Yep, exactly so on ideographic nature -- just couldn't think of the word at the time! But we're so used to seeing L+I+F+E as "life" and yet then also seeing L I V I N G as "living" and knowing that it's just -FE and +VING ... that we're used to taking apart and putting together. Maybe if we were used to single letters being a concept -- well, outside mathematical systems, which seems to be the only place we do, like with variables X, or N.
I think the huge emphasis on sound in the West is possibly thanks to the fact that our dominant paradigm for the past two thousand years has repeated on an almost weekly basis for generation after generation: "the word of god". There's the fact that god spoke the world into existence, or that his son is the 'logos', the word, and again is a spoken-into-real, not written.
And, too, that the major religion was text-based but in a language that most folks couldn't read or write, so memorization was the order of the centuries for most folk (including a lot of priests). There might be both distrust of the written word if you don't particularly understand it, and comfort in speaking the word out loud... reminds me, too, of the fact that in Buddhism a way to meditate is to copy out the heart sutra, over and over, or you could recite it over the prayer beads -- while in the west Catholics say prayers over the rosary but don't seem to have an equivalent of "write this out a hundred times" version to go along with it.
Absolutely about symbolism, but I think that's one that nearly every culture has -- and it's something we can process a lot faster than words (letter-words, that is, where we must assimilate the parts to determine the whole, compared to character-words which could be treated as images).
But images/symbols are still highly mutable, and can cross-reference to each other with amazing variation, a lot better than letter-words can. I mean, if I see a cross with equal-length arms, I say, it's a cross, and I say the same if I see a cross with longer vertical and slanted horizontal. But if I see a really funky graffiti-style font, it takes me a moment or more to parse each letter out of the unfamiliar style, and then to further parse the entire word.
(CP has a shirt with tribal lettering on it, and I actually misread it regularly for nearly two years before one day realizing that 'p' was in fact a 'g' or something like that.)
Which means when you know a symbol pretty well, you can pick up on it even when it's been flexed to incorporate something else. Like, hrm, a cross that straddles three interlocking circles -- if you're fluent in those two symbols, you 'get' on a nonverbal level the meaning within seconds. If you aren't fluent in them, you'd probably think it's a completely different and unrelated symbol, though.
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Date: 26 Nov 2008 10:59 pm (UTC)I think the huge emphasis on sound in the West is possibly thanks to the fact that our dominant paradigm for the past two thousand years has repeated on an almost weekly basis for generation after generation: "the word of god". There's the fact that god spoke the world into existence, or that his son is the 'logos', the word, and again is a spoken-into-real, not written.
And, too, that the major religion was text-based but in a language that most folks couldn't read or write, so memorization was the order of the centuries for most folk (including a lot of priests). There might be both distrust of the written word if you don't particularly understand it, and comfort in speaking the word out loud... reminds me, too, of the fact that in Buddhism a way to meditate is to copy out the heart sutra, over and over, or you could recite it over the prayer beads -- while in the west Catholics say prayers over the rosary but don't seem to have an equivalent of "write this out a hundred times" version to go along with it.
Absolutely about symbolism, but I think that's one that nearly every culture has -- and it's something we can process a lot faster than words (letter-words, that is, where we must assimilate the parts to determine the whole, compared to character-words which could be treated as images).
But images/symbols are still highly mutable, and can cross-reference to each other with amazing variation, a lot better than letter-words can. I mean, if I see a cross with equal-length arms, I say, it's a cross, and I say the same if I see a cross with longer vertical and slanted horizontal. But if I see a really funky graffiti-style font, it takes me a moment or more to parse each letter out of the unfamiliar style, and then to further parse the entire word.
(CP has a shirt with tribal lettering on it, and I actually misread it regularly for nearly two years before one day realizing that 'p' was in fact a 'g' or something like that.)
Which means when you know a symbol pretty well, you can pick up on it even when it's been flexed to incorporate something else. Like, hrm, a cross that straddles three interlocking circles -- if you're fluent in those two symbols, you 'get' on a nonverbal level the meaning within seconds. If you aren't fluent in them, you'd probably think it's a completely different and unrelated symbol, though.