school and english class wise...

One thing I do not get about some teachers is that after finding the meaning and that meaning DOES make sense they mark it wrong! I mean each person has a different opinion about a subject, and marking ones opinion false is plain out wrong. No one thinks alike, everyone is unique, but what some teachers try to do is blur out that unique line and make everyone the same...I mean if you are asking for a opinion than accept that damn opinion the way it is!



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DeviantART - LeonhartBA

Ah, but is the fact that language can be interpreted in many different (and subjective) ways a weakness or a strength? After all, subtle language can be *far* more effective than outspoken and obvious language in either a written or verbal form. Think about many of the great works of literature and great speeches that are known for their sublte language. Surely this indicates that a great deal of power can be found in subtlety.

hasn't leon got a great sig, don't you think?

anyhoo, to the topic; when i was a humble art student many decades ago, one of my first exercise was in visual and verbal association, based on the early Bauhaus teachings of Johannes Itten. In this we were asked to draw *a dog* and almost everyone drew a straighforward profile mutt with tail and 4 legs, each different but essentially all the same. Very few people including myself departed from this *archetype* - btw there's a good neo-Platonic term for you, zeds!

However when the tutor qualified the term *dog* as a *barking dog* then things began to change, interpreatations naturally became more dynamic but also more varied. I did a 3/4 profile of the head only, some sort of rabid mastiff iirc.

ultimately of course everything is subjective.



Edited by - Tawakalna on 11/14/2005 7:33:12 AM

@Arania
You might be interested to read about the thoughts of the Greek Philosopher Platon. His reflexions are based on a strictly scientific approach. He was interested in the "conditions of knowledge". Knowledge is based on an universal IDEA .

An example may illustrate what this has to do with your question about languages: if I say "tree" to a group of (different) people everybody understands it - because we share the idea of a tree. If we discuss about details we might find out that A thought of a cherry tree, B of a pine tree etc.etc. . But there was a common understanding of 'tree'.

Plato's own famous example was the idea of beauty.

---

An object is beautiful to the extent that it participates in the Idea, or Form, of beauty. Everything in the world of space and time is what it is by virtue of its resemblance to, or participation in, its universal Form. The ability to define the universal term is evidence that one has grasped the Form to which that universal refers.

---

Source

What you critisize is not the core (idea) but the context of the words and their meanings. But every context has its objective part (denotation) and its subjective part (connotation).

I agree sometimes it is very difficult when people fight because of cultural understanding problems; but on the other hand small gaps in the context are a source of endless fun.
Just think of the world of irony. Or the world of love. I still prefer the traditional way of "I love you" to a binarian formula

@taw...yep,it truly is fantastic.I wonder if the wabbit has a name

(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste bunny into your
(" )_(" ) signature to help him gain world domination.

Not only the spoken word but every language and in fact every form of information transferrence is open to interpretation. We as human beings receive information subjectively and assess its meaning using the tools we personally posess. Our life experiences and eduaction etc will colour how we perceive the world around us including the messages we receive. I cannot predict what word associations you will create.

Language, like ourselves, has its shortcomings. In the main it is a very useful tool.

As far as deciphering Old Willy there are several forms of reading. You can place the text entirely in its historical context for example and try to understand it from a temporal point of view or study the authors' life to attempt an understaning of their intended meaning. The more modern and more popular mode today is to give the text a personal meaning from the readers vantage. In a way this is easier for students as they do not necessarily have to fully understand nor disect the history of the last half millenium to give a correct answer, indeed there is no one correct answer to such a reading, once you make a valid and well supported argument supported by the text you can pretty much declare open season.

I'm not a programming wizard by any stretch of the imagination. But I find that even programming language is flawed by context and "meaning."

After all programming language is subject to rules. The body of which must cohere and not permit outright internal contradiction (admittedly). But who makes those rules?

