The Poetry of Knowledge and the 'Two Cultures' by John G. Fitch

Author:John G. Fitch
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

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Clearly the appeal of rhythm has a bodily basis: children’s rhymes usually sound best when accompanying rhythmic physical activities like skipping or ball-bouncing.

In addition to rhythm and rhyme , the sounds of language are a delight to children. They particularly like onomatopoeic words such as hiccup, zoom, zap, beep and splash. They also enjoy words that express or reinforce their meaning in a physical way: shiny things glisten, gleam and glitter like glass; energetic people have vim and vigour; after a fight one is bashed, bruised and battered. All of these pleasures of language are laid down in the neural pathways of our developing brains from our earliest years. 3

Along with this developing physical pleasure in language , children are also learning to construct, categorise and understand the world through words. They may first apply ‘cows’ to all ‘large animals in the field’, and then learn to discriminate between cows, horses and sheep (Holt 1967 , pp. 58–59): the natural pattern of rough-and-ready action followed by fine-tuning. Similarly, as Aristotle noticed, they may apply ‘father’ first to all men, and ‘mother’ to all women, and only later to one man and one woman 4 ; in this way they learn to discriminate not only cognitively between identities, but also emotionally between types of relationship. When they learn distinctions such as plural/singular and past/present, the learning will typically be accompanied or generated by emotional experience, as we saw in Chapter 6 on ‘human knowledge.’

The processes of learning language and learning about the world go on simultaneously. A person moving to a new city learns the names of the subway stops or bus-stops or main streets, and in the process comes to recognise the special character of different neighbourhoods: as a result, he or she begins to feel at home, in a place that makes sense. If one moves to the country, one learns to distinguish shrubs and trees, so that what began as an undifferentiated mass of greenery takes on meaning, and one learns which plants have edible berries, which have sharp thorns, which announce the presence of water. 5

This learning is possible because words already exist in the culture that discriminate between particular trees and shrubs. Language, then, shapes and forms our understanding of the world. The converse, however, is also true: the world shapes language. There are indeed botanical differences between various trees and shrubs, which our language has evolved to recognise. This interplay between language and the world is well expressed by Barry Lopez (1987, pp. 248–249), writing of the language of the high Arctic:

The Eskimo language reaches its apogee in describing the land and

man’s activity in it … Language is not something man imposes on the

land. It evolves in his conversation with the land—in testing the sea ice

with the toe of a kamik, in the eating of a wild berry, in repairing a sled

by the light of a seal-oil lamp. A long-lived inquiry produces a

discriminating language. The very order of the language, the ecology of

its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind’s intercourse with the

landscape.

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