WAR ON LANGUAGE

Maybe it is just me, but it seems that everywhere I read, very negative things are said about language. I have recorded some of these examples in these pages.

It is becoming clear that I need to start another site dealing with language, and documenting the examples that I find regarding our cultural evaluation of it.  Most of it is not good.

Yiyun Li recently wrote a piece in the New Yorker about her giving up her native language, Chinese, and then adopting English.  She is a writer.  And the point she makes is what she had to give up when shifting languages.  What intuitions, what instinctive relationships, what unsaid meanings were given up.  The cultural understanding that you develop as a child is tied to the first language that you learn.  When you no longer use that language, much of this cultural understanding is lost.

And she goes on to say that changing languages was, for her, a salvation.

These pages advocate a similar change in language.  Consider for a moment that our drawings are our language;  if we change from representational to transparent drawing languages, what are we loosing?  Are we loosing deeply ingrained cultural understandings?

Think about the Beaux Arts.  They believed wholly in the flat drawing.  Their prime focus was to get things like proportion and shape exactly right.  Their flat drawing language enabled them to focus on these cultural things.

With our Transparent drawing language, might we be losing a sense of shape?  Or what about proportion;  with an elevation of transparency, is proportion less important?  Or to ask this another way, is the sense of shape that you get from Transparent language culturally different from a flat, representational drawing language?   I think the answer is yes.

The point remains that the language, or to put it more broadly, the means of communication that we adopt, shapes our thinking.  Indeed, the Medium is, to a great extent, the Message.

In the words of Ms. Li:

“Yet language is capable of sinking a mind.  One’s thoughts are slavishly bound to language.” “…one’s language closes in on one like quicksand.”

Li, Yiyun.  “To speak is to Blunder. ” New Yorker.  Print.  p31.  2Jan17.

The drawing above is based on Japanese Kanji characters.  Various characters are devised in plan and elevation projection.  Is this somehow between drawing and writing?