The fundamental theorem of linguistics
John Bjarne Grover
This article takes the place (URL) of a former exposition of the theme under the same title which was written many months ago - it was not so well organized and I present a newer version here.
The author has written several books of poetry which provide empirical evidence for some essential theories which otherwise are hard to prove. Most notably, one of the books provide for a method of dating any text on basis of its semantic contents only - and this leads on to what the author defines as the fundamental theorem of linguistics - which reduces logical order and semantic assignment to one and the same thing.
The Endmorgan Quartet
In the years 1997-2008 I wrote 16 books of poetry which constitute a unit called 'The Endmorgan Quartet' = 'TEQ', a total of 1719 enumerated poems. After the first 10 poems each and every line is written in its order of appearance and all of them are dated. The poetic principle is that an inner poetic articulation takes place and can be written as one line when the subject steps from the limited subjective space of knowledge into a larger universal knowledge-space. The books are constituted by successive such lines written by inner poetic articulation in a 'dantean walk' up to the top of the mountain of transfiguration, as it can be called. It turned out that each of the 16 books constitute a definition of what can be conceived as fundamental poetic functions of language, and each such function has a local and a global format - the local applies internally to the book, the global applies to the function of the book relative to the full work of 16 books. I here mention book 14 in its global function: The distribution of a word, say, the word 'considerable', will be over a certain number of occurrences with a certain number of intervals in days. 'Considerable' occurs three times in the full work, here quoted with the lines on which it occurs:
02.11.97: considerable consequences to all the
01.02.99: Two hundred and seventyseven: / This would be a considerable trait for me to know
16.07.99: A considerable curb, in the concedation
which means two intervals 456 days + 165 days = 621 days. There are (depending on how one counts) 207 poems in book 14. Computing 456/621 * 207 = 152 then selects poem #152 - which is a three-liner (written on 8-9.12.03) wherein each of the three lines can be found to correspond to each of the three occurrences in their contexts:
One of the [greatest] British politicians
Fi-net is another dog or similar
referendum.
Zhym
= occurrence on 02.11.97
= occurrence on 01.02.99
= occurrence on 16.07.99
The first occurrence (02.11.97) corresponds to the first line, the title of the poem, while the second occurrence corresponds to the second, and the third to the third. The poem #152 in book 14 thereby defines the semantics to the word which has such a global distribution - also via the context of the occurrences. When there are many occurrences of a word, there will often be one significant interval by some metric - and the strong version of the theory tells that all intervals contribute to the semantics of the word.
Now the local function of book 14 constitutes a 'rainbow' with the semantics in the one half and the phonology in the other mirror point in the other half. The phonology to 'considerable' of poem #152 will then, tells this theory, be found in 208-152 = poem #56, which is the following 'nonsense' poem - with interpretations to the right:
|
Lo stesso capit Shalali, coo baboo: Bemann aeroplace forty-nine. Oh dear! Oh! Oh! Eliassen |
= k = a = (closing the vowel) = n = co-baboo nasalized = s = fricative, turbulence = i = drib = el |
Clearly the phonological definitions will be more intuitive and belong to a realm of human associations which are active and suggestive but less exact, but the principle seems to obtain somehow - and makes the linguistic theory which can be derived therefrom maximally strong and universal.
The 'rainbow' form of book 14 can be attested in other works - I mention Paul Celan's 'Fadensonnen' wherein my book 14 poem #152 ('One of the [greatest] British politicians') will be his 'Kleide die Worthöhlen aus'.
The theory on 'The Endmorgan Quartet' is that it outlines the 16 (or 32) fundamental linguistic functions - this 'semantic-phonological' being one of them.
The blue metre
Now after 'The Endmorgan Quartet' = 'TEQ' was completed in august 2008, I started drafting the next book - the 'blue metre' called 'POLAKK English Bloggi' = 'PEB' - which I drafted in the year 2008-2009 and wrote out in the year 2009-2010 in the form of 365 sonnets (that is, poems of 14 lines with sonnet rhyme structure in the end of the lines) plus a leapyer poem. The poetry was written totally without any ideas of what I subsequently discovered: It turned out (after the work was completed in the summer 2010) that the 366 poems interpret a cycle of 1000 years of historic time - in line with the theoretic basis for this which I had made in my study of the history of formal linguistics in the article "The history of linguistics and information technology" which I wrote in 1992-93. The sensational discovery is that the PEB interprets TEQ function 1 in the first line of each and every of the 365 sonnets, TEQ function 2 is found in line 2 etc. I here mention the principle of line 4 of PEB - as the interpretation of TEQ book 4 called 'Cardiff/Harding': This seems to be about state level government in the form that each line 4 gives the name of the governments (by the name of the head of government) in succession, and each new poem will give the name of the head of the next government in its line 4. The governments can be followed in lines of succession through many decades before they leap to another part of the work and continue there. If 'Gordon Brown' is in poem #227 for which the fourth line is 'of distant friction, joins the packet', one can follow the governments backwards one by one for several decades. 'Anthony [=Tony] Blair' would be #226 = fourth line 'interesting life is your domain'. 'John Major' would be #225 = 'It is quite good - it is a quality label' etc. 'David Cameron' = #228 = 'in 'Wechselstub''. 'Francois Hollande' is in #44 = 'to reinvigorate the life of youth', which is Brown #227 minus 183 - half of the cycle of 366 poems. 'Nicolas Sarkozy' = PEB #43 = 'her body is closer to mine'. Even for France one can follow the french presidents back to 'Charles de Gaulle' = #38 = 'points chopsticks in the air'. Most interesting is the phenomenon of a 90 degrees axis crossing this 'Channel' axis - which seems to be found in the axis Belgium-Spain crossing it:
