We were discussing with L. J. Kramer, H. P. Grice's example:
The HMS Pinafore sank the Bismarck.
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The HMS Pinafore sank.
We were discussing with Kramer the fact that in Old English, the distinction was between 'sink' and 'senk', two verbs with, obviously, two senses. I'm not sure I want to go the whole hog.
When I studied etymythology with Carlo Dissandro, he would say -- 'never go beyond the root'. Consider m-n: this root gives 'mind', 'mens', 'mental', and a few others. It's pretty basic in 'mens' and 'mental' -- less obvious in English 'mind'.
But the root is the same, hence ONE sense.
Now consider this quoting O'Shaughnessy who died last week, and H. P. Grice:
[PDF]Arm Raising and Arm Rising
2 See H. P. Grice 'The Causal Theory of Perception', Proceedings of the Aris- ... this conclusion I am indebted to Brian O'Shaughnessy.3 I attempt to state ...
www.jstor.org/stable/3750976 - Similar
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I would hold that 'raise' and 'rise' have the same SENSE.
Surely, there is a causative aspect in 'rise' -- but, I would now go further -- since the ROOT is the same ('r-s'), the SENSE is the same.
So, the causative aspect must be implicatural. It shouldn't BE implicatural. Perhaps it ISN'T implicatural. I'm saying it "Must" or ought to be implicatural.
Hence 'sink' -- here, English found a way to avoid 'senk' (which sounded pretty bad, if you ask me) and get away with the root variation.
My Greek teacher, on the other hand (Carlo Dissandro taught me a load of Latin), A. Gamerro, would emphasise the difference between a 'stem' and a 'root'. So, he would say that while the ROOT of 'rise' and 'raise' (and 'sink' and 'senk') is the same, the STEM is different.
I may be a linguistic botaniser, but Gamerro's distinction I found slightly otiose (for a Wednesday).
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I've been away, and now back, I'm surprised to find that I have been discussing something. But I do recall that we were discussing it, and so that'll have to do.
ReplyDeleteOn long airplane rides I like to read Scientific American. I really enjoy it, but I think that's because I only take a few such rides a year, and so the topics are always fresh.
This month, the questions of whether time and space "exist" (whatever that means) were front and center as part of discussions of dimensions and GUTs and quantum gravity and twistors and such. I was pretty comfortable with the idea that time is a construct with no reality to speak of. Caused events are occurring all around us. One is the movement of my clock, another is the movement of my car. I can do math with respect to the movement of the car in relation to the movement of the clock, or the beats of my heart. Time itself need never enter into the matter.
But what about space. One of the articles I didn't grasp spoke of spacetime as a construct. I suppose the idea is that there are successive statuses of things as regards their relationship to each other, and that the changes that we call movement are merely changes in relation - movement being our word for the fact that the car is fewer strides from Cleveland when the clock reads 4 than when it read 3. It is possible to describe the situation without reference to location, just by distance, measured by the length of real things.
If there are sufficient oxygen and other molecules pressing upon us, they keep us from exploding and we can breathe them in. Otherwise, we explode and/or suffocate. But there is no "empty space," just a lack of stuff within our ability to affect change in status.
I thought of this stuff when I read about roots and senses. Roots, I think, are real. But "senses"? What significance attaches to the number of "senses" a word has? And is the matter circular. Is "lead" one word or two? How many senses does it have? Why do we care? By what authority does etymology assign meaning to modern words? Isn't etymology merely interesting but usage all that really matters? And if a word can have more than one usage, again, what is a "sense" that we should care about it?
Good stuff, Larry. And never forget to post your own posts to this blog, too! I will try and reply in a different post.
ReplyDeleteO. D. is not distanced from me anymore, so he may have something to say. The other day I was reading something on TIME that he wrote to CHORA.
I do like all that stuff you read in "Scientific American". Shouldn't that be "American Scientific", though? (Just teasing).