We Live in a World of Doubt (further comments from my Linguistics course) (English)

Or: "Forgive the young, the tides have not washed enough of their days away..."
Of course, no one can predict the future, and I wouldn't attempt to, but I would caution anyone who puts his or her eggs all in one basket.

When I was in High School, we believed the Soviet Union would start a war that would destroy us all. In fact, being a mere 10 miles from a second strike target in Pennsylvania, we were even taught what areas of the county would be vaporized, what zones in the firestorm, what zones would have doors and windows blown out, and what zones would merely suffer radiation poisoning. I remember my biology teacher saying that when he heard the Soviets were bombing, he planned to take his wife and daughters to the army depot and wait there to be vaporized.

Yet, most of you who are younger than I did not know that world, or are too young to have understood it. The world was a different place a mere 20 years ago.
A century? None of us will recognize the world then really, not if we could see it from our seats behind our computers.

My aunt Arwilda was born in 1908. When she was a girl, Latin and French were the languages to learn, and the farmers in the countryside all spoke Deits (Pennsylvania German). There was no electricity in her town, nor were the streets paved. They had telephones, but no radio. She read the Sears Catalogue by gaslight. She could remember her mother renting a horse and buggy at the livery stable down the block to ride to a rather distant village (15 miles away) on a family emergency. She was in such a hurry, the buggy went up on one wheel as she rounded the corner on her way out of the livery. My aunt lived until 1994. She saw a gaslit, horse and buggy world evolve into a world with computers, color television and the very real threat of hot, atomic death.

I think you have all posited very fine thoughts, but many of you make leaps of faith and commit dreadful logical fallacies. The future is as mutable (changeable) as the past was varied, indeed, moreso. Perhaps English will still be important in 100 years. Certainly it will still be spoken.
But while it shall still be spoken, it won't necessarily be the first language in schools and in business meetings. One thing is relatively certain, the United States will not be the world's only power. This is new, and it won't last, no country holds power for long, and as I have pointed out in several places, there are many tell-tale signs of our decline. I suspect it is likely that we will still be an important player in the global arena, but we will be sharing top-billing with other nations, just as we have in the past.

Things will not always be as they are now.

Watch out, tomorrow will be exciting, thrilling, hair-raising, and nothing like any of us imagines ;)

Further Comments from my Linguistics Course (English)

So far, I think you've all added some really good contributions to this discussion, but I'm a little disappointed that not more of you caught on to the very different ways those who speak Mohawk and those who speak English view their world.

There are two concepts which I often share with my language students: Crossing the Bridge & Parallel but Incongruous Linguistic Universes.

Crossing the Bridge: this is a term I learned during my early years of learning Welsh and being, albeit marginally, involved in Welsh and Welsh language politics. Back in the 80's there was a movement in Wales called "Croesi'r Bont," or Crossing the Bridge. This idea was used to demonstrate how non-Welsh speakers could cross the bridge to the Welsh speaking world with time and practice. I remember Welsh Tutor John Albert Evans describing people in our class in relationship to the bridge (much to the glee of my own ego, I was described as having already crossed it!) Other students were described as setting foot on the bridge, or halfway across, etc. I tell my own students about this bridge and explain to them that when they finally do it, when they finally master their chosen language well enough to function comfortably in their new language, that they have now crossed a bridge to somewhere new...

...to a Parallel but Incongruous Linguistic Universe. No matter how close two languages may be, say French and English, the perception of everything shifts when you move from one to the other. You really do "see" the universe differently while wearing French colored glasses as opposed to English colored ones, and vice-versa. The same is true for any language. There are whole ideas, concepts, from the mundane to the profound that differ wildly from one language to the other.

It is indeed true what Noam Chomsky claims about language, that all human languages are equal, at least theoretically. In practice they do not exchange relevant concepts that are unique and different between them to make each complete. It is not just the concepts (semantics) however, but also the syntax, morphology and pragmatics that give each language a different perspective, each totally unique. As hard as it is to imagine, but when I'm in Wales, speaking Welsh all day, everyday, my universe is Welsh. China has a Welsh accent (there are Welsh speakers there having Welsh thoughts about it!). Quantum Physics flows like poetry through ancient concepts of the natural world, even if the math behind it is no easier in Welsh than in English (but in Welsh I get to talk about my numbers in base ten or base twenty, or for fun mix the two systems up!). World politics are colored by millenia old Celtic concepts of federation, tribal allegiance, freedom and fair play. It is not the world that I occupy in English, and because none of you speaks Welsh, you will never really understand what I mean unelss one day you do. However, some of you have crossed bridges into English or other languages, and perhaps, if you're proficient enough, and you're sensitive enough, you will perceive these linguistic differences in perception. French, Japanese, English, Mandarin, Wolof, Mohawk, Latin, Russian, Arabic, and all the other languages of the Earth occupy the same space and time, but do not share the same reality.