While possibly more precise or better governed, programming language ultimately fails or succeeds on the rules by which the language must abide and, for the most part, those rules are artificial, much the same as the spoken word.

I do not think that the examples of language offered which do not suffer misinterpretation are even close to being good examples. Heiroglyphics are hardly fool proof and if memory serves me right they are only understood at all intelligibly because many of the symbols were found on the Rosetta Stone along-side their Greek equivalents.

However, the very fact that Arania could log onto an internet web site and convey a written message to people of so many nations and that an easily comprehendible conversation on the subject could follow is proof enough for me of the brilliance of our simple and flawed little language.

Unless I misinterpreted the original topic that is.

Edited by - druid on 11/14/2005 10:24:03 AM

not at all. that was rather my point.

@druid: I really couldt think of a better symbolic language at the time, i was rather referring to pictorial languages where the meaning is direct (Like: That is a tree, that is a rock, that is an angry person), although, i do conceede that these are also (to somewhat an extent) subjective much in the same way as art.

@indy: My point was that if you did something in visual basic (or C), it would run EXACTLY the same (within reason for computer differences) on another computer with the same language. You build a windows App, and is will do the asme thing on every single computer, as opposed to saying: "well, i think 'format c:' means... MAKE HOT DOGS!" (ok, bad example)

Although dont get me wrong, almost every language i can think of does it's job, its just when people overanalyse it that it becomes rather annoying (Teacher: and WHY did the playwright say this?
ME: BECAUSE HE WANTED TO MAKE MONEY! NOT BECAUSE THERE WAS SOME UNDERLYING MOTIVE, HE WANTED MONEY! END OF STORY!
Teacher: And WHY do you think he said this?)

I'm just voicing my opinion, thanks for yours too, BTW

I for one am all for the subtleties in the human verbal dialog, much easier to communicate ideas than in a text based form.

Which brings me to an interesting point.

The majority of internet conversations are misinterpereted for the first couple of convo's because the reader of my messages has just realised that i'm tking the piss, rather than having a go at them, and i have the problem of taking everything i read online as a joke... which has landed me in hot water.

sarcasm, irony and satire are very hard to transmit in a text based form. sarcasm especially.

-:-
Kill The Revolution

@ jake:
THAT'S WHY WE HAVE SMILIES !!!

That was, in fact, what spawned the creation of "Emoticons" which started as a simple : ) And become embraced by the teenage world (Yes, we invented emoticons, hell, we've invented 1337 speak, not bad for a bunch of hormonal-influenced geeks, eh?) which then gave rise to graphical emoticons that grew in complexity. Now we have animated emoticons and an emoticon for about every single possible emotion, along with some rather random and pointless ones. I believe there are over 100 "lol" emoticons out there. Or more.

Additionally we have developed an entirely new language consisting of shortcuts and a huge amount of acronyms.

WTF
WTH
LMAO
ROFL
ROFLMAO
LOL
GFY
GFFY
FU
u
r
c

Not to mention substituted numbers as a use of a sound

i h8 u
c u 2marrow
that sux

And apparently, we now have x0rz all over the place

suxx0rz
dudz0rz
whatever

We have even invented a method of typing that avoids the use of most letters. Ironically the potential for using this to get past word-regonition software and passwords has not been seen until to day. A computer can read the following sentance fine:

A brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

But not this one:

4 b/^0\/\//\/ f0>< j/_//\/\/>3</ 0\/3r 7/-/3 14zy </0g

Nowadays people commonly used passwords like: 7h3 h0us3 in order to fool dictionary password crackers.

Language always seems to be evolving.

I made up my own 2 languages, one using english grammer and another using an odd sort of spanish-like grammer.

EDIT: Bad TLR! You have turned by lines into slashes! tis unreadable now

Edited by - Blackhole2001 on 11/16/2005 1:31:49 PM

are there emoticons for vague teenage angst or middle-aged disappointment and cynicism?

Do a google search on "emo", you're bound to find some common themes there.