ORAL LANGUAGE A SYSTEM OF SOUND TO CARRY THOUGHTS
anthro.ox.ac : The site offers an essay regarding human language v animal communication, a complex conceptual structure: we live in a concept. Language creates the world we live in, our social structures and our thought structures.
A sign is anything that communicates meaning. An allegory is a sign, a representation of a hidden (moral spiritual) meaning.
A phoneme is an elemental natural sound made by a human that has a common generic meaning at origin which is used with other elemental sounds to create a compound word which has a Metaphoric beaning which is based on the similarity of human association, and it occurs between two conceptual domains. Like two words together allude to a new meaning. Example High and Rise.
A sign is anything that communicates meaning. An allegory is a sign, a representation of a hidden (moral spiritual) meaning.
A phoneme is an elemental natural sound made by a human that has a common generic meaning at origin which is used with other elemental sounds to create a compound word which has a Metaphoric beaning which is based on the similarity of human association, and it occurs between two conceptual domains. Like two words together allude to a new meaning. Example High and Rise.
Metaphor (drawing a similarity between two things) and metonymy (drawing a contiguity between two things) are two fundamental opposite poles along which a discourse with human language is developed.
It has been argued that the two poles of similarity and contiguity are fundamental ones along which the human mind is structured; in the study of human language the two poles have been called metaphor and metonymy, while in the study of the unconscious they have been called condensation and displacement.
In linguistics, they are connected to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic poles.
For Chomsky, there are two basic minimalist questions — What is language? and Why does it have the properties it has? — but the answers to these two questions can be framed in any theory.
Armenian, like Hittite, Luwian, and Lycian, retains the third laryngeal initially, and has no inherited long vowels, no palatal-velar distinction, and no feminine gender.
The Armenian word for death is MAH which obviously comes from Mahākāla which is a Sanskrit bahuvrihi of mahā "great" and kāla "time/death", which means "beyond time" or death.
Regarding what is good or bad in writing.
"The Magic of Reading"
Meaning of meaning: Armenian 1. իմաստ 2. նշանակություն
something that is not directly expressed. something one is aiming intending to communicate like an idea indirectly
"...Western culture, or Western civilization, seems more precisely named “alphabetized civilization”, or “alphabetic civilization”.
"... Once we start writing, we are able to then reflect back upon what we have written, and we enter into this kind of recursive relation to our own written signs. ...and only then does a certain degree or experience of self-reflection, that we now sort of take for granted, come into being."
"It's not by chance that the word spell has this double meaning - to cast a spell, or to arrange the letters in the correct order to spell out a word. ... to be able to arrange the letters in the right order, to actually conjure, as it were, that thing that you just spelled—it was experienced by oral peoples, who had not met the written word before, as magic, as a very powerful form of magic."
"So, the history of the Jewish people, and hence, of Christianity as well, is integrally intertwined with the story of the alphabet — with this phonetic writing system that unlike any others that came before it, or any others that developed elsewhere, that privileged the human voice."
"...our writing system, very very powerfully, not only impacts our experience of our own subjectivity, it also profoundly impacts our experience of the sensuous surroundings. So much so, that I would have to say that the alphabet has played a very crucial role in the deepening environmental crisis—ecological crisis that now besets us on every hand."
