The Universes :: Semantics Language Essays

The Universes I can't tell you what I was just thinking. As in Augustine's view of intuition, the associations I registered were too free of any repeatable limitations for me to verbalize the experience. Perhaps these associations were of diverging thoughts that have not departed my mind. The most handy example of something similar is the simultaneity of sense perception. Each sense perception is specialized and in that respect removed from the whole and yet also registered in the same moment. In the thought I'm speaking of there were different concerns, we might even say a universe of concerns none of which I can fully express. This complex event might be considered incidental in regard to what I have learned to value. I am now attempting to acquire a greater appreciation of something I cannot verbalize, meaningful associations I can't excite a recurrence of through keying words into a computer. Semantic sensation is never original. It must always be familiar. Language does excite original sensations, as in the sound of a speaker's voice, but the semantic experience itself is never sound or vision, or any other sense perception of the material universe. Original experience of semantics would be like immediately comprehending a language we never heard before. This kind of appreciation is possible with music. Music we've never heard before can be immediately appreciated as music, but semantics, like memory, must always be a response to what is already familiar. My concern is how to proceed. If I can only register verbally what has already become familiar through cognitive means, my work with language is not directed toward spurring meaning for the first time. Has there ever been a first time in regard to comprehending language? Is anything we read utterly strange, or is it rather strangely familiar? We may read something and make no sense of it, and later return to it and find familiarity as if we always should have been able to comprehend this particular passage. This parallels how we initially acquire language through a growing familiarity with the effects of verbal expression. We learn to fortuitously repeat limited effects. We grow to appreciate what we had already experienced albeit as incidental and free of the constraints of communication. Infants can distinguish between phonemes their parents, having learned a particular language, can no longer tell apart (Pinker 264), and meaning is similar in this respect. To understand how this c an work we must put aside the notion that language makes meaning.