PEB #44 line 4 = 'to reinvigorate the life of youth' = Francois Hollande
PEB #136 line 4 = 'it is a good time' = Yves Leterme
PEB #227 line 4 = 'of distant friction, joins the packet' = Gordon Brown
PEB #319 line 4 = 'and all that lived on in their brain' = Mariano Rajoy Brey
As a scandinavian correlate to this 'coordinate system', Denmark with 'Helle Thorning-Schmidt' is #177 = 'the suffering of the flesh' relative to Norway by 'Jens Stoltenberg' = #268 = 'and watch its dizzy roll' and Sweden's 'Fredrik Reinfeldt' = #85 = 'aboard a vessel of the celibate' (the series goes convincingly backwards - with Olof Palme semantically #80 = 'her hand on top of the head' and phonologially #76 = 'as one from a fair') and then one can recognize also Iceland's 'Geir Haarde' = #361 = 'is on the right' (backwards). If Syria's president 'Bashar al Assad' = #264 = 'terminates in grief' (an excellent concept for a president but should not be mistaken for the presidency), Israel's 'Benjamin Netanjahu' could be 264-183 = #81 = 'through the rest of the wall' (and indeed the israeli state chiefs follow line 4 backwards to Ben Gurion at #65 'stepwise to ground'). And then Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan comes on #172 = 'because it is the text'. (Saddam Hussein of Iraq could be #354 = 'and the following downpouring pelt' but I cannot evaluate the advanced arabic associations of that series). Could be such 'coordinate systems' on the map is a widespread phenomenon, and clearly much political theory can be made on basis of this. If 'Vladimir Putin' = #145 = 'tells you of Jesus', which allows for tracking russian leaders back at least to Andropov, one could conjecture 'Barack Hussein Obama' as #328 = 'calming McLorry to truth', which likewise would allow for tracking US leaders back to 'John Fitzgerald Kennedy' as #319 = 'and all that lived on in their brain' - same as the spanish PM years later. The Austria-Hungary axis is also very good: 'Werner Faymann' = #104 = 'behind the crises' and 'Victor Orban' = #288 = 'theatre: You're soft inside' - and the lines backwards in time are convincing - for Austria back to WWII. The PEB was completed in the summer 2010 and it seems that panic broke out rather quickly and british Labour elected new leader Ed Miliband in september 2010. The reportedly entire top polish leadership aircrashed at Smolensk only a few weeks after I had written the title to the book in the early spring.
A discussion of line 1 follows towards the end of the article.
But line 4 and 1 are only examples of what the PEB really is on larger scale - which is the possibility to date a text all and only on basis of its semantic contents, which is the surprising discovery. Take a complete prose text, divide it into 366 equal units and slide these back and forth (like a sliding ruler) untill you have found the optimal all-over match semantically relative to the 366 poems of the PEB (including wrapover from #366 to #1) - that gives a certain offset 'Y' of the first segment relative to PEB #1, and this gives (via the year 2009 of writing of PEB) the year 'X' of writing of the text by the formula (2009-X) * 0.366 = the offset 'Y' (rounded off upwards). One computes on millenia only. It can be shown that Acts of the Bible was written in the year AD 67-68 - unless it was in 1067-1068.
Clearly there will always be an 'optimal match' - the question is whether the time of writing which it suggests is right - and that is empirically verifiable. A puzzling phenomenon is the 'helicopter' of my PEB #49 which seems to correlate with the idea of people 'hanging in the air' if the match of the gliding ruler is optimal. My PEB #49 is this:
"A bulky barge, a ferry / glides in mystery out / the harbour basin, very / red, black, white and stout. // This the movement dodgic / that sympathize the fall. / I says: Here's the logic. / He's the marine call. // Hidden on the corner / there's a stainless ring: / Library Zhikorsky Mourner. // I write on poetic Mecca. / I will write something / for the bridges of Giudecca"
The optimal match for the Odyssey is to move the last 665 verses from the end of song 24 to the end of song 18 (which suggests that it took about 53 years to settle the form of the oral poetry into script), and with the offset at PEB #58 for Od.1:1-33, the poem #49 comes at song 22 verses 460-493.
Franz Grillparzer: 'Der arme Spielmann' - the work started in 1831 and was completed in 1846. It contains 15068 words which means 15068/366 = 41.17 words per poem. (2009-1846) * 0.366 = 59.66 hence it starts on sonnet #60 - which means that sonnet #49 (366+49-60) * 40.95355 = starts at word 14615: "die herausstehenden Kanten des Leichentuches wieder zurecht. Die Gärtnersfrau führte mich vor; da fingen aber unten die Posaunen an zu blasen, und zugleich erscholl die Stimme des Fleischers von der Strasse herauf: Barbara, es ist Zeit! Die Träger erschienen, ich zog mich zurück"
Nathaniel Hawthorne: 'The great stone face' was written ca. 1840 = onset at PEB #62. It contains 7590 words: 7590/366 = 20.74 words per poem with sonnet #49: "he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life"
James Joyce: 'Dubliners' is a collection of short stories - the story 'An encounter' was written ca. 1913 = it starts on PEB #36. It contains 3246 words = 8.87 words per poem, and then sonnet #49 correlates with "[Mrs.] Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house". The story "Araby" was also written ca. 1913 - it contains 2328 words = 6.36 words per poem and then sonnet #49 is "hung in all the rooms, and the".
