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Philologos
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15 May 2011, 10:38 pm

Or if you feel more traditional, parables. The Semitic base [yes, those are Greek morphemes, but the use of parable is stolen directly from Western Semitic usage] covers parable, proverb, example.

Me - I operate on analogies more than anything else.

God in JudaeoChristian scriptural imagery:

the father analogy

the farmer analogy

the proprietor analogy

[the list is not intended to be exhaustive, though each collapses several specific comparisons]

Would you say these are essentially one, or distinct? There are certainly shared features: for example, the father training and chastising the child, the farmer tending and trimming the vine. Yet in human culture one's attitude toward one's staff and one's children and one's crops varies,



leejosepho
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15 May 2011, 11:25 pm

Philologos wrote:
the father analogy

the farmer analogy

the proprietor analogy

[the list is not intended to be exhaustive, though each collapses several specific comparisons]

Would you say these are essentially one, or distinct?

Certainly none is exclusive of another, and any could be used to show a given set of principles ... and the better we can understand that, the closer we can come to "all things to all people" ...

... and as a linguist with analogous thinking, you could likely say this far better than me:

There really is only one set of principles, and the "skins" we use to convey that set do not ever change the heart of any objective conveyance or subject matter.


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Philologos
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15 May 2011, 11:34 pm

weell, I could say it with more professional sounding terminology

"The three tropes in essence present us with in essence the same underlying relationship, as seen from three somewhat nuanced viewpoints. As Gerber points out in his June 2009 paper in AASWfT, ...


That is not necessarily better.

Our dealings with one another are complex, even before Dios comes into the picture, and our language is not much better at multidimensional imagery than the blind men with the elephant.

Jersus particularly tends to use series of parables, some clearly variations on the same theme, other apparently different.



leejosepho
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16 May 2011, 7:46 am

Philologos wrote:
Our dealings with one another are complex, even before Dios comes into the picture, and our language is not much better at multidimensional imagery than the blind men with the elephant.

I think the spoken word is far from being the best mean of communication, but we are stuck with it.

However, at least Hebrew (as far as I know), is more like "speaking in pictures".


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Philologos
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16 May 2011, 8:39 am

Well, Biblical Hebrew still has not made it to being a written language.

You have illiterate Oral Languages, Oral Languages with a writing system, Written Languages with speakers, and Written Languages without speakers. My classification, I doubt you will find it in the books.

The first Western Written Languages - adapted for written communication rather than optimized for speech - start showing up in Europe somewhere in the Middle Ages. I am inclined to think it resulted from the increase of literacy and the switch from NeoLatin to Early Romance with Latin retained in writing in the church and documents.



jrjones9933
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16 May 2011, 8:46 am

Sameness or difference depends on perspective. I personally prefer the up close perspective, where every word has a different meaning or implication. I try to avoid use that perspective to analyze the speech of someone who prefers it differently.



Philologos
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16 May 2011, 11:30 am

jrjones9933 wrote:
Sameness or difference depends on perspective. I personally prefer the up close perspective, where every word has a different meaning or implication. I try to avoid use that perspective to analyze the speech of someone who prefers it differently.


Ah! I have tended not to say it too loudly, but I have been heard to mutter in the direction of the linguistic and lay communities that there is no such thing as a synonym. No matter how silar the referent is, there is always a difference in usage; self evidently, or there would not be two words. Which differences are NOT random though the pattern may be too complex for me to analyze.

Language in practice often works toward a greater specificity and communicative success by presenting near-synonyms [you can say synonyms for short as long as you remember that is only an approximation] to give a kind of binocular vision [trinocular and up] - precision through triangulation or parallax, as it were.

There is a good possibility that is what is happening here, narrowing down the relationship specified by multiplying viewpoints.



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16 May 2011, 11:50 am

I feel like a happy puppy to have had that exchange of ideas!



NeantHumain
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16 May 2011, 12:07 pm

As an atheist, the analogies, parables, metaphors, and imagery you mention aren't all completely familiar to me, but I was raised Catholic and have some familiarity.

  • God is like a father; he begot Jesus as his son.
  • God is like a farmer; he sows the seeds of creation.
  • God is like a proprietor; he [this one is pretty unfamiliar to me].

From these analogies, we can extract a few more general patterns: God-as-agent performs some act on an object; God-as-that-which-exists-before; God-as-superior in a power dynamic.

In general, I see words as occupying semantic spaces of meaning, where some fuzzy, synonymous overlap can occur. You can think of it like electron orbitals in quantum mechanics: The probability that the word resonates with the semantic space becomes less with increased distance, and some orbitals take up overlapping space. This semantic terrain is most intuitive for native speakers, but sometimes people who've adopted a language will try to make one-to-one translations between their language's semantic terrain for a set of words and the new language's semantic terrain and get it wrong.



Philologos
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16 May 2011, 1:14 pm

If you wanted I could supply some example images - one of the good proprietor ones is where the boss comes back from a trip and finds the farm a mess and the crew holding an orgy in the kitchen [for some reasonthis bothers him].

Mords are necessarily fuzzy - you could not squeeze into a human head a system with a duistibct label for each individual item and relationship and quality and action.

The problem for the speaker and audience is always to deduce from what A chooses to say what he is trying to mean and relate that to reality.

