- Last 7 days
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metagov.org metagov.org
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https://metagov.org/projects/koi-pond
Metagov's KOI (Knowledge Organization Infrastructure) is a graph database that supports relationships between knowledge objects, users, and groups within Metagov. via JM
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- Sep 2024
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blogs.dickinson.edu blogs.dickinson.edu
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And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
"cloistered" (religious) referring to the seclusion of monks or nuns in a monastery "Walls of jet" (flea), hard dark exterior of flea, shows a physical and symbolic barrier that contains their union
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dl.acm.org dl.acm.org
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Coughlan
Tim Coughlan, University at Bath; work is focused on the design and evaluation of systems that support inclusion, creativity, and openness in learning.
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Gabora
cognitive scientist Lee Gabora's work looks at how culture changes over time, how people come up with new ideas, and how this helps culture change.
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“an associative mode of perceiving metaphoric connections between correlating items in memory, and an analytic mode that is conducive to understanding cause and effect relationships”
there are two ways of thinking: the first assists in seeing creative links between ideas and the second assists in understanding how one idea leads to another (i.e cause and effect).
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Becoming sensitized to these epistemological differences enables us to discern which aspects of creative work is emphasized more than others and see how hierarchies of knowledge get constructed.
in exploring how our foundations of knowledge are built, we can dissect how we assign value or rank to knowledge - or generally accepted assumptions.
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tools for ideation are frequently distinct from tools for implementation, often lacking the capability to seamlessly transfer data between them
this is often seen in common design tools; is it a product of capitalism? Is the market afraid of standardization? In the transfer of one product to another?
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This perpetuates seeing the “support staff” as merely a resource (rather than central to the creative process), whose work can be replaced.
designs solely generated by models are not informed by the complex human interaction in the design process, by designers.
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This emphasis on “acting through the interface” [19] sees technology as acting as an extension of the artist or designer using the tool.
tech is integral to creative process - well designed tech is about ease of use and integration.
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The third wave or the third paradigm [70] shares many of the same assumptions as the second wave – i.e. the centrality of the physical world in our construction of meaning – with a stronger focus on the various abilities of the human body.
focus on physical abilities / senses shape novelty in interaction.
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The shift in perspective toward the social in psychology covered in the previous embodied action view of creativity resembles an analogous trend in HCI’s “second wave theories”.
focus on group work and social contexts of digital environments.
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The tool-mediated expert activity view of creative work focuses on supporting (expert) creative practices through tools. Activity theory
There are many philosophical theories that explore computers as a tool that are extensions of humans. In some circles, humans have become cyborgs in that sense - they cannot be separated from the tools they use every single day.
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Since the 1980s, creativity research in psychology has moved away from “univariate, positivist research paradigms” to “more complex, constructivistic, systems-oriented research models” [56].
creativity research has evolved from simple, individual-focused approach to an increasingly complex, systems-oriented approach that centers social interactions and artifacts. This has attracted sociologists.
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In other words, moment-to-moment creative actions draw from a large pool of embodied resources, relying on tacit analysis of the fit between the resource and the situation at any given moment.
In the moment, creativity relies on constant adjustments based on intuition - an intuition that is formed based on prior experience.
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In addition to the primacy of interacting with the physical world through our bodies, the embodied view of creative work also highlights the role of the body in partnership with the dynamic situation, i.e. the moment-to-moment actions people take in response to different contingencies.
Creativity benefits from interacting with the environmental and adapting to environmental changes.
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Creative work as reflective practice focuses on the “importance of physical and artifact-centered action in the world to aid thought”
Artifact interaction enriches design processes by grounding it in real world experience.
But what of the bias toward familiar materials? Asking a blacksmith to prototype a house and you might find yourself living in a tin can.
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That view of creativity neglects the role the body and the physical world play during the creative process as well as the social context in which creativity takes place.
As mentioned earlier, creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum - there is a plethora of societal and culture context which any designer exists in.
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They do not subscribe to the thinking that “geniuses use cognitive processes that are radically different from those employed by most individuals and that may not be accessible to the methods of cognitive science”
Creativity comes from common mental processes that everyone uses - all creativity (aka problem-solving) relies on the same basic principles. Creativity is, then, accessible to anyone, because it just depends on how you mix and match those principles.
Intertwined within each person are emotional, cultural, and experiential factors that inform and, at times, limit their creativity.
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“Most opinion among design methodologists and among designers holds that the act of designing itself is not and will not ever be a scientific activity; that is, that designing is itself a nonscientific or a-scientific activity”.
design isn't scientific but concedes that scientific methods can formalize design.
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Proponents of this movement stood on the spectrum with regards to how close they placed design next to science. On the looser end, design is viewed simply as “systematic design”, or, “the procedures of designing organized in a systematic way”
asks is creativity connected to science or science?
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In other words, creative work is about “devis[ing] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”
In creativity, problem solvers choose the best tool for the job using their own foundational knowledge they've acquired over their education or career. Building upon this, what tool an individual selects to solve a problem may be based on prior values and assumptions.
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a precise definition will adequately circumscribe creative work, marking out the part(s) of creative process or levels of expertise technology should support
current research looks to define creativity in hopes of understanding what parts of creation (iteration, design, execution) tech should help enhance, as well as which level of skill (beginner, intermediate, etc) tech should be catered towards.
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Identifying this vagueness, Remy et al. [112] point out that creativity can simultaneously refer to the “creativity of the outcome”, “the usability of the tool itself”, or “the productivity of the process [as mediated through] CST”.
creativity can mean different things at the same time.
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Simply put, creativity is a noun performing the work of an adjective.
to further simplify, creativity is used as a noun (a thing) but functions as an adjective (a descriptive word).
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When evaluating computer-mediated creative work, should we ask if technology is enhancing the creative person(s) –perhaps pointing toward an adoption of CST definitions such as “[computational techniques that] mak[e] people more creative more often” [124]– or should we examine how technology is facilitating the creative activity –thus suggesting the need to develop evaluation metrics for CST that are comparable to usability principles
in evaluating computer-mediated creative work, does one focus on whether tech enhances the creator or that it facilitates the creative action?
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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for - Donna Nelham - language - constructs our reality - Donna Nelham - Linked In post
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Local file Local file
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It's you and me upagainst the wall, baby.
Foreshadowing the existence of the Wall, where they are hung up. Play of language
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They had notyet reached the level of words
Again how language can be subversive and deceptive in comparison with the pure and multifaceted nature of desire and the senses.
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It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was,because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave somethingout, there are too many parts, sides, cross currents, nuances; too manygestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never befully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, toomany
She admits her own unreliability by using the physical sensory imagery and therefore showing that language is often insufficient and incapable of fully describing the human experience of the senses.
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Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven'tsigned up for. There wasn't a lot of choice but there was some, and this iswhat I chose.
The fact that none of these words except the word "fucking" can describe it shows that all humanity is taken out of the equation, only beastiality is left. Anything to describe a human experience of sex cannot be used (copulation, rape, making love). No emotion. Just the act itself
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english.stackexchange.com english.stackexchange.com
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I've been a UK resident for over 70 years, have two degrees from a very well known university, and find both zeros and zeroes quite acceptable as the plural form. So our perceptions are different. Do we toss a coin, or see who can shout the louder? ... Dictionaries are less open to subjective bias than individuals because of the averaging effect of carefully controlled large surveys (and acceptability is usage driven). It's good to realise that personal preferences may not be the best basis for judging correctness.
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- Aug 2024
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Local file Local file
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Margaret Atwood implies that language is the tool of humanity and the tool of survival. They assimilate information through the use of stories, most importantly, an adaptation from long ago, as a melting pot of rationality and feeling, thought feeling machines/ entities are human.
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Regarding storytelling, it serves as a form of escape from the repression. Though it is hard to achieve (the level of focus) it is still there -- and it defies laws in the sense that even when there is nobody, a story has to be told to somebody. This abstractness also with language shows that restriction cannot exist because of these paradoxical loopholes
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There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom toand freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you arebeing given freedom from. Don't underrate it
This is ironic and very important. Freedom to and freedom from -- playing with language, a form of manipulation. Gilead is more than for its birth rate purposes... A form of gaslighting.
Shows the role of language in perception, in reality, and yet also shows that there is a limit that the mindset can do for you. It is still suffering, without duty.
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Local file Local fileUntitled9
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self-sufficient, pre-given referent. Both the Freudian andthe Lacanian unconscious, as it were, put external reality outof play.
Even though Lacan objects and states that the unconscious is made of a chain of signifiers (language), he actually in some sense agrees with Freud in the sense that language is not connected to reality. It constructs reality.
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language and the thing about which itspeaks
Language shapes the world experience or reality because of our signifiers that create distinctions (the other/ the symbolic) and in turn we are shaped by our world experience (truth), and therefore shaped by language and the symbolic in itself.
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Lacan’s terms, these distinctions come to us from the order ofsignifiers, and they must therefore be understood as an activelystructuring principle.
Distinctions between subjects is purely a matter of language, when discernible things are usually gradual and not ordered. This connects to Hume's bundle theory where the human mind chooses where the boundary lies between continuity and discontinuity even when all should be gradually discontinuous -- the continuity is simply an illusion, a phantasy.
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we will never find anything morethan gradual differences. Yet we are not a bit “man” and a bit“woman” (or vice versa), but either “man” or “woman”—we areone or the other. This absolute difference does not exist in (lived)reality, which knows only gradual distinctions.
This is an example of how language or symbolic signifiers alter the lived experience more than the lived experience does simply to the real. Does this mean that as one grows up and is exposed to more of the symbolic world and language, one is indulged more in the phantasy and is further from accessing the "real"?
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hat clearly cannot bedirectly derived from the facts of experience.
Language shapes the experience of reality in a way that simply experiencing cannot. Like performativity. Is there a signifier that articulates this way of experience? this is created in the symbolic order, rather than any other.
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it is a question of whether there is a signifier inthe symbolic system that articulates this connection.
The concept of fatherhood relies directly on the notion and connection between procreation and fatherhood which is passed through language, which articulates it.
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For Freud, this means that language does notyet function as language in the proper sense here: the uncon-scious does not know language, and nor therefore does it knowthe test of reality.
Language = reality even for freud
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he connection between trompe andtromper arises simply on the basis of the material similarity be-tween the words. If the dream thus employs language t
This is why the Freudian slip exists (the reasoning behind the freudian slip) -- since words can only exist in the unconscious in a purely material way, mistakened meanings between words are due to sound and appearance alone.
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o that the hidden “logos” ofwhich they are the expression can be brought to light. ForLacan, moreover, the fact that the unconscious “logos” at workin those experiences can be brought to light by way of languageimmediately implies that the unconscious, too, also belongs tothe order of language in one way or another.
Lacan states that the unconscious is made of language because the states of knowledge within the unconscious can only be understood by way of language? through articulation?
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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Anglophonic monoculture which renders certain dimensions of life invisible and therefore impossible to address
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- English language - makes invisible salient aspects off reality vital for rapid whole system change
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Shifting our linguistic habits towards ecological communication would require learning to pay attention to “motion and mystery of the interrelatedness and entanglement of everything” which entails deactivating the old habits and reactivating “capacities that have been exiled by these habits.”
for - rapid whole system change - salience of shifting language habits - planetary emergency - salience of shifting language habits - question - shifting language habits
question - shifting language habits - from industrial, goal oriented - to ecological - how? Watch Great Simplification Interview
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relationship to language and how it might lead to miscommunication
for - language - miscommunication
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while our predicament is eco-logical (“let it live”), our thinking remains techno-logical (“fix it”). The monoculture's fixation on what I call algorithmic rationality (linear, sequential, goal-oriented problem-solving),
for - adjacency - ecology of communication - progress traps - intentionality - language
adjacency - between - ecology of communications - progress traps - intentionally - language - emptiness - adjacency relationship - human intentionally focuses it attention on only a few select aspects of the entire gestalt of any moment of our phenomenological reality - It creates our salience landscape - What we choose to focus on and know more about it always coupled with and complimented by a vast ignorance of what we choose NOT to know - Indeed, the use language itself is the telling of a very specific story - Of all the stories we can tell, - Of the infinite stories we can construct now, -we settle on one - So the use of language already betrays the complexity inherent in each and every one of our ecological moments - We plant the seeds for progress traps as soon as we - manifest an intention - attempt to communicate - Hence, it is not avoidable and the best we can do is - recognize our situation - manage it - It is the relationship between - human nature (perceived as limited) - nature nature (infinite) - What springs to mind if the Zen koan - The elbow does not bend backwards
Tags
- adjacency - ecology of communication - progress traps - intentionality - language + emptiness
- language - miscommunication
- English language - makes invisible salient aspects off reality vital for rapid whole system change
- planetary emergency - salience of shifting language habits
- rapid whole system change - salience of shifting language habits
- question - shifting language habits - how?