Gustave Flaubert: 'Un coeur simple' was written in 1875, hence (2009-1875) * 0.366 = 49.044 = offset 50 - the parallel starts on PEB #50 and ends on PEB #49, which means that #49 is the famous parrot at the end of the story - Flaubert's 'Zhikorsky Mourner'. There are 11061 words in the short story and hence 30 words per sonnet, the last being these: "comme une fontaine s'épuise, comme un écho disparaît; et, quand elle exhala son dernier souffle, elle crut voir, dans les cieux entr'ouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, planant au-dessus de sa tête".
Could be Flaubert could be used for a dating of the Odyssey? But then I do not mean that one can skip the theory and empirical evidence in my work and conjecture the similarity directly from Flaubert to Homer for a dating of the epic - such a theory must credit my work as the source. (See the file István Örkény and devanagari on potentially related problems).
The corollary to this - if the empiricism is seen to supports the theory - is that there exists an absolute time beyond the normal historic time and that this absolute time is prior to the semiotics of the alphabetic technology. Indeed that seems to be the case - the PEB is divided into 22-23 sections which define the hebrew alphabet in equally many possible semiotic functions. I drafted the book from ideas in the year 2008-2009 and wrote these out in the following year - and it turned out that the relation between drafts and complete text in the form of the process of work describes well the graphic form (including serifs) of the AIN = chapter 7 called 'The Endmorgan Trolley'. The book goes in parallel with the 366 first verses of Genesis. The chapter on the NUN is called 'The calle of lots and mille' which tells of the tendency to have a semantic-phonologic match between poem and hebrew words in the first line and a phonologic-semantic match in the last words plus a vertical turning at the mid lines - which explains the graphic form of this letter. There seems to be 22-23 such possible forms - which lend a certain semiotic function to the alphabet - and explains how an absolute historic time can be derived from a text written in that alphabet or in an alphabet with close affinities. Could be the principle applies to all alphabets?
The PEB could only be written after and on basis of the preceding 11 years of work with TEQ - which claimed my attention every day: I could not interrupt the work for even a single day throughout those 11 years without losing the entire value of it - and when that work was completed, I could easily surf on in the writing of the PEB.
After the blue metre was completed, I wrote a red metre ('My mention e Anna') on an archetypal basis which goes a little outside the scope of this article.
The yellow and white metres
The yellow metre was written in german language in the years 2009-2015. What the blue metre adds of explanatory force to Genesis and the hebrew alphabet, the yellow metre seems to add to an understanding of the 440 first verses of Rigveda - and possibly also chinese radical systems. The work is called 'Der Dornenstrauch' = 'DDS' and consists of four parts:
Part 1 = 'Kinderhilfe' = a 'catalogue of mysteries' in 294 poems enumerated 1-187.
Part 2 = 'Unter Gesellschaft', 66 poems enumerated 1-64 plus pre- and post-word. This is the 'transcendent loop/coil' starting the formalization from the metaphysical mysteries.
Part 3 = 'Linien die prägen die Sterne über uns' - 'Aufgestellt in tiefem Staube' - 64 poems in the 'immanent loop/coil' - continueing the formalization of the mysteries towards a metric format.
Part 4 = 'Die Schönheit der Welt', 16 poems that serve to insert the mysteries that have gone through the double coil into the historic reality of the society.
Where PEB follows the 366 first verses of Genesis, the DDS follows the 440 first verses of Rigveda in such a way that it has another form of explanatory value: 'Kinderhilfe' is divided into 4 main sections (Hunde, Grenze, Baum, ROP) and DDS lets the 440 verses run in loops with 4 different offsets (the first is 1-440, the second starts on poem 59 (in absolute enumeration) and runs to the end, wraps over and continues from the start to end with RV verse 440 on poem 58, the third, fourth and fifth columns do the same with starting points at poems 114, 151 and 188 (in absolute enumeration), running to the end, starting from my poem 1 and ending on 113, 150 and 187. This means that each poem of mine will correspond to 5 different verses of the Rigveda. One can find empirical evidence for the relevance of this by the following method: Study my poem followed by a detailed study of the sanskrit verses in the four first loops - then put the work aside and write down your spontaneous associations and free ideas coming to your mind on the background of the first four verses and my poem. When you thereafter look up the sanskrit (in all its details) to the fifth verse - there are the ideas you wrote down. This clearly is a very different sort of semiotic constraining than the hebrew of the blue metre - and indeed devanagari is much more 'coily' than the hebrew. (There is an apparent phenomenon that can be called 'the lizards' of a cyclic shift from left to right hemisphere of the human organism in the course of 4444 days).