People who have NOT learned more than one language nearly always assume it is just pig Latin - English or French or Zapotec with funny words.



leejosepho
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16 May 2011, 2:19 pm

NeantHumain wrote:
[*] God is like a proprietor; he [this one is pretty unfamiliar to me].


Quote:
Psalm 50:10
"For every beast of the forest is mine,
and the cattle upon a thousand hills."


He Owns the Cattle (on a thousand hills)
Words and Music by John W. Peterson

He owns the cattle on a thousand hills,
The wealth in every mine;
He owns the rivers and the rocks and rills,
The sun and stars that shine.
Wonderful riches, more than tongue can tell -
He is my Father so they're mine as well;
He owns the cattle on a thousand hills -
I know that He will care for me.


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cdfox7
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16 May 2011, 7:13 pm

Philologos wrote:
If you wanted I could supply some example images - one of the good proprietor ones is where the boss comes back from a trip and finds the farm a mess and the crew holding an orgy in the kitchen [for some reasonthis bothers him].

Mords are necessarily fuzzy - you could not squeeze into a human head a system with a duistibct label for each individual item and relationship and quality and action.

The problem for the speaker and audience is always to deduce from what A chooses to say what he is trying to mean and relate that to reality.

People who have NOT learned more than one language nearly always assume it is just pig Latin - English or French or Zapotec with funny words.


QFT Linguistically we agree on that my good sir, even tho your an academic linguistic and am psychotherapeutic linguistic we may not see eye to eye about Chomsky but who cares anyway :wink:



Philologos
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16 May 2011, 7:36 pm

Chomsky - even if you had seen everything I have and I everything yiu have, we might diusagree. So what? Each is responsible for his own decision. Even if you buy my conclusions, the proverb says he who follows advice is alone responsible for the outcome.

So - psychotherapeutic linguistics -

What is that when it is at home? Clearly not applied phonetics, which I know about. If it was around in my day, I never heard about it,



naturalplastic
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16 May 2011, 7:47 pm

Philologos wrote:
Or if you feel more traditional, parables. The Semitic base [yes, those are Greek morphemes, but the use of parable is stolen directly from Western Semitic usage] covers parable, proverb, example.

Me - I operate on analogies more than anything else.

God in JudaeoChristian scriptural imagery:

the father analogy

the farmer analogy

the proprietor analogy

[the list is not intended to be exhaustive, though each collapses several specific comparisons]

Would you say these are essentially one, or distinct? There are certainly shared features: for example, the father training and chastising the child, the farmer tending and trimming the vine. Yet in human culture one's attitude toward one's staff and one's children and one's crops varies,


I was going to say that this seems a bit inane even for an academic.
All those "analogies" are the same, and all of them are a little bit different.
So what? Whats to worry about?
Also- I wouldnt call them "analogies". I would call them "metaphors",

But then it did get me to thinkiing.
Look at your list.
Notice something?
Whats missing?

The first duty of any diety would be what?
To create life. And then to nuture it.
In short: to be a mother.
Where is that on your list?

Then it occured to me: the first dieties invented by mankind in the stone age were fertility goddesses.
From the Paleolithic cave days, through the Neolitic, god was a woman. A nurturer.
None of your biblical metaphors is feminine.

With the rise of civilization in the bronze age human society began to evolve hierarchies of male authority figures so male gods as well goddess appeared, and gradually male dieties became more important.

Finnally in the Iron age- when the Hebrews decided to dispense with a pantheon of gods and to just go with one diety- it was a male diety: Yahweh.

So God became a divorced Dad.
Like all divorced dads he had to be both a mother and father to his children. Sometimes he is the stern patriarch of the clan, sometimes hes our reassuring Mom.
But how do you convey the idea of male mom? The best the writers of the OT could do was use the analogy (or metaphor) of a farmer (or a shepard in the NT). A person who takes care of living things (crops and livesock) for market. Its not quite the same as a mother nurturing human children but its as good a metaphor as you can get when your people need nurturing from a diety that is only allowed to have a male face.

Judiaism, Islam, and Protestantism have all inherited this divorced dad diety. However, starting in the Middle Ages, the Earth goddess quietly crept back into Roman Catholicism in the form of the Virgin Mary. So in some parts of the western world - god still always has a male face- but atleast god himself has a mom you can run to.

So there is a lesson to be learned from your list of "analogies". The lesson is that God is a divorced dad just trying to do the best he can without a wife!



cdfox7
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16 May 2011, 8:28 pm

Philologos wrote:
Chomsky - even if you had seen everything I have and I everything yiu have, we might diusagree. So what? Each is responsible for his own decision. Even if you buy my conclusions, the proverb says he who follows advice is alone responsible for the outcome.

So - psychotherapeutic linguistics -

What is that when it is at home? Clearly not applied phonetics, which I know about. If it was around in my day, I never heard about it,


In my training and experiences as a client of psychotherapy and hypnotherapy a good number of approaches use ideas from linguistics and philosophy. I have a background in Ericksonian hypnotherapy, brief therapy, gestalt therapy, person-centred therapy & neuro-linguistic programming useful tools for change.



Philologos
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16 May 2011, 10:43 pm

cdfox:

gestalt therapy and neurolinguistic programming I know something about, having read a bit and seen them in action. The others are blank to me, but the list - AS gestalt[!] gives me some perspective. Very far from ehat I do, but Ling and Anthro and Biology are like China - you can go a very long way from one place to another and still be on the map.