Annotators
URL
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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for - Indyweb dev - large language model for - constructing causal loop diagrams - System Dynamics Bot - large language model - constructing causal loop diagrams
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- Jul 2024
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whoosh.readthedocs.io whoosh.readthedocs.io
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Whoosh provides methods for computing the “key terms” of a set of documents. For these methods, “key terms” basically means terms that are frequent in the given documents, but relatively infrequent in the indexed collection as a whole.
Very interesting method, and way of looking at the signal. "What makes a document exceptional because something is common within itself and uncommon without".
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- Jun 2024
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ell.stackexchange.com ell.stackexchange.com
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Save this question. Show activity on this post. I'm from South East Asia, and in here, it's very common to use "kindly" as a written polite request to other people, and I often see it on the internet as well. But I've just discovered that from this website, "kindly" is regarded as a "low-brow, patronizing, and overly sensitive". Other people are recommending that you use the word "kindly". Please, never use the word "kindly" when interacting with Americans. In the view of Americans, only English-speaking Indians use this word. It comes across as low-brow, patronizing, and overly sensitive. Oh wow, I never know that. But coming from a non native western background and culture, I have nobody here I can crosscheck information with. Maybe someone here with the appropriate culture background knowledge can give some insight? Is this a general view, or just a partial view of Americans about this word? Should I stop using this word from now on, or I just overly worried over nothing? Thanks.
TIL
I didn't know that most people (outside of Asia) consider "kindly" to be patronizing. The many quirks of language!
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languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu
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If you disprove something, you haven't necessarily proved the opposite. If you disprove something, you have indeed proved its negation. If you disapprove of an action, you do indeed approve of not doing that action (so, disapproving X is approving not-X).
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(That is, when you disprefer that George be elected, you prefer the negation, that George not be elected, rather than just you do not prefer that George be elected, which is compatible with indifference.)
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Who says it's not a word? Not a word, simply because lexicographers have not recognized it? When a lexicographer recognizes it, it has already been in use! Even Mr. Fiske says it is a word, although he obviously disprefers it.
by the time a lexicographer recognizes it, it has already been in use
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www.merriam-webster.com www.merriam-webster.com
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At the entry for irregardless, we provide a paragraph in which we note that the use of the word is still met with considerable objection, and we even go so far as to advise the reader to use regardless instead—which is about as close as we get to offering a usage prescription in our dictionaries.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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- [ ] Search for publications by Dr. Evelina Fedorenko on the role (or rather absence) of language in thinking.
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coevolving.com coevolving.com
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Thus, as in the case of natural languages, the pattern language is generative. It not only tells us the rules of arrangement, but shows us how to construct arrangements as many as we want which satisfy the rules.
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the language provides the framework for using the patterns as a program to create form. But he aims for semantics, allegory, and poetics, as well as the aspects of language that generate feelings, emotions, a sense of order — all of which extend beyond the structural, topological and syntactic aspects of his program.
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openresearch.ocadu.ca openresearch.ocadu.ca
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Language action
also known as Conversation for Action
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coevolving.com coevolving.com
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Language-Action
ref. REA in Value Flows
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Language-Action
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I'm no longer truly an individual I'm always parasitic on this 00:13:10 larger relationship
for - adjacency - symbolic language - no longer individual - parasitic on larger relationship - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt
adjacency - between - Terrence Deacon explanation of symbolic language - symbolic language - no longer individual but parasitic on collective - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency relationship - Deacon asserts that the successful use of symbolic language implies we are no longer truly individual, that is - isolated, but rather are dependent on the collective - The Deep Humanity praxis recognizes the same intertwingledness in defining the individual/collective gestalt
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how was it that our symbols became so dislocated 00:09:34 from physical uh materiality and the biophysical reality that we've created an economy that's destroying the biosphere
for - question - Planet Critical podcast - What is the role of language in creating an ecocidal economy?
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what life might be that baby could be 00:38:31 born in an era 10,000 years ago and would be coming into its World learning to make sense of the relationships and the way that you 00:38:45 survive in this world
for - Nora Bateson - response to interview question - Is English language more separating? - Gedanken - Entangled Worlds podcast
response - Nora Bateson - Entangled Worlds podcast question - Is English more separating than other languages? - yes - Gedanken - Nora responds by posing a Gedaken that shows how culturally relative our worldviews are - Our enculturation plays a major role in shaping our worldviews - Ronald Wright's famous quotation about how the human brain has not substantially changed in the past 50,000 years implies that - between the present and anytime less than 50,000 years ago, - if we were transported back in time, we would simply adapt the same culturally norms at that time
epiphany - time travel and a clue to the deepest part of nature within human nature - This Gedanken suggests something important, namely that - if the seemingly immovable worldviews we adopt are a consequence of enculturation - then perhaps that which is the most fundamental aspect of our nature is not dependent on culture? - In other words, if we remove our enculturation, what is left is the most profound set of qualities of being human, - one that transcends all relative cultural perspectives
reference - Ronald Wright computer metaphor on progress traps - Ronald Wright's computer metaphor helps us see how fluid the enculturation of a neonate is - https://hyp.is/6Lb6Uv5NEe2ZerOrftOHfA/www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/321797-a-short-history-of-progress
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it's really 00:40:26 important to to to tickle that to loosen it to to start to approach things in really different ways because they you get really different 00:40:40 responses and then things are shifting
for - Nora Bateson - response to interview question - Is English language more separating? - loosen up!
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The more inventive and fecund a great mind is, the more it will shape thelanguage it uses to fit its thought. To express a new idea or insight, a new word isinvented or an old word given a novel meaning. Sometimes in the development ofhis own characteristic vocabulary, a great writer uses a new word for an old ideawhich he has appropriated and assimilated to his own thought. Sometimes theopposite occurs; the traditional word is appropriated or borrowed, but the ideawhich it long expressed is replaced either by a totally new, or at least by a variant,conception.
Language is essential for the expression of thought, be it novel or ancient.
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- May 2024
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media.dltj.org media.dltj.org
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Google translate is generative AI
Google Translate as generative AI
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for - Denis Noble - Ready Noble - evolutionary biology - critique of Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene theory - critique of gene centrism - book - Understanding Living Systems - human agency
summary - In this informative interview, brothers Denis and Ray Noble discuss their new book - Understanding Living Systems, and - dispel the 70 year old narrative of Gene centrism and the selfish gene as determining the high level behaviour of living organisms
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luhmann.surge.sh luhmann.surge.sh
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Theoretically interested readers should therefore follow the advice of learning as many languages as possible in such a way that they have at least passive mastery of them and thus can read and understand them.
Interesting, Luhmann recommends to know many languages so as to prevent the pitfalls of translational errors in conveying meaning when it is to read translated books. So read books in their original language.
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meta.stackexchange.com meta.stackexchange.com
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LLMs, by their very nature, don't have a concept of "source". Attribution is pretty much impossible. Attribution only really works if you use language models as "search engine". The moment you start generating output, the source is lost.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Our core assumption is that foundational models, having been extensively trained in English texts, possess a substantial level of understanding and reasoning capabilities. Transferring these capabilities from English to another language, such as Korean, could be more efficient than developing performance from standalone Korean pre-training.
Hipótesis: Transferencia de conocimientos de Ingles a nuevo lenguaje
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- Apr 2024
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larvalsubjects.wordpress.com larvalsubjects.wordpress.com
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www.google.com www.google.com
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for search - google - applying nagarjuna to penetrate the circularity of language -
search - Google - applying Nagarjuna to penetrate the circularity of language - https://www.google.com/search?q=applying+nagarjuna+to+penetrate+the+circularity+of+language&sca_esv=f3a10901b51afbdb&sxsrf=ACQVn09m0Xq0UJifhB2MGXO1HNWdkYPGjA%3A1714198161525&ei=kZYsZsTQH_GVxc8P7O2K2AM&udm=&oq=applying+nagarjuna+to+penetrate+the+circularity+of+language&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIjthcHBseWluZyBuYWdhcmp1bmEgdG8gcGVuZXRyYXRlIHRoZSBjaXJjdWxhcml0eSBvZiBsYW5ndWFnZTIIECEYoAEYwwRIvaEDUKhuWMmTA3ADeACQAQCYAfIDoAGSTaoBCDItMS4yMS42uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIMoAKuHMICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAgQQHhgKwgIKECEYoAEYwwQYCpgDAIgGAZAGBJIHBzMuMy01LjSgB-Uz&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#ip=1
search results returned of interest - Larval Subjects . https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com › 2012/03/21 › aut... 21 Mar 2012 — ... applying the principles of autopoietic ... Language is only ever a response to language. ... Nagarjuna, who agrees with him that the college ... - https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/autopoiesis-and-rhetoric/
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www.google.com www.google.com
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search - Google - https://www.google.com/search?q=penetrating+the+circularity+of+language&sca_esv=f3a10901b51afbdb&sxsrf=ACQVn09m0Xq0UJifhB2MGXO1HNWdkYPGjA%3A1714198161525&ei=kZYsZsTQH_GVxc8P7O2K2AM&oq=penetrating+the+circularity+of+language&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIidwZW5ldHJhdGluZyB0aGUgY2lyY3VsYXJpdHkgb2YgbGFuZ3VhZ2UyBBAjGCdI1DBQryFY6iRwAXgBkAEAmAGIA6AB1AqqAQMzLTS4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgKgAuMCwgIKEAAYsAMY1gQYR5gDAIgGAZAGBJIHBTEuMy0xoAfkCw&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp search results returned - Very few salient results returned, - indicating little research in this field - try this:
search - Google - Nagarjuna penetrating the circularity of language - https://www.google.com/search?q=nagarjuna+penetrating+the+circularity+of+language&sca_esv=f3a10901b51afbdb&sxsrf=ACQVn082tuUJX8gz-CjpZ6AF3wXPxbGK6Q%3A1714197263134&ei=D5MsZvLhB56Jxc8Ph-CH0A0&oq=nagarjuna+penetrating+the+circularity+of+language&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIjFuYWdhcmp1bmEgcGVuZXRyYXRpbmcgdGhlIGNpcmN1bGFyaXR5IG9mIGxhbmd1YWdlSPPEDFCx_gtY0akMcAN4AZABAJgBqwSgAbQgqgEHMy01LjMuMrgBA8gBAPgBAZgCCqACpxfCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgIHECMYsAIYJ8ICCBAAGIAEGKIEwgIEEB4YCpgDAIgGAZAGBJIHBzMuMy00LjOgB9Ab&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#ip=1
search results returned of interest - › logic...PDF Logic and Philosophy of Language Language and languages—Philosophy. 4 ... pupil Alexander had, after all, penetrated to India in the course ... Nagarjuna's system . Philosophy East and West, vi ... - https://dokumen.pub/download/logic-and-philosophy-of-language-2nbsped-0815336101-0815336098-081533608x-081533611x-0815336128-9781136773440-1136773444.html - › Lang... Saying what Cannot Be Said With Western and Confucian Ritual ... This dissertation addresses one of the classical philosophical and theological problems of religious language, namely, how to speak meaningfully about ... - https://www.academia.edu/41159976/Language_as_Ritual_Saying_what_Cannot_Be_Said_With_Western_and_Confucian_Ritual_Theories - https://www.academia.edu/41159976/Language_as_Ritual_Saying_what_Cannot_Be_Said_With_Western_and_Confucian_Ritual_Theories - collectionscanada.gc.ca https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca › ...PDF A Comparative Study of Nagarjuna and Derrida - https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/002/MR46971.PDF - Monoskop https://monoskop.org › Var...PDF Varela_Thompson_Rosch_The_... recurrent patterns (in Piaget's language, "circular reactions") of sen- sorimotor activity. Piaget, however, as a theorist, never seems to have doubted the - https://monoskop.org/images/2/21/Varela_Thompson_Rosch_The_Embodied_Mind_Cognitive_Science_and_Human_Experience_1991.pdf -
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www.google.com www.google.com
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for - search - Google - penetrating the essence of language - https://www.google.com/search?q=penetrating+the+essence+of+language&oq=penetrating+the+essence+of+language&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigAdIBCTk1ODVqMGoxNqgCAbACAQ&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#sbfbu=1&pi=penetrating%20the%20essence%20of%20language
Source - Reading Ernest Becker - The birth and death of meaning - listening to David Loy - https://youtu.be/UGEbXdFWfPA?si=ksPZePFzTrfS_gq. <br /> - https://youtu.be/ajwH-5YhxBc?si=y-Z9CFn09PvMfdUA - need to find someone for Deep Humanity work - Common human denominator of language
results returned of interest
- jstor https://www.jstor.org › stable Quest for the Essence of Language Roman Jakobson presented a communication en- titled Quest for the Essence of Language. The discussion of this question was introduced by recalling the work of ...