Now the story goes that the second part was written as 12-line poems, 3 stanzas of 4 lines each, with interlocking rhymes. I wrote something like 75 such 12-line poems in succession untill it suddenly came to a total stop and I could not continue - untill I discovered that there was a certain structure which allowed me to divide the poems 65-75 into separate couplets which could be appended to the poems 1-64 for obtaining quasi shakespearean sonnets. It was the inherent logic and the relevance for the resulting 'sonnets' in this scissoring of the last 10-11 poems (the 'concluding' value at the end) which convinced me. No sooner had I completed this work, the ex nihilo matter started to pour in and I suffered a considerable collapse, and where the walk had been 'dantean' for TEQ, it now started turning a little 'faustian'. (The collapse included a curl-up of the right hand, the little and ring fingers curling up in the palm like Christ on Caravaggio's Emmaus paintings - I still type with only one finger of the right hand - and this happened rather precisely 4444 days after the same had happened with my left hand - which had recovered in the mean time). I started, in spite of my condition of what felt like complete exhaustian, with a part 3 which I wrote as such 'shakespearean' sonnets in the spring and summer of 2014, and I continued with these untill I had reached 77,3 such sonnets - when it came to an absolute wall that could not be transgressed. I did not feel much for doing the same 'mistake' as with part 2 over again, but the resistance was so complete that I had no other choice and tried to see if I could find a sensible way to reduce the 77,3 'sonnets' down to 64 poems of 16 lines each. Indeed that turned out to be even more interesting than in part 2 - and no sooner had I completed this reduction from 77,3 to 64, I found the very Koh-i-Noor diamond of alchemistic study, a true 'lapis philosophorum' in my kitchen sink. It is considered the innermost secret of being, and mystics such as Jacob Boehme calls it the very Jesus Christ himself. It is the famous one with the head of a sleeping sheep or lamb (or is it an eagle?) and a naked headless Eve against a smooth half on the other side of a diagonal line - like a boat under the water. There are elements of christian mythology that can be spotted in the patterns on the stone - such as a face with an upwards-pointing nose for the idea of supernatural 'resurrection'. Or naked Eve pointing to her own belly for 'the virgin Mary'.
I looked up poem 77,3 = poem 78 in part 1 = 'Kinderhilfe' (in absolute enumeration this is poem #111):
Leben fährt fort
eben wenn die äußere Bedingungen
die innere Erscheinungen
wiederspiegeln. Hier
sind wir plötzlich versteinert,
unsere Gedanken sich in die zweifelhafte Verhältnis
wieder und wiedermal ähneln
wie in ein Spiegel der Zeit
wenn die Negerin im blauen Kleid
meine gestrige Gedanken ausspricht.
So ist es immer in das gekrümmte Licht
beim Fortschreiten des paradoxalen Lebens
eine Ausfaltung der inneren Geschichte
in der Hoffnung
dass einmal
die große Schönheit
sich in der ständige Endzeit offenbaren will.
The line of 77,3 is just that fifth line - which tells of the sudden white stone. It had been a strange summer - the salt in a container started to produce water which rose and rose - even above the top level of the salt - before the salt itself seemed to take fire at the bottom of the water, and small black flies surrounded my head like a cloud when I tried to concentrate. It was the strangest summer in my life. I personally believe that the stone is a true ex nihilo mystery and that it did not come from a burglar who had tiptoed in while I was out and left it in the kitchenbench. The lapis philosophorum is traditionally considered as composed of the chemical substances salt, mercury and incombustible sulphur.
Rigveda is much about this white stone matter, at least in accordance with some traditional translations, and it goes that the religious congregations of ancient India used to make the white stone, crush it in a mortar and drink it mixed up for 'soma' in fruit juice. That clearly is the hindu variant of the christian holy communion. The white stone comes ex nihilo from heaven and is consumed by the congregation who thereby is set in a paradisal state.
The fourth part I wrote in 2014-2015 - even this with some reduction principles. It consists of 16 poems of 20 lines each. After this was completed, I was in a hotel and heard some wild geese or swans cry when they flew by - I went out on the balcony and saw a huge drill, as if somebody were drilling for oil, it was 15-20 metres high and suspended on top in probably 6 long ropes that held it in position, and the drill went up and down and turned around with mighty speed. It was this which had made the mechanic sounds which sounded like birds. In the night there was a terrible sobbing from some neighbour, but all too strange and mechanic to be normal human, and all too loud for me to sleep. It lasted for an hour or two, then there followed silence for an hour or more, then the sobbings went for hours again - but mainly at night. The drill and the sobbing lasted for several days - at least 3-4 days, and I often stood there observing the drill and wondered what it was for. The sobbings were on and off with varying intervals. It was probably the mysteries of the Kinderhilfe catalogue that had gone through to reach History. The sobbing is likely to be what is found in the beginning of Rilke's Duino elegies.
I spent the autumn trying to understand these mysteries and wondered if I could make the white stone once again, and on 11 january 2016 I started writing what turned out to be the white metre, a work of another 64 poems by a reduction algorithm, but now in norwegian language, to see if the language were of importance. I wrote 105 poems of 12 lines each, 3 stanzas of 4 lines with interlocking rhymes - only poems 4-5-6 had already five stanzas. At the end of the work, on 20 september, I could start reorganizing the poems 65-105 into the reduced format of 64 poems of 20 lines each, plus title - for the white-metre work which got the title 'Stillhetens åndedrag' = 'The breathing of silence' and subtitle 'Og lønn vi fikk avstanden fra' = 'And wages we got the distance from'. It had taken appr. 256 days to write it. It is likely that the visual and auditory impressions after part 4 of DDS constitute the formal basis for this white metre.
The white stone did indeed occur this time as well, and the experiment was successful for these reasons, but it occurred before the work was completed and not afterwards: It was on 10 august in the morning that I went for fetching water from an outdoor water tap in the garden to my house in Hungary - I went on a concrete path, filled the water container and went back - and there was the stone just outside the threshold to the house, in the middle of the concrete path. I would certainly have seen it if it had been there on the first passing - and it contains patterns that tell of the contents of poem 5 in the book in such a way that it is convincing. This poem #5 was then long-since written - in the 5 stanzas it eventually has. It has a pumice or skeleton bony substance - characteristic of the white metre. After I had translated Ouyang Xiu's chinese poems (approximately 1000 years old) on this theme, the poems on the Western Lake which corresponds to my kitchenbench water basin, it dawned to me that the white stone is inherently occurring in two forms - one fundamental white stone with christian symbolism followed by this secondary and lighter form (more 'bony').