Socrates and Plato lived in an incredibly significant time in history. They witnessed in their life times the creation and subsequent mass integration of an incredible new technology: the alphabet. Children today, who grow up with iPads, iPhones and the world at their fingers, a new technology like the alphabet is likely to have huge effects on the mental states and ideas of the people who grow up utilising it.Socrates and Plato were born at around 470 and 428 BC respectively. Whilst the Greek alphabet is known to have existed since around 800 BC, it was treated with much scepticism and it wasn’t until sometime around Plato’s lifetime that the alphabet began a gradual integration into Greek society.Pioneering research by Harvard classicists Parry and Lord in the 1930s popularised this idea, as they began to notice repeating phrases throughout the poems. (1) These phrases, such as “when Dawn spread out her fingertips of rose”, continually repeat throughout the texts, and further, certain phrases seem to be governed less by their content but by their rhythm. Since these ‘texts’ were preserved orally, they were given a structure that was memorable – like the hook in a song. This suggests that Homer, as the genius bard, was less like a novelist and more like Pac or Biggie.The earliest dates of young, Greek children being taught to read and write date back to Plato’s childhood. Like anything, it was met with initial doubt. This doubt is even present in Plato’s early work, despite him being the great pioneer of writing. Much like today, we worry how children growing up with touchscreen technology will be affected. The same thought ran parallel in ancient Greece – people wondered how the alphabet would affect the mental states of children. Would they become too used to externalised thought and forget how to use their internal minds? Would they become forgetful, incompetent and misinformed?
Early Greek texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey are in fact oral texts. They are not written works, but rather, constructions of orally chanted poems. Homer was a rhapsode (a Greek term, meaning “to stitch song together”). He built upon classic stories in Greek tradition, dating from older bards than himself, prior to the Trojan War.Plato’s primary concern had to do with misrepresentation of the meaning hidden behind letters and words. This criticism of writing is peculiar to hear from such a pioneer, but he makes it clear that the written text should best serve not as an informative item in itself, but as a reminder to already learnt information. The text was best to serve as a static gathering of reflective reminders to students of his academy. This would prevent the student from radically misunderstand the text.
Despite these warnings, Plato went on to change the world with his writing. Most importantly, the alphabet itself catalysed many of Plato’s famous ideas – in particular, the idea of Forms. The alphabet meant that words such as “justice”, “beauty” and “temperance” were visible as stand alone concepts. This was a big deal: words like these had previously only been understood in their contextual situation. This is evidenced in the Socratic dialogues where Socrates asks whoever his interlocutor is to give an account of a word, yet all he gets in reply is a situation where the word is applicable.
For example, when pressed by Socrates into defining “virtue”, Meno simply accounts a large swarm of instances in which the action can be described as virtuous. Socrates wants to know what virtue is, in and of itself. He is convinced that virtue is not something inexplicably tied to situation but is a fixed, unchanging, stand alone concept.
This thought would not have been possible without the alphabet, for the alphabet made it so terms like these could be removed from their situation and viewed on their own. The very act of seeing the letters make up the word “beauty”, written on paper, suggested that there must be an objective element to concepts.
Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with. No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain, Socrates states, but rather can only remind those that already know what writing is about. Furthermore, writings are silent; they cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense.
Accordingly, the legitimate sister of this is, in fact, dialectic; it is the living, breathing discourse of one who knows, of which the written word can only be called an image. The one who knows uses the art of dialectic rather than writing:"The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it happy as any human being can be."
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses (Ancient Greek: Μοῦσαι, romanized: Moûsai, Greek: Μούσες, romanized: Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture.
*MEN, the word Muses (Ancient Greek: Μοῦσαι, romanized: Moûsai) perhaps came from the o-grade of the Proto-Indo-European root *men- (the basic meaning of which is "put in mind" in verb formations with transitive function and "have in mind" in those with intransitive function),[2] or from root *men- ("to tower, mountain") since all the most important cult-centres of the Muses were on mountains or hills.[3] R. S. P. Beekes rejects the latter etymology and suggests that a Pre-Greek origin is also possible.[4]
Mneme original Boeotian Muse, Mneme was the muse of memory.
MANIA: Divine madness, also known as theia mania and crazy wisdom, refers to unconventional, outrageous, unexpected, or unpredictable behavior linked to religious or spiritual pursuits. Examples of divine madness can be found in Hellenism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Shamanism.
It is usually explained as a manifestation of enlightened behavior by persons who have transcended societal norms, or as a means of spiritual practice or teaching among mendicants and teachers. These behaviors may seem to be symptoms of mental illness to mainstream society, but are a form of religious ecstasy, or deliberate "strategic, purposeful activity,"[1] "by highly self-aware individuals making strategic use of the theme of madness in the construction of their public personas".