- De Gruyter https://www.degruyter.com › html Language and the mind: how language shapes our thinking by X Zhou · 2023 · Cited by 1 — Abstract. This paper analyzes languages and their connections to thinking and culture using an autoethnographic lens.
- U.S. Department of Education (.gov) https://files.eric.ed.gov › ful...PDF Language as a Field of Energy: A Critical Question for Language Pedagogy by AO Soter · 2017 · Cited by 5 — This essay offers a reorientation of our views on the interrelationships of language and thought as a field of constantly
- University of Pretoria https://repository.up.ac.za › ...PDF CHAPTER 3: HEIDEGGER'S CONCEPT OF TRUTH Heidegger's interpretation is meant to show that regardless of the important statements about language we find made in the realm of thought, in spite of the.
- U.S. Department of Education (.gov) https://files.eric.ed.gov › ful...PDF Linguistics; Verbal Communication A survey of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ...
by FH Lapointe · 1973 · Cited by 5 — child. Language is revelatory of being and existence. If we would grasp fully the meaning of language we must - https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED085799.pdf - Merleau-ponty's conceptions stand in opposition ts, Saussure's linguistic postulations and Korzybski's scientism. That is, if language is studied phenomenologically, the acts of speech and gesture take on greater importance than language as currently viewed in structural linguistics and general semantics. - Universidad de Granada https://www.ugr.es › Langu...PDF Language and Mind, Third Edition language to language. ... guages – that defines the “essence” of human language. ... rationalist view that Peirce outlined, we must penetrate the mysteries of - https://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/Language%20and%20Mind.pdf - University of Pennsylvania - School of Arts & Sciences https://www.sas.upenn.edu › ...PDF 32 Relations Between Language and Thought by L Gleitman · Cited by 91 — If so, the suggestion is that labeling practice is penetrating to the level of nonlinguistic cognition. Roberson and colleagues adopt this - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Gleitman%20&%20Papafragou%202013_Relations%20between%20language%20and%20thought.pdf - Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu › The_I... (PDF) The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social ... While all other systems of communication in the biological world target the interlocutors' senses, language allows speakers to systematically instruct their - https://www.academia.edu/35571744/The_Instruction_of_Imagination_Language_as_a_Social_Communication_Technology - PhilArchive https://philarchive.org › MU...PDF The Essence of Language: Wittgenstein's Builders and Bühler's ... by K Mulligan · 1997 · Cited by 45 — I compare what Wittgenstein says about language and reference at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations with some - https://philarchive.org/archive/MULTEO-3
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www.linkedin.com www.linkedin.com
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follow up - book - Exactly What to Say" - author - Phil. M. Jones
for - symbolosphere - language - book - Exactly What to Say - author - Phil M. Jones
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www.rauljimenez.info www.rauljimenez.info
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real life community
I would change this to "physical community" to avoid implying that online communities are "less real".
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AMYPA
Explain what AMYPA stands for and its relevance to all readers, or provide a local equivalent for international audiences.
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Giving the possibility to start the first contact behind the keyboard can help the most timid people, first observing 👀 before encouraging them to take the first step.
Allowing initial contact to be made behind the keyboard not only helps the most timid individuals by letting them observe before participating, but it also caters to people with disabilities and those who prefer text-based communication, making it easier for everyone to engage confidently from the start.
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theconversation.com theconversation.com
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Children are struggling to master the most basic reading skills in their home language in the foundation phase (grades 1-3).
My app addresses this I hope - or assists in some way to address this.
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A child needs at least two kinds of skills before they can comprehend what they’re reading. These are oral language skills (listening, speaking and knowing how spoken words sound) and decoding skills (knowledge of letter-sound relationships to turn a written word into a spoken word).
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theconversation.com theconversation.com
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resource-scarce language
This app seems to focus on Grade 3 isiZulu and then english.
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But in South Africa, 8 out of 10 children cannot read for meaning by the end of their third school year.
Confirms my other research.
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www.researchgate.net www.researchgate.net
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HOW TO IMPROVE TO MOTHER TONGUE LEARNING Begin literacy teaching in mother tongueA curriculum, rooted in the child’s known language, cultureand environment, with appropriate and locally-developedreading and curriculum materials, is crucial for earlylearning success. Using the home language in the early stagesof schooling in multilingual contexts supports child-centricpolicies. It starts with what is familiar and builds in newknowledge. It creates a smooth transition between home andschool; it stimulates interest and ensures greaterparticipation and engagement. This prepares children for theacquisition of literacy and encourages fluency andconfidence in both the mother tongue and, later, in otherlanguages, where this is necessary. Ensure availability of mother-tongue materialsChildren need to be engaged in and excited about readingand learning and this can only be done if the materials areones which they will understand and enjoy. In mostdeveloping countries, the only reading material children seeare school textbooks, which are often in very short supply.Other materials to support learning are hardly everavailable. Without access to good materials, children struggleto become literate and learn. In most low- and middle-income countries, the majority of primary schools have nolibrary, and books are luxuries which families cannot afford.For children from minority language communities, thesituation is even more dismal. Textbooks are rarely availablein local languages. Provide early childhood education in mother tongueLiteracy development starts early in life, and the homeenvironment is an important factor in children’s learningachievement. It helps build the knowledge and skills childrenneed for learning to read. Where parents and the communityare supporting literacy development, results show a markedimprovement. The earlier children are exposed to stories thebetter their reading is: reading for only 15 minutes a day canexpose children to one million written words in a year,thereby helping them to develop a rich vocabulary. Childrenwith access to materials at home are more likely to developfluency in reading
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www.researchgate.net www.researchgate.net
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class children and their teachers. There are two elements of the critique. Thefirst element focuses on the linguistic resources of children and teachers. Thecritique is that the knowledge project implicitly works from an English speakingnormative social universe and starting points, and does not field test or generateenough research placing African language children and teachers at the centre. Assuch, our ideas about literacy and mathematics do not build upon the languageresources of African language speaking children and teachers. The secondelement focuses on social class and its relation to education. The critique isthat the knowledge project implicitly works from a more middle class schoolingcontext, underestimating the exigencies of the poor and working class, deeplyrooted in historic neglect and the marginalisation of communities and schools
Research reflecting back to the idea that the mother tongue is critical.
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www.readingbarometersa.org www.readingbarometersa.org
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Adults do not perceive accessibility of reading materials in appropriate languages as a primary barrier to reading with children. Only 5% of adults who do not read with children said it wasbecause they did not have materials in the right languages (most said it was a lack of time). On the other hand, 79% of adults also report that they would read more with children if theycould access more materials in their preferred languages. This suggests that adults who are strongly motivated to read with children will do so, irrespective of materials access, but thatincreasing accessibility to reading materials in the right languages may increase the quality and amount of reading.71Figure 49
Language barriers for home language vs second.
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which is the national curriculum,emphasises the importance of student proficiency in at least two languages and being ableto communicate in others. The language-specific curricula follows an additive approach tomultilingualism, namely, all students learn a language on a “home language” level (which formost would be their home language) and at least one additional offi cial language, and becomecompetent in their additional language on a second-language level, while the home languageis maintained and developed.
Why home language is important to learn first
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bootcamp.uxdesign.cc bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
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Should Kids Use Apps at All?
Reasons kids should use apps and what apps and parents must consider
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- Mar 2024
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research.ibm.com research.ibm.com
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https://research.ibm.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-RAG
PK indicates that folks using footnotes in AI are using rag methods.
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off-planet.medium.com off-planet.medium.com
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science has transformed our understanding of time.
- It’s not an exaggeration to say that
- science has transformed our understanding of time.
- But as well in conjunction with this
- it has transformed- the concept of who we are.
- From biology we have learned that
- there is no such thing as race,
- we are all fundamentally one species
- (with contributions from a few other sister species, Denisovans and Neanderthals).
- And from physics we can say that
- we are literally the space dust of the cosmos
- experiencing itself in human form.
- we are literally the space dust of the cosmos
for - language - primacy of - symbolosphere - adjacency - language - science - multi-scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - complexity - social superorganism - major evolutionary transition - worldviews - scientific vs religious - Michael Levin - multi-scale competency architecture
adjacency - between - deep time - multi-scale competency architecture - Michael Levin - social superorganism - complexity - major evolutionary transition - complexity - adjacency statement - Deep time narrative has potential for unifying polarised worldviews - but citing purely scientific evidence risks excluding and alienating large percentage of people who have a predominantly religious worldview - Language, the symbolosphere is the foundation that has made discourse in both religion and science possible - Due to its fundamental role, starting with language could be even more unifying than beginning with science, - as there are large cultural groups that - do not prioritize the scientific worldview and narrative, but - prefer a religious one.<br /> - Having said that, multi-scale competency architecture, - a concept introduced by Michael Levin - encapsulates the deep time approach in each human being, - which withing Deep Humanity praxis we call "human INTERbeCOMing" to represent our fundamental nature as a process, not a static entity - Each human INTERbeCOMing encapsulates deep time, and is - an embodiment of multiple stages of major evolutionary transitions in deep time - both an individual and multiple collectives - what we can in Deep Humanity praxis the individual / collective gestalt
- It’s not an exaggeration to say that
Tags
- worldviews - scientific vs religious
- adjacency - language - science
- Micheal Levin
- adjacency - language - science - multi-scale-competency architecture - Michael Levin - social superorganism - major evolutionary transition
- language - primacy of
- multi scale competency architecture
- symbolosphere
Annotators
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www.phenomenalworld.org www.phenomenalworld.org
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My belief is that societies cannot organize effectively to cope with the impacts of climate change without a shared understanding of the future that awaits.
quote - shared futures - climate crisis and appropriate language - (quote below)
- My belief is that
- societies cannot organize effectively
- to cope with
- the impacts of climate change
- without a shared understanding of
- the future that awaits.
- Currently, representations of the net-zero future
- don’t do that.
- They are a denial of the best of human nature.
- They shut down the possibility of
- imagining something different
- in favor of a fantasy of more of the same,
- minus catastrophic climate change.
- With a better, shared understanding of the world we’re moving toward,
- we can better organize ourselves to live in that world,
- whatever that might mean,
- whatever that might look like.
- we can better organize ourselves to live in that world,
- My belief is that
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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www.ylolfa.com www.ylolfa.com
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https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781800992887/my-way-to-welsh<br /> My Way to Welsh: A complete course for home learning<br /> Heini Gruffudd
ᔥDeborah-SSi in Heini Gruffudd's new book - Welsh / General / Questions - SSi Forum<br /> (accessed:: 2024-03-07 07:59:11)
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www.icongrouponline.com www.icongrouponline.com
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en.forum.saysomethingin.com en.forum.saysomethingin.com
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This morning I ran across a copy of Jane Austen's novel Emma with some of the keywords on each page translated into Welsh as footnotes at the bottom of the page. Apparently it's part of a series of classic books published by Icon into a variety of different languages and meant for language learners.
The full list of their titles with Welsh can be found here: Webster's Welsh Thesaurus Editions
I'm curious if anyone has used these before, and if so, how helpful they've found them for building their Welsh vocabulary as they read English language works.
Is anyone aware of Welsh language books that have this sort of English vocabulary cross listed on the page? (Sort of the way in which lingo.360.cymru has news stories in Welsh with English translation help along the way?)
syndication link: https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/websters-welsh-thesaurus-editions/40131
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media.dltj.org media.dltj.org
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Actually, ChatGPT is INCREDIBLY Useful (15 Surprising Examples) by ThioJoe on YouTube, 8-Feb-2024
- 0:00 - Intro
- 0:28 - An Important Point
- 1:26 - What If It's Wrong?
