9.7:CREATION OF LANGUAGE:
The language develops from the SIVA THATHVA.
They are four types:
1. Sukumai vakku:சூக்குமைவாக்கு this is the intuition we get. It has no thought form
2.Paisanthi vakku:பைசாந்திவாக்கு this is in the form of half intuition and half
thought.
3.Mathimai vakkuமத்திமைவாக்கு: here the thought is clearly formed and has a
linguistic form but cannot be pronounced.
4. Vaigari vakkuவைகாரிவாக்கு: it is fully formed word that can be communicated in
a language.
All the vakku forms are from suddha maya and are from
the siva thathva.
The cosmogony chapters in saiva siddhantham have no
substantial basis for psycho analytic interpretation to my knowledge. Escept
that the creation of mind and language are dealt in small manner. There are
reasons to say the language came first and it created the
other physical bodies- from certain descriptions within unmai vilakkam. These
aspects are very hermeneutic in a sense that all out interpretations stem from
language and the meanings we attribute to symbols in a language[i].
This is very close to our gestalt models of philosophy and modern philosophical
hermeneutic theories[ii].
[i] Thought, communication, and understanding
Language use is a remarkable fact about human
beings. The role of language as a vehicle of thought enables human thinking to
be as complex and varied as it is. With language one can describe the past or
speculate about the future and so deliberate and plan in the light of one’s
beliefs about how things stand. Language enables one to imagine counterfactual
objects, events, and states of affairs; in this connection it is intimately
related to intentionality, the feature
of all human thoughts whereby they are essentially about, or directed toward,
things outside themselves. Language allows one to share information and to
communicate beliefs and speculations, attitudes and emotions. Indeed, it
creates the human social world, cementing people into a common history and a common
life-experience. Language is equally an instrument of understanding and
knowledge; the specialized languages of mathematics and science, for example,
enable human beings to construct theories and to make predictions about matters
they would otherwise be completely unable to grasp. Language, in short, makes
it possible for individual human beings to escape cognitive imprisonment in the
here and now. (This confinement, one supposes, is the fate of other animals—for
even those that use signaling systems of one kind or another do so only in
response to stimulation from their immediate environments.)
The evidently close connection between
language and thought
does not imply that there can be no thought without language. Although some
philosophers and linguists have embraced this view, most regard it as
implausible. Prelinguistic infants and at least the higher primates, for
example, can solve quite complex problems, such as those involving spatial
memory. This indicates real thinking, and it suggests the use of systems of
representation—“maps” or “models” of the world—encoded in nonlinguistic form. Similarly,
among human adults, artistic or musical thought does not demand specifically
linguistic expression: it may be purely visual or auditory. A more reasonable
hypothesis regarding the connection between language and thought, therefore,
might be the following: first, all thought requires representation of one kind
or another; second, whatever may be the powers of nonlinguistic representation
that human adults share with human infants and some other animals, those powers
are immensely increased by the use of language.
The “mist and veil of words”
The powers and abilities conferred by the
use of language entail cognitive successes of various kinds. But language may
also be the source of cognitive failures, of course. The idea that language is
potentially misleading is familiar from many practical contexts, perhaps
especially politics. The same danger exists everywhere, however, including in
scholarly and scientific research. In scriptural interpretation, for example,
it is imperative to distinguish true interpretations of a text from false ones;
this in turn requires thinking about the stability of linguistic meaning and about
the use of analogy, metaphor, and
allegory in textual analysis. Often the danger is less that meanings may be
misidentified than that the text may be misconceived through alien categories
entrenched (and thus unnoticed) in the scholar’s own language. The same worries
apply to the interpretation of works of literature, legal documents, and
scientific treatises.
The “mist and veil of words,” as the
Irish philosopher George
Berkeley (1685–1753) described it, is a traditional theme in
the history of philosophy. Confucius
(551–479 bc), for example, held that, when
words go wrong, there is no limit to what else may go wrong with them; for this
reason, “the civilized person is anything but casual in what he says.” This
view is often associated with pessimism about the usefulness of natural
language as a tool for acquiring and formulating knowledge; it has also
inspired efforts by some philosophers and linguists to construct an “ideal”
language—i.e., one that would be semantically or logically “transparent.” The
most celebrated of these projects was undertaken by the great German polymath Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who envisioned a “universal characteristic”
that would enable people to settle their disputes through a process of pure
calculation, analogous to the factoring of numbers. In the early 20th century
the rapid development of modern mathematical logic (see
formal logic) similarly
inspired the idea of a language in which grammatical form would be a sure guide
to meaning, so that the inferences that could legitimately be drawn from
propositions would be clearly visible on their surface.
Outside philosophy there have often been
calls for replacing specialized professional idioms with “plain” language,
which is always presumed to be free of obscurity and therefore immune to abuse.
There is often something sinister about such movements, however; thus, the
English writer George
Orwell (1903–50), initially an enthusiast, turned against the idea in his
novel 1984 (1949), which featured the thought-controlling “Newspeak.”
Yet he continued to hold the doubtful ideal of a language as “clear as a
windowpane,” through which facts would transparently reveal themselves.
[ii] MODERN LINGUISTICS VERSUSTRADITIONAL HERMENEUTICS* Robert L.
ThomasProfessor of New TestamentAn emerging field of study among evan gelicals goes by
the name modernlinguistics. Its terminology, self-appraisal, approach to
language analysis, andrelationship to traditional exegesis furnish an
introduction to a comparison withgrammatical-historical hermeneutics.
Indispensable to an analysis of modernlinguistics is a grasping of its
preunderstanding—its placing of the language of the Bible into the same
category as all human languages and its integration with othersecular
disciplines—and the effect that preunderstanding has on its interpretation
of the biblical text. Its
conflicts with grammatical-historical principles include aquestioning of the
uniqueness of the biblical languages, its differing in the handlingof lexical
and grammatical elements of the text, its differing in regard to the
importance of authorial
intention, its lessening of precision in interp retation, itselevating of the
primacy of discourse, its elevating of the impact of stylisticconsiderations,
and a questioning of the feasibility of understanding the text in a
literal way. Such contrasts mark
the wide divergence of modern linguistics fromtraditional
grammatical-historical interpretation.
http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj14b.pdf
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