Evolution of Language and Society

I find the connection that Vas makes between the evolution of language and the changing views of society very interesting. I was exploring this connection writing assignment 2.1 and I thought I would share some of the thoughts I had about it. I was looking mainly at the fold out page near the beginning of the book and the way it explores this connection. It seems to connect the difficulty square has in expressing what he wants to express in his story with the evolution of language itself. This is kind of summed up on the fold out page when it says "If it's in the language, it's in the thoughts." It's suggesting that the language of a society directly affects how people think. When Square is trying to write his story, it's sometimes difficult for him to express exactly what he's thinking since his language often represents the ideas of the society as a whole and is not necessarily ideally suited to expressing the thoughts of a particular person. This might be related to why so many great writers are known for their unique style of using the language to express themselves very clearly.

Wrdos, Wrods, and more Words

The same thoughts and ideas just keep popping into my head or coming up in what ever i do. During yesterday's class we talked about words and languages in VAS. All the things we talked about just overlapped with more ideas that have been following me for a while, for example when i was preparing to write my History paper i read a quote from a Cheyenne Native American which said

" We need our land and we need our language. The two are inseparable".

This gives a lot of power to language, which is often very faulty. Take for example this conversation i had with my girlfriend about love. "Love" is such a restricting word. there is only one word and yet it is supposed to be used many different ways(i.e. for you friends, family, dog, house, significant other...). All of these are very different forms of love and yet we have only one word. When i do think of this i refer to the bible often, not because i am super religious or anything, but because of the language it was originally written in ( some sort of Greek). So in this form of Greek there are four words for love: Storge, eros, phylios, and agape. I also thought of this in class when someone referred to that Native tribe that just had two words for color opposed to the more advanced peoples nine ( just for an example). It just leads me to think the more advanced a people and their understanding is then the more advanced or more wordy their language is. So i assume the Greeks are just better than us at certain things, like love.

What also caught my ear during class is the way that we are capable of comprehending things and how that affects how we then see those things.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are... the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Whether this is really true or not, i can still read it so it means something to me. When ideas or letters or numbers are all scrambled up people have a hard time making it have a meaning. Being a cartoon nerd i always think of Bender from Futurama when something is a bit confusing until i flip it around. In one episode Bender, being a robot, reads a line a binary and declares it jibberish, but when he turns around and reads it in a mirror then he becomes afraid of the message. It also happens in math. there are certain sequences that you just have to know the trick to understand, like the fibonacci sequence ( 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 ...). Most of VAS is like this, or at least i think it is. On the first read through i was really confused on why certain parts were there and how they would fit into the book. Now that we are done some of these are making more sense, while others may need another read through. Now that we know where everything is going we can figure out how we got there.

So language can be anything that has some meaning behind it ( or at least that is what we said in class) therefore silence can be a language...










... i wonder what that meant to you.

Oh, and if futurama can teach you anything it is that God speaks in binary so make sure and brush up on it before you decide to kick the can.

Train Wreck of Thoughts

So I think I should start writing my posts earlier because there's always someone else that writes about what I wanted to write about and always does it first. But anyway... here we go. We can call it WTF part II.

So I'm also extremely confused with the book. At first I thought it was really interesting how we have the storyline intertwined with scientific facts or anecdotes about our species or other species. But now I'm getting kind of irritated with how the side notes don't seem to make sense half the time. For example, what do all these Hitler quotes have to do with the story? They try to tie it in by putting words like "goose-stepping formations" (p. 117) in the storyline, but they use it to describe Circle's attitude towards an abortion rally. I just really don't understand the correlation between the two. I feel like the book is reaching to make these connections but they seem so contrived.

I think the genetic engineering part is a little more sound. For instance when they start talking about cleansing the gene pool (even though this is a very Nazi - supremacist point of view) it does tie into the fact that abortions are now common legal procedures and that we are giving people the legal choice to decide who gets to live and who doesn't even get to be born based on their own judgment. So I guess it does show how abortion in some ways is a supremacist point of view. (Just to make it clear, I'm pro-choice... I'm just trying to make sense out of the book.)

The language... I don't get this relationship at all. It would be great if someone could guide me in the general direction as to where these things are going, because I'm just missing the boat. But what does the language thing have to do with anything? For example they say 95% of languages that have at one point started have disappeared... not that that isn't interesting, because it is, but I'm just reading this book by reading the story line as one set, and then the interesting facts as a separate completely disjoint set. Some of you seem to find meaning in how the two are related... a little help?

So the last thing I would like to mention is the salad dressing. I really like the salad dressing theme. I guess I like it because when I first moved here I had that exact sensation. I went to a grocery store with my parents and we were going to buy toilet paper, and I remember distinctly thinking it would take us forever to figure out which one to get. There were SO many options and it seemed overwhelming. But I agree with the idea that is partly the essence of America.