Vade Mecum fuer den Herrn Janda

[Paul J Hopper]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Rich Janda's allusion to Lessing in defense of synchronicity seems a
little ironic. Lessing, in his 1766 essay "Laokoon: Ueber die Grenzen
der Malerei und Poesie", drew a distinction between art forms that are
intrinsically temporal, like music and literature, and those that are
intrinsically spatial (plastic), like painting and sculpture. Lessing
builds the essay around the story of Laokoon and his sons wrestling with
the serpents that had been sent to punish them; he compares the
treatment of this incident in the 2nd century BC Greek sculpture and by
Virgil in Book II of the Aeneid. A temporal art form deals with the
unfolding of events in time, a plastic one with spatial relationships at
a single point in time. Perhaps the issue of synchronicity in language
has become confused because of the tendency in the discipline of
linguistics to equate "diachronic" with "historical", when the real
issue is the very one that Lessing focuses on: is language a
spatial/plastic phenomenon or a temporal one?
 
Paul
 
PS As Rich knows, my title is an allusion to another essay by Lessing!