Saturday 27 April 2002

Pic of the day: Life seems to grow in the cracks between order and chaos. (Yes, the lake in the middle there has the telltale shape of a Mandelbrot fractal.)

A-pun the border

I was rather proud of yesterday's entry when I finished it. Then this morning I woke up after almost 8 hours of sleep and realized how pathetic it was. I blame it on the recent imbalance between work and sleep. As a rule of thumb, I seem to need nearly one hour sleep for each hour of work. But this week, there has been less sleep, thanks mainly to my exploration of Hibernia. Dark Age of Camelot makes for sleepless knights.

The pun is intentional. Actually, it was what made this entry.

***

I don't think all languages lend themselves equally well to puns. The core of the pun is the double meaning. Languages of old seems to have been less ambiguous, with more redundancy. Words were long, and there were suffixes and permutations for the most unlikely of grammatical events. I am sure you could have fun with that too, but I think the modern puns started with the Huns. The great migrations in Europe led to a collapse in the old intricate languages. Some languages repeated this process later, most famously English. The long words collapsed, and grammatical forms too. Many words that were once different, now sounded the same. And grammar doesn't always help either, simplified as it is. So you get statements such as "time flies" which make perfect sense until someone replies "I can't, they fly too fast".

Such double meanings are rare in a relatively undisturbed language such as Finnish. (Notice that I'm talking about the language, not the people who speak it.) In Finnish, you add the suffix -kaa to the verb when you ask someone to do something, so there is no confusion. I am not even sure if someone steeped in such a language would see the point of word games like that. On the other hand, there are a few languages that go even further, though I haven't studied any of them. One of the main Chinese languages supposedly uses the same few hundred words for a lot of different things, and with no grammatical forms. I believe that in such a language, a "pun" would no longer have the effect of surprise that delights us. (Well, some of us. Others prefer to see people get a pie in the face. There is no accounting for tastes ... though lemon meringue pie seems popular.)

I thought about how English seemed to be a language on the border between the two types of languages: One where "words mean things", and the other where meaning comes from the context rather than from each individual word. And I thought about other borderline phenomena.

***

Is not life itself straddling the border between order and chaos? A bit more orderly, and the chemicals in our body would start to settle down in crystals or at least inert compounds. A little more chaos, and we could not maintain the framework of interlocking filaments that keeps those swirling chemicals in place. Rather than rocks or puddles, we are us.

And is not our species still in a perilous transition from instinct to reason? Reason is still mostly the servant, doing more and more of the work, but the instincts still make the real decisions. And then they leave it to reason to come up with a plausible explanation: "I just wanted to help", "she was wearing short skirts", "I needed the money", "a snake told me to eat it".

Certainly we wish there could be more reason in the world (and especially in the Middle East). But in our own lives we seem to realize that there must be a balance between them. That living on the border is part of what makes life exciting and enjoyable.