Last Dingling posting & list policies

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear Uralists,

this is the last text on this subject, from this author, that I will post on
the URA-LIST. I still fail to see the relevance or sense of what follows
(and what may, in the best case, be regarded as an excentric kind of
poetry); at the same time, a parallel of the following contribution has
created confusion and protests on the Endangered-languages-list.

Questions of sense or coherence aside, this will be the last time a lengthy
multi-part text like this will be forwarded to URA-LIST. Future contributors
of this kind are requested to send a link to a WWW page or an address where
those interested in commenting the text can find it.

My apologies to all URA-LIST members - I promise to read future
contributions more carefully!

Best

Johanna
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Universitätscampus, Spitalg. 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
tel. +43 1 4277 43009 | fax +43 1 4277 9430
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/


From: Mike Lawrence <hoosiersky2002 at yahoo.com>

'Attempts at harmonizing the findings of pre-historic
archaeology with linguistic data are fraught with
danger....When applied to prehistoric times,
linguistic labels have no meaning.'
[Sinor, The Uralic Languages]

Relating to the p'i disc, the triplicitous nature of
consciousness, I think, is best explained in Bergson's
Duration and Simultaneity, expounded on by Gilles
Deleuze in his Bergsonism. Part IV.2 'Kamassian
Cuttlefish' paves the way for analysis of
proto-Uralic/Udhihe word for fire.

''When we are sitting on the bank of a river, the
flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the
flight of a bird, the uninterrupted murmur of our deep
life, are for us three different things or a single
one, at will.'

Here Bergson endows attention with the power of
'apportioning without dividing' 'of being one and
several,' but more profoundly, he endows duration with
the power to encompass itself. The flowing of the
water, the flight of the bird, the murmur of my life
form three fluxes; but only because my duration is one
of them, and also the element that contains the two
others. Why not make do with two fluxes, my duration
and the flight of the bird, for example? Because the
two fluxes could never be said to coexist or be
simultaneous if they were not contained in a third
one. The flight of the bird and my own duration are
only simultaneous insofar as my own duration divides
in two and is reflected in another that contains the
flight of the bird: there is, therefore, a fundamental
triplicity of fluxes.

....We call simultaneous, then two external fluxes
that occupy the same duration because they hold each
other in the duration of a third, our own....Einstein
has merely invented a new way of spatializing
time....But this achievement is that of a symbol for
expressing composites, not that of something
experienced that is capable, as Proust would say, of
expressing 'a little time in its pure state': Being,
or Time, is a [multiplicity)italics)]. But it is not
'multiple,' it is One, in conformity with its type of
multiplicity.'
[Deleuze, Bergsonism, p.85]


Glide down to these lakes
With their muddy shores
And gather golden beetles!

Taarig, salten
Taagle saltim humin koln
Taarig, salten
[Crane Song, Mansi]

First calls of the migrant geese,
Cicadas have gone.
South of the hundred-foot tower,
Water confounds with sky.
Azure-blue woman, silk-white fairy,
Endure the cold together.
One in the frost, one in the moon,
Rivals in allure.
[Li Shang-yin, Frost Moon, T'ang Dynasty]

'Third, by manipulating the number of white squares on
a black background, we found that as few as four white
squares among 316 black squares(or 1.25%) produced
disruption patterning, yet increasing the number of
white squares to 20, 40, or 80, did not increase the
frequency of appearance of the cuttlefish 'white
square,' but only the clarity of expression.
[Cuttlefish Camouflage, J. Experimental Biology, June
2002:204]

Abondolo's marvelous passage:

'This sequence seems to be a cover for the word taarb*
'shaman.' If we try to force taarb* into the frame,
the final -r is assigned to the following
pseudo-possessive suffix, but for the formal
parallelism to remain, the final -r of the first half
must be re-assigned, as well:

ta-        b*-
     rcaa-     rdza

Although the formal parallelism is maintained, the
semantic transparency is blurred once again, since
this time the final -r of tar has slipped away in
spite of the fact that it belongs to the etymological
material of the word. The result is an accoustic
hide-and-seek similar to certain kinds of optical
illusion based on the complimentarity of
black-and-white patterns which one can only identify
one at a time: when you focus on one, the other is
blurred, and vice-versa.

....The first parallelism tells a story while
describing its topic; the second tries to utter and,
at the same time, to conceal a word. Yet both do the
same: poetry, and neither speaks directly. In addition
to manipulation at the syntactic level, Kamassian
poetic speech also relies on transformations at the
level of morphology(break-up of the word by
expletives, splitting words into constituent
morphemes, and intertwining them within etymological
phonic material, etc.) just as do the northern
Samoyedic traditions, Nenets and Nagansan.'
[Abondolo, The Uralic Languages, p.588]

We see here the relevance to Carl Jung's passages on
the quicunx and consciousness as it comes into being,
for the number four is also paramount in Jung's
system. It is at this point of 'fourness' that the
unconscious becomes conscious.

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