Translating the Facts of Landscape into the Facts of Language: Ethnoecological Ruminations on Glossopoiesis in Early Ireland

Bennett, Fionn

doi:10.1057/9780230360297_4

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Granted, but-as I pointed out in an earlier article [47]-even if you could not, in principle, translate the hieratic hyponoia encoded in music into the profane semiosis encoded in ordinary speech, this does not mean that, despite this theoretical impossibility, no one ever tried to do so. Indeed, all the signs indicate that the desire to uncover the hyponoia chanting poets encoded in melody and meter was insatiable and the efforts to gratify that desire both strenuous and sustained.…”

Section: Melodized Tones and Metered Rhythms As A Cosmological Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%

Music and Language in Ancient Verse: The Dynamics of an Antagonistic Concord

Bennett

2016

Humanities

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In antiquity, the relationship between "music", "poetry", and "language" was very different from the way they relate to each other today, for back then each of these mediums was endowed with a distinct, independent signifying code expressing a semiosis all its own. However, these separate "semiospheres" nonetheless never ceased growing towards and into one another. This is so because music and "melic" poetry were believed to have the capacity to denote something ordinary language could not denote but could not do without, namely "etymonic truth". As a result, the users of ordinary language were obsessed with divining the "hyponoia" poets encoded in music and chant. Above all, they wanted this hyponoia to constitute the signifié of their language. For this reason, the meaning expressed in language was subject to a process in which it was constantly being "deported" from its ordinary acceptations and transported towards meanings encoded in music. However, this "deterritorialization" of ordinary meaning never resulted in a full "reterritorialization" upon the terrain of the truth encoded in music. Musicians and poets would not tolerate it. As far as they were concerned, music and poetry would cease being "truthful" if the semiosis they conveyed and the semiosis conveyed by language were interchangeable. For, again, as a signifying code, prosaic language was sui generis incapable of representing the truth. Hence, the relationship between these three codes consisted of a sort of intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium in which language was continuously evolving towards a non-linguistic expression of meaning which conferred truth upon it and what it means. And yet the music and poetry which were the source of that truth deliberately kept language from consummating the aspiration of accosting the truth they encoded. This paper explores the mechanics of this intersemiotic dynamic equilibrium.

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Section: Melodized Tones and Metered Rhythms As A Cosmological Sourcementioning

confidence: 99%