gyrus
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Re: numinosity
Jan 14, 2006, 13:32
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Yeah, German makes our need for loads of hyphens when colliding different words kind of clumsy.
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morfe
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PeterH
Jan 14, 2006, 13:42
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Are you saying that 'sacred' is objective, or subjective?
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FourWinds
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Re: numinosity
Jan 14, 2006, 13:49
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>> Yes, but German is even more constructable (yes I can invent new words too)
My wife, who is German and has a masters degree in English and Spanish linguistics doesn't agree with you there.
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FourWinds
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Re: numinosity
Jan 14, 2006, 13:55
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You can do a lot with German, but they also have very frequent language reforms. The last one in English was a few hundred years ago.
Many English compound words used today should be made into one. We have already accepted milkman and shopkeeper etc as one word, but many other compounds are still separated or hyphenated at best. Words such as milkmaid were formed when English was a lot more Germanic and so the joining of words used together was easier to adopt.
Words such as 'car park' (which is linguistically considered to be one compound word) should become carpark etc.
Fuck the hyphen I say!
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gyrus
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Re: Ritual
Jan 14, 2006, 13:58
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I ill-advisedly dived into this post a little way in and got a bit mired, thought I'd take a breath, step back and see what the original idea was here!
> To me life in Western Europe is full of ritual activity and pretty devoid of spirituality. Can this be applied to the past? probably not, I think ethnological studies of none western (capitalist) societies are possibly our best chance at trying to understand Britain 5000 years ago.
I totally agree with this. There's certainly caveats about it not being simple, but they're kind of obvious. To me the main point is that when we're looking at prehistory, there are huge, inevitable, unresolvable gaps in our image of life then. Some people cut loose and fill the gaps with wishful thinking, some hold tight and refuse to commit to anything that can't be scientifically verified. (Of course most people sit somewhere between these poles on the continuum somewhere...)
But I think both ends have their risks, and because of our science-heavy culture, we often miss the main danger of that end: the illusion of objectivity. In my experience, I don't think it's humanly possible to completely leave those gaps in unknowable entities like prehistory totally void. It seems that if they're not consciously addressed, they're filled unconsciously. We can't help having an image of life back then, but if we try to "stick to the facts", just the skeletal picture we get from archaeology, the flesh gets put on by our habitual assumptions about life that we've grown into here and now - leaving an image of the past arguably as distorted as any Atlantean fantasy, as well as informing our ideas from behind the scenes instead of being actively brought on-stage and dealt with.
I assume the attacks on the word "ritual" you're referring to come from this, where archaeological evidence is deemed too spartan to even guess at behavioural stuff like ritual - *how* objects were used, etc. But if we don't consciously imagine stuff like this, we're in danger of unwittingly applying our pretty empty experience of ritual to our picture of the past. And yeah, I think ethnology is crucial to consciously imagining prehistory.
Of course there's a whole minefield here, around the simplistic equation of contemporary "stone age" culture with the literal stone ages. But it always seems to me the bottom line is whatever the differences (and there'll be plenty), these cultures are much closer to the actual stone ages than we are. For us they're one of our best tools for building our imagination of the past. (As well as being an invaluable cultural repository of information about how to survive without modern tech, which we're trashing at our grave peril, but that's another story...)
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FourWinds
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Re: Ritual
Jan 14, 2006, 14:13
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Love the last paragraph.
Good to see you around gyrus (no matter how briefly). I was hoping I'd get across to London for the Cope gig and perhaps have chance to meet up for a pint with you and Jim. Sadly it won't be.
Hope all is well
Tom
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gyrus
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Re: Ritual
Jan 14, 2006, 14:20
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Bah, was hoping the gig would be an occasion to meet up with good folk like yourself again. Well, Jim's relocating Dublin-wards soon, I'm off travelling for a bit but I'll no doubt be visiting and checking out sites around Dublin. No doubt see you sometime soon then!
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PeterH
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Re: PeterH
Jan 14, 2006, 14:37
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Subjective.
If a space, tomb, church, structure, well, tree or whatever is dedicated to a god, spirit, ancestor or whoever by builders, users or whoever - then it is sacred to them. A mosque is sacred to a Muslim, but not to me as a non-believer. I should still respect its sacredness although I don't share or subscribe to it. Does any atheist on this list use the word sacred personally other than relating to second or third persons? If you have no god or religion how can anything be sacred to it? Can you have a sacred vacuum? For an atheist, it only works if you carelessly change the meaning of the word "sacred" to mean something else. People do of course and when they say that something is sacred to them, they often really mean special, spooky, inviolate, precious etc etc. "Wembley - the sacred turf" comes to mind, but then we have already covered that ground.
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PeterH
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Re: numinosity
Jan 14, 2006, 14:40
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Yes. The hyphen is a half way stage and the words soon consolidate. Sometimes there never is a hyphen - witness "wild flower" and "wildflower"
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PeterH
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Re: numinosity
Jan 14, 2006, 14:41
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Care to explain?
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