/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11112448]

>ywn understand words as those that created them did
Has alphabetisation and the ubiquitousness of writing permanently ruined my mind, locked me in to a certain way of thinking?
I cannot but think of words in terms of letters, and yet for most of these words' histories, they weren't thought about in that way by most people.
I was talking to somebody about how plurals work in German, where in some words a vowel gains an umlaut, and so "Hand" becomes "Hände", "Kuh" becomes "Kühe" (whereas in "Hund", it doesn't, and it becomes "Hunde"). But I realized that not only my explanation, but my entire way of thinking about the words revolved around letters. How would a common, illiterate 19th century mother explain that to her child? How would she be thinking about it?

It seems I've been completely shut out from one approach to words and language, and not a marginal one, but the one of most of our ancestors.

[Anonymous No.11112460]

>>11112448
I think about this sort of thing as well. People complain about the ubiquity and degenerative effects of new digital technologies but don't even consider the consequences of literacy. There is a real difference between when the word for a thing was its name, a proper name, and not some "sign" not some pretext for a simulacrum.

[Anonymous No.11112463]

Read Derrida

[Anonymous No.11112474]

>>11112463
>Read
I want a mother to sing it to me like she would to her child

[Anonymous No.11112486]

>>11112474
This. I want to be around campfires and speak in a gutteral dialect full of idiosyncratic phrases known only to my immediate community. I want things to be personal, actual intimates for me.

[Anonymous No.11112527]

>>11112486
I mostly want to think of language in a more organic way.
One thing that got me thinking about this was reading Luther's letter on translation.
>[...] den man mus nicht die buchstaben inn der lateinischen sprachen fragen, wie man sol Deutsch reden, wie diese esel thun, sondern, man mus die mutter jhm hause, die kinder auff der gassen, den gemeinen man auff dem marckt drumb fragen, und den selbigen auff das maul sehen, wie sie reden, und darnach dolmetzschen, so verstehen sie es den und mercken, das man Deutsch mit jn redet.
>[...] for one mustn't consult the letters of the Latin language on how to speak German, as the donkeys [the papists] do, instead one must consult the mother in the house, the kids in the streets, the common man in the market square, to observe their mouths, how they speak, and afterwards to translate accordingly; that way they will understand and realize that one is speaking German with them.
I feel like I've spent my life in the school of the donkeys, so to speak, and lost the ability to connect to the others Luther mentioned.

[Anonymous No.11112532]

>>11112527
So this explains why Luther wrote like a dyslexic lol

[Anonymous No.11112537]

>>11112532

[Anonymous No.11112542]

>>11112527
We will never have it again. Our language has been sacrificed to literacy. This is why Ulysses stirs the heart because he intentionally sidestepped latinate diction for the anglosaxon, but even in his day there was a language to be heard among common illiterates.

[Anonymous No.11112568]

>>11112527
absolutely disgusting domesticity, you can see how Nazism is latent within this volkisch peasant logic

alphabets have existed since 600-1000 BCE you fucking niggers, most greek nobles and intellectuals were vaguely literate in the most basic sense

[Anonymous No.11112591]

>>11112568
>ebil nazis!
You are missing the point entirely. The Odyssey was originally a song.

[Anonymous No.11112604]

>>11112568
>implying those languages weren't shaped in large part by illiterates as well
But never mind all that: What about Chinese? I can learn a character and it's meaning, but I will never not think about its sound in Pinyin or some other romanisation. But this is not the way anyone thought about Chinese before contact with the West.
Thinking in letters has not been the normal way of thinking about words for most of the world for most of history, and that includes periods of great poetic/literary/philosophical output.

And this >>11112591
Greek writing itself is not much older than Homer.

[Anonymous No.11112645]

>>11112591
the Odyssey is from the archaic period before Greeks had an intellectual culture im talking about hellenistic greeks and Nazis are demonstrably evil and my analysis is correct this retarded fetishizing of awful peasant consciousness comes from Luther
>>11112604
Chinese scholars and ministers in 300 AD probably had a linguistic-alphabetic psyche; i don’t know what you mean by “thinking in letters” when only the most autistic people do that. My inner world is a chimeric unfolding of sounds, numbers, symbols, geometries and motions. The self-conscious druid definitely repeated mantric sequences as did the vedics so you’re fucking retarded. If you’re talking about the Phonetic alphabet, yes it creates a unique linear style of narrativizing devoid of symbolic intelligence. But Jung has already tried working on this as has McLuhan, just take acid, read them, make art, go into nature, stop socializing like a bonobo everyday

[Anonymous No.11112655]

>>11112645
Your entire post reeks of linear thought, trapped in a logical sequence with no correspondence to "nature" which you predictably evoked, but yea take some more of that mkultra syrum developed to induce schizophrenia.

[Anonymous No.11112659]

>>11112645
>druids repeating sounds is the same as a standardized alphabet and textual conventions

[Anonymous No.11112774]

If I was illiterate I wouldn't be able to read this moronic thread, and that would be a pretty good thing.

[Anonymous No.11112778]

>>11112774
Do you mean if you *were* illiterate?
Good post.

[Anonymous No.11112821]

>>11112778
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/660/when-to-use-if-i-was-vs-if-i-were
>However, you should not flinch if — nay,when— you hear someone say“If I was... I would...”as a Class C conditional in casual speech. This sometimes happens even in educated speakers and writers, so you should not make anything of it. Some writers prefer not to do that, but unless the person complaining is your English teacher, you shouldn’t let it get to you. (Yes, this is ungrammatical for some people. For others, it is not.)

[Anonymous No.11112858]

>>11112821
>googled it for 11 minutes
Welcome back