I've always been a crusader of sorts for Australian pronunciation and spelling.
For no good reason, mind you. Sure, back in primary school there was always the "right" and "wrong" way to spell. But primary school simplifies a lot of things into black and white. It would be more than difficult to discuss this sort of thing with hyperactive nine-year-olds, most of which had one too many cups of red cordial at recess. So we dumb it down. As my Chemistry teacher of the last two years puts it, we lie. In much the same way, we tell eighth-graders that electrons orbit the nucleus in nice, neat, fixed paths called "shells", because there's no chance in hell all of them will absorb any discussion of electron clouds, orbitals, and the fact that an electron is both a particle and a wave. Heck, chances are that that, my present understanding of electrons, is itself a lie. Or so my very brief discussions of quantum physics with Jordan suggest.
But I digress. Primary school passed, leaving behind a set of rigid spelling and grammar laws in my head, along with the idea that anything else is just wrong. Incorrect. Falsch. Another lie. And then year eleven came, and with it Theory of Knowledge. (Most. Relevant. Subject. EVER.)
The ToK syllabus divides the continuum of knowledge into what it calls "ways of knowledge": sensory perception, language, reason and emotion. (Bear with me, now.) It also acknowledges that these divisions are artificial, much like the boundaries between the colours of the rainbow. These are not discrete things. There is no place where you can draw a line and say that everything before it is red, and that there is no red beyond that boundary. It's a spectrum. ROYGBIV? A useful teaching tool. A good way to simplify things for those who can't grasp the next level. But, in essence, a lie. The only reason indigo is there is so that there would be seven colours, because seven is a cool number. (Essentially.) And what about the cyan that you can clearly see in rainbows? Etcetera ad infinitum. In much the same way, treating these ways of knowing as four discrete processes that interact heavily with each other, instead of four regions of a continuum, but essentially one thing, is useful for teaching.
And there I go, digressing again. My point is, when we studied language as a way of knowing, it was stressed that there is no "correct" way to spell. There is a way to spell which is deemed "correct" by particular portions of society (which often disagree with each other), but when it comes to absolute, objective correctness? No. Try to claim otherwise and you'll hear cries of You Fail Linguistics Forever. And in a few hundred years, that spelling? It'll probably be wrong. Just because "arse" was spelled "erys" back in Chaucer's day (sorry, first example I could think of. Go the Miller's Tale) doesn't mean you can use the latter now; people will just stare and ask you to explain. Not good communication. (Another digression: that isn't to say that uniformity of language conventions is a bad thing. Just think of the textbook eraser-rubber-condom confusion between Australians and Americans. Uniformity would reduce this type of confusion to virtually nil.)
So there is no "right" or wrong way of spelling. Or pronunciation, in much the same vein. Why crusade for the Aussie ways to do so? Because I want to. (Take THAT, reason.) Cultural sovereignty and all that. And that's all there is to it. So I diligently ensure that I use "colour", not "color"; favour "-ise" over "-ize", "-re" over "-er", and so on. Not that I bring that up if a friend asks me to proofread something. (Pedantry should be saved for the important things, like making sure your browser window isn't a pixel too tall. Oh yeah, also grammar.) And, as is inevitable with this sort of thing, I'm a hypocrite. I love the contraction "ain't". I think "y'all" is a brilliant solution to a stupid ambiguity. One thing I've never shifted on, though, is the pronunciation of the letter "Z". "Zed". Not "zee", you degenerate. "ZED".
Which is why today, when I was detailing the evidence for the existence of main electron energy levels and sub-levels, I was more than a tad surprised to hear my mind's voice use "zee". (Yes, that's the reason I'm writing this blog post. I've never denied that I'm a nerd.) So (naturally) I tried to figure out the rules I was subconsciously following.
And it turns out that they're ridiculously convoluted. Awesome. Spelling words out? Zed. Alphabet song? Zed. "Z" used as a symbol for atomic number? Zee. "Z-axis"? "Z-score"? "Z" as a pronumeral? Zed. Huh.
My subconscious evidently hates me.
Self Esteem.
7 years ago
8 comments:
NUU I LEARNT SOMETHING
NUUU
I BLAME YOU
AHHH
man, that sounds as confusing as psychology and philosophy. WHY MUST THIS WORLD BE OF SHADES AND NOT BLACK AND WHITE?!
- Pris
PS: it's all all lie in the end anyways. awesome that we can learn, then delete that past knowledge and continue to learn again atop of that wrong knowledge and loop.
PSS: CAPTCHA SAYS "nosychi"
I got "fordo" over on Louise's blog yesterday.
