On May 14, 2008, at 11:08 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
"Look, it's no good my trying to explain how to do this -- lemme
just show you."
Then, standing in front of you, he proceeds to the demonstration
without saying another word? I don't think so. I am pretty sure he'd
say things like, "Next, you pick up the ..." and "But watch out
for ...." etc. That's what I meant by "presenting relationships to
ourselves."
Picture, 10,000 words, etc. But all in all, a picture or visual
exhibit is not the best vehicle to show relationships, especially
conditional or optional ones.
I've been working off and on on an essay titled "Consider the
Preposition." In it, I muse on the way prepositions came into being as
a specific class of words in English (and, btw, it's a closed class,
admitting very few words over time, not a profligate bawdy-house like
nouns, allowing anything in). To start, we learn prepositions by
positioning of things (after all, the word is "prePOSITION," isn't it?):
This is ON
This is BELOW
This is BESIDE
This is UNDER
This is IN
This is INTO
etc.
Somewhere along the way in the development of English, the pure
locational aspect of prepositions was augmented by a figurative
connotation, so that, first by analogy, words like "in" and "on" were
used without the force of location to them; then, later, by making
derivative analogies to other linguistic uses (not locational), "in"
and "on" and the other prepositions were used as the syntactic
connector we know in Modern English, as well as the adverbial particle
added to verbs; and most vividly, prepositions are much employed in
slang.
Can you show visually the concepts "on and on"? "Getting into" a
topic? "Coming down" with something? Etc. No, language is far better
suited to showing relationships and many conditional situations.
I bet you didn't even notice the relationship words in the second and
third paragraphs above: "all in all," "off and on," "came into being,"
etc.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
