General Introduction to the Metalanguage

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General Introduction to the Metalanguage 1 THE WITU GRAMMAR OF CULTURE ................................................................................................. 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................... 1 ZENITH ICONIC SCHEMA: THE FINAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF DEATH ........... 17 THE ALLOMORPHS MATE AND MATA OF THE WITU VERB ROOT ‘TO PLANT ’ ............................................. 17 THE ALLOMORPHS TAKUTA AND TAGUTA OF THE WITU TERM ‘CARDINAL 2’........................................... 18 The biological father and homeland of the second seed ..................................................................... 19 THE THIRD PAIR OF TERMS PADAGO AND PANAGO : A CERTAIN MAN , THE MAN OF LIGHT DOOMED TO DIE 21 THE FOURTH PAIR OF TERMS : THE TWO FORMS LATA AND LATE OF THE WITU VERB ROOT MEANING ‘TO RECOVER ONE ’S LIFE FORCE ’.................................................................................................................... 21 THE FIFTH PAIR OF TERMS : THE TWO FORMS OF THE ‘PERSONAL EXEMPLARY ’ CLITIC -LAWE AND -LOE ... 22 The Witu Grammar of Culture General Introduction This general introduction has been written for final year High School and university students and graduates from the Witu and other Papua New Guinea language groups. The Witu have two complementary language systems i) the common language system of communication of information, and ii) the metalanguage system of communication of information. The two systems are subsumed under a single unifying system referred to as The Akolali Centric Relationship Schema. This seems to give priority to the metalanguage system which is not intended since one can only discover and arrive at an understanding of this higher level overarching system through the common language and the culture in general. We will discover that the Witus’ common language and the culture in general are relationship-focused systems. Once this is discovered and it is realised that both are congruently governed by what the anthropologist Hallpike called Heraclitian principles, it is also discovered that an understanding of the relationship-focused organisation of both has remarkable explanatory powers. The analysis, in other words, becomes more than a description. It becomes an explanation of how the Witu conceive of the nature of their language, their society, the world in which they live and the protective sky-covered universe at large. We will discover that since the Witus’ focus of attention is on relationships, prototypically binary relationships between physical entities and binary relationships between events involving the entities, they have developed quite remarkable pre-scientific cognitive abilities We will discover that they know that space and time are not independent of each other but are simply different aspects of something more fundamental, which the Western world, since Einstein’s time, refers to as space-time. We will discover that while the Western world only learns about this in higher level 2 education, and most members acquire it for the most part as intellectual baggage, the Witu and other members of the Trans New Guinea Phylum of language groups, live by such intuitive knowledge. We will also discover that the Witu are cognitively aware of the fact that articulate messages have to be superimposed on vibrating carrier waves for their transmission. The Witu are not only cognitively aware of such things. They also encode this knowledge in their metalanguage. In other words, they show that they know that they know. They qualify in every respect to be recognised not just as members of the species homo sapiens ‘man who knows’ but more correctly as members of the species homo sapiens sapiens ‘man who knows that he knows’: they show to others through their metalanguage that they know that they know. The relationship of the common language to the metalanguage is more or less the equivalent of the relationship between i) the language of physics, the science that deals with the material world, and the material universe in general, and ii) the language of metaphysics that deals with the world of the spirit . This analogy may seem either trivial or presumptuous or both, since the language of physics, like the language of the hard sciences in general, is governed by rigorous principles. The analysis must, at least in theory, if not always in practice, be objective, not subjective. In other words, the analyst must be reacting objectively to the evidence, and not reading things into the evidence. The physicist, who represents the first stage in the acquisition of knowledge about the world and the universe at large, has a great advantage over the linguist and the anthropologist who cannot experiment with the evidence. He also has had the advantage of increasingly sophisticated tools for discovering that the principles governing the potentially open ended complexity of his field of interest are both extremely simple and extremely powerful. No one today doubts the existence of the atom, and the inner organisation of the atom with its proton, electron and neutron. Mendeleev’s simple essentially two-dimensional Periodic Table had both descriptive and predictive powers. An empty cell in the two-dimensional matrix pointed to the existence of an element yet to be discovered, and determined much of its most important properties before it was discovered. The principle governing the systematic relationship of the elements to each other within the matrix was very simple. It was the binary relationship between two systematic opposites: the positive proton and the negative electron. Both jointly had a systematic relationship with the third member of the triad, the neutron, whose behaviour, beginning with the neutron of deuterium, hydrogen 2, was critical in the first phase of the generation of all the other elements by a totally systematic 3 progression step by step through every cell in the Mendeleev Periodic Table. The biologist, who represents the second stage in the acquisition of knowledge, now restricted to the world of living things, has also, since the time of Mendel, had a great advantage over the linguist and the anthropologist who cannot experiment with the evidence. He also has had the advantage, since the time of Mendel, of increasingly sophisticated tools for discovering that the principles governing the potentially open ended complexity of his field of interest are both extremely simple and extremely powerful. No one, today, doubts the existence of the gene, and the alphabet of four nitrogenous bases that operate in pairs, cytosine and guanine as one pair, and thymine and adenine as the other pair. There remains the third stage in the acquisition of knowledge, now restricted to one species of the biological world, homo sapiens ‘man who knows ’. This field of knowledge is the domain of the linguist and the anthropologist and accompanying disciplines embraced by the cov7er term, the social sciences. It has had, until quite recently, only one discovery tool, language itself. It has, and will, undoubtedly remain the most sophisticated of all investigative tools. But here we are faced with the problem of the tool investigating itself. Until the tool itself is understood it remains paradoxically a weak implement. While hundreds of PhDs have sought to produce a definitive grammar of just one language (their mother tongue, English, for the majority of them), there is still no such grammar in existence. The dilemna is simple. First there has been the implicit supposition that language is so complex, that its potential open ended complexity, far in excess of the potential open ended complexity of the biological world of living creatures, cannot be governed by such elementary binary principles as those governing the potential open ended productiveness of the universal binary relationship between the proton and electron of the physical universe, and the universal binary relationship between the two pairs of nitrogenous bases of the gene of the biological world. Secondly, the linguist and the anthropologist have been handicapped by the nature of their subject matter. People cannot be experimented with and manipulated like the product of the atoms in the physical world and the product of the genes in the plant and animal world. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, language which has begotten culture, has been able to create culture by virtue of the break between the form and function of words. So long as the sound, however great the potential for variation of sound, was the message, there was no possibility for language to develop. Not even the highest of the primates, the 4 chimpanzee, could progressively build up a repertoire of words and syntax so that they could speak between themselves about each other and about their world at large. For them, the sound was fundamentally the message. How, then, could the linguist studying language, and using language as his tool, hope to see behind the random shape of the form and the random relationship between a form and its meaning or function to discover the equivalent of a binary system governing the communication of meaningful information. What tool, if any, might the linguist have at his command for such a task? Richard Pittman believed that he had found such an analytical and explanatory tool in Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a theory of language. He had been an ardent student of nature since childhood, and continued this interest to the end of his life. It found expression
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