Thursday 7 February 2002

Pic of the day: Foggy. Screenshot from Daggerfall. (Bet you did not see that coming!) Incidentally, this is the temple "Mercy of Stendarr", my personal favorite.

Vague ideas

The Platonic school of philosophy claimed that ideas were real, more real than perceived reality. Indeed, the world we live in, with its multitude of shapes, is just an imperfect reflection of the perfect world of ideas, so the philosophers claimed. The strangest things in all this is this: That this curious fantasy survived for a couple millenia and influenced a lot of European thinking, including (and not least) the European brand of Christianity.

The whole sad thing stems from the usual macho attitude of disregard for foreigners. The ancient Greek referred to other people as "barbarians", which was evidently a word originally made to mock the sound of other languages: "Bar-bar-bar", blah blah blah, meaningless babble. If the Greek had bothered to learn other languages, they would find that those languages sometimes conveyed strikingly different concepts, or ideas, that did not exist in Greek. And the other way around. This clearly shows that the world of ideas is inside our brains, not floating around somewhere outside reality.

***

As I am fond of pointing out, Norwegian does not really have a word for city. The corresponding word "by" is used both for towns and cities, though at least in the last 50 years or so there has been a word "bygdeby" (village city) that refer to rural towns. I would not be surprised if this has been invented to mimic the superior vocabulary of English in this area.

Neither do we have a word for wizardry, to the best of my knowledge. The word "trolldom" corresponds roughly to sorcery. (Strangely, it has nothing to do with trolls, even though it literally means "troll doom" or "troll judgement" or more likely "trollness", the art of being troll.) Then again we have the norse words (now barely known anymore) of "gand" and "seid", both of them magic practices. Seid in particular was considered ethically dubious, as it included rituals evidently of a feminine sexual nature. The exact nature of these rites is long lost[1], though I'm sure there are various heathen groups that believe they have them. My point, in so far as there is one, is that the ideas of magic practices is strikingly different in English, old Norse and modern Norwegian. Not just the words - they don't even refer to the same ideas.

([1]: In the inner Mediterranean, worshippers of female Bronze Age goddesses occasionally seems to have castrated themselves and served the temple as homosexual temple prostitutes, in honor of the goddess. Small wonder the masculine Iron Age religions, from Asatru to old Judaism, regarded homosexuals with fear and suspicion. They were prime suspects of Old Faith magic. What this has to do with today's topic is left as an exercise for the reader.)

If we move on to German, we find that the grammatical gender and the physical sex don't necessarily match. Lifeless object seem to be assigned a gender more or less randomly, based on what letters they end in. In Finnish, there are no grammatical genders at all. If you want to find out what sex someone is, you will have to take a more direct approach than check their personal pronouns. He and she are the same, though lifeless things still stand out. I refuse to believe that this reflects the ideal world of Finns.

And as any theologist will be delighted to tell you, the New Testament contains three different words for love. One refers to spiritual love, the way God loves us; another to friendship; and a third to erotic love. In modern European languages this is all stirred together in one word. That's bound to cause some confusion, you would think. It is certainly not ideal.

***

Some famous Swede, E. Tegner I think, said that murky speech reveals murky thought. Sadly, I believe this to be the default condition of humans. Outside mathematics, haziness reigns supreme. For survival purposes, fuzzy logic may be ideal. But it is kind of sad that we will never be able to talk about abstract concepts in a clear and consise way.

Worse yet, we may never be able to truly understand each other. We babble like drunk men, each convinced of his own wit and wisdom.