- 1:54 - Explain Command Line Parameters
- 2:36 - Ask What Command to Use
- 3:04 - Parse Unformatted Data
- 4:54 - Use As A Reverse Dictionary
- 6:16 - Finding Hard-To-Search Information
- 7:48 - Finding TV Show Episodes
- 8:20 - A Quick Note
- 8:37 - Multi-Language Translations
- 9:21 - Figuring Out the Correct Software Version
- 9:58 - Adding Code Comments
- 10:18 - Adding Debug Print Statements
- 10:42 - Calculate Subscription Break-Even
- 11:40 - Programmatic Data Processing
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- Feb 2024
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athenaze.com athenaze.comAthenaze1
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Cross reference with Hans H. Ørberg's LINGVA LATINA for Latin.
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rwu.brightspace.com rwu.brightspace.com
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While the language of oppression is still with us, new words continue to emerge that are more accurate and descriptive, and allow us to be more successful in ameliorating oppression and more productive in our interactions with each other. If humankind can relearn the language of diversity, then we can relearn how to respect and treat each other with honor, dignity and love
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www.cortical.io www.cortical.io
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for - semantic folding - semantic fingerprint - natural language processing - NLP - cortical.io - Numenta
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www.campion.ox.ac.uk www.campion.ox.ac.uk
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Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.
What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...
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azorion.tripod.com azorion.tripod.com
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https://azorion.tripod.com/whorf.htm<br /> The (Hopi) World According to Whorf -- a Brief Note<br /> by Gary A. David, 2004
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- Jan 2024
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Hubinger, et. al. "SLEEPER AGENTS: TRAINING DECEPTIVE LLMS THAT PERSIST THROUGH SAFETY TRAINING". Arxiv: 2401.05566v3. Jan 17, 2024.
Very disturbing and interesting results from team of researchers from Anthropic and elsewhere.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Some of Newton's notes come from a 1654 edition of: Gregory, Francis. Ονομαστικὸν βραχύ; sive, Nomenclatura brevis, Anglo-Latino-Græca, in usum Scholæ Westmonasteriensis. Per F. G. [i.e. Francis Gregory.] Editio vigesima secunda, etc. John Meredith, in trust for Royston and Elizabeth Meredith, 1710.
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whitehead says that philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language
for - Whitehead's philosophy - Whitehead - limitations of language - Indra's Net - Whitehead - process relational ontology
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Whitehead says that
- philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe
- in terms of the LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE
- philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe
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And i think this image of the spiderweb with the dewdrops each reflecting the others is the perfect analogy for whitehead's ontology
- You may have heard of indra's net from madhyamaka buddhism
- the idea of dependent co-origination of all things
- that nothing has independent abiding existence
- but is rather caught up in a network of
- relations or
- causes and conditions
- but is rather caught up in a network of
- and so you can't remove any of the nodes in the network without destroying the node and totally changing the rest of the network that it was embedded within
- that nothing has independent abiding existence
- the idea of dependent co-origination of all things
- This is the key to what a process RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY is trying to reveal to us about the nature of reality
- Dependent co-origination or you could say
- the inter-penetration of all things
- though in Whitehead's cosmology there really are no
things
- if by thing you mean an inert isolated entity
- Whiteheads ontology is really composed of events or processes
- You could say and these processes for whitehead are
- drops of experience
- So for whitehead, there's no node in the network of reality that is not there for itself
- It is not enjoying some degree of experience or subjectivity or has some degree or capacity for feeling
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cdn.openai.com cdn.openai.com
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GPT-4 System CardOpenAIMarch 23, 2023
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www.technologyreview.com www.technologyreview.com
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- for: progress trap -AI, carbon footprint - AI, progress trap - AI - bias, progress trap - AI - situatedness
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- Dec 2023
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levidigitalcommentary.org levidigitalcommentary.org
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ho bisogno che
In the 1947 version, Levi writes ‘voglio che’. The change to ‘ho bisogno che’ in the 1958 edition closely recalls, and seems to be in dialogue with, the beginning of SQ (‘Prefazione’), where Levi states that he wrote his book to satisfy an urgent and elementary need - that of telling his story and bearing witness after his liberation from Auschwitz.
VG
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Annotators
URL
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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スアッド su – Japanese Update - 3 Months | Refold/ Immersion Learning {YouTube}
site:: [[YouTube]] channel:: スアッド su date:: 2021-12-21 url:: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYUi6gO9Ip8 accessed:: 2023-12-20
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eddieantonio.ca eddieantonio.ca
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The true distinction: static vs. dynamic
The true distinction that we should be teaching students is the difference between properties of languages that can be determined statically—that is, by just staring at the code without running it—and properties that can only be known dynamically, during runtime.
Notice that I said “properties” and not “languages”. Every programming language chooses its own set of properties that can be determined either statically or dynamically, and taken together, this makes a language more “dynamic” or more “static”. Static versus dynamic is a spectrum, and yes, Python falls on the more dynamic end of the spectrum. A language like Java has far more static features than Python, but even Java includes things like reflection, which is inarguably a dynamic feature.
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To restate another way, every single time we try to navigate real life (including the metacrisis) by focusing our attention on human-created constructs like economy and education, we automatically double down on dissociating from reality. As Daniel says, it is reductionistic to do this. That’s the nice way of putting it. Losing touch with reality is also the literal definition of psychotic.
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for: critique - language
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question: navigating without language
- critique: language
- adjacency between
- kariotic flow
- word intent
- epoche
- is the author sayng that we can and must navigator without language and ideas? If so, I don't see how that is possible, since language shapes the way we experience reality. Decades of languages training has become a part of the way we experience reality now and I don't see how it can become undone.
- I've explored my entire life, in fact to determine it's itt is possible to undo this deep linguistic conditioning
- my latest explorations of epoche are towards this direction
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Unfortunately, whenever we attempt to orient thought, choice and action using these human-created concepts, we’re effectively navigating towards the centre or essence of the concept’s definition, and as an inevitable consequence are simultaneously orienting away from reality-as-it-is, as a whole. (The map is not the territory!)
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for: critique - language constructs
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critique: language constructs
- it is an inherent aspect of language that words are loci of a specific aspect of reality
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www.facebook.com www.facebook.com
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仔細聽就可以知道他們講的地地道道的「北京話」和我們所說的「國語」也不是兩回事。當「國語」剩下煮、煨、燉、煎、炒、炸這些「大方向」的動作時，他們還會使用焯、飛水、燒、打沫、擼之類的詞。顏色都還會用棗紅、糖紅、碧綠、翠綠來區分，黏不只黏，還黏糊；顫不只顫，還顫悠。「北京話」和「國語」差異絕對不只兒化音和捲舌問題。問題關鍵當然是在為了方便推行「國語」，人工的、製造的國語便少了很多生活或細節的部份。寫作文章差別愈顯明。平平寫「中文」，「國語」和「北京話」的豐富程度天差地，欲寫贏中國人，真僫。這時台語優勢就出來矣。和北京話仝款，閣保留誠濟用詞幼路的所在，親像炕、燖、煏、𠞭。最近台語文書寫的作家增加也是按呢，使用生活語言寫作，才有可能寫愈好。
語彙的豐富性，例如煮食
北京話 >> 普通話， 臺語 >> 國語
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- Nov 2023
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Local file Local file
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he spoke of the ‘historian’s credo’ that ‘the factscrubbed clean is more eternal than perfumed or rouged words’ (Marcus, 1957:466).17
Jacob Marcus, ‘The Historian’s Credo’, 1958, AJA Marcus Nearprint File, Box 2.
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www.facebook.com www.facebook.comFacebook1
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catch me if I stray
"Evolving from violent language" (picture, see Obsidian)
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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the explanatory Gap
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for: explanatory gap
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comment
- insight
- there is very little research on the role of language in the explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness
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github.com github.com
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I guess we should look at what CRuby does here but the autoload logic in CRuby seems particularly unreadable.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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for: BEing journey - adapt to, DH, Deep Humanity
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comment
- Potentiality coupled with limitations - Daseitz Suzuki and the elbow does not bend backwards.
- The experience of the unnamable quality present in every moment - infinite potentiality
- The mundane is the extraordinary. Even when we name it and discover it in all our scientific discoveries and articulate it, and mass produce technologies with it, is is still miraculous
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adjacency
- Nora Bateson's book Combining and the Douglas Rushkoff podcast interview
- potentiality
- adjacency statement
- both are alluding to the pure potentiality latent in the moment
- language can be contextualized as an unfolding of the space of potentiality to a specific trajectory. Each word added to the previous one to form a sentence is a choice in an infinite, abstract space of symbols that communicates intentionality and is designed to focus the attention of the listener to one very narrow aspect of the enormous field of infinite potentiality
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www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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COMMENTS BY REVIEWER AI have studied this manuscript very carefully withlemon juice and X-rays and have not detected a singleflaw in either design or writing style. I suggest it bepublished without revision. Clearly it is the mostconcise manuscript I have ever seen-yet it containssufficient detail to allow other investigators to repli-cate Dr. Upper's failure. In comparison with theother manuscripts I get from you containing all thatcomplicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine.Surely we can find a place for this paper in theJournal-perhaps on the edge of a blank page.
Flawless bullshitting.
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journal.equinoxpub.com journal.equinoxpub.com
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chromestory.com chromestory.com
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The nice point of Kiwi is that it supports Chrome extensions, this is why I am trying it. Browser extensions are something which I believe should be rather more widespread in Android by now.
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www.postandcourier.com www.postandcourier.com
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“You will never get anywhere in life speaking like that.”
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- Oct 2023
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style
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In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader
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www.thoughtco.com www.thoughtco.com
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New words, and new senses and uses of words, are not sanctioned or rejected by the authority of any single body: they arise through regular use and, once established, are recorded in dictionaries and grammars.
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In this book, grammar refers to the manner in which the language functions, the ways that the blocks of speech and writing are put together. Usage refers to using specific words in a manner that will be thought of as either acceptable or unacceptable. The question of whether or not to split an infinitive is a consideration of grammar; the question of whether one should use literally in a nonliteral sense is one of usage."
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Of the novelist Saul Bellow, a hero to that generation, Ozick wrote with pride that he “capsizes American English.”
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Peterson worked on The Message throughout the 1990s, translating the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts and paraphrasing them into contemporary American English slang. The translation was published in 2002 and had sold more than 15 million copies by 2018.
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en.wal.unesco.org en.wal.unesco.org
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According to TLC, 143 out of 219 languages are in danger of extinction in the United States, while 75 of 94 are at similar risk in Canada.
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The RWC was developed by The Language Conservancy (TLC), an NGO dedicated to protecting around 50 Indigenous languages around the world, in order to churn out such dictionaries at super-speed. TLC, which has a $3 million budget, regularly teams up linguists with Native American language teachers to work on these dictionaries.
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International Conference on Indigenous Language Documentation, Education and Revitalization (ICILDER) last weekend at the University of Indiana.
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Introduction of the RoBERTa improved analysis and training approach to BERT NLP models.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Wu, Prabhumoye, Yeon Min, Bisk, Salakhutdinov, Azaria, Mitchell and Li. "SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms byStudying Papers and Reasoning". Arxiv preprint arXiv:2305.15486v2, May, 2023.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Zecevic, Willig, Singh Dhami and Kersting. "Causal Parrots: Large Language Models May Talk Causality But Are Not Causal". In Transactions on Machine Learning Research, Aug, 2023.
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www.gatesnotes.com www.gatesnotes.com
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"The Age of AI has begun : Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet." Bill Gates, March 21, 2023. GatesNotes
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www.inc.com www.inc.com
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Minda Zetlin. "Bill Gates Says We're Witnessing a 'Stunning' New Technology Age. 5 Ways You Must Prepare Now". Inc.com, March 2023.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Feng, 2022. "Training-Free Structured Diffusion Guidance for Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis"
Shared and found via: Gowthami Somepalli @gowthami@sigmoid.social Mastodon > Gowthami Somepalli @gowthami StructureDiffusion: Improve the compositional generation capabilities of text-to-image #diffusion models by modifying the text guidance by using a constituency tree or a scene graph.