Here is a photo of the first white stone to the left, the detail of 'naked Eve' at the eye of the sleeping lamb (the two seem to 'share head'), and the second stone from that angle which shows what corresponds to the line in poem 5 'it is like spaniards who lisp / when opportunities are offered':
Now the important thing to observe from the work with the white metre is the procedure of writing: In order to avoid the problem of subconscious 'preplanning', I wrote most of the 105 poems (before the reduction to 64) by letting myself be cued by History - I wrote on basis of inspiration, or some would call it an element of revelation in history, and put the notebook aside untill there came a 'response' from history - not as 'transcendent' as the drill and 'sobs but rather of the type of inspiring or telling light rays, meaningful answers of various kind in the historic reality. It could be called 'writing by faith': I was guided by my sense of 'faith' (such that all humans must have in order to be conscious) rather than by any sort of plan. This means that the progress of the white metre work was guided mainly by the progress of History and not so much by my own intentions and wishes and plans.
The fundamental theorem of linguistics
The interesting result at the end of the work with these four metres - blue, red, yellow and white - was this time not primarily the white stone that I found on 10 august but the sensational correlation I discovered relative to TEQ books 13-16. Or, put differently, the reason why the stone occurred before rather than after the work was completed was due to the correlation with the last quarter of TEQ. I had discovered at the end of january 2016 that there was a correlation between the 320 words that occurred twice and only twice in TEQ book 1 ('Hammerfest') relative to the 320 lines of DDS part 4, which means that when the 'lapis philosophorum' had occurred between parts 3 and 4 - it was just on the threshold to 'The Endmorgan Quartet'. I had in fact noticed this 'twice and only twice' occurrence in 'Hammerfest' when I sent it (in vain) to an english publisher in late 1997 or early 1998, and now I wanted in late january 2016 to check what it was that I had pointed out then - and by simple word processing and a calculation program I could establish that there were 320 such double words. I checked the number of double occurrences (without studying the words concerned) in all the books but could conclude that it was only this book 1 which had that number. (I also looked briefly at the word list for two of the books TEQ 13-16, but not so long that I could memorize them in any way). After the white metre was completed in september, I found that the 1344 lines of the 64 poems including titles corresponded with amazing precision to the 1345 words (alphabetized) that occurred twice and only twice in TEQ books 13-16 - and hence that the 'threshold to TEQ' of the first white stone had a correlate in the 'threshold to the last quarter of TEQ' for the second white stone - and the revelation of the drill and sobbing as a projection from 'Kinderhilfe'. When I listed the twice-and-only-twice occurrences alphabetically of book 13 (there were 413 occurrences of words 'twice and only twice' in this book), followed by the same alphabetic listing for book 14 (359 occurrences), then the alphabetic listing for book 15 (141 occurrences) and eventually for book 16 (432 occurrences), it turned out that the resulting series of 1345 words constituted a precise definition one by one of the 1344 lines of the white metre - the poems 1-64 with titles - plus a single superfluous occurrence of the norwegian letter 'å' as occurrence 1345 at the end. I reproduce here poem #35 (out of 64) aligned with words 715-735 in the complete list of word pairs - these are word pairs #302-322 from TEQ book 14 in alphabetic order:
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
starts
step
store
stupid
substance
suggesting
sum
survive
sweet
sword
symbol
taking
talking
tape
teacher
temperature
ten
therefore
third
thirty
though
Savonarolas tanke
Mennesker reiser i rom.
Jeg sitter og hviler blant dem
og jeg grubler og tenker på om
jeg noensinne har gått frem.
Fuglene reiser i tid
som byggekunstenes hjem.
Savonarola var i
tanken som tenkte dem.
Husene tett i tett
bak løvverkets grønne skur
skildrer mitt synske vett.
Tiden ligger på lur.
Dette landskapet skygger sitt grønt
og hang med hodene tyngre,
forteller om det du nettopp har skjønt
at når vi kom frem var vi yngre.
Dette landskapet henger sitt brunt
som dreier sitt hode om.
Rovfuglen kaster sitt legeme rundt
mellom det hvite skum.
Savonarola's thought
Humans travel in space.
I sit and rest among them
and I ponder and think if though
I have ever progressed.
The birds travel in time
as the home of the art of building.
Savonarola was in
the thought that thought them.
The houses tightly and tightly
behind the foliage's green shed
describe my clairvoyant intelligence.
The time lies in ambush.
This landscape shadows its green
and hung with its heads heavier,
tells of what you have just understood
that when we arrived we were younger.
This landscape hangs its brown
which turns its head around.
The bird of prey throws its body around
inbetween the white foam.
If the reader agrees that the listing to the left, the alphabetically ordered words that occur twice and only twice in TEQ book 14, can serve as a definition or having its definition from the corresponding line in the white metre book, then it can be concluded that this is the same phenomenon as the semantics by global distribution of words for TEQ book 14 - when the number of occurrences in the global distribution of TEQ books 1-16 and their dates of writing allow for correlation with a poem from book 14 which gives the formal meaning to the word line by line: It means that, in the white metre, the logical order (the alphabetic listing in this case, such as this poem 35) and the semantic assignment is one and the same thing. This competes with TEQ function 14 wherein the global distribution (by the temporal intervals) and the semantic assignment is 'one and the same thing'.
