Submitted by Rifkin the Historian on
Image by Mariusz Matuszewski from http://Pixabay.com
Sumerian language would have immediately oriented on the subject of the statement, only including the object and verb after.
Ah, This I understand.
I’m starting to see how words can be considered magic…altering consciousness. Yes, words can indeed alter perception.
‘The house it’s owner entered’ would be how their language was structured.
Help you I can. Yes, sort of like Yoda speak. His phrasing is actually not a grammar error despite what so many people opine online.
What would our imaginations and thinking be like if the subject always came before the object, and object before the verb? The house its owner entered. How would that effect our behaviour?
The house was entered by its owner… Passive voice. Editors hate that.
It affects what your brain keys onto, the house vs owner. It makes you imagine the house first. I’ve heard writers say to write what you want the reader to think about first.
I never understood what was so wrong with passive voice. It’s one of those little rules that college editors cling to, because writing is so subjective they need something to correct you on.
And unfortunately it now makes Word grammar correct useless. It always brings up passive voice so I ignore it.
Many times that’s exactly what you mean to say.
Perhaps another example, ‘the dog it’s guardian walked’, or ‘the park the people visit’. How would that affect problem solving?
Focuses on objects rather than action.
I need to put the park in the right place vs control how people visit it.
I think part of the reason for our stress, and sometimes really strange or questionable judgment, is the emphasis on actions, tasks. It ignores the fact that everything that occurs is actually shaped, even completely dictated by the components involved in it. We often try to achieve a fix of something without actually considering the circumstance in which the problem occurred, or all the relevant components involved. This might be why as a culture it can be said we don’t know what we want.
Yea…people expect a one size fits/fixes all solution.
Like feng shui, the focus should be on arranging objects and a persons behaviour will flow from there as required.
We don’t even arrange the picture clearly in our heads. It’s all clouded up with adjectives and verbs. This makes no literal sense of course, but this phrase, ‘blue run’, probably feels like it makes sense.
Adjectives – it’s more important how we feel about it.
Or ‘green talk’. Does it seem to make sense?
Yes. Green day would.
Green day tripping. If we become engrossed in green day tripping, what sort of behaviour would that lead to? Or blue singing, red eating?
I can relate to blue singing.
We think actions can have nuances outside of the context of the objects involved. Is that at all logical? Generates ego, reinforces characterization outside of anything concrete, distracts us from perceptions of genuine identity. It can keep us looking anywhere but at the gateway, or if you prefer logic gate that is the acting self, rather than the action. It is why we assert so commonly these days the notion that you are what you do, or are what you do repeatedly. Does that concept make sense? That you are what you do repeatedly? If so why?
Well, what you do can change who you are…but are you a different person when you are sailing as opposed to cooking?
Now let’s look at this sentence, The car it’s owner started. Does this lead you to believe that the owner is a car starter?
No. A better example I have not seen.
It does say that the owner is able to start cars, but leaves everything else wide open. Maybe creating more space for creative thinking and imagination? More flexible problem solving?
This way I will be talking for the rest of the day.
It could help to use it as a meditation technique even if you don’t speak that way. Mantras are often structured in a way that seems strange to westerners.
So any questions about cuneiform or Sumerian language before I conclude? Was the subject adequately covered?
I’d like to create my own sort of hieroglyphics some day. It would be a worthwhile exercise I think. Perhaps a deep path of self discovery. It might be a big part of what motivates artists, trying to uncover their own language.
Sumerian cuneiform is one of the worlds oldest languages, written scripts that is. In it’s original form it had around 1000 characters and no linguistic content. So to start, and maybe to add some focus, what is your familiarity with Sumeria the culture and language so far?
Very little.
Well, Sumerians were in the ancient middle east…Persia? Were they the ones who wrote about the annunaki?
I just know a little about the artwork. My assistant just showed me something that looked like a Sumerian figure that she found at goodwill. It had chia in the beard. A Sumerian inspired sculpture? It was actually supposed to be a biker, but it looked Sumerian the way they did the beard.
Ah, they say our creative efforts actually all draw from channels that were established previously. Once something like a sculpture is done, then that will shape all further sculptures over time. You can see some evidence of this especially between sculptures of widely differing cultures over the age of empires, as the call it.
Yes, the Babylonians tended to texture beards with little spherical bumps.
Sumer would correspond to modern day Iraq, where as Persia I believe corresponds to Iran. The difference is in size and degree of centralization. Sumer would have been more central to the Mesopotamian area than Persia, and well at one point it controlled the region that would only later go by the name Persia anyway. Persia was the land of the Magi where we get modern day terms like mage and magic from today. In fact the practice of what is loosely called Arabic astrology would have had it’s roots in Sumerian culture and the surrounding peoples.