B
i beg to differ on the continum of knowlage thing,
ill start with explaing how it works in physics and draw the connection to TOK in a sec,
ok
takeing the rainbow example, while there is a clear misconception of the 7 coloured bands idea, it is also a falacy that there is an infinte number of colours, cos while there is a minute differance between each shade, and each band of light taking on a minutely differant hue that is almost unditectable, there is a quantised jump between each colour, taking the movement red to orange, while at first it may be considered that there is infinte possibilities for differant colours between them in ever smaller ratios, this becomes physicly impossible due to quantas of light (the smallest possible increase or decrease in physics ever, for the case of this point lets just accept this as being true). Taking this idea of quantas, it then allows a diffinitive classification of red and orange as in the most simplistic form, u could (all theoretically) get every single shade of red/orange between absolute red and absolute orange and then draw a line clearly in half and then define one side as red and the other as orange, as would follow conventional logic
now to link it all together
this still has nothing to do with TOK and the 4 continuity thing yet, but, while knowlage and all that theoretical crap that we get to ponder as humans may seem all related and as indivisible as the rainbow's colours to start with there must be a similar 'quanta of knowlage' so to speak that seperates everything. oviously as this is now delving into human understanding of knowlage and not something (reletively) solid such as light or anything in physics, it would be much harder to define or understand, but at the most basic level it can be conceptulised to be the smallest differances in every piece of knowlage when all knowlage is lined up. Working from this completely unatainable baseline, knowlage can comparatively then be split into each section of a givin therory of knowlage, weather it be the 4 mentioned above or just an arbetary method of classification. regardless of how u decide to classify it, in theory knowlage like basicly everything can b cut up and classified, assuming u know all knowlage, which is oviously the current limitation of any classification of knowlage
but yea
on a simpiler note
the whole misinterpritation of language idea stems from the fact that people are using abstract sounds and sylables to discrescribe physical things, in theory the ultimate form of communication would b in pictures or movies as they would be the most accurate representation of any given thing, but thats a whole differant theroy which i cbb to get into
but there u go
one more thing
the electron thing is still up in the air cos the current model of the electron that is accepted is flawed in the fact it only explains the electron orbit of hydrogen and no other elements and apears to disobay all kinds of physics principles just because they decided to say the words, 'this is quantum physics' which is like the get out of jail free card for breaking the laws of physics
-.-
anyway
some food for thought
=P
Hmm, I never considered quanta. (Heck, I only learned what a quantum is about an hour after I wrote the post. Missed the first lesson on analytical chem.) Thanks for the introduction to the idea. However, I think you're kind of missing my point.
(Incidentally, we're running into your problem with "focus"/"foci" again. Singular is "quantum", plural is "quanta". Not that you care.)
(Also hey, the lame title of the new James Bond movie actually makes sense now. Still lame, though.)
I think it would be fallacious to draw definitive lines in the rainbow and assign every hue to a colour. It's a gradient.
We'd be hard-pressed to decide what "absolute orange", "absolute yellow" and the like are, because we'd run into the problem that "pure" light (sorry, I don't know the scientific term) falls into only three hues in the visible spectrum. In order to mark something as, say, "absolute violet", we would need to make a purely subjective decision as to how many hues exist between blue and red. And it would be an artificial division. One that has no grounding other than "we wanted to divide this up for the sake of classification".
Which is kind of what I was trying to get at. The colour that is "absolute red"-plus-one-quantum-in-orange's-direction is just that. I don't think we can legitimately consider it to fall just under red, because it contains orange. (So to speak.)
The analogy was made to indicate that in much the same way, many distinctions we make are similarly artificial. Hence the overlap in so many fields. To use emotion, you need to reason (even if the syllogism is flawed, you're using it). You need sense perception; you need language. And thus there is no boundary in this manner. Heck, this is where the rainbow analogy starts to fall apart. A spectrum is a line; this is more entangled strings. (Were you there for the Bible study where Martin made the [facetious] graph comparing the deities of world religions and put the Scientology god on top because of the money it gets? Remember Lachlan suggested entangled strings to represent the Trinity?) They're each inextricably part of the other, and divisions would be artificial and inaccurate.
And now that I think about it, that has nothing to do with the purpose of the blog post. Woo. I'd just like to add that the four ways of knowing ToK proposes are by no means perfect, or even correct. It's the best (albeit the only) suggestion I've heard, so I'm sticking with it until I hear a better one is all. (Hooray for the scientific method!) The description of emotion it uses just feels flawed.
But anyway.
The other problem with language is that it evolves. And if you take a language and set it in two areas which communicate more easily with themselves than each other, it's going to evolve differently.
I'm not sure that a visual language (say, for example, if you ignore practical sensibilities, carrying around a screen which shows what you want it to) would be best, though. Yeah, we're using abstract sounds to describe physical things. We're also using abstract sounds to describe abstract things.
And I forgot about the fact that we've only solved Hydrogen so far, thanks.
Also lol quantum physics.
B
GOODLUCK WITH UR IB!!!
oh goodness me barney.
you shud loosen up, it's just spelling? :)
and sorry, was it the jackie chan thing? his quite close to my heart u see, SORRYYY
SPESOL!
GOODLUCK AGAIN WITH UR IB! ACEACEACE! YAY!!! why isn't it on the same time as hsc?
hmmm i almost agree, cept that on reflection if u continued the theory of the quantised colour/knowlage, every differant quanta of light would have a differant name, thus in theory there would only be one absolute red, the next one along would be rod or something, some arbetary name for pure red+1 quanta of orange, and so on, so just like in knowlage while everything may involve parts of everything, still in theory there could be a point taht someone acts with pure emotion (however unlikely that is) thus classifies as pure emotion, then emotion+wateva else comes next is a totally differant thing, tho in this case ud have even more names as then u can have combos involving all 4 thus creating more arbetory names to classify each one seperately, thus why there are broard classifications to simplify things from this,
so yea
still i think pure knowlage can be disected in quantas, just not by us
=P
anyway
gl with exams
they suck -.- i am so over them
anyway
when do u start???
Problem with that is that we already use "orange" to describe the range of colours, so which one gets picked as "absolute orange" would still be arbitrary. (I'm avoiding following your use of red as an example, given that it is a primary colour. Tint. Thing.)
But yeah. Last week, you can DOOO IITT! I start on Tuesday with German.
B
...and so the "collapse all comments and reply to the last because the walls of text are too big" method fails.
@Louise: Thanks! I don't know if you're done yet, so all the best for what's left, if stuff is left.
And nah, I just take pretty much everything too seriously. Totally not a character fault. In this case, I'm a total hypocrite, though, given my constant mangling of both spekking and gramer for comedic purposes. :D
B
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