But it is so in a much more profound and precise sense of it. The cue to the socalled 'semantic assignment', as goes the naive term, is for natural language in function 14 wherein the global distribution assigns a position on the 'rainbow' for the semantics and a phonological counterpart in the mirror point in the other half of the 'rainbow'. The naive idea of socalled 'semantic assignment' is related to a semiotic theory of sign-meaning attached to sign-form - and the question is what keeps the two together. The mirror symmetry of the rainbow is what makes sense for the human semiotics when it recognizes the form and the meaning as 'the same'. Poetically, tells Eliot, 'in my beginning is my end'. But the rainbow is a distributional arch - and it means that if item A has a distribution (by function 14) in history which puts it on position x on the rainbow, and item B has another distribution in history that puts it on position y, and x and y are symmetric on the rainbow, the human semiotics should claim that these two are 'the same', sort of, otherwise things could not mean anything and the 'semiotic glue' could not hold meaning and form together. But clearly they are not the same, otherwise they would have been on the same position x - and yet they have to be the same nevertheless.
This paradox is the reason for the white-metre phenomenon of occurrence 'twice and only twice' in the books 13-16 and it reduces to what I call the fundamental theorem of linguistics which reduces logical order and semantic assignment to one and the same thing. The fundamental theorem of linguistics tells that the human linguistic competence can recognize one item in one reality as having the same distribution as another item in another reality by recognizing that these items have the same distribution in the two different realities, and then the innate linguistic (chomskyan) competence recognizes (or declares) these two as the same - however different the two items can be in their respective realities. It could be a stone in the one reality and an umbrella in the other - but the human mind is a little narrow-sighted and declares them to be one and the same thing. Birds fly with impressive precision, speed and correlation in flocks - humans cannot do that. They eat a few breadcrumbs and fly thousands of kilometres without landing - humans cannot understand that. That is the human proof that other realities exist - and that is why angels have wings.
'Two realities' can be different in a radical sense of it - realities of birds are not the one of humans - or a trivial one of the two parents of a small child being two different realities. Your subjective reality is not the same as another person's reality - the distribution of your world is not the distribution of another subject's world - that is the most trivial sense of it - and language gains its communicative force by way of the fundamental theorem of linguistics - which by the human semiotics recognizes item (thing) A as being the same as item (thing) B because the two items (things) have the same distribution in their respective realities. Hence humans mix up things with distributions in their categorial competence - thereby reducing two different realities to one and the same which together make up the specific human consciousness - and that is how semantics and logical order can reduce to one and the same thing. The first white stone is the 'logos' (including christian symbolism) which occurred after the work was completed and is categorially 'the same' as the second white stone which is the 'lexis' of 'semantics' and which occurred before the work was completed. If the drill of the summer 2015 is the same as the phrase structure grammar of Chomsky, balancing finely its ontology against the pushdown automaton of distribution, the occasional sobbings could be the 'butterfly sign' that opens if a stoic 'lekton' be imposed as a fourth semiotic component on the otherwise triadic sign of 'logos', 'lexis' and 'phone'. The butterfly sign can trivially be recognized as 'the same' (!) as the Fast Fourier Transform of signal processing (in its permutational algorithm) that can be conceived as the formal metrics of the continuous transform. The sobbings could thereby be the aural counterpart to (what makes them compatible with) the visual modality of the drill in its four stages 1) rotation on the top, 2) plunging down, 3) rotation on the bottom, 4) being flung upwards.
The radical conclusion is that the innate linguistic competence is the faculty that makes it possible to assess the distribution of an item in a reality which the human mind cannot overview and therefore cannot measure the distribution of: Angels had wings long before humans could track the movements of birds over longer distances with radio equipment. One could perhaps invoke the idea of 'psychological expectancy' to understand how the clairvoyance functions. But by understanding that the two which are conceived as the same are not the same any longer, the original distribution, that is, the hitherto unknown reality, can come to be revealed and understood.
Put differently, if the phenomenon of two and only two, which holds the human reality together in its web, suddenly starts squeaking open, revealing a paradisal state (rather than a roaring gap of chaos underneath), the pair of 'same distribution' would split apart and shoot out one on either side in their respective realities wherein they had enjoyed a shared distibutional ratio - like a quantum split. The quantum mystery is just that - that it makes it possible to extrapolate the distribution of an occurrence into a reality that extends beyond the borders of human reality as being the same as an occurrence in another reality that extends beyond the borders of the human reality - and hence one can construct quantum-mechanic connections between things which normal causality cannot account for. When the sameness opens up and the umbrella no longer looks like a stone, or, rather, when it is understood that these are diagonals of different realities which share not much more than a hypothetical distribution, then one gets the transfinity suggested by Cantor as the basis for these metres of language. It is the human semiotic competence which declares the two and only two items to be the same - in their respective non-human realities they could be very different - and clearly this can open up for new studies in the field of physics. The four metres I have written correlate well with the four known forces of physics:
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Strong nuclear force
Weak nuclear force
= the white metre ('Stillhetens åndedrag')
= the yellow metre ('Der Dornenstrauch')
= the red metre ('My mention e Anna')
= the blue metre ('POLAKK English Bloggi')
It is the nuclear decay by weak nuclear forces that makes it possible to date age of organic matter by the method of Carbon 14 - and that is essentially the same as makes it possible to date a text by sheer semantic contents by way of the blue metre.
