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Pretentious words battle

Rock


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I've always been fascinated by language because it's a tool and like all tools first we shape it and then it shapes us.

Two Japanese words defines their entire social structure.
義理 (Giri)
人情 (Ninjō)

Or the truly beautiful German word.
Flüchtling

Or the wonderful Italian verb:
Gironzolare

There are so many abstract structures within a culture but it would be totally impractical to ascribe a single word to every one of them. So I think finding which structures DO find a specific word tells us what is most significant within the cultures that coined and used such words.
 
As Ludwig Wittgenstein stated - the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

Go back a millenia and for the vast majority of the population most facts were a posteriori (empirical) i.e. directly experienced or directly observed. But now I think it fair to say that the vast majority of the things we know are based on a priori evidence i.e. deduction, logic and axioms with them overwhelmingly being communicated through language oor representations of language.

In an early Joe Orton novel (Head To Toe) the protagonist ends up alone on an island where the one thing the previous lodger left was huge library of books. It is related how Gumbold experiments to find sentences able to produce direct harm by unsettling the mental processes of anyone who hears them or who reads them.

Looking back it really was a truly bizarre book.

I only posted that single sentence from a Kirkegaard book because it MAY be an example of a sentence that could unbalance the mental processes of a person of faith.
 
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