In modern figurative usage, a Muse may be a source of artistic inspiration.No language has a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds of the language and the runes/sigils/symbols/signs/alphabet that represents those sounds.
Phonological representations.
Traditionally, the term 'phonological representations' refers to the underlying sound structure of specific words stored in the long-term memory (Locke, 1985). A phonological representation is the mental representation of the sounds and combinations of sounds that comprise words in a particular spoken language.
An oral language is hard to master. For example, my native language Armenian was not written until about 400A.D.,. It lacked a standard writing system that everyone could agree to use so cuniform was used. To develop a writing system, was rejected by traditionalists within the various communities. Some people strongly believed that language shouldn’t be written down at all, while others think writing it will push the group as a whole with the agreed language forward and preserve the group for posterity.
An oral tradition, respects each 'tribal dialect' and protect each tribe’s individuality. Because of this large land mass, there were and still are a large number of dialects. Why you might ask might speakers of Armenian not have wanted their language to be written down? Some speakers of oral languages do not necessarily even want a standard representation on paper. It shows respect to appreciate each other’s individuality and embrace different dialects pronunciations and languages. With standardisation, we lose that personalisation.
Writing a language down also offers a path for outsiders to potentially exploit cultural knowledge intended only for Native people. As a whole, for millennia 'Native Armenians' experienced repeated attempts of forced assimilation.
Relatively recently, we have the example of attempts of forced assimilation of American Indians who went through a horrendous time that we know as the 'boarding school era', when their children were separated from their families and forced into boarding schools to try to assimilate them into a society that was completely foreign to them. The motto was 'Kill the Indian, save the person'. Being stripped of ones culture and language leaves deep wounds that affect people for generations. People all over time and space are very proud of what culture and language they have and need to be left in peace.
Elders, especially our elder veterans, share stories of war. In these stories, they describe speaking in their language and no-one being able to know what they were talking about. The language is a code and the survivors of wars, soldiers pass on tactical messages in their own language, an undecipherable 'code' that the enemy couldn't understand, that helped then survive. This is an important perspective that elders, the wise take when talking about keeping a language oral.
We learn language by ear as small children. When we learnt our first language(s) as children, we are in total immersion environments. People expected us to speak, at any degree of fluency; we discovered the ins and outs of the language as we went along.
Could they have developed a system to reflect Armenian phonemes on a one-to-one cuniform symbol-to-sound basis I ask myself.
The question of old must have been as to whether to use an existing writing system, 'write it how you hear it in any system', or create a new system?
Many English or other language speakers cannot recognise the phonemes in Armenian, partly because they are just not used to or unable to hear the unfamiliar sounds. This creates a problem when people use the 'write it how you hear it' method, simply because using English conventions to write personal interpretation of what they hear is chaotic. The role of storyteller among the Armenian people is still alive and well. Obviously it becomes harder to hear spontaneous storytelling, as time and distance separate us and it is scary to think about our stories being lost. These stories are said to have been passed down from the earliest of storytellers. When they are transferred, each story also passes on the power and spiritual entity that lives within it. This is what I believe was the fear expressed in the Tower of Bable narrative (Hebrew: מִגְדַּל בָּבֶל, Migdal Bavel) narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר). There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.
The Narrative: Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east,[a] they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 5 The LORD[b] came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech." 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel,[c] because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. — Genesis 11:1–9
From ancient history to the present man continues to pursue more efficient ways to communicate his inner world to other beings. The spoken word is a system of sound symbols that carry thoughts from one person to others who before the modern age, must be present to hear them and remember them, recording that meaning in the mind. The written word allowed a persons thoughts and meaning to be recorded through symbols onto a medium, and given to countless others who did not need to be geographically present, or even alive at the time the words were created!!!
