Ambiguity Linguistics Quotes

There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world. Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these songs. It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone. It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been. Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen? We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth. It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold.

Unlike meaning, the truth always survives translation.

It may well be that individuals who are attracted into linguistics have a certain talent for metalinguistic reflection—a delight in constructing ungrammatical sentences, finding curious ambiguities and implicatures, hearing and imitating accents, and the like—and that professional training as a linguist only amplifies this proclivity. It would then be no surprise that linguists’ sense of what is interesting in language is different from that of our friends in biology, economics, and dentistry. It is just that we linguists have made the mistake of assuming everyone else is like us.

Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily drawn as a picture) by means of the sign for a depictable noun that had the same phonetic pronunciation. For instance, it’s easy to draw a recognizable picture of arrow, hard to draw a recognizable picture of life, but both are pronounced ti in Sumerian, so a picture of an arrow came to mean either arrow or life. The resulting ambiguity was resolved by the addition of a silent sign called a determinative, to indicate the category of nouns to which the intended object belonged. Linguists term this decisive innovation, which also underlies puns today, the rebus principle.

The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

Rasa has two primary meanings: 'feeling' and 'meaning'. As 'feeling' it is one of the traditional Javanese five senses - seeing, hearing, talking, smelling and feeling, and it includes within itself three aspects of "feeling" that our view of the 5 senses separates: taste of tongue, touch on the body, and emotional 'feeling' within the 'heart' like sadness and happiness. The taste of a banana is its rasa; a hunch is a rasa; a pain is a rasa; and so is the passion. As 'meaning', rasa is applied to words in a letter, in a poem, or even in common speech to indicate the between-the-lines type of indirection and allusive suggestion that is so important in Javanese communication and social intercourse. And it is given the same application to behavioral acts generally: to indicate the implicit import, the connotative 'feeling' of dance movements, polite gestures, and so forth. But int his second, semantic sense, it also means 'ultimate significance' - the deepest meaning at which one arrives by dint of mystical effort and whose clarification resolves all the ambiguities of mundane existence(...) (The interpretation of cultures)

It’s not just that we’re less clear than we think, but we’re often completely misunderstood. You were sure that you were sending a nice note, while your receiver is equally sure you were delivering a pointed critique. When you build an entire workflow on exactly this type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication—a workflow that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers like Alex Pentland documented as being fundamental to successful human interaction—you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging is making us miserable.

She sighed hard and shook her head, realized she was still staring at the same recipe card in her hand. She propped it against the monitor and read again, Elegant French Pork and Beans, by Carmine Grosz of Huron, South Dakota. She scanned the recipe, which called for haricot beans- a not inelegant bean, Olivia thought. Two kinds of sausage, two cuts of pork. Leeks. Well. This looked like a midwesternized cassoulet- definitely better than the usual "Casserole Corner" fare, which was largely made up of recipes containing endless and minute variations on the same hot dishes, issue after issue. For a couple of years there, chicken and broccoli had been all the rage: Chicken Broccoli Divan, Chicken Broccoli 'Divine', Chicken Broccoli Supreme ("Them's fightin' words," Ruby had told Vivian). Chicken Broccoli Surprise, Chicken Broccoli 'Rice' Surprise (David: "Where's the surprise? You've just listed all the ingredients in the title"). Elegant Company Chicken-Broccoli Casserole. "Which is the inelegant part," Olivia had asked over the phone from college, because she was studying ambiguous reference in her Linguistic Description of Modern English class, "the company or the casserole?

Well, I think that this is just a question for linguists and lexicographers. Although, as previously mentioned, a person needs to sense another person and needs to think about the person to behave in a certain way, which requires conscious thought, is it possible for a programmed reaction, or a programmed way of behaving, to be defined as behavior? Let me elaborate: if a normal human being is slapped in the face, the person would sense the slap and reflexively think of things such as how painful, unexpected, or annoying it was. Then, the person would say “ow” or maybe try to slap the person back. However, a p-zombie would react by saying “ow,” or by slapping the person back, but it is not doing any of this out of its own will, because without conscious thought, it doesn’t have a will. Something in the p-zombie could cause it to react without having to think, like with a robot; if I were to say “hi” to a robot, it could be programmed to say “hi” back, but it would only do it because it was programmed to do it, not because it senses that a person is saying “hi” and thinks of it as a friendly greeting. If it is possible for a being to be programmed like that, it could do such things, but determining whether or not actions like this are forms of behavior still depends on how society defines behavior. When a person behaves a certain way, he/she provides a reaction for a person. When a robot says “hi” to a person who just said “hi”, it is reacting to that person, so this could be viewed as a behavior, but the dictionary definition is a bit ambiguous, because it doesn’t specify whether the way one acts has to be conscious (like with a normal human being) or unconscious (like with a robot), so linguists and lexicographers need to establish that parameter to define behavior. If linguists and lexicographers were to say that behavior, by definition, does not have to be conscious, then a p-zombie could be conceivable.

The insatiable ambiguity of sentimental resonance with which we interpret music purely on the basis of emotions is evident through the impotency speech possesses in defining them.

Fundamentalism denies legitimacy to interpretation. Instead of interpreting, a reader is engaged at most only in rephrasing the meaning of the written document, a meaning which is really transparent, simple, and complete – but which the detritus of history and linguistic change have temporarily concealed. Fundamentalist translations are considered to be merely restatements of an inerrant truth that is clear and non-ambiguous – they are not adaptations or interpretive readings. Fundamentalism ideally should produce no gloss or commentary. Thus the role of scholarship is solely to identify the accumulations of interpretive debris and to polish up the original, simple meaning. It is reasonable, from a fundamentalist attitude, that God must be the direct author of the Bible. This belief holds true as well among secular fundamentalists writing about literature, who postulate a God-like author who plans, directs, and controls the meaning of his work.

Every linguist (a term which is ambiguous between theorist of language and polyglot) has suffered the question “So how many languages do you speak?” It is often hard to convince people that the answer doesn’t really matter. Having a little knowledge of half a dozen languages is less useful than knowing one language with native proficiency.

Consciousness is a misnomer for a subcategory of qualitative awareness; therefore, one is at risk of being redundant when expressing it instead of using the word 'Subconsciousness' that should suffice in referring to that state of mind. The ambiguity that arises in entangling these definitions with one another explains the mass confusion in attributing the right meaning to each term separately; that is why etymologically speaking the word 'Consciousness' stems from conscire (meaning, 'Conscience') which refers to the innermost thoughts and intentions. With the word forming of 'Con' in it, the meaning is rendered to: mutual awareness. It was therefore linguistically erratic for the English tongue to eventually attribute to the word 'Conscience' an ethical platform to distinguish it from the word 'Consciousness'; both words are still -semantically- the same! Trying to understand a cosmic phenomenon by projecting it onto man's tongue over and over again is certainly futile and always ends up in disintegrating the language being exposed to it.

If words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium.

The greeting of risk, the willingness to discover through (certain classes of non-lethal) trial and error, the subordination of success to exploration and discovery, and the insistence of finding the edge of patterns; where they fail, all of these seem to contain echoes of field work in Special Forces and related intelligence organizations, the passion for languages, the recognition that much of what passes for effective communication can be achieved with very little actual understanding, the primacy of non-verbal communication in influencing face-to-face communications, a tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness, and a fascination with the unknown.

Two of the biggest problems with language is that you can say what you do not mean to say, and that you can say what you do not mean.