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Training language models to follow instructionswith human feedback
Original Paper for discussion of the Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback algorithm.
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d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net
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GPT-2 Introduction paper
Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners A. Radford, J. Wu, R. Child, D. Luan, D. Amodei, and I. Sutskever, (2019).
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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"Attention is All You Need" Foundational paper introducing the Transformer Architecture.
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GPT-3 introduction paper
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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"Are Pre-trained Convolutions Better than Pre-trained Transformers?"
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Application
"LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Application" Meta's introduction of LaMDA v1 Large Language Model.
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Benyamin GhojoghAli Ghodsi. "Attention Mechanism, Transformers, BERT, and GPT: Tutorial and Survey"
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www.technologynetworks.com www.technologynetworks.com
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- for: language - concept formation, language - formation of abstract concepts
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scrape user IP addresses
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www.ted.com www.ted.com
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Boroditsky, Lera. How Language Shapes the Way We Think. Streaming Video. TED | TEDWomen 2017, 2017. https://www.ted.com/talks/lera_boroditsky_how_language_shapes_the_way_we_think.
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Kuuk Thaayorre language (Australia) orients everything with respect to cardinal directions or is mapped onto their terrain/land. Even their perception of time (chronology) is mapped onto the land with respect to their bodies.
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Perception of events can differ dramatically in different languages based on their constructions and what those constructions dictate.
Example: Accidents in different languages are seen differently. In English, focus is on the actor who receives blame while in Spanish, there is more focus on the action and intention rather than what English would view as "perpetrator". Spanish eyewitness are less likely to remember the actor for testimony versus in English.
Tags
- TED
- language is perception
- Lera Boroditsky
- languages as a tool for thought
- indigenous ways of knowing
- linguistics
- Dan Allosso Book Club 2023-07-29
- embodied cognition
- Kuuk Thaayorre
- language disappearance
- W.E.I.R.D. (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)
- perception
- time
- tools for thought
- blame
- cardinal directions
- watch
Annotators
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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this other sort of development also happened in the last couple years just clip models um and this enables us to do predictive 00:09:47 modeling across domains um what do I mean by that it means that you can understand and provide the model information in one modality and it can essentially translate it into another
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for: definition, definition - CLIP models
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definition: CLIP model
- contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model allows model information in one modality - predictive modeling in one domain to be translated to another domain
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ell.stackexchange.com ell.stackexchange.com
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If you want the easy way out (which looks like the way majority usage is going anyway), you can probably get away with using dependency all the time.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
- Sep 2023
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- for: symbiocene, ecozoic, ecocivilization, eco-civilization, animal communication, inter-species communication, Azi Raskin, Earth Species Project, umwelt
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summary
- Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
- https://www.earthspecies.org/
- cofounder of https://www.humanetech.com/
- on two main themes:
- how AI is being used to decode language communication of many different plant and animal species, including inter-fauna, inter-flora and fauna-flora cross communication
- how AI used to study human languages has detected a universal meaning shape between all languages.
- Very interesting talk given by Aza Raskin, founder of:
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reference
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given this motion for an animal what sound might it 00:35:42 make an example two whales coming together what sound do they make that might mean hello if a whale Dives what sound would the 00:35:54 other whales have to make to make that whale dive and that would mean maybe it means dive maybe it means there is danger up here maybe it means there's food now there but has something to do with diving
- for: animal motion and language
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AI used to have separate fields this is great when I get to reuse slides um speech recognition computer vision robotics music generation were all different fields that changed also in 00:30:21 2017 when they became one thing language
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for: AI - everything is one thing - language
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comment
- Has importance for the Indyweb / Indranet
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this is like 00:24:33 where this like cusp of a moment as we move this from able to work with lab-like data to real life data that we're about to have access sort of like to the new telescope to look out at 00:24:45 the universe and then to discover all the things that were invisible to us before
- for: making the invisible visible, decoding the language of the biosphere
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whales and dolphins have had culture passed down vocally for 34 million years humans have only been speaking vocally impacted on culture for like 200 000 years tops 00:17:16 like and that which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest
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for: quote, quote - age of whale and dolphin languages
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quote
- whales and dolphins have had culture passed down vocally for 34 million years
- humans have only been speaking vocally impacted on culture for like 200 000 years tops and
- that which is oldest correlates with that which is wisest
- author - Aza Raskin
- date: 2023
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pretty much every human language that's been tried ends up fitting in a kind of universal human meaning shape 00:15:40 which I think is just so profound especially in this time of such deep division that there is a universal hidden structure underlying us all
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for: language, quote, quote - Aza Raskin, quote - universal language shape, quote - universal meaning shape, CHD, CHD - language - universal meaning shape
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quote
- pretty much every human language that's been tried ends up fitting in a kind of universal human meaning shape
- which I think is just so profound especially in this time of such deep division that there is a universal hidden structure underlying us all
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AI turns semantic relationships into geometric relationships
- for: key idea, key idea - language research , AI - language research - semantic to geometric
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the shape which is say Spanish can't possibly be the same shape as English right if you talk to anthropologists they would say different cultures different cosmologies 00:14:45 different ways of viewing the world different ways of gendering verbs obviously going to be different shapes but you know the AI researchers were like whatever let's just try and they took the shape which is Spanish 00:14:59 and the shape which is English and they literally rotated them on top of each other and the point which his dog ended up in the same spot in both
- for:AI - language research, AI - language research - semantic invariancy
Tags
- language - indyweb
- quote - language - universal meaning shape
- key idea - AI - language research
- quote
- universal meaning shape
- ecozoic
- decoding the language of the biosphere
- eco-civilization
- language - universal meaning shape
- quote - Aza Raskin
- AI - language research
- animal communication
- ecological civilization
- AI - language research - semantic to geometric
- animal motion and language
- language - indranet
- Azi Raskin
- symbiocene
- Earth Species Project
- CHD
- making the invisible visible
- AI - language research - semantic invariancy
- quote - age of whale and dolphin language
- quote - universal meaning shape
- umwelt
- key idea
Annotators
URL
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www.economist.com www.economist.com
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If you want to learn a language just for fun, start with Swedish. If you want to rack up an impressive number, stay in Europe. But if you really want to impress, bulking up your brain to master Cantonese or Korean is the sign of the true linguistic Ironman.
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A second way languages can be hard is with sounds and distinctions that do not exist in the learner‘s language.
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Chinese stands out for its difficulty. It is commonly said that a learner must memorise around 2,000 characters to be able to read a newspaper. But even this estimate is criticised; someone with 2,000 characters will still have to look up unfamiliar ones in every few lines of text. Japanese is (mostly) written with a subset of the Chinese characters, but most characters can be given either a Japanese or Chinese pronunciation, making the task mind-tangling in that language too.
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The main reason a language is hard is that it is different from your own.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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publications.hse.ru publications.hse.ru
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- for: language graph, linguistic graph
- title: An application of graph theory to linguistic complexity
- author: Alexander Piperski
- date: 2014
- source:
- chrome-extension://bjfhmglciegochdpefhhlphglcehbmek/pdfjs/web/viewer.html?file=https%3A%2F%2Fpublications.hse.ru%2Fpubs%2Fshare%2Ffolder%2Flenyneoat0%2F178007616.pdf
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hypothes.is hypothes.is
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"Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong
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He moved into United State when he was age of five. He first came to United State when he started kindergarten. Seven of them live in the apartment one bedroom and bathroom to share the whole. He learned ABC song and alphabet. He knows the ABC that he forgot the letter is M comes before N.
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He went to the library since he was on the recess. He was in the library hiding from the bully. The bully just came in the library doing the slight frame and soft voice in front of the kid where he sit. He left the library, he walked to the middle of the schoolyard started calling him the pansy and fairy. He knows the American flag that he recognize on the microphone against the backdrop.
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Tags
- My family immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990, when I was two. We lived, all seven of us, in a one-bedroom apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, and I spent my first five years in America surrounded, inundated, by the Vietnamese language. When I entered kindergarten, I was, in a sense, immigrating all over again, except this time into English. Like any American child, I quickly learned my ABCs, thanks to the age-old melody (one I still sing rapidly to myself when I forget whether “M” comes before “N”). Within a few years, I had become fluent—but only in speech, not in the written word.
- Weeks earlier, I’d been in the library. It was where I would hide during recess. Otherwise, because of my slight frame and soft voice, the boys would call me “pansy” and “fairy” and pull my shorts around my ankles in the middle of the schoolyard. I sat on the floor beside a tape player. From a box of cassettes, I chose one labelled “Great American Speeches.” I picked it because of the illustration, a microphone against a backdrop of the American flag. I picked it because the American flag was one of the few symbols I recognized.
Annotators
URL
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- Jul 2023
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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LLAMA 2 Release Paper
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arxiv.org arxiv.org
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Daniel Adiwardana Minh-Thang Luong David R. So Jamie Hall, Noah Fiedel Romal Thoppilan Zi Yang Apoorv Kulshreshtha, Gaurav Nemade Yifeng Lu Quoc V. Le "Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot" Google Research, Brain Team
Defined the SSI metric for chatbots used in LAMDA paper by google.
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Annotators
URL
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redsweater.com redsweater.com
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Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them
Nope (re: offline). You're confusing "browser-based" and "Web-based" (sort of the way people confuse statically typed" versus strongly typed*). They're different. You can have a fully offline browser-based interface. Most common browsers are every bit as amenable as being used as simple document viewers as Preview.app or Microsoft Word is. The browser's native file format is just a different sort—not DOCX, and not PDF (although lots of browsers can do PDF, too; you can't write apps in PDF, though—at least not in the subset supported by typical browsers). Instead of Office macros written in VBA, browsers support scripting offline documents in JS just like online documents. You can run your offline programs using the browser runtime, unless they're written to expect otherwise.
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german.stackexchange.com german.stackexchange.com
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But in almost all English sentences containing »there is«, these words do not mean »in this place is« but »it exists«. But the German words »da ist« do not have the meaning »it exists«. They only mean »in this place is«.
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- Jun 2023
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levidigitalcommentary.org levidigitalcommentary.org
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«perciò»
The causative connector in inverted commas aims at highlighting the perverted logic regulating life in the Lager. Levi repeatedly noticed this disturbing lack of consequentiality, which prevented the prisoners from deducing from observation what the expected behaviour was, which in turn translated into a constant state of insecurity and danger: ‘ogni congettura è arbitraria ed esattamente priva di ogni fondamento reale’. Pikolo’s privileged condition follows another ‘fierce law’ of the Lager: ‘a chi ha, sarà dato; a chi non ha, a quello sarà tolto’.
EL
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qui
The focus of ecosemiotics is ‘on the interactions between environmental conditions and semiotics processes and the diversity of life stories, meaning-making strategies, and narratives that spring from these intertwinings’ (Maran 2020, 4). One of the main difficulties in any ecosemiotic approach is that cultural entities are predominantly symbolic and therefore they are relatively independent from their environmental conditions, as symbols are made autonomous from their objects. In other words, because of the complex and highly symbolic quality of our human communications, we constantly run the risk of creating artifacts that are self-sufficient and closed, with little to no relationship with the actual material circumstances they describe and in which they are involved. This is an apparent danger for any form of literary narrative that aims to the status of testimony, as bearing witness (to the complexity of the nonhuman world as much as to what happened in Auschwitz) requires instead referring to a material reality that lies outside the text. To avoid a radical symbolic self-sufficiency, ecosemiotics scholars suggest paying attention to the inclusion of simpler iconic and (especially) indexical sign relations, as they ‘establish both the connection between the text and the communicative situation as well as make it possible to distinguish between the discursive universe and the real world’ (Maran, 33).
A crucial group of indexical signs is known in linguistics as deictics. Spatial and temporal words, such as here, or this, or now, have fixed semantic meanings, but their information refers to a specific context without which they cannot be properly interpreted. For instance, and broadly speaking, if I say ‘this’ in my speech, my interlocutor and I need to share an extra-linguistic context in which the close object I am pointing to with my deictic does exist. The absence of a shared material context in literary texts makes the use of deixis particularly poignant, as it inevitably incurs in some sort of paradoxical double experience: a similarity because both narrator and readers are surrounded by a material reality in which words like ‘this’ or ‘now’ have a specific meaning, and a disjunction between the context of the former and the context of the latter as they likely diverge (cfr. Uspenskij 2008, 112).
