[Xmca-l] Re: Vowels Are From Venus

[David Kellogg]

You notice that James gives us two antithetical couplets, each of four
syllables (Chinese, like child protolanguage, doesn't differentiate vowels
and consonants).

炉火纯青
出神入化

Lú huǒ chún qīng  (the fire of the furnace burns a pure green hue)
Chū shén rù huà (The god emerges and merges, comes out and goes in)

I haven't actually rendered the feeling that a Chinese person feels on
hearing these expressions,
any more than the words "consummate" or "superb" communicate the thought.

For one thing, my translation is too labored and literal; a a Chinese
person doesn't analyze so literally and the imagery is largley
"automatized" rather than visualized.
For another, the four character line has a history that goes all the way
back to the Book of Songs (11th C BCE) and all the way up to the
antithetical couplets peasants put on their doorways as Spring Festival in
the the countryside

(But James is right: the idea of antithetical couplets is a kind of natural
dialectic built into the Chinese language.
Somedays, like today, I find it that it influences the way I write in
English.)

David Kellogg



On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 6:21 AM, James Ma <jamesma320@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
>