The astrology most people are familiar with is Arabic, and draws a great deal of its symbolism and lore from cultures such as Sumer like the goat being used to symbolize Aries. The term Aries was only tacked on later with the coming predominance of the Roman empire.
The original Sumerian script had nothing we would recognize as linguistic content today. Our own alphabet draws from the later Phoenician script rather than anything like the Sumerian. The original set of characters were entirely logographic. One character was one word or concept. Modern examples of logographic communication are things like the restroom symbols.
Ah, like hieroglyphics. Indeed, it would have things in common both with Chinese kanji and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Some people would say we’re returning to logographic communication today. It’s all symbols.
Many traffic signs. Easier for people of different languages to understand. Indeed, though they don’t recognize the naturalness or appropriateness of it.
It’s very useful in airports.
A distinctive characteristic of logographic systems is to transcend the limits of spoken language. The restroom symbols are understood world wide.
Numbers too. The numeric system is Arabic like our astrology. The original signs of Sumerian cuneiform were more obviously pictographic, only later moving to the more strictly logographic form you see in these stellae.
Mysterious script archaeologists find is often probably the equivalent of a sign for the toilet.
What this has to offer to the modern spiritual seeker, and student of magick, is an understanding of the relationship of imagery to conceptual formation.
Cuneiform is perhaps not unlike our doodling today, a sort of primitive form of conceptual abstraction. I use the term primitive not in a derogatory sense, but more in the sense that we use the term prim in Second Life, basic building blocks. To the modern mind these figures perhaps look strange, no?
I like the way cuneiform looks.
Modern neuroscience has discovered that even the contemporary brain is more sensitive to straight lines and divisions, as well as the angel of lines, than it is to contours and abstract shapes or even colours. What do you think of this?
I like ‘angel of lines’. Angle. Pardon the typos, though even those are sometimes meaningful.
Freud thought so.
Why a lot of people don’t understand art maybe.
Yes, straight lines are easier to grasp quickly. A straight line only requires two points of data…a curve requires many more. Straight lines are less data to absorb.
So yes, perhaps cuneiform was the most natural short hand style evolution of a strictly logographic lexicon.
Perspective in drawing or photography is all about lines and angles.
The structure of Sumerian language is perhaps relevant as many contemporary thinkers and researchers would say it contains the very essence of their psyche. We do know something of their language and its structure though there is no surviving descendant form of it today. Even Latin still has vestiges in modern languages spoken in various places in the world though no one speaks the original language, at least not conversationally. They had only one word for gender which would have translated roughly as human, though the same word also meant statue, and god.
Latin or Sumerian? Sumerian. Latin is more like our own language than Sumerian was. The later forms of cuneiform, which were even carried on by cultures after the Sumerian, like the Akkadians, would have read something like a rebus does today. Pictograms coupled with phonetic modifications.
What’s a rebus? It’s basically pictures with linguistic cues and modifications of the word.
Eye c u with pictures. Ah, excellent example.
Like charades. Yes, or like math in a way.
Eye sea ewe? Ah, another good example.
Used in games or game shows sometimes.
Just as their language had no future tense, it had no suffixes. It is sort of viewed as a puzzle in today’s world, but originally it would have been simple literacy. In Sumerian things can stand off, but nothing can be standoffish. Things can be green, but not greenish. You can be kind but not kindly. You can go, but you will never be going, not in Sumerian language and thinking. Almost as if they intuited the illusory nature of time, no?
I would love to see someone try to translate German or Hindi into a rebus. Hindi rebus would be way too complex for most people. In fact, their spiritual artwork is a form of rebus, codified in it’s symbolism and structure, and many just see it as unintelligible.
We would be more present moment focused if our language was restricted to it.
The past tense would perhaps just refer to memory or recorded data, rather than rumination. Most of their recorded works and mythology suggests a people very little disposed to any sort of rumination.
Ah, they did have the ability to distinguish between the human and the non-human, which is really a key element of self awareness, or so it’s commonly thought today. Much of this information is still debated today though.
Well, they may have had concepts but just not a word/sign for the concept. Indeed, I struggle to imagine a reason for them to adopt more strictly expressive features when their languages was perfectly functional.
To deceive. Yes. Deception does become easier in an expressive language. Their own methods for dealing with other peoples were rather more direct than how we handle things today.
https://dragonintuitive.com/space-for-creation/
https://dragonintuitive.com/transcend-limits-of-spoken-language/