Beginning with the very title of his first book (Se questo è un uomo / If This Is a Man (my emphasis)), Levi’s use of deictics is remarkable in size and meaning, and plays a crucial role in his testimonial work. For instance, if we consider how he utilises the word ‘qui’ (here) in the context of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we notice four occurrences, all of them in pivotal moments of friction between linguistic and extra-linguistic realities. In fact, Levi twice employs ‘qui’ in relation to the passage of the Commedia he is trying to remember (‘Qui mi fermo’; ‘Qui ancora una lacuna’). They represent a sort of pause in the character Levi’s effort to communicate with Pikolo, a mark of discourse interruption and ultimately of failure, as in both instances they denote a gap – a ‘lacuna’, as Levi calls it – in the intradiegetic attempt to teach his friend some Italian language and, most importantly, to share Dante’s poetry with him. Twice instead the deictic refers to the actual external environment of the concentration camp (‘come si dice qui’; ‘del nostro essere oggi qui’). In this case, too, the deictic determines a break of communication, but the relationship that is interrupted is between the intradiegetic narrator and the reader. The deictic ‘qui’ in the literary text refers in fact to a reality that is surely not shared by the readers of SQ, who likely have a completely different context denoted by ‘qui’ (the library, or their room, but almost certainly not Auschwitz). The deictic thus highlights an ambivalence, as every reader has their own experience of ‘qui’ and yet cannot truly refer to the reality to which the ‘qui’ in Levi’s book points, both epistemologically and ethically (as the reality of Auschwitz is almost unknowable to those who did not experience it). To paraphrase Maran, we may say that the ‘qui’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ emphasises both a connection and a distance between the discursive world of the text and the external reality of both the first-hand witness and the readers.
In a famous passage of SQ, Levi uses a different series of deictics but a similar strategy to address precisely the almost inconceivable distance between different instances of ‘qui’, as he writes that ‘questo vero oggi in cui io sto seduto a un tavolo e scrivo, io stesso non sono convinto che queste cose sono realmente accadute’ (emphasis added to the deictics).
Yet, the most radical application of such usage of deixis is in Il sistema periodico. The fictional testimony of the atom of carbon included in this volume ends in fact with the sentence ‘un doppio scatto, in su ed in giù, fra due livelli d’energia guida questa mia mano ad imprimere sulla carta questo punto: questo’ (OC I, 1032). In a story that links the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman world to the act of writing, the deictic metalinguistically redoubles and forces readers to pay attention to the material context of our reading. In pointing to its own materiality made of ink or graphite (carbon again!), Levi thus transforms the full stop from a mere convention into a literary strategy in which indexicality becomes a crucial testimonial tool capable of bringing together different realities without necessarily overlapping them. The deictic therefore functions as a sort of multistable sign through which we experience both writing and the external world; our presence and the presence of others; what happened out there and what is instead happening ‘qui’, here.
(On other instances of 'qui' in this chapter, see here.)
DB
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Trattengo Pikolo
This paragraph fascinatingly exemplifies how a text can build on bodily patterns and sensorimotor experience to produce an effect that enriches its semantic meaning. Positioned towards the end of the chapter, it coincides with the emotional peak of Levi’s attempt to explain Dante’s Commedia to Pikolo. The conversation leads Levi’s mind outside of the camp and far from his present condition (‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’), back to Turin (‘non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino!’) and to a place where it is possible to devote time and mental effort to existential issues other than bare survival. Yet, at the same time, it is Levi’s present condition that makes it all the more important to convey to Pikolo the relevance of Ulysses’ story and Dante’s recounting of it.
The feeling of this sudden expansion – towards other geographical places, past times, and higher meanings – is rendered through various stylistic devices. While the average length of sentences in the chapter is 16.5 words (Voyant Tools), this sentence counts 74 words; the anomalous length of the sentence dovetails with the unusual breadth of Levi’s thoughts, with how far he concedes himself to go with his mind away from the concerns of his life in the camp. Within this continuous flow of words, the urgency of Levi’s present task is formally conveyed through the accumulation of paratactic sentences linked via asyndeton, which reinforce the idea of a linear proceeding, simply propelled forward without strong control (which would be expressed by a period with a more complex and rigid structure), stretching out towards meanings that seem to escape Levi’s reach (and whose scope progressively increases: specific textual passages; the Middle Ages; human destiny). However, this long, loosely ordered period is delimited by words with a high deictic power: ‘Trattengo’ and ‘oggi qui’. Both the opening verb and the closing pair of adverbs (temporal and spatial) identify a deictic centre that coincides with the narrator (and the reader): in between, the paragraph unfolds in a flow that leads both narrator and reader far from the camp, in an encompassing movement that reaches out in time and space to the point of touching and almost enfolding something ‘gigantesco’, which is the sense of destiny of the entire human race, and then swiftly reverts to the starting point of the here and now (‘oggi qui’). (For more on this 'qui', see here.)
The meaning of Levi’s words is reinforced thanks to a conceptual metaphor operating unconsciously which is that of THINKING IS MOVING (writing conceptual metaphors in capital letters is a linguistics convention). THINKING IS MOVING is an elaboration of the very general conceptual metaphor MIND IS BODY, which means that we automatically tend to conceptualise mental activities in terms of bodily activities, because the latter are those of which we have immediate experience. In this paragraph, the encompassing wandering of Levi’s thoughts, its breadth and immense distance from the reality of the camp, is conveyed through strategies that all variably rely on the reader’s bodily experience. Sensorimotor experience operates unconsciously and yet plays a crucial role: it is our non-representational knowledge of what is feels like to move through open spaces, to be held vs. be released, to roam freely with our bodies, that scaffolds and enriches our understanding of what it means to metaphorically roam with one’s mind. Thanks to this metaphor, because the deictic centre at the beginning and at the end of the period is the same and is close to the narrator (reader), this period is endowed with a feeling of circularity, of reaching out and returning to the starting point, which is not explicitly expressed in the text and is rather projected by the reader’s embodied experience.
MB
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il Pikolo
In this same paragraph, the ‘Pikolo’ is said to be a ‘fattorino-scritturale, addetto alla pulizia della baracca, alle consegne degli attrezzi, alla lavatura delle gamelle, alla contabilità delle ore di lavoro del Kommando’, and three paragraphs later Levi adds that ‘la carica di Pikolo costituisce un gradino già assai elevato nella gerarchia delle Prominenze’.
Whereas the other titles mentioned in this chapter - Vorarbeiter; Kapo - identify recognised positions within the hierarchy of the Lager, Pikolo, according to the testimony of Jean Samuel, was the invention of Primo Levi: ‘Pikolo was not a camp job. The term was coined for me by Primo Levi. I was the only Pikolo. Of course, all the Kapos had helpers, often very young people, sometimes as young as twelve, who served as their assistants, doing everything they asked, including prostitution. The Kapos’ lovers, their sexual victims, were called “Pipel”. I escaped all that’ (Samuel, Dreyfus 2015, 37; my translation).
Jean’s testimony also raises questions about the spelling of this term. In a letter he sent to Levi on 13 March 1946, Jean signed his name with his title and identification number from Auschwitz, ‘Picolo ex 176.397’, amending the spelling to ‘Piccolo’ in subsequent correspondence (Franceschini 2017, 268). Moreover, Levi replied to Jean’s letter with a note dated 24 May 1946, attached to which was an early draft of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, which differs in some ways from what would become the published version, including identifying Levi’s conversation partner as ‘Jean detto Piccolo', a spelling that corresponds to that adopted in the draft of the chapter that Levi sent to Anna Foa on 14 February 1946 (269). Beginning with the first edition of SQ, however, the spelling of Jean’s title was changed to ‘Pikolo’. Fabrizio Franceschini argues that Levi adopted this term, with its new spelling, from its common usage in northern Italian (and possibly also in Vienna in German usage) to refer to shop boys and other minor functionaries (272-79).
CLL
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Vorarbeiter
The Vorarbeiter, or foreman, was responsible for supervising the prisoners’ labour. This was a privileged position within the Lager, for which extra food rations were provided (Megargee 2009-2012, 200). A study of another camp reports that those ‘employed as foremen (Vorarbeiter) represented the most hateful attitudes towards Jews’ (4), a finding that might inform our understanding of Levi’s account of Auschwitz. In SQ, Levi discusses the Vorarbeiter in the chapter ‘Il lavoro’, where he explains the discriminatory power that the role affords: ‘Il Vorarbeiter ha distribuito le leve di ferro a noi e i martinetti ai suoi amici’ (OC I, 44).
For confirmation of the violence with which this power was enforced, we can consult the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum, which contain the contents of a talk given to members of the French Army in October November 1945 in which the deportee Henry Cogenson testified that: ‘As for Kapos and Vorarbeiter, mostly German, Russian or Polish “common criminals”, they, like the SS, never knew when to stop; after having been hit by others when they were simple inmates, they returned the favor on their peers now that they were given a smidgen of power. It was rather common to bring back to camp in the evening a comrade who had been struck during the day and was unable to withstand the blows’. The Auschwitz Museum online hosts images of the armbands worn by the Vorarbeiter, and of the whips they used to beat prisoners. We might also compare Levi’s account with that contained in the Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski’s 1946 collection of short stories Pożegnanie z Marią (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, 1967), wherein the Vorarbeiter Tadeusz is a frequent protagonist.
CLL
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Chissà
Levi’s ‘chissà’ suggests that the decision to discuss Dante’s ‘Canto di Ulisse’ during the walk with Jean was a matter of mere happenstance, or better still of fortune, to use a word that was dear to Levi and crucial to his conception of the Lager (Gordon 2010). ‘Who knows’ how and why the Inferno, and not another text, came to Levi in this pivotal moment of human connection amidst the inhumanity of Auschwitz?
To answer that question, we may wish to note that Dante’s Inferno similarly occurred to many others among the first witnesses to describe the horrors of the Lager. In an article published in the Socialist daily Avanti! in October 1945, Francisco Largo Caballero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, recounted his ‘Ritorno dalla morte’ after being interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which he described as ‘uno scenario da “Inferno” dantesco’. Writing in the same daily in July 1949, the French Resistance fighter turned member of Parliament Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier described her own internment in similar terms: ‘Auschwitz! Si è molto scritto sui campi della morte: quando ci eravamo ci pareva che solo un Dante avrebbe potuto descriverne l’orrore per coloro che non ci sono stati’. Umberto Consiglio, bearing witness to the enormity of Dachau for L’Èra Nuova in May 1946, argued that ‘[s]olo Dante, guidato dal suo alto ingegno e aiutato dalle Muse, potrebbe degnamente descrivere quello che è stato il martirio di migliaia e migliaia di esseri umani’, comparing his arrival in the camp to ‘il “lasciate ogni speranza” della porta dell’inferno dantesco’. In that same year, Aldo Pantozzi described Mauthausen as the brutal realisation of Dante’s vision: ‘La fantasia di Dante relegò nelle infernali viscere della terra tali scene: dovevano passare sei secoli di civiltà perché esse, dalle tenebre infernali, venissero trasferite alla luce del sole dalla barbarie nazista’ (Pantozzi 2002, 88). In Liana Millu’s 1947 Il fumo di Birkenau, she describes that infamous Polish camp as having ‘l’aria “senza tempo” descritta nel cerchio dantesco’, relates how during her imprisonment her thoughts became ‘un tormento quasi dantesco’, and recalls her struggle to call to mind, as she sought to make sense of her condition, ‘un canto dell’Inferno dove si parla di dannati che trasportano pietre’ (Millu 1947, 36, 139, 166). As Robert Gordon summarises the situation, in Italian accounts of the Shoah, ‘Dante’s Inferno is a familiar and recurrent reference point’ (Gordon 2010, 52).
Far from a random occurrence or even a fortunate intimation, therefore, Levi’s decision to deliver a Lectura Dantis while in confinement might best be understood as conforming to a recognisable cultural pattern. Consider that while Levi and Jean were discussing ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ in Auschwitz, more than five thousand miles away, the Italian prisoner of war Giuseppe Berto was offering his own interpretation of Dante to his fellow internees in Camp Hereford, Texas, where he was held from May 1943 to February 1946 (Culicelli 2022, 286). Berto, who would go on to achieve literary acclaim with the publication of the novel Il cielo è rosso in 1950, had been captured in Africa, and the experience of military defeat, coinciding with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime, shattered his most deeply held convictions. Unlike many other Fascist true-believers, however, Berto refused to pass directly into the anti-Fascist camp, engaging instead in a continued confrontation with his former faith motivated by an agnosticism that he termed afascismo (CIDAS, 88).
