I and I sometimes overstand. Sometimes don't! And does *ver-stehen *have 
the same relationship to standing as *sich vertun *has to doing?

On Tuesday, March 3, 2015 at 6:36:22 PM UTC+1, Gabby wrote:
>
> Cheers Francis!
>  
> Schonhaltung or schon Haltung. The break makes the difference. And your 
> medical knowledge bridges the gap.
>
> Actually "overs", short form of "overstand", was my initial key word that 
> got me looking deeper/higher into language construction long time ago. I 
> was deeply impressed by what I had learned about Jamaican itations and 
> Rastafari poltitical poetry. In your case the ability to do religious 
> contextualization of language items certainly helps when studying 
> Kulturwissenschaften. Viel Erfolg!
>
> 2015-03-03 17:15 GMT+01:00 frantheman <[email protected] <javascript:>>:
>
>> I'm still here - in some sense anyway. More passive, thoughtful, 
>> watching, listening and thinking. As they say on Facebook; it's 
>> complicated. There's such a volume of *stuff *out on the web now that I 
>> find my reluctance to contribute to it growing ever stronger in the past 
>> years. Do I have anything to say that thousands are others aren't saying? 
>> Is any attempt we make to say something not drowned out in a cacophony of 
>> of puppies, selfies, mindless chatter and incivility? In a world where 
>> significance seems to have become dependent on reduction to a viral 
>> hash-tagged tweet, or a five-second video on Vine, what happens to depth, 
>> complexity, the possibility of real interaction? Has communication finally 
>> reduced itself to atomic brevity and superficiality? Otherwise - tl;dr. 
>>
>> "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, 
>> plausible, and wrong." What Menken actually said was a little different; 
>> "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a 
>> well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong" 
>> (*The 
>> Divine Afflatus*, 1917). Even within the same language quotational drift 
>> occurs. Interpretative drift is a constitutive element of discourse. Our 
>> communication is always a hit-and-miss thing, or maybe, better, a 
>> constantly creative process. What you say, what I understand. Each of us 
>> culturally in our own particular place, but sharing enough to bring some 
>> kind of communication into being - a wonderful, organic, continually 
>> self-creating kind of thing, with all sorts of levels, eddies, 
>> side-effects. An orchestral symphonic symbolic performance of memes and 
>> tropes. And that's just when it's carried out between people who "share" a 
>> common language.
>>
>> Accurate, one-to-one translation/conveyance of meaning is impossible; 
>> even between two speakers of the same language. Communication becomes 
>> something else, something independent. The German theorist, Niklas 
>> Luhmann <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann>, has some 
>> interesting ideas in this area. It's a deeply counter-intuitive way of 
>> seeing things - and useful as an instrument to challenge one's own 
>> assumptions, even if you don't go all the way with him.
>>
>> Nobody - as far as I know - has translated Luhmann's major works from 
>> German into English. Understandably - it's hard enough trying to figure out 
>> what exactly he's saying in one language without trying to express it in 
>> another, and when you move to his discussions and arguments with Habermas 
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas> (another German 
>> master of the complicated obtuse) ... forgeddaboudit!
>>
>> Though translation programmes have improved in the past decade, they're 
>> still a long way from being good. Because "meaning"/"sense" is always 
>> contextual (human subjective contextual), therefore always fluid and 
>> shifting. This is more than just "fuzzy logic." I suspect we will need 
>> genuine AI as the basis of operating systems to make them really work. Two 
>> people from different lingusitic backrounds with very limited vocabularies 
>> can communicate better - agree that they have achieved some kind of 
>> understanding - than a programme which has access to comprehensive 
>> dictionaries.
>>
>> For the past months I've been formally studying - in the academic sense - 
>> in German. *Kulturwissenschaft *at that. It's a weird experience - 
>> there's stuff I can understand better in English, other stuff works better 
>> in German. There isn't even a good translation of the subject I'm doing my 
>> Masters in. A literal English translation of *Kulturwissenschaft *would 
>> be "cultural science" but English academia generally calls it "cultural 
>> studies." Which, when you think about it, means something else. Well, it's 
>> a post-modernist phenomenon anyway, which, arguably, allows one to be 
>> multidimensional with reference to meaning!
>>
>> And sometimes it can be enormously productive to take an ordinary, 
>> everyday word in a particular language and twist it, mine it, pummel it, 
>> *rape 
>> *it, alienate it. Poets do this all the time. Sometimes even academics 
>> (a pretty mediocre lot for the most part) manage it. The use of the German 
>> word *Verstehen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verstehen> *["to 
>> understand"] is one example.
>>
>>
>>
>> Am Sonntag, 1. März 2015 01:56:27 UTC+1 schrieb Chris Jenkins:
>>>
>>> Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war 
>>> durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die 
>>> digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn 
>>> sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?
>>>
>>> Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen 
>>> in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die 
>>> anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht 
>>> nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde 
>>> noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person 
>>> erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?
>>>
>>> Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich 
>>> würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in 
>>> einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu 
>>> finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in 
>>> englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich 
>>> einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden 
>>> meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D
>>>
>>  -- 
>>
>> --- 
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the 
>> Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this topic, visit 
>> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/minds-eye/wo_ToDMnO4s/unsubscribe.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to 
>> [email protected] <javascript:>.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
>>
>
>

-- 

--- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
""Minds Eye"" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email 
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Reply via email to