Publié chez New directions

but    to the
      australian aborigine    an aranda say    among the aranda
     there is i take it   a different way of looking at all this    or at
      least a different way of talking about what we have just been
     looking at     for in aranda     in the vernacular aranda system
   as it existed in the 19th century    there were according to the
      people familiar with them      four      or actually five
     fundamental color terms    two blacks    white    red
      and one other term for all the rest    one black was purka
       used of charcoal    and the other was urupulla    which included
     brown and a fair range of greys    white was churungura
       red tutuka    and the other was tierga    the sky was tierga a
      green leaf was tierga   and yellow ocher was also tierga
                                                  now this is a
     very different system for talking about seeing than ours   one
     for red      and one for the range of blue yellow and green
                                                   i have no doubt
     that we could persuade any reasonable aranda gentleman or lady
    to distinguish between sky color leaf color and the color ocher
      and they could do this very handily   this gentleman or lady
       an aranda painter maybe    they could say that of course
     one was sky tierga the other was leaf tierga and the last was
    ocher tierga but that they were merely three different shades of
      the same color    tierga    that is    that they were all the
        same color but modified by some other aspect of vision that
      weve chosen to call « shade »    which would be somewhat similar
    to our « light » and « dark » or « deep » or « thin » or « saturated » or
     « not »    but we really wouldnt have any appropriate name for
   this feature of vision that we have just called « shade » but which
     applies to a somewhat different range of visual experiences
       because their word « color » would also not apply to quite the
     same visual experiences of looking as ours    or would apply in
       a different way    so their word « shade »     which would
      depend for its significance on their word « color »    as our word
       « shade » depends on our word « color »    would not be at all
      the same and we would simply not have any word for it that
    came conveniently to hand though we might very well know what
      they mean by it
                      and this leads to interesting conclusions
    because it seems that « blue » occupies a different semantic space
       to use our old formalist conception of word meaning     a
     different semantic space than our word « blue » and that not only
     that    their conception of « color » probably has a different
       spatial configuration in the semantic domain of aranda looking
     than our notion « color »

now lets take a pair of words like        « generous » and « thrifty » say we could probably find an axis        that ran through them unfortunately we could find many more        than one axis but lets take an axis an axis is a good        word it suggests so much a kind of space through with        it runs a kind of semantic globe domain ? hyperspace ?        anyway lets call it an axis        […]        but what could that mean that        a word could lie closer to the same axis than another it could        mean that we will have to find only pure opposites or antonyms        lying at ends of feature axes and that all the words in the        system will have to be plotted by the intersection of various axes        their spatial coordinates in some kind of hyperspace so that        we know just how far off the axis of « closed » and « open »        « generous » and « thrifty » may really be and how close they lie        to an axis of « big » and « small » for example or « soft » and        « hard »        how many features will we need to map any lexeme        how many features are there is there a feature axis that        can be constructed by drawing a line between any two words        that can be regarded as opposites seen from some point of        view will we have to connect every word with every        other word in practice in principle dollars and doughnuts        if not will        there be a finite set of such contrasts ?        […]        now the reason i chose to talk about tuning        i was proposing a way of looking at how we understand        things how we come to understand things come to an        understanding with each other about things through        language has something to do with a notion process        i would like to call tuning

clichés are the        commonplaces by which we begin a discourse        there is no way to        put down cliché in the beginning because if there was        nothing in common in the utterances with which we addressed        each other thered be no way that we could understand what we        were saying in some sense there is no adequate theory of how        we understand what we say to each other one of the most        depressing things about the present attempts at knowledge        is the array of formal machines we have for explaining how we        know what we say and how poorly they explain it