21-10-2020, 04:12 PM
I would like to share an example from modern English that may relate to the discussion of what may or may not be considered sensical content in a reading or interpretation of a text:
About a decade or so ago, a line in a popular song in the United States contained the following words:
"Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack"
Many English speakers who aren’t familiar with the cultural context of the era and the social milieu in which the song was popular, might well read this and think of it as a nonsensical “wordsalad”: One can identify English nouns and verbs and prepositions, but this particular combination of these words may well make no sense to many English speakers. And imagine how much more so this will be the case 100 years from now, or 200 years, or 300 years. Or 600 years.
How does one brush one’s teeth with a bottle?! And what is a bottle of Jack, isn’t that a man’s name? It makes no sense! It’s a wordsalad!
And yet it actually does make sense...if one has the appropriate knowledge of the social and cultural context. First of all one must know that Jack Daniels is the name of a popular liquor, and then one must also know that “Jack” is a popular nickname for this liquor. Yet even with this understanding, the phrase may still be confusing to those who attempt to read it too literally: Is the singer pouring the whiskey from the bottle on her toothbrush, and then literally brushing her teeth using the liquor in place of toothpaste? This too would strike many people as absurd and nonsensical.
In order to truly understand the sensical content of the text, one needs to grasp that the phrase is metaphorical: The singer is not literally referring to brushing her teeth with the bottle, or even with the liquid in the bottle, but rather is conveying the following meaning:
“Rather than brush my teeth before I leave my home to go out tonight, I’m just going to ‘cleanse my mouth’ by taking a big drink from my bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey instead.”
Without all of this context and understanding, the line from the song sounds like a meaningless combination of random words stuck together to appear grammatical in form but with content that seems to make little or no semantic sense to many people. Very much like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Or perhaps like the phrases in my Old Polish or Silesian interpretation of the text, according to some people.
How many centuries will it take until almost no one will be able to read this line and understand how it makes sense? I will take a guess that the answer will be “less than six centuries”.
We must be prepared for the possibility that this may be the kind of content that we may be dealing with in the text of the Voynich manuscript.
About a decade or so ago, a line in a popular song in the United States contained the following words:
"Before I leave, brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack"
Many English speakers who aren’t familiar with the cultural context of the era and the social milieu in which the song was popular, might well read this and think of it as a nonsensical “wordsalad”: One can identify English nouns and verbs and prepositions, but this particular combination of these words may well make no sense to many English speakers. And imagine how much more so this will be the case 100 years from now, or 200 years, or 300 years. Or 600 years.
How does one brush one’s teeth with a bottle?! And what is a bottle of Jack, isn’t that a man’s name? It makes no sense! It’s a wordsalad!
And yet it actually does make sense...if one has the appropriate knowledge of the social and cultural context. First of all one must know that Jack Daniels is the name of a popular liquor, and then one must also know that “Jack” is a popular nickname for this liquor. Yet even with this understanding, the phrase may still be confusing to those who attempt to read it too literally: Is the singer pouring the whiskey from the bottle on her toothbrush, and then literally brushing her teeth using the liquor in place of toothpaste? This too would strike many people as absurd and nonsensical.
In order to truly understand the sensical content of the text, one needs to grasp that the phrase is metaphorical: The singer is not literally referring to brushing her teeth with the bottle, or even with the liquid in the bottle, but rather is conveying the following meaning:
“Rather than brush my teeth before I leave my home to go out tonight, I’m just going to ‘cleanse my mouth’ by taking a big drink from my bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey instead.”
Without all of this context and understanding, the line from the song sounds like a meaningless combination of random words stuck together to appear grammatical in form but with content that seems to make little or no semantic sense to many people. Very much like “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Or perhaps like the phrases in my Old Polish or Silesian interpretation of the text, according to some people.
How many centuries will it take until almost no one will be able to read this line and understand how it makes sense? I will take a guess that the answer will be “less than six centuries”.
We must be prepared for the possibility that this may be the kind of content that we may be dealing with in the text of the Voynich manuscript.