One notices that the metres are 'formalisms' reduced from 'The Endmorgan Quartet' - and thereby the physical forces arise as different. It is the faith that keeps the human subjective mind intact and leads to enlightenment (preventing chaotic roaring gaps), and the white metre is written by the parametre of faith of 105 poems before it was reduced to the 'skeleton' white structure bone of 64. It is the skeleton that can rebel against the powers of gravity - but only as long as faith still keeps it going for yet some time.
I add a real pearl - the correlation of my white metre book with Luigi Nono's string quartet "Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima" from 1980, recorded by the LaSalle Quartet and published in 1986. There is only one major wrap-over in the reduction from 105 to 64 poems in my book, when the poems 65-105 were divided and pasted onto 1-64, and that wrapover is in the last stanza of poem 50 where my end of 105 is in my beginning of 65, that is as far as faith is concerned - and this is the only point in Nono's quartet which approaches classic tonal harmony - the point of harmonic 'calibration' that occurs at 1:40-1:45 into part 2. That 'calibration' can be called transcendent or transfinite harmony - an alternative to the classic ratios of pythagorean harmony. The correlation starts with his part 1 on my poem 17 - which means an offset of one quarter exactly - and his part 2 on my poem 48. My poem #47 = 'Adam' and #48 = 'Eve'.
The blue metre again: Line 1
I can now return to the blue metre refreshed with the theory of the fundamental theorem of linguistics - and the knowledge that the fourth part of 'Der Dornenstrauch', the yellow metre, has exactly as many lines as there are occurrences of words twice and only twice in TEQ book 1 ('Hammerfest'). One can compute the semiotic function of the blue metre line 1 in advance - and then test it afterwards - and, voila, it can be seen to be precisely that: The word itself, that is, its phonological form, followed by its semantic definition (as on the rainbow of function 14, discussed above) - in a line 1 in the poem which is found by multiplying the interval between 2009 (the year of writing of the PEB) and the first extant occurrence of the word in written documents with 0,366 and rounding off upwards. For reaching the phonological form, one must normally move some features around (like the rotating drill), thereby changing the rest of the line (with corresponding feature rewrites) for the semantic definition - and those movements are the logical order of the alphabetic elements. I give some examples from hungarian, italian, english and polish:
Hungarian: 'Kolna' (1814) = 'Kelterhaus', 'villa', 'Landhaus'. (2009-1814) * 0.366 = 71,37 = PEB #72 = 'And show the child' - which rewrites by movement of features into "kolna: it's shift / it's fruit". 'Kurgat' (1803) = 'noisily expel/chase': (2009-1803) * 0.366 = 75,4 = PEB #76 = 'Here's the place where he came', hence "kurgat: flesh the very same". 'Imád' (1195) = 'prayer' = PEB #298 = 'Many bathrooms have a sink', hence "imád: mathrooms have a sfinx". 'Dolog' (1372) = 'work', 'task' = PEB #234: 'he's approaching a pen' hence "dolog: pseudo-hymen". 'Bors' (1075) = 'pepper' = PEB #342 = 'spending the night', hence "bors: tin the right / try the tin / tinnitus".
Italian: 'Rovina' (1292) = 'ruin' = PEB #263 = 'The man is reaching out' hence "rovina: thinning out". 'Laguna' (1304) = 'lagoon' = PEB #259 = 'A slamming door: Do not play roles', hence "laguna: as a waterway runs". 'Quasar' (1965): 'quasar' = 'quasi stellar radio source' = PEB #17 = 'Over the shoulders spot' hence "quasar: welders spot". 'Biondo' (1193) = 'blonde', 'light-haired' = PEB #299 = 'Then it is loot' hence "biondo: so light/licht". Two examples of double meaning and time - showing the difference in replacing features at beginning or end of the line: 1) 'Orca' (1498) = 'Schwertwal', 'sea monster' = PEB #188 = 'in some hotels there is space' hence "orca: mythological beast". 2) 'Orca' (1578) = 'dutch ship' (a flying dutchman?) = PEB #158 = 'through this glass door' hence "dutch history: orca". 1) 'Spillo' (1320) = 'pin' (for temporary attachment of textiles) = PEB #253 = 'sometimes the food will fall' = "lambs, I'm the Fido: spillo". 2) 'Spillo' (1412) = 'thin spurt of water or wine' = PEB #219 = 'I look around a corner and can see' hence "spillo: around around Canaan key". Finally a convincing example - to the poem 'Lo stesso capit' = TEQ 14:56 in the beginning of this article, a poem relevant to the 'nympfen' of the 'lapis philosophorum', the word 'capitagna' was attested first in 1777, which suggests PEB #85 = 'the measure is the sound', hence 'capitagna: maschochist' - the sobber in the neighbouring room - and conversely 'a drill: capitagna'. That is the acoustic measure to the 'considerable' = visual drill.
English: 'Dupe' (1681) = PEB #121 = 'It happened as I crossed the sea' hence "dupe: i.e., not as I crossed the see". 'Frog' (1610) = 'elastic horny substance under mid of horse's hoofsole' = PEB #147 = 'A lonely place I live' hence "frog: liaison is". 'Pillion' (1503) = 'light saddle' (often for women) = PEB #186 = 'It's in a sort of Bierstub' hence "pillion: a sort of bitstuff". 'Stirp' (1502) = 'the stock of a family', 'a line of descent' = PEB #186 = 'It's in a sort of Bierstub' hence "it's in a sort of beer: stirp".