That confrontation propels Berto’s Dante lectures, which he began to deliver in November 1943, but which were published for the first time only in 2015. If Levi focused on Inferno 26, Berto chose instead Inferno 5, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, with whom his current fate, cut off not only from his home but also from his previous ideals, inspired evident sympathy. It is not hard to recognise Berto himself in the description of Francesca’s ‘malinconia di cose belle perdute per sempre’ (461). Yet Berto appears to identify more with Dante the poet than with the sinners whom Dante pilgrim encounters during his voyage. Having witnessed first-hand, and with profound regret, the demise of Fascist Italy’s imperial ambitions in Africa, Berto presents a Dante
ancorato a quella sua medioevale concezione imperialistica, mentre l’impero e il potere teocratico dei papi erano ormai cose morte […]. E chi vi ha detto questo, vi ha anche spiegato come gran parte della grandezza morale di Dante abbia le sue origini appunto nella sua fede in ideali sorpassati. E questa interpretazione, ben che non possa del tutto convincerci, ci affascina per la sua novità, e sopra tutto perché molti di noi sappiamo quanto costi mantenere fede a quegli ideali che sembrano perduti (451).
With these words, Berto unmistakably addressed himself to all those Blackshirts whose honour rested on the refusal to forsake their ideals even when all seemed to be lost.
Primo Levi’s ideals are of course quite far from those promoted by Giuseppe Berto. Levi had been captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, Berto as a Fascist colonial soldier. Yet, just as Levi, interpreting Dante in Auschwitz, finds ‘forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere qui oggi’, so too does Berto find that the Commedia speaks to his conflicted condition before the ‘pulpiti herefordiani’ (448). Ultimately, that condition appears to align Berto more closely with Levi than with Dante, whose unforgiving judgement of the sinners in Inferno clashes with more modern sensibilities. For Berto, ‘la poesia di Dante si rafforza e si esalta proprio dove i sentimenti umani raggiungono una vetta tale da superare i pregiudizi del poeta […]. Farinata, Ulisse, Brunetto Latini hanno un valore umano che sta al di sopra della religione e della morale’ (455-456). Does not this celebration of the sinners’ humanity echo, across a vast physical and ideological divide, the ‘così umano e necessario e pure inaspettato anacronismo’ that Levi discovers in his sympathetic identification with Dante’s Ulysses?
CLL
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Häftling
Levi introduces the term ‘Häftling’ (pl. Häftlinge), German for ‘detainee’ or ‘prisoner,’ in the chapter of SQ entitled ‘Sul fondo,’ wherein he recounts his arrival in Auschwitz, a camp designed to produce ‘un uomo vuoto, ridotto a sofferenza e bisogno, dimentico di dignità e discernimento’, so that ‘Si comprenderà allora il duplice significato del termine «Campo di annientamento»’ (OC I, 152). It is immediately after offering this reflection that Levi provides the term used to denote this ‘uomo vuoto’: ‘Häftling: ho imparato che io sono uno Häftling. Il mio nome è 174 517; siamo stati battezzati, porteremo finché vivremo il marchio tatuato sul braccio sinistro’ (ibid.). Later in the same chapter, Levi explains the distinction between ‘Häftlinge privilegiati’ and ‘comuni Häftlinge’ and describes how the various groups of prisoners are distinguished: ‘Tutti sono vestiti a righe, sono tutti Häftlinge, ma i criminali portano accanto al numero, cucito sulla giacca, un triangolo verde; i politici un triangolo rosso; gli ebrei, che costituiscono la grande maggioranza, portano la stella ebraica, rossa e gialla’ (OC I, 158).
CLL
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istrice
This is not the only porcupine to appear in Levi’s writing. In The Truce, we learn that Levi’s companion Cesare, disappointed after a misadventure on the black market, spent two days ‘huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine’ (CW I, 338). In The Wrench, Faussone identifies a clearing in which ‘a porcupine was advancing cautiously, with brief stops and starts’ (CW II, 1025). These English translations suggest a possible connection to SQ that is less obvious in the original Italian, where the text refers not to an ‘istrice’ but rather to a ‘porcospino’. In La tregua, Cesare is described as ‘ispido come un porcospino’ (OC I, 417), and in La chiave a stella, Faussone points out that ‘un porcospino avanzava cauto, con brevi arresti e riprese’ (OC I, 1099).
The terms ‘istrice’ and ‘porcospino’ refer to animals of the same family, Hystricidae, and identify the same species, Hystrix cristata, the crested porcupine, which is native to Italy. In the Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, ‘porcospino’ is listed as a synonym of ‘istrice’, which is defined scientifically as a ‘piccolo mammifero con il corpo coperto di aculei appuntiti ed erettili’, with a second figurative meaning as a ‘persona intrattabile, scontrosa’ (805).
Despite their similarity, there is a notable difference between the two synonyms with regard to their literary resonances. As the Tesoro della lingua Italiana delle Origini demonstrates, ‘istrice’ was the preferred term for medieval philosophers, historians, and poets, including Boccaccio, who used it in his Caccia di Diana and Ameto, where the husband’s beard is described as being ‘né più né meno pugnente che le penne d’uno istrice’ (Tutte le opera di Giovanni Boccaccio, 774). The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana attests subsequent citations from Parini, D’Annunzio, De Amicis, and Foscolo, with the latter two adopting the term metaphorically to refer to a person who is taciturn and cagey (615).
I suspect that Levi had another literary reference in mind when he opted for ‘istrice’ rather than ‘porcospino’ in SQ. Here are the words with which the Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet reveals both his identity and the infernal torments he suffers in the afterlife:
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 14-28)
In standard Italian translations dating back at least to the early nineteenth century, Shakepeare’s ‘fretful porpentine’ is rendered as a ‘pauroso istrice’ (Amleto, 59). This word, and these lines, would seem to resonate remarkably well with Levi’s description of the hell of Auschwitz, which is the context for his invocation of ‘la difesa dell’istrice’.
After all, Hamlet’s Ghost is compelled to speak quickly, in the brief interval he has been granted in his eternal suffering:
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, vv. 5-7)
Cannot Levi and Jean say the same thing? The ‘lungo giro’ that Jean has arranged buys them a brief respite, but this precious time has begun to disappear as soon as it arrives: ‘quest’ora già non è più un’ora’. Cannot Hamlet’s Ghost say the same thing?
The moment of connection and communication at the heart of ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ can be said to have begun with Jean’s clever strategy to curry favour with cruel Alex, the Kapo Levi describes as ‘un bestione violento e infido’, who is won over by Jean’s ‘opera lenta cauta e sottile’, finally ceding to him the coveted role of Pikolo. It is this victory that Levi describes as penetrating ‘the porcupine’s defence’. And it is this victory that frees Jean to choose Levi for the task of fetching the daily soup ration, enabling the disquisition on Dante that gives the chapter its title.
If I am correct that the reference to ‘la difesa dell’istrice’ is thus evidence that Levi and Jean’s Dantean voyage begins under the sign of Hamlet, this would be a particularly elegant literary manoeuvre, since the voyage concludes under the very same sign. As their hour runs out once they have reached the kitchen, Levi finds himself unable to say all that needs to be said and is forced to concede that ‘il resto è silenzio’, an unmistakable echo of Hamlet’s final words: ‘the rest is silence’ (Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, v. 395).
If further evidence for a Shakespearean source text is warranted, I would note that Levi included in Ad ora incerta a poem that explicitly references Hamlet’s Ghost, who is referred to as an ‘old mole’ because he continues to speak from beneath the floorboards (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, v. 183). Italian translations render this line as ‘vecchia talpa’, words that Levi borrowed for the title of a 1982 poem, which literalises the reference - the poem is in fact written from the perspective of an old mole - while nevertheless conveying the sense of the original, with its profound intimations of the latent power of buried knowledge.
In altri tempi seguivo le femmine,
E quando ne sentivo una grattare
Mi scavavo la via verso di lei:
Ora non più; se capita, cambio strada.
Ma a luna nuova mi prende il morbino,
E allora qualche volta mi diverto
A sbucare improvviso per spaventare i cani. (OC II, 727)
The reference to an ‘istrice’ in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ similarly suggests hidden depths.
CLL
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vorrebbe imparare l’italiano
Interlinguistic necessity. Although containing the record of a ‘lesson’ on Dante’s Inferno 26, the central experience recounted in this chapter is set in motion by linguistic rather than literary elements. Jean desires to learn a new language, Italian, and Primo’s teaching accordingly combines his intermittent recitation of Dante’s text in the original language with a hesitant French commentary on, often a paraphrase of, salient elements in it. At its core, thus, the chapter relates an attempt at interlinguistic mediation. The text’s emphasis on interlinguistic communication is projected against the backdrop of the Lager’s Babel-like dehumanising confusion of languages that Levi explored in other texts (SQ, I sommersi e i salvati). As such, the circumstances of the episode are exceptional.
Jean is an exceptional, and exceptionally positive, character in the universe of the book. He speaks and thinks in two languages: most importantly, he is native in both (‘Jean parlava correntemente francese e tedesco’). As established on the chance encounter with an SS, Rudi the Blockführer, bilingual utterances are for him the norm: ‘È indifferente, può pensare in entrambe le lingue’. The role he plays in the structure of the concentration camp, facilitated by the distinction of his bilingualism, however, is not what is at stake in the episode per se. While Jean certainly has acquired a linguistic capital of sorts, Levi’s narrative insists on what he decides to share of that privilege. His multilingualism is not associated with exclusionary practices, but with the work of intermediation it brings about and the community of intents it creates. The language learning situation is presented as a space in which the power dynamics of the Lager’s languages are suspended and ultimately refused.
(For more on this, go back here or forward here).
SM
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e che riguarda noi due, che osiamo ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle
Dante’s text ‘riguarda’, ‘has to do with’, Levi and Pikolo. ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.’ What I would emphasise is that by remembering and translating and discussing Dante, Levi and Pikolo live out that terzina from Inferno 26, or rather, they live out a new version of the terzina. That action - ‘ragionare di queste cose con le stanghe della zuppa sulle spalle’ - is a particular living out of Ulysses’ words. For Levi and Pikolo here, discussing Dante becomes a way of seeking after ‘virtute e conoscenza’, and of going beyond the camp’s Pillars of Hercules; ‘è scagliare se stessi al di là di una barriera’, as Levi writes earlier in the chapter. Yet while Dante’s Ulysses casts aside bonds of friendship and affection - seeing the ‘piéta | del vecchio padre’, the ‘debito amore | lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta’ as obstacles to his pursuit of ‘virtute e conoscenza’ - Levi and Pikolo seek after knowledge through conversation, through attention to each other. In the chapter Pikolo listens, he pays attention, he suggests possible translations, he reassures Levi. Interpreting Inferno 26 - ‘ragionare di queste cose’ - is a joint endeavour (Gordon 2001, 68-70; Insana 2009, 107-10; Montemaggi 2020, 127-42), an endeavour in which Levi and Pikolo pursue virtue and knowledge, but do so in a mode quite different to Ulysses (Montemaggi 2020, 133-35; Montemaggi 2011, 66-67, 71-72).
What seems to matter particularly in this passage is that Pikolo and Levi realise that Dante’s is a text about them. ‘[F]orse […] ha ricevuto il messaggio, ha sentito che lo riguarda, che riguarda tutti gli uomini in travaglio, e noi in specie; e che riguarda noi due’ (emphasis added). The ‘messaggio’ arising from Levi and Pikolo’s joint interpretation of Dante is not only a fuller understanding of the ideas Dante is expressing, important as that is, nor is the message limited to assessing the truthfulness of Dante’s words, important as that is too. But - and perhaps underpinning both of these - the ‘messaggio’ also involves recognising that Dante’s words speak about and to Levi and Pikolo. The repeated ‘riguarda’ casts the terzina as not just concerning humanity as a general, abstract category, but as concerning specific, particular lives: Pikolo’s and Levi’s. In the movement from Pikolo (‘lo riguarda’) outward to all those in travail and then narrowing inward to those in the camps (‘noi’) and then inward again to Pikolo and Levi (‘noi due’), the ‘riguarda’ also cast the terzina as open to be encountered in an equally personal light by others.