If you get a chance, go back and read the chapter on Mohawk again, and see if you can begin to appreciate what this means in relation to how Mohawk perceives reality.

Comments on a Student's Submission about Meaning and Deconstruction (English)

I really enjoyed this contribution, and what I like most about it is that it demonstrates how interdisciplinary approaches can be meaningful in more than one academic direction.

I think you hit on something with your Derridian comments about the non- compositional meaning in language. One thing that more science-oriented linguists struggle with is the very nature of meaning. The problem they arrive at is that it's incredibly difficult, within the subdiscipline of Semantics, to establish what meaning is.

Of course, the irony is that inspite of his apparent railing against "traditional" literary criticism, Derrida created a whole new nomenclature which is now repeated like Biblical rote throughout the circles of literary criticism among my colleagues who are a little bit older than I, and at times even among my generation and the younger generations of literature students. For some reason however, Derrida's work is rarely deconstructed with any seriousness (rarely is not to say never...), which I think he would see as a pity. "Derrida," professor David Wills of SUNYA said," only had one idea, but it was a big one." I would at least in part concur with Wills. Wills is, by the way, a Derridist, and was a personal acquaintance (perhaps indeed an actual friend) of Derrida before he died. To me, Derrida did have one idea, although it wasn't very big really.

Deconstruction has been inflated well beyond its origins, but is nonetheless an amazingly powerful tool for literary analysis. Due to is flexibility, it's also a great tool for other kinds of social analysis as well. Without a doubt, Deconstruction, in its essence, belongs in the realm of the cognitive sciences, as one of the many tools in the arsenal to coming to terms with the understanding of how the human mind works and what it is capable of grasping and creating.

To be honest though, I would have to side with the "anti-Derridians," by large an far in the same way that, while I more often than not agree with Dawkins and the other New Atheists, that reason and science are most likely to solve our problems and lead more humans to some kind of rational enlightenment, I feel that we would be foolish to throw out the spiritual baby with the religious bath water. Derridians and their ilk have a tendency to scoff at older forms of literary analysis, and at times even scoff at literature itself! Their adherence to their absolute ideals is no better or different than Structuralists or other traditionalists, in the same way that how the New Atheists approach their Work is no different from the zealots of any religious movement.

You will notice that I link my comments back to literary criticism when I reference Derrida because that is where I believe his work is best equiped to make meaningful (hehe) contributions. While Deconstruction can be (and should be) applied to many disciplines, the vast majority of Derrida's work beyond his one big idea is founded on very faulty knowledge. He often made forays into sociology, anthropology, theology and philosophy while having no real background in those areas, despite his self-proclamation as a philosopher, and his comments in those fields are often viewed by their respective specialists as specious and spurious. While there is a small camp of Derrida-fans in some branches of Linguitics, since one of the main projects of the discipline has been to move toward hard data and hard science whenever possible, a largely untrained literary critic and his novel idea haven't met many warm welcomes. It must furthermore be said that Derrida's rise to prominence was based more on whom he knew rather than on what he knew.

Finally, while it is true that Semantics struggles to define meaning, other subdisciplines of Linguistics (notably Pragmatics), when married with Semantics, do begin to define how we understand what each other is saying, even if the absolute meaning is still open to interpretation.

Oh, and why I titled this post "Derridian Nightmares".... your post put in mind of a nightmare I had a couple months ago in which Derrida was alive and well and had come to teach at the college. In the dream he conned me into helping him get a tooth imprint of a woman he was in love with, but was not sure of her identity. At the same time, he was dossing down in the Administrator of Technology's office, who himself was hiding from an irrate faculty because he had given us all ridiculous and mildly insulting email addresses. It was my perogative to find both Derrida in order to deliver this still spit-moist clay tooth mold and to give the administrator a piece of my mind. I never did find the administrator, but I did, as I mentioned, find Derrida fast asleep on a vintage 1970's sofa at the back of said adminstrator's office. We had words and many twenty year old copies of Of Grammatology some with the pages still uncut went crashing to the floor as I put my hands around his neck and began pushing him around. Sundry yellowing pages then went floating through the air as I used some WCW moves on him (he was surprisingly strong!). The dream ended as I gazed on Derrida sitting on the floor rubbing his throat amid strewn remains of Of Grammatology, a small piece of clay with the bite marks of his septagenarian love-interest laying atop one of the torn pages.

I would prefer that you neither deconstruct nor psycho-analyze that dream!