Language – The Narrative Transformation Lab

To make up the name of a person or place is to open the way to the world of the language the name belongs to. It’s a gate to Elsewhere. How do they speak in Elsewhere? How do we find out how they talk?
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Inventing Languages” (2006) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 36)

Once one takes the view that culture itself comprises an ambiguous text that is constantly in need of interpretation by those who participate in it, then the constitutive role of language in creating social reality becomes a topic of practical concern.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986, p. 122)

A word, let us say, has its dictionary or conventional meaning, which exists independently of what we are reading; and it also has its particular meaning in the context of what we are reading. Our attention as we read is thus going simultaneously in two directions, outward to the conventional or remembered meaning, inward to the specific contextual meaning.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 57)

A living language is a concrete fact fact—grammar is its abstract substratum.
Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale (1968, p. 15)

The centripetal aspect of a verbal structure is its primary aspect, because the only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point…
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 60)

An incoherent language is a contradiction in terms. A language is, in a sense, its rules. It is a symbolic pact, a convention, a social contract.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Inventing Languages” (2006) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 39)

There is a way around the practical constraints—it is to use words as arrows that go straight to the heart of an audience. A stage play is a brilliant vehicle for the past, because it is a hazardous, unstable form, enacting history as it was made—breath by breath.
Hilary Mantel, “Adaptation” (Reith Lecture 5, July 11, 2017)

Black-and-white photo of famous author Hilary Mantel, photographed during a lecture. The photo is of Mantel, a white woman with a blonde bob, pictured from the shoulders up. She is talking animatedly with her hand raised as she looks off camera. — Hilary Mantel, Booker Prize-winning author, at Cambridge in 2010. (Photo by Chris Boland)

…it is a sobering thought that it is sensitivity to one’s own language, not scholarly knowledge of the original, that makes a translation permanent.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981, p. 208)

As important as language is, however, it’s only the surface by which we capture the reader to lead him to the inner life of the story. Language is a tool for self-expression and must never become a decorative end of its own.
Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (2010, p. 238)

Language is ‘for’ communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Inventing Languages” (2006) in Words Are My Matter (2019, p. 37–38)

BACK TO THE NARRATIVE THEMOGRAPHY

To make up the name of a person or place is to open the way to the world of the language the name belongs to. It’s a gate to Elsewhere. How do they speak in Elsewhere? How do we find out how they talk?

Once one takes the view that culture itself comprises an ambiguous text that is constantly in need of interpretation by those who participate in it, then the constitutive role of language in creating social reality becomes a topic of practical concern.

A living language is a concrete fact fact—grammar is its abstract substratum.

The centripetal aspect of a verbal structure is its primary aspect, because the only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point…

An incoherent language is a contradiction in terms. A language is, in a sense, its rules. It is a symbolic pact, a convention, a social contract.

There is a way around the practical constraints—it is to use words as arrows that go straight to the heart of an audience. A stage play is a brilliant vehicle for the past, because it is a hazardous, unstable form, enacting history as it was made—breath by breath.

…it is a sobering thought that it is sensitivity to one’s own language, not scholarly knowledge of the original, that makes a translation permanent.

As important as language is, however, it’s only the surface by which we capture the reader to lead him to the inner life of the story. Language is a tool for self-expression and must never become a decorative end of its own.

Language is ‘for’ communicating, but when we come to such phenomena as poetry and made-up names and languages, the function of communication and the construction of meaning become as impenetrable to intellect alone as the tune of a song.