At least here, the value of the Commedia seems ultimately to lie not in the particular elaboration that Dante offers of various worldviews, but in how the text becomes part of a reader’s lived experience. The two are, however, connected, and one of the questions arising from this chapter is: How? Levi tells us that Dante’s words - in and through the context of Levi’s encounter with them in Auschwitz - revealed to him, ‘perhaps’, ‘forse’, ‘il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. A question perhaps worth investigating further would be: How might moving towards fuller understanding of the Commedia and particular lived experiences of Dante’s text inform each other?
HPR
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Si annunzia ufficialmente che oggi la zuppa è di cavoli e rape: – Choux et navets. – Kaposzta és répak.
Levi and Jean’s fleeting Dantean reprieve is abruptly halted by the return to the ‘sordid, ragged crowd of the soup queue’. Standing in contrast with Dante’s majestic verses and Ulysses’ voyage of discovery is the cramped enclosure of the queue and the banality of the description of the day’s cabbage-and-turnip soup. But the contrast is also between Levi’s own Italian language and sense of cultural identity and the Babelic experience of the Lager. Linguistic chaos is a key component of Levi’s experience and subsequent description of the camp, and one to which he was unusually attentive. Early on in his testimony (and once again, Dante is an important model here), Levi designates the camp a ‘perpetua Babele’. He evokes the linguistic confusion of the camp by including in his account unfamiliar tongues. We see this here in the soup queue but also, for example, in his recollection of the distribution of bread (‘la distribuzione del pane, del pane-Brot-Broit-chleb-pain-lechem-kenyer’) and in his description of the industrial tower in the camp (‘i suoi mattoni sono stati chiamati Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, bricks, teglak’). Linguistic chaos contributes acutely to the condition of extreme isolation associated with the Lager.
Levi’s most sustained meditation on language in Auschwitz comes in the essay ‘Comunicare’, found in the 1986 collection I sommersi e i salvati. Here he reflects not only upon the extreme linguistic isolation of the camp and the psychological damage this often wrought, but also upon the degradation of language he witnessed. Violence and brute force would often replace linguistic exchange as the ‘communicative’ medium between individuals. Levi describes how, for those who did not speak German, words were used not on account of their referential function but as blunt aural instruments that could elicit the desired response from the receiver. The linguistic interaction between guards and prisoners became more reminiscent of that between humans and working animals than that between human beings existing on the same level.
TK
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Kraut und Rüben
Examples are everywhere in SQ, but this is arguably the most striking instance of how an elevated style and references taken from literary tradition clash continuously with plurilingualism in Levi’s writing; abstract concepts with harsh materiality; ‘destiny’ with ‘Kraut’. In this case, ‘cavoli e rape’ is repeated in four different languages. The harsh sound of these words in German, Italian, French, and Hungarian clashes with the philosophical reasoning of the vertiginous previous lines. Language underscores the tragic irony of the entire sequence (a tragic irony that was present even in Dante’s original treatment of Ulysses’ story, in his Inferno 26).
FB
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Ci dev’essere l’ingegner Levi. Eccolo, si vede solo la testa fuori della trincea. Mi fa un cenno colla mano, è un uomo in gamba, non l’ho mai visto giú di morale, non parla mai di mangiare.
In the linguistic framework of the chapter, and in light of the Dantean subtext on which it relies, the figure of this non-speaking character is particularly meaningful since it evokes, as a foil, the character of Nimrod in Inferno 31. Dante introduces Nembrotte as the speaker of an unintelligible language, embodied in a single five-word enigmatic utterance: Raphèl maì amecche zabi almi (v. 67). Three elements seem pertinent to establish the contrastive connection. First, the position: both Nimrod and the ingegner Levi stand in a hole, visible only from the waist up. Secondly, the speaking: Virgil mocks Nimrod’s inability to move out of his own private, untranslatable language, while ingegner Levi ‘makes a gesture’ (‘mi fa un cenno’), entrusting to a non-verbal cue its expression of charitable and friendly connection with Primo. Finally, the restriction of what may be conveyed verbally: Nimrod does not speak intelligibly, while ingegner Levi ‘never speaks of eating’. The verb for “eating” (It. mangiare) is a particularly sensible one in the linguistic domain of the Lager, having been violently shifted in the semantics of the Lager from the human and communal ‘essen’ to the animal and isolating ‘fressen’. Ingegner Levi’s character in the episode reinforces the notion that a desire for communication is at the root of a human community, the exact opposite of ‘life as brutes’.
(Note: L’ingegner Levi appears twice earlier in SQ: first in ‘Il viaggio’ as the father of three-year old Emilia - ‘una bambina curiosa, ambiziosa, allegra e intelligente’ (OC I, 146) - murdered on arrival at Auschwitz; and then in ‘Sul fondo’, nervously asking Primo where his daughter and wife might be.)
SM
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«misi me» non è «je me mis»
As in ‘Argon’ in Il sistema periodico, Levi here demonstrates a philologist’s interest in historical grammar. The grammatical difference that separates the marked ‘Ma misi me’ and its unmarked equivalent in Italian is not expressly stated (the French je me mis is the ordinary, unremarkable grammar, and hence can’t serve to illustrate it). Levi’s free indirect discourse here indicates how much store he put in this difference: he explains its effect in three different ways to Jean (as ‘audacious’, as a broken chain, as the other side of a barrier).
The expected fourteenth-century Italian syntax is Ma misimi. (It is unlikely to be Ma mi misi, as it would be today, because in old Italian ma frequently triggers the postposition of the pronoun). But Levi does not limit himself to describing impressionistically the effect of the marked grammar. Scientifically, he analyses the form of mettersi via comparison with other instances of the same lemma in the passage. Of si metta: ‘I had to come to the Lager to realise that it is the same expression as before’.
The difference between Ma misimi and Ma misi me is that the unaccented, enclitic pronoun mi has become the accented, separate word me. This completely changes the rhythm of the line: *Ma mísimi per l’álto máre apérto (accents on 2, 6 and 10) becomes Ma misi mé per l’álto máre etc. (with accents on 4, 6 and 10). A number of Commedia manuscripts, in fact, have misimi – another clue to precisely the ‘audacity’ that Levi detects in Dante’s rhythmical and grammatical usage here.
Dante’s me makes his reflexive pronoun mi into (almost) a transitive object – a distinct, real-existing entity, separate from the grammatical subject: ‘I’ act on a ‘me’, not just ‘myself’.
What Levi hears, via a kind of solecism, is a prominent, sticking-out me – ‘oggi mi sento da tanto’. This is a sense of self that grows – ‘Per un momento, ho dimenticato chi sono e dove sono’ – into almost an answer to his title’s question.
RP
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Tuttavia l’esperienza pare prometta bene: Jean ammira la bizzarra similitudine della lingua, e mi suggerisce il termine appropriato per rendere «antica».
Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.
Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.
(For more on this theme, see here.)
Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]
-
Pikolo [KZGerman]
-
Häftling [KZGerman]
-
Kommando [KZGerman]
-
Also, etc. [German]
-
Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]
-
Kapo [KZGerman]
-
Ihr Doktoren! [German]
-
Meister [KZGerman]
-
Lager [KZGerman]
-
Aujourd’hui [French]
-
Essenholen [KZGerman]
-
Corvée [French]
-
Tu es fou de marcher [French]
-
Blockführer [KZGerman]
-
Sale brute [French]
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Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]
-
Je me mis [French]
-
Kraftwerk [German]
-
Keine Ahnung [German]
-
Ça ne fait rien [French]
-
Kraut und Rüben [German]
-
Choux et navets [French]
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Káposzta és répak [Other]
SM
-
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– Aujourd’hui c’est Primo qui viendra avec moi chercher la soupe.
Interlinguistic mutuality. Shuttling between recitation of Dante’s text in the Italian original and its hurried and utilitarian French prose version, the lesson Primo imparts to Jean is deeply interlinguistic. The exchange between Jean and Primo is also mutual, at the very basic level of collaboration that any linguistic exchange requires. In addition, Jean is not a passive learner. He takes part in the process of communication, which unfolds in a living dialogue and requires that dialogue to exist. The first words of Italian that Jean picks up and adopts emerge from the living context of a spoken exchange, by the ‘natural’ and immediate imitation of two native speakers. The syllabification of the initial vocabulary Jean apprehends (“zup-pa, cam-po, ac-qua”) from those exchanged between Primo and another prisoner from Rome, Limentani, is not a marker of alienness but of co-participation. More importantly, the learning process is from the start accompanied by a smile, a pre-linguistic sign of mutual understanding.
Levi’s insistence on the collaborative work that undergirds the acts of interlinguistic communication taking place in the episode resonates with Walter Benjamin’s notion that translation is the cultural practice which best captures the intrinsic drive of all languages to communicate through their apparent mutual exclusiveness: ‘All suprahistorical kinship between languages consists in this: in every one of them as a whole, one and the same thing is meant […]. Whereas all individual elements of foreign languages - words, sentences, associations - are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions’ (‘The Translator’s Task’, 156). The experience of shared humanity, which Primo and Jean achieve within the Babel of the Lager, and notwithstanding its violence, relies on the same underlying philosophy of language as Benjamin’s.
(For more on this, go here next.)
SM
-
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levidigitalcommentary.org levidigitalcommentary.org
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Tuttavia l’esperienza pare prometta bene: Jean ammira la bizzarra similitudine della lingua, e mi suggerisce il termine appropriato per rendere «antica».
Interlinguistic felicity. Passages addressing questions of communication, language acquisition, interlanguage connection and intercultural translation scattered throughout the text are constantly marked by a specific affective tonality: they are remembered and represented as successful. The situation at hand is exceptional. In both SQ and I sommersi e i salvati, linguistic plurality is often used to characterise the absurd chaos and linguistic cacophony that marked Häftling existence in the Lager, which is a temporary universe of linguistic dissension and violence. To the contrary, the exchange between Jean and Primo is not simply based on, and concerned with, translation. It also is utterly charitable, in a technical sense. It is based on a systematic practicing of interpretive benevolence. It is dominated, that is, by the desire to move beyond linguistic differences and find a common ground. Such desire is not simply posited: it is acted upon. When Primo stumbles or forgets, Jean encourages him to go on (“Ça ne fait rien, vas-y tout de même”). Similarly, when memory of Dante’s original fails Primo and something of the original text is admittedly lost, the text does not dwell on the loss, but it vindicates the eventual success of the mediation work: ‘nonostante la traduzione scialba e il commento pedestre e frettoloso, ha ricevuto il messaggio’.
Felicity in interlingual communication is crucial for Levi to regain momentary existence as a human being in the violent linguistic landscape of the Lager. Accordingly, interlinguistic success is made the vehicle of interhuman connection. The exchange between Primo and Jean, in its translative quality, sheds light on an oppositional element in the language of the Lager, which Levi defines as ‘orts- und zeitgebunden', tied to that place and that time (I sommersi e i salvati, 1066; OC II, 1025). Levi draws his terminology from Victor Klemperer’s 1947 book Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Klemperer’s merciless diagnosis of the language of Nazi Germany as the product and the producer of a dehumanising regime is the foil for Levi’s momentarily but crucially successful act of communicating across different languages. In the chapter, the willingness and ability to free the most meaningful human exchange from the ties of a time- and place-bound language is the antidote to the isolating and dehumanising linguistics of the concentration camp.
Linguistically categorised terms: * Vorarbeiter [German]
-
Pikolo [KZGerman]
-
Häftling [KZGerman]
-
Kommando [KZGerman]
-
Also, etc. [German]
-
Qu’est-ce qu’il-y-a [French]
-
Kapo [KZGerman]
-
Ihr Doktoren! [German]
-
Meister [KZGerman]
-
Lager [KZGerman]
-
Aujourd’hui [French]
-
Essenholen [KZGerman]
-
Corvée [French]
-
Tu es fou de marcher [French]
-
Blockführer [KZGerman]
-
Sale brute [French]
-
Ein ganz gemeiner Hund [German]
-
Je me mis [French]
-
Kraftwerk [German]
-
Keine Ahnung [German]
-
Ça ne fait rien [French]
-
Kraut und Rüben [German]
-
Choux et navets [French]
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Káposzta és répak [Other]
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