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Thanks, Mikey, for starting up this (goofily named!) board for me, an upstart hairless newcomer!
I was looking at Stuart Davis's website recently and came across photos of his artwork, much of which used an Asian-looking language he had constructed (which he calls IS, I believe). I don't know any details about his language, but looking at his artwork reminded me of an experimental language I created about 20 years ago, when I was barely out of my teens. Before I describe what I was up to with that language experiment, I just would like to ask: What do you think of the idea of conscious language evolution? Is there good reason to seek to create new forms of language that may more closely reflect and embody certain holistic, process-oriented, or even nondual principles? I gave a talk on this subject after creating my language, and found that people were often interested in the idea, but had not given it much thought themselves.
I was inspired to try to create a new form of language primarily by the work of David Bohm. He believed that the structures and patterns of most modern languages tend to reinforce fragmentation and problematic, outdated modes of thought – particularly the reified subject-object distinctions and the heavy emphasis on static nouns rather than more open and flowing verbal forms. His own approach to this was to create something he called the rheomode, a more verbally centered way of using English. (Many of you may be familiar with this from his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order.)
At the time I read this book (about 20 or 21 years ago), I decided to take up David Bohm's suggestions – inspired also by my own beginning inquiries into meditation and nondual philosophy – and I set out to create an entirely process-oriented grammar which emphasized verbs and perspectives instead of nouns and pronouns. At first, I tried to do this with English, then decided to abandon the familiar and to just start from scratch. (I'll post an example of it below). I never finished the language, but I did get a good start on the grammar and I developed a 500-word vocabulary (with some principles in place for generating new words).
Now that I am familiar with Integral theory, Wilber-5, and Integral mathematics, the question I would ask now (that I couldn't ask then, when I was just reading Bohm and Krishnamurti), would be: How might we create a more Integral, perspective-driven, process-oriented language which is alive to and more actively embodies the dynamics of tetra-enactment.
I think the language I created many years ago is a start, at least in terms of working this out in practice. As I mentioned, I set out to create a verb-centered language, which entailed getting rid of nouns as a grammatical category, replacing them with particular forms of interactive verbal constructs and ambient locatives; and modifying verbs according to type of action or process (manifesting, becoming, creative/generative, causal, etc) and perspective (first-person, first-person shared, third-person objective, even third-person removed or “hearsay,” and so on) instead of using pronouns.
I'm not entirely satisfied with how I worked this out, and I think I would do a number of revisions if I ever went back to it, but I think it's interesting that this inquiry took me in the direction of perspectives as well as processes (which was the original aim). Looking at Wilber's latest work, it might be worthwhile to go back and see how his ideas about enactive perspectives might find expression in this grammar (or another one).
What do you think? Do you have any ideas how this might be done? Do you have any ideas for how we might look at language afresh and experiment with newer, more Integral forms?
I enjoyed thinking about this all those years ago. I ended up actually entering trances and experiencing altered states as I tried to envision a radically new way of languaging experience. (I think a good exercise is to expose ourselves to radically different languages, if we can find any, to help us more clearly see the presuppositions and “constructs” that drive our own ways of thinking and organizing the world. I think an experiment of the sort I've been describing also can do this.)
Just for fun, here is a sample of text from my language:
Om-alu yε deoš amas ymer undεš mal šai uĵerište.
Le amεš ðirymer de'ilustote, aiu ymer ilustütu, le unas yð-ilist'auluš. Le emas aĵ-ilus'emyš, aiu le an'yð-ilust-emüš erεgai. Om-erĵuš ram ĵui emb-ur'emuš virðai, aiu ram ĵas yð-elθuš yr-aumai. Le amεš čeu sumai, yð-daur'auluš, aiu yð- auluš ram de'uĵerošte ymer gelašte.
I can translate it and offer a description of how the grammar works in another post, if anyone is interested. I have also created a new script for this language, where letters are built out of different strokes which stand for different modes and points of articulation, based on basic phonetic terms. For instance, “B” is a voiced bilabial plosive stop. There are “strokes” for each element of this description. If you take away the stroke for “voiced,” then you end up with a “p.” If you add a stroke for aspiration, you end up with “bh.” If you take away the symbol for “stop” and replace that with aspiration, you end up with the Japanese “f”. Etc. I tried to make it both scientific and aesthetically attractive; if I can ever scan what I've written out, I'll give you some examples of what this looks like….
Anyway, that's all for now. I just wanted to introduce something I worked on years ago, and to open up a discussion on the possibilities of conscious language evolution.
Best wishes,
Balder
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/ˈgɒb