Ancient Cuneiform is the earliest known form of the written word. It used a system of wedge marks that acted as symbols of the thoughts which were able to be understood by others. Think of it. Thoughts that originated in the brain of a scribe working for the Assyrian Emperor Tigalth-Pileser in the 12 Century BC were recorded with these marks on a baked clay tablet and accurately understood by British Explorer and Scholar Henry Rawlinson and three others in the final London test that proved to a panel of scholars that Cuneiform had finally been deciphered in 1857. The meaning was recorded and understood 3,000 years later, by those from another continent, culture and time.
Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.
From 2900 BC, these began to be impressed in wet clay with a reed stylus, making wedge-shaped marks which are now known as cuneiform.
The process of writing cuneiform stabilised over the next 600 years. Curves were eliminated, signs simplified and the direct connection between the look of pictograms and their original object of reference was lost.
Sometime during this same period, the symbols – which were initially read from top to bottom – came to be read from left to right in horizontal lines (vertical alignments were kept for more traditional pronouncements). In keeping with this, the symbols were also realigned, rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.
In 2340 BC, Sumer fell to the armies of Sargon, King of the Akkadians, a northern Semitic people who had previously co-existed with the Sumerians. By this time, cuneiform had, for several centuries, been used bilingually to write Akkadian too. Sargon, the latest in a line of expansive Akkadian leaders, built an Empire that ran from present day Lebanon down to ‘the nether sea’ (the Persian Gulf). Eventually, as many as 15 languages would use cuneiform-inspired characters.
Sumerian lingered on as the language of learning until at least 200 BC. Cuneiform, the system invented to record it, however, outlived it by almost three centuries: it lasted as a writing system for other languages well into the Christian era. The last datable document in cuneiform is an astronomical text from 75 AD.
"In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. Hebrews 1:1-3
The Apostle John put it this way, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
Jesus said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father..." John 14:9
What a powerful mystery! We have the honor of seeking God's communication to us and asking Him for the correct meaning He desires for us to gain. We have the privilege of asking God about His purpose for our lives and the meaning He wants us to understand and the actions He wants us to take. We can even be carriers of that meaning and give it others.
"You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2Cor. 3:3
Jeremiah 36:28 - Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.
Jeremiah 30:2 - Thus speaketh the LORD God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book.
Exodus 17:14 - And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this [for] a memorial in a book, and rehearse [it] in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
In linguistics, they are connected to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic poles.
For Chomsky, there are two basic minimalist questions — What is language? and Why does it have the properties it has? — but the answers to these two questions can be framed in any theory.
INVARIANCE: A simple example of invariance is expressed in our ability to count. For a finite set of objects of any kind, there is a number to which we always arrive, regardless of the order in which we count the objects in the set. The quantity—a cardinal number—is associated with the set, and is invariant under the process of counting.
Merge (usually capitalized) is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit (a set). Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may apply to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge. This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2).[1]
Armenian, like Hittite, Luwian, and Lycian, retains the third laryngeal initially, and has no inherited long vowels, no palatal-velar distinction, and no feminine gender.
The Armenian word for death is MAH which obviously comes from Mahākāla which is a Sanskrit bahuvrihi of mahā "great" and kāla "time/death", which means "beyond time" or death.
Regarding what is good or bad in writing.
"The Magic of Reading"
Meaning of meaning: Armenian 1. իմաստ 2. նշանակություն
something that is not directly expressed. something one is aiming intending to communicate like an idea indirectly
"...Western culture, or Western civilization, seems more precisely named “alphabetized civilization”, or “alphabetic civilization”.
"... Once we start writing, we are able to then reflect back upon what we have written, and we enter into this kind of recursive relation to our own written signs. ...and only then does a certain degree or experience of self-reflection, that we now sort of take for granted, come into being."
"It's not by chance that the word spell has this double meaning - to cast a spell, or to arrange the letters in the correct order to spell out a word. ... to be able to arrange the letters in the right order, to actually conjure, as it were, that thing that you just spelled—it was experienced by oral peoples, who had not met the written word before, as magic, as a very powerful form of magic."
"So, the history of the Jewish people, and hence, of Christianity as well, is integrally intertwined with the story of the alphabet — with this phonetic writing system that unlike any others that came before it, or any others that developed elsewhere, that privileged the human voice."
