Menus, Music, and PLATOCRATES…or The Phonetic Bottleneck
Am I just getting older, or, through the process of brute repetition, have I stumbled upon a well known, underlying inefficiency plaguing our every attempt at written communication since the invention of Hieroglyphics?
It may be because I am getting closer to death and am more keenly anticipating that mortality thing, or because I have become exceedingly stingy with my time as a by-product of the modern malaise of multi-tasking. But, I have come to hate reading. I hate reading because reading is work. Reading is work because, what we’re really interested in is “Reality.” And our written language is several degrees removed from “Reality.”
Our written language can be divided into words that attempt to reflect the nature of the tangible (experienced by the senses), the conceptual (based on some idea), and the provisional, to quickly pluck out a phrase in the general neighborhood of some characterization of words utilized to express the relation of words of the previous two categories (words like “the” “and” “if” and so on). Am I leaving out some categories? Possibly… probably. But I’m thinking on the fly, and won’t take the time to be too tidy. I’m pressed for time, remember? This is a blog, after all, and not a graduate thesis
Consider this quote of a quote.
“Suppose a person were to make all kinds of figures (schēmata, σχήματα) of gold…—somebody points to one of them and asks what it is (ti pot’esti). By far the safest and truest answer is [to say] that it is gold; and not to call the triangle or any other figures which are formed in the gold “these” (tauta) as though they had existence (hōs onta)… And the same argument applies to the universal nature (phusis, φύσις) which receives all bodies (sōmata, σώματα)—that must always be called the same; for, while receiving all things, she never departs at all from her own nature, and never…assumes a form (morphē) like that of any of the things which enter into her; … But the forms which enter into and go out of her are the likenesses (mimēmata) of real existences (tōn ontōn aei) modelled after their patterns (tupōthenta) in a wonderful and inexplicable manner….”
That’s Plutocrates, according to Wikipediatotle.
Plutocrates is talking about “forms,” but he might as well be talking about words, and, as far as we’re interested, talking about written words.
Here’s his point: there are “forms,” and there is the essence of that on which those forms are based…the “formness,” or the pure and ideal form.
So, too, here, there are words, and then there are the pure ideas or concepts which those words are supposed to represent. Talk about “Lost in Translation.” The delta between what was conceived and what was communicated is so great that it is akin to two people holding up their hands, as if to touch one another, only there is a pane of glass in between their hands, so they touch the glass, presumably in the same place.
But, really, that only describes the inadequacies of the spoken language in dealing with ideas and concepts, and so forth. Here, we are writing about the written language. So, it would seem appropriate, that our touchers are actually blind, and that someone has to describe to them where their hands are, as they cannot even rely on their sense of sight to substitute for their inability to touch. Clearly, one can rely on their sense of sight when reading the written word (presuming they are not physically blind…let’s not get too far afield, here), so their blindess would only be representative in this case. Such is the written word in comparison to ideas and concepts that spawned the attempt at communication.
So, what is the solution? Well, with the exception of the Chinese, and such people as still use symbolic pictorials to communicate, we’ve long since abandoned the idea of using a Uniform system of graphics to represent anything and everything. Anyway, ask any Chinese immigrant who knows, that form of communication is inefficient because it takes so long to learn and great difficulty to remember. Not to mention, even the Egyptians abandoned their own pictorial symbology in favor of a phonetic system. So much so, that no one even could remember the old system…until the Rosetta Stone showed up, as you may know.
Anyway…there I sit, in the restaurant, with the teenage waitress wanting me to hurry up, and I can’t seem to make my way through the menu, which is full of all sorts of flowery descriptions of the food, all written out in text. I mean…can a brother get a picture of what he’s going to eat? Better yet, make it Scratch -n- Sniff, at least.
Anyway, I’ve got to run. I’m in a hurry, remember? I have to go coax my daughter to practice piano. It’s a struggle, you know. She doesn’t want to learn to read the notes. She wants to play everything by ear.
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