Rod responded,
> >> because the reflections which led me to ask about it was actually that
> such
> >> words have great literary, rhetorical and poetic potential. The Gerard
> >> Manley Hopkins poem confirmed this in spades, with not only dappled, but
> >> pied, brindle, fallow, freckled.
> >>> Perhaps I ought to have phrased my question in terms of adjectives
> >> which, when used, evoke a specific kind of referent, only implicit in
> the
> >> adjective? Remember in West Wing, when the candidate calls his opponent
> >> "sprightly" - cleverly praising his fitness while reminding us that he
> is
> >> an old man. That's what I was interested in.
> >>> Andy
> >>>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>> *Andy Blunden*
> >>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> David Kellogg wrote:
> >>>> So, as Andy must realize by now, his question has to be
> >>>> de-metalinguist-icized. The original question is, do we linguists have
> >>>> any meta-linguistic term (that is, a term about terms, a terminology)
> >>>> to describe the situation where a word has a single, unique referent?
> >>>>
> >>>> Before we can answer this (and I'll do my best) we have to determine
> >>>> whether any such situation ever exists. That is, is there a situation
> >>>> where a word meaning (which is, Vygotsky tells us, always and
> >>>> everywhere an act of generalization) has a unique referent? Here the
> >>>> answer appears to be no, since generalization always presupposes that
> >>>> you are taking one context of situation and applying it to another.
> >>>>
> >>>> You might say that a proper noun like "Andy Blunden" is an exception
> >>>> that proves the rule--Andy is always Andy, no matter what situation we
> >>>> put him in, and the longer period of time we take the more general the
> >>>> generalization "Andy Blunden" becomes. But this is not so, both
> >>>> externally and internally: externally, speaking of the name in context
> >>>> as a whole, Andy the supposed Referent of the name changes as he and
> >>>> we age. Internally, speaking of the structure of the name itself
> >>>> alone, we notice that "Andy" specifies which Blunden in the Blunden
> >>>> household we mean.
> >>>>
> >>>> This suggests that "Blunden" is more general than "Andy"--and on the
> >>>> other hand if we google the name we find that in the English language
> >>>> as a system, "Andy" is far more general than "Blunden". Needless to
> >>>> say, names and nouns are quite a bit more unique in their supposed
> >>>> referents than verbs--we have proper nouns which are supposedly closer
> >>>> to Andy's ideal of a unique referent than common nouns, but there is
> >>>> no such thing as a proper verb describing a unique and unrepeated
> >>>> singularity: all verbs are common verbs.
> >>>>
> >>>> But we can de-metalinguistic-ize still further. We can ask whether
> >>>> there is a situation where a word meaning has a concrete referent. Do
> >>>> word meanings always indicate, not some thing in the world (the sort
> >>>> of thing that Andy was calling "matter"), but rather some
> >>>> generalization we make about it?
> >>>>
> >>>> Here the answer appears to be yes, but once again it's really a matter
> >>>> of degree. At one end of language we find grammatical morphemes like
> >>>> the "~ed" in "dappled" and "perished" are more grammatical than
> >>>> lexical. That is, they have the three grammatical properties Halliday
> >>>> calls "closure", "generality" and "proportion". They come from a
> >>>> closed set of morphemes--a user of English has a lot of freedom, but
> >>>> those freedoms do not include the freedom to invent a new past tense
> >>>> morpheme and have it adopted into the language. They are general--you
> >>>> can apply them to a wide variety of verbs across the system. And they
> >>>> are proportional, because every time you do this you achieve more or
> >>>> less the same effect.
> >>>>
> >>>> In contrast, you find that the roots of the words "dapple" and
> >>>> "perish" are more lexical than grammatical. That is, they are not
> >>>> closed class words--you are free to invent new words and to make big
> >>>> changes to the pronunciation of old ones, as Gerard Manley Hopkins
> >>>> reminds us with his use of "sprung rhythm". They are not general; they
> >>>> apply to much narrower and more local, more restricted situations
> >>>> (though never unique ones, as Hopkins reminds us insistently with his
> >>>> use of the plural). And of course they are not proportional--"dapple"
> >>>> means one thing applied to ponies and another applied to mackerels
> >>>> (and I find the idea that for Andy the prototypical meaning of
> >>>> "perish" has to do with rubber tells us rather more about Andy than
> >>>> about rubber).
> >>>>
> >>>> And this is where the thread on "dappled" and "perished" meets the
> >>>> thread on "Fate, Luck, and Chance", and begins to form some answer to
> >>>> Vera's and Martin's twenty thousand dollar question on how
> >>>> consciousness develops. If we go back in time to the moment when Andy
> >>>> was an infant, we can imagine that Andy engaged in infant activities
> >>>> like ostension and indication. Because the objects the infant Andy is
> >>>> picking up and holding are completely new, we can imagine that in his
> >>>> undifferentiated consciousness they are in fact singularities. He
> >>>> doesn't use words to indicate them (because in order to do this he
> >>>> would have to generalize), but his act of picking up and holding do
> >>>> have unique referents.
> >>>>
> >>>> We can't call this consciousness as we know it (which is why we cannot
> >>>> say that "Andy Blunden" refers to any singular context of situation).
> >>>> But we can certainly call it consciousness, and we can even see
> >>>> fossils of this primitive undifferentiated consciousness in Andy's
> >>>> adult language (e.g. his use of "he he", which is what we call in
> >>>> Korean "ouiseongeo", that is words that only mean their sounds--Korean
> >>>> also has a category of "ouitaeeo" which are words that only describe
> >>>> the sound of the way actions look, such as "hurly burly" or "hanky
> >>>> panky"). And that, in my humble de-metalinguisticized linguist's
> >>>> opinion, is the origin of consciousness.
> >>>>
> >>>> My original question on Fate, Luck, and Chance was--it seems to
> >>>> me--related. "Luck" is the way I (as an individual) generalize
> >>>> unrelated chance events. But "fate" is the way we (as a speech
> >>>> community) generalize the notion of "luck".
> >>>>
> >>>> David Kellogg
> >>>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
> >>>>
> >>>> On 26 November 2014 at 01:38, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> I am coming late to this, but I think "collocation" would be of
> >> interest. Wikipedia has some good stuff on that.
> >>>>> Henry
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>> On Nov 25, 2014, at 12:00 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I have a trivial question for the linguists on this list.
> >>>>>> Do you have a word for words like "dappled" and "perished" (or
> dapple
> >> and perish) which can describe only one thing (shade and rubber
> >> respectively)?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Andy
> >>>>>> --
> >>>>>>
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>>>>> *Andy Blunden*
> >>>>>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
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