"...our writing system, very very powerfully, not only impacts our experience of our own subjectivity, it also profoundly impacts our experience of the sensuous surroundings. So much so, that I would have to say that the alphabet has played a very crucial role in the deepening environmental crisis—ecological crisis that now besets us on every hand."
Socrates and Plato lived in an incredibly significant time in history. They witnessed in their life times the creation and subsequent mass integration of an incredible new technology: the alphabet. Children today, who grow up with iPads, iPhones and the world at their fingers, a new technology like the alphabet is likely to have huge effects on the mental states and ideas of the people who grow up utilising it.Socrates and Plato were born at around 470 and 428 BC respectively. Whilst the Greek alphabet is known to have existed since around 800 BC, it was treated with much scepticism and it wasn’t until sometime around Plato’s lifetime that the alphabet began a gradual integration into Greek society.Pioneering research by Harvard classicists Parry and Lord in the 1930s popularised this idea, as they began to notice repeating phrases throughout the poems. (1) These phrases, such as “when Dawn spread out her fingertips of rose”, continually repeat throughout the texts, and further, certain phrases seem to be governed less by their content but by their rhythm. Since these ‘texts’ were preserved orally, they were given a structure that was memorable – like the hook in a song. This suggests that Homer, as the genius bard, was less like a novelist and more like Pac or Biggie.The earliest dates of young, Greek children being taught to read and write date back to Plato’s childhood. Like anything, it was met with initial doubt. This doubt is even present in Plato’s early work, despite him being the great pioneer of writing. Much like today, we worry how children growing up with touchscreen technology will be affected. The same thought ran parallel in ancient Greece – people wondered how the alphabet would affect the mental states of children. Would they become too used to externalised thought and forget how to use their internal minds? Would they become forgetful, incompetent and misinformed?
Early Greek texts, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey are in fact oral texts. They are not written works, but rather, constructions of orally chanted poems. Homer was a rhapsode (a Greek term, meaning “to stitch song together”). He built upon classic stories in Greek tradition, dating from older bards than himself, prior to the Trojan War.Plato’s primary concern had to do with misrepresentation of the meaning hidden behind letters and words. This criticism of writing is peculiar to hear from such a pioneer, but he makes it clear that the written text should best serve not as an informative item in itself, but as a reminder to already learnt information. The text was best to serve as a static gathering of reflective reminders to students of his academy. This would prevent the student from radically misunderstand the text.
Despite these warnings, Plato went on to change the world with his writing. Most importantly, the alphabet itself catalysed many of Plato’s famous ideas – in particular, the idea of Forms. The alphabet meant that words such as “justice”, “beauty” and “temperance” were visible as stand alone concepts. This was a big deal: words like these had previously only been understood in their contextual situation. This is evidenced in the Socratic dialogues where Socrates asks whoever his interlocutor is to give an account of a word, yet all he gets in reply is a situation where the word is applicable.
For example, when pressed by Socrates into defining “virtue”, Meno simply accounts a large swarm of instances in which the action can be described as virtuous. Socrates wants to know what virtue is, in and of itself. He is convinced that virtue is not something inexplicably tied to situation but is a fixed, unchanging, stand alone concept.
This thought would not have been possible without the alphabet, for the alphabet made it so terms like these could be removed from their situation and viewed on their own. The very act of seeing the letters make up the word “beauty”, written on paper, suggested that there must be an objective element to concepts.
Socrates tells a brief legend, critically commenting on the gift of writing from the Egyptian god Theuth to King Thamus, who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. After Theuth remarks on his discovery of writing as a remedy for the memory, Thamus responds that its true effects are likely to be the opposite; it is a remedy for reminding, not remembering, he says, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with. No written instructions for an art can yield results clear or certain, Socrates states, but rather can only remind those that already know what writing is about. Furthermore, writings are silent; they cannot speak, answer questions, or come to their own defense.
