Alice writes, “This is an Aztec speech glyph that dates back before the conquest. I’m a linguist, and I believe this glyph embodies the impossible elegance of spoken language as well as the intrinsically artificial and cumbersome nature of written language.”
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"Celebrated curiosity monger"
Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist.
He is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. His website is carlzimmer.com and his address is blog at carlzimmer dot com .
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December 5th, 2008 at 10:25 am
“the impossible elegance of spoken language as well as the intrinsically artificial and cumbersome nature of written language.””
Hmmm … I’m going to have to think about this one. My first reaction was that it was about as silly a statement as I’d seen in quite a while, but it’s worth considering.
December 5th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Wow! That’s totally Awesome! Couldn’t have said it better. Profound
December 21st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Yeah, it’s a little pretentious-sounding, but I figured I could either say that or go into a paragraphs-long rant about why I love language, so I figured this was best for now. I think anybody who’s studied some linguistics will kind of get what I’m going for, but if you’re curious:
impossible elegance: refers to how, the more I study language, I find an incredible amount of detail and complication that is somehow resolved in an immediately recognizable system of communication. Crap, that sounded pretentious, too. Like, the stuff that goes on in your brain for you to be able to say, “Where did she go?” is pretty wild. There, that’s better, right?
intrinsically artificial and cumbersome nature of written language: written language IS an artificial representation of a mental process, and the whole process is of course more cumbersome than speaking. So I could get into it here, but I sort of have a love-hate relationship with writing. The glyph is on my right arm (the arm I write with) to signify that.
Hopefully that will give you a better idea of where I’m coming from (I mean, if you’re still interested at this point) and show that I’m actually not a pretentious jerk. I just write like I am.
-Alice