glokaja / colorless ideas

[Tom Priestly]

In reply to  Robert Orr:

>Actually, I'm not sure that either 'colourless green ideas" or "' twas
>brillig .." are meaningless as such:
>
>1) It has been claimed that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" was an
>accurate description of the Rio Conference on the Enviroment in 1992.
>
>2) Lewis Carroll actually provides an elucidation (through, I think Humpty
>Dumpty) of "twas brillig .." accompanied by an illustration.  Has anyone
>attempted to illustrate "glokaja kuzdra .."? (I always think of a sinister,
>goatlike creature ...)


I tried to allow for the potential meaningfulness of both the above in my
formulation:

. . . . "Colorless green ideas" (which has meaningful morphemes in an
LESS-THAN-NORMALLY MEANINGFUL combination. . .
and
. . . "'Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,"
- where you have meaningless (or CLOSE-TO-MEANINGLESS) morphemes . . .
Knowing of Humpty Dumpty's explanation, which I accept 100%, having heard
it dozens of times as a child; and also once having read a beautiful poem
(by a Sister Someone, forgive my memory) which ends, logically, "and green
ideas furiously sleep."
Re:  both "kuzdra" and "toves"- their non-arbitrary, phonetic-symbolic
meanings are not negligible. "glokaja" is certainly sinister, and the whole
Shcherba's sentence has an abnormal abudance of "dark" sounds. In which
context, does 'shteko' have a [yo]?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
*  Tom Priestly, Professor
*  Slavic & East European Studies
*  Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
*  University of Alberta
*  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E6
---------------------------------------------------------------

*  day-time telephone:  780 - 492 - 5688
*  fax:               780 - 492 - 9106

*  email:           tom.priestly at ualberta.ca
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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