Accordingly, the legitimate sister of this is, in fact, dialectic; it is the living, breathing discourse of one who knows, of which the written word can only be called an image. The one who knows uses the art of dialectic rather than writing:"The dialectician chooses a proper soul and plants and sows within it discourse accompanied by knowledge—discourse capable of helping itself as well as the man who planted it, which is not barren but produces a seed from which more discourse grows in the character of others. Such discourse makes the seed forever immortal and renders the man who has it happy as any human being can be."
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses (Ancient Greek: Μοῦσαι, romanized: Moûsai, Greek: Μούσες, romanized: Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the poetry, lyric songs, and myths that were related orally for centuries in ancient Greek culture.
*MEN, the word Muses (Ancient Greek: Μοῦσαι, romanized: Moûsai) perhaps came from the o-grade of the Proto-Indo-European root *men- (the basic meaning of which is "put in mind" in verb formations with transitive function and "have in mind" in those with intransitive function),[2] or from root *men- ("to tower, mountain") since all the most important cult-centres of the Muses were on mountains or hills.[3] R. S. P. Beekes rejects the latter etymology and suggests that a Pre-Greek origin is also possible.[4]
Mneme original Boeotian Muse, Mneme was the muse of memory.
MANIA: Divine madness, also known as theia mania and crazy wisdom, refers to unconventional, outrageous, unexpected, or unpredictable behavior linked to religious or spiritual pursuits. Examples of divine madness can be found in Hellenism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Shamanism.
It is usually explained as a manifestation of enlightened behavior by persons who have transcended societal norms, or as a means of spiritual practice or teaching among mendicants and teachers. These behaviors may seem to be symptoms of mental illness to mainstream society, but are a form of religious ecstasy, or deliberate "strategic, purposeful activity,"[1] "by highly self-aware individuals making strategic use of the theme of madness in the construction of their public personas".
In modern figurative usage, a Muse may be a source of artistic inspiration.No language has a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds of the language and the runes/sigils/symbols/signs/alphabet that represents those sounds.
Phonological representations.
Traditionally, the term 'phonological representations' refers to the underlying sound structure of specific words stored in the long-term memory (Locke, 1985). A phonological representation is the mental representation of the sounds and combinations of sounds that comprise words in a particular spoken language.
An oral language is hard to master. For example, my native language Armenian was not written until about 400A.D.,. It lacked a standard writing system that everyone could agree to use so cuniform was used. To develop a writing system, was rejected by traditionalists within the various communities. Some people strongly believed that language shouldn’t be written down at all, while others think writing it will push the group as a whole with the agreed language forward and preserve the group for posterity.
An oral tradition, respects each 'tribal dialect' and protect each tribe’s individuality. Because of this large land mass, there were and still are a large number of dialects. Why you might ask might speakers of Armenian not have wanted their language to be written down? Some speakers of oral languages do not necessarily even want a standard representation on paper. It shows respect to appreciate each other’s individuality and embrace different dialects pronunciations and languages. With standardisation, we lose that personalisation.
Writing a language down also offers a path for outsiders to potentially exploit cultural knowledge intended only for Native people. As a whole, for millennia 'Native Armenians' experienced repeated attempts of forced assimilation.
Relatively recently, we have the example of attempts of forced assimilation of American Indians who went through a horrendous time that we know as the 'boarding school era', when their children were separated from their families and forced into boarding schools to try to assimilate them into a society that was completely foreign to them. The motto was 'Kill the Indian, save the person'. Being stripped of ones culture and language leaves deep wounds that affect people for generations. People all over time and space are very proud of what culture and language they have and need to be left in peace.
Elders, especially our elder veterans, share stories of war. In these stories, they describe speaking in their language and no-one being able to know what they were talking about. The language is a code and the survivors of wars, soldiers pass on tactical messages in their own language, an undecipherable 'code' that the enemy couldn't understand, that helped then survive. This is an important perspective that elders, the wise take when talking about keeping a language oral.
