Unfinished Language
You wonder
What to make of it
I've thought about this for years and years and years and
I don't know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence
Giving language lessons in hyperspace
That certainly, consistently seems to be what is happening
I've thought a lot about language
As a result of that
First of all, it is the most remarkable thing we do
Chomsky shows
The deep structure of language is under genetic control
But that's like the assembly language level
Local expressions of languagе are epigenеtic
[Chorus]
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
We have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust
But the most articulate, brilliantly pronounced
And projected English or French or German or Chinese
Is still a poor carrier of our intent
A very limited bandwidth
For the intense compression of data that we are trying to put across to each other
Intense compression
Intense compression
Ntense compression of data of data
It occurs to me, the ratios of the senses
The ratio between the eye and the ear, and so forth
This also is not genetically fixed
There are ear cultures
And there are eye cultures
Print cultures
And electronic cultures
So, it may be that our perfection and our completion
Lies in the perfection and completion of the word
[Chorus]
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
Again, this curious theme of the word and its effort to concretize itself
A language that you can see
Is far less ambiguous than a language that you hear
If I read the paragraph of Proust
Then we could spend the rest of the afternoon discussing, what did he mean?
But if we look at a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore
We can discuss, what did he mean
But at a certain level, there is a kind of shared bedrock
That isn't in the Proust passage
We each stop at a different level with the textual passage
With the three-dimensional object we all sort of start from the same place
And then work out our interpretations
Is it a nude, is it an animal?
Is it bronze, is it wood?
Is it poignant, is it comical?
So forth and so on
[Chorus]
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
It seems to me that language
Is some kind of enterprise of human beings
That is not
Finished
It is the most remarkable thing we do
Thing we do, thing we do
It is the most remarkable thing we do
You wonder what to make of it
It is the most remarkable thing we do
Thing we do, thing we do
It is the most remarkable thing we do
You wonder what to make of it