[Xmca-l] Re: Vowels Are From Venus

[James Ma]

I often find it interesting to read David’s words, good and catalytic to
me.

I’ve been working on the Peirce-Vygotsky project and Peirce’s idea of final
logical interpretant which I take to be a qualitative transformation,
perhaps equivalent to “a dialectical leap”. To me, this transformation is
not only attributable to an accrued quantitative change but also bears
itself the heritage of all the earlier qualitative changes. So, the
resultant final logical interpretant encapsulates both qualitative and
quantitative changes.

By the way, on the face of it, “a dialectical leap” is a more congenial and
customary concept to most Chinese people (from Mainland) due to historical
reasons.

In a stage drama, I agree with David that an actor’s privileged access is a
real problem for him. This privileged access will have to be calibrated or
attuned to a dialectical leap in such a way that the actor needs to make a
choice from the plenitude of signs that are constantly on the move both
consciously and subliminally. However, in the case of Peking opera, a
dialectical leap is far more complex since there is more to it. The actor
is involved in an organic combination of vocal performance, acrobatics and
dance etc. Perhaps, dialectical leap is not quite a right word to reflect
what is perceived as the essence of Peking opera: 炉火纯青 consummate, and 出神入化
superb.

James


*James Ma*  *https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa
<https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa>   *


On 28 October 2017 at 00:26, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>