We learn language by ear as small children. When we learnt our first language(s) as children, we are in total immersion environments. People expected us to speak, at any degree of fluency; we discovered the ins and outs of the language as we went along.
Could they have developed a system to reflect Armenian phonemes on a one-to-one cuniform symbol-to-sound basis I ask myself.
The question of old must have been as to whether to use an existing writing system, 'write it how you hear it in any system', or create a new system?
Many English or other language speakers cannot recognise the phonemes in Armenian, partly because they are just not used to or unable to hear the unfamiliar sounds. This creates a problem when people use the 'write it how you hear it' method, simply because using English conventions to write personal interpretation of what they hear is chaotic. The role of storyteller among the Armenian people is still alive and well. Obviously it becomes harder to hear spontaneous storytelling, as time and distance separate us and it is scary to think about our stories being lost. These stories are said to have been passed down from the earliest of storytellers. When they are transferred, each story also passes on the power and spiritual entity that lives within it. This is what I believe was the fear expressed in the Tower of Bable narrative (Hebrew: מִגְדַּל בָּבֶל, Migdal Bavel) narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and migrating eastward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר). There they agree to build a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Yahweh, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.
The Narrative: Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east,[a] they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." 5 The LORD[b] came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech." 8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel,[c] because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. — Genesis 11:1–9
From ancient history to the present man continues to pursue more efficient ways to communicate his inner world to other beings. The spoken word is a system of sound symbols that carry thoughts from one person to others who before the modern age, must be present to hear them and remember them, recording that meaning in the mind. The written word allowed a persons thoughts and meaning to be recorded through symbols onto a medium, and given to countless others who did not need to be geographically present, or even alive at the time the words were created!!!
Ancient Cuneiform is the earliest known form of the written word. It used a system of wedge marks that acted as symbols of the thoughts which were able to be understood by others. Think of it. Thoughts that originated in the brain of a scribe working for the Assyrian Emperor Tigalth-Pileser in the 12 Century BC were recorded with these marks on a baked clay tablet and accurately understood by British Explorer and Scholar Henry Rawlinson and three others in the final London test that proved to a panel of scholars that Cuneiform had finally been deciphered in 1857. The meaning was recorded and understood 3,000 years later, by those from another continent, culture and time.
Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.
From 2900 BC, these began to be impressed in wet clay with a reed stylus, making wedge-shaped marks which are now known as cuneiform.
The process of writing cuneiform stabilised over the next 600 years. Curves were eliminated, signs simplified and the direct connection between the look of pictograms and their original object of reference was lost.
Sometime during this same period, the symbols – which were initially read from top to bottom – came to be read from left to right in horizontal lines (vertical alignments were kept for more traditional pronouncements). In keeping with this, the symbols were also realigned, rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.
In 2340 BC, Sumer fell to the armies of Sargon, King of the Akkadians, a northern Semitic people who had previously co-existed with the Sumerians. By this time, cuneiform had, for several centuries, been used bilingually to write Akkadian too. Sargon, the latest in a line of expansive Akkadian leaders, built an Empire that ran from present day Lebanon down to ‘the nether sea’ (the Persian Gulf). Eventually, as many as 15 languages would use cuneiform-inspired characters.
Sumerian lingered on as the language of learning until at least 200 BC. Cuneiform, the system invented to record it, however, outlived it by almost three centuries: it lasted as a writing system for other languages well into the Christian era. The last datable document in cuneiform is an astronomical text from 75 AD.
"In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. Hebrews 1:1-3
The Apostle John put it this way, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
Jesus said, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father..." John 14:9
What a powerful mystery! We have the honor of seeking God's communication to us and asking Him for the correct meaning He desires for us to gain. We have the privilege of asking God about His purpose for our lives and the meaning He wants us to understand and the actions He wants us to take. We can even be carriers of that meaning and give it others.
"You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. 2Cor. 3:3
Jeremiah 36:28 - Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned.
Jeremiah 30:2 - Thus speaketh the LORD God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book.
Exodus 17:14 - And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this [for] a memorial in a book, and rehearse [it] in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
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