Polish: 'Dotyk' (1900) = 'touch' = PEB #40 = 'the steps are the secret mystery' hence "dotyk: the earth is a Zipporah mystery". 'Kaganiec' (1779) = 'Beißkorb', 'muzzle' = PEB #85 = 'the measure is the sound' hence "kaganiec: the earth is safe". 'Kaktus' (1861) = 'cactus' = PEB #55 = 'some people think that right' hence "kaktus: pantofle dance". I add the interesting word 'nietoperz' (1204) = 'bat' = PEB #295 = 'that is the sentry' which can have the rewrite in the beginning or end: "the sentry: nietoperz" tells of 'the semantics' while "nietoperz: that is" tells of the deictic function in 'that is [phonology]'. Brückner's etymological dictionary gives the year 1472 = PEB #197 = 'some meanings were doubled' - and if 'some meanings' is turned into 'nietoperz', 'were doubled' is turned into 'some meanings'. (Cp. Flaubert's parrot).
Interestingly, hungarian for 'bat' is 'denevér' which is first attested in 1395 - that gives PEB #225 = 'At Fondamenta di tre ponti restaurant'. Rewriting this in the beginning leaves e.g. 'two monti trapezoid rest of one', rewriting in the end leaves 'at road of monti Ditto spontaneous' - which could be about preparing for a ground to open apparently by itself - in the ground of three points - a ground of triangular or triadic sign opening up to the four of a butterfly. In italian, the 'batman' looks more hebrew: 'Bat' = 'pipistrello' first attested in 1341 or 1342 which gives PEB #245 = 'We live in the social complexion' - rewriting in the beginning leaves 'pipistrello: sexual penguin' while rewriting in the end gives 'holy land he-Moses: pipistrello'. English 'bat' was first attested in 1575, hence PEB #159 = 'Sie ist eine Lawine'. A dolphin in the air?
A guess is that line 1 applies to all languages - which would mean that a word is introduced in a language as a function of time for reasons of function 1. This is what line 1 is about - such as line 4 is about the function of political government in a similar way. These are not the same as the poetic functions that make up the form of historic time - but rather the formalized blue-metre versions of them.
Conclusion
The article has shown that there are reasons to believe that transfinite metres exist in human language, contributing to the metaphysical constitution of the human reality. This means that the fundamental theorem of linguistics seems to apply, telling that the innate human linguistic competence can recognize one item in one reality as being the same as another item in another reality by recognizing that these two and only two items have the same distribution in their respective realities, and then the innate linguistic (chomskyan) competence recognizes (or declares) these two as the same - however different the two items can be in their respective realities. This identification of paradoxical sameness of elements by distribution is the same as Cantor's diagonal proof for the existence of transfinity. In so doing, the fundamental theorem of linguistics reduces logical order and semantic assignment to one and the same thing - subsequently being understood as two (and only two!) things. The drill and the sobs are likely to be about the two different realities of vision and audition - and what are the reasons why the bird you see is 'the same' as the birdsong you hear? It is, tells the fundamental theorem, not that they are simultanous but rather that the distribution of the birdsong in the auditive world is the same as the distribution of the bird in the visible world - cp. the polish word for 'bat' = 'nietoperz' discussed above - and the apparent causal nexus in terms of simultaneity is something that arises after time has been construed by the human semiotic constitution. The drill is constant, the sobs are now and then - like a scottish bagpipe. Or, as is the essential example, like written versus spoken language. The corollary of this is that the fundamental theorem of linguistics can be considered prior to and constitutive of the physical theories and parametres at stake - such as quantum theory (which can be compared with Cantor's transfinity) and the four fundamental forces of physics. A conclusion to this is that poetic and linguistic theory can contribute to the controlled formation of new matter and new causalities which is the field of studies in physics.
The books referred to still await a proper publishing. The author, who has a master degree in linguistics from the university of Oslo 1992, while his doctoral dissertation 'A waist of time' was rejected in Bergen in 1998, seems to have been subjected to persecution from the level of international secret intelligence services (johnbjarnegrover.com/evidence.htm) but has self-published on a minor scale the books discussed in this article in their order of occurrence and these have been accepted by some university and national libraries - the number of copies having been limited by the humble economic resources available. The author has never sanctioned uncrediting or unauthorized use of this or other of his material and is strictly opposed to the idea of reserving it for 'intelligence' or political use.
The author's works discussed in the article
Grover, John: The Endmorgan Quartet. 16 books of poetry - most of them self-published in a minor number of copies in their order of occurrence 1997-2008.
Grover, John: Stillhetens åndedrag. Self-published, Vienna 2016. English translation Vienna 2017.
Grover, John: Der Dornenstrauch. Self-published, Vienna 2015.
Grover, John: My mention e Anna. Self-published, Vienna 2012.
Grover, John: POLAKK English Bloggi. Self-published, Vienna 2010.
The sources of the etymological data
Benkö, Lorand: A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára, I-III. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1984.
Bankowski, Andrzej: Etymologiczny slownik jezyka polskiego I-III. Warszawa 2000.
Brückner, Aleksander: Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego. Krakow 1927.
De Mauro, Tullio & Mancini, Marco: Dizionario Etymologico. Garzanti 2000.
Onions, C.T.: The shorter Oxford english dictionary on historical principles. Oxford 1973.
© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 8 september 2017
Last updated 10 september 2017