Brady quotes Cheerskep, then writes:
" "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."
Michael, I wasn't contradicting you, or claiming that language doesn't have
uses. I was, in keeping with the thread, solely trying to indicate yet another
case of someone's thinking while not verbalizing.
And in fact, yes, I have seen many demonstrations of how to do something with
no accompanying verbal vademecum. (My computer maven does it, maddeningly,
almost all the time.) As a kid, I remember many instructions from my
non-loquacious father when the only words uttered were the likes of, "Watch how
I do
this," and "Try it this way."
I like your essay topic. Your line, "I muse on the way prepositions came into
being as a specific class of words in English" makes me wonder if you'll say
anything about prepositions in ancestors of English -- like Latin and Greek,
both of which had a word for "preposition". My guess is I could better follow
this intriguing paragraph if you helped me along with some examples:
"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."
I presume under slang you'll talk about the adjectival use of prepositions
("This is the in place these days." "Robin Williams is always on." maybe even,
"She is so into him!" And as a verb: "He threatens to out the senator as a
gay."
You've picked yourself a complex subject, Michael, and your essay could
become a book. Some hard going ahead of you. But then, as Seneca the Younger
said:
"Per Aspera Ad Astra"
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