Panaesthetics by Daniel Albright

Author:Daniel Albright
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300186628
Publisher: Yale University Press

Marcello is profoundly suspicious of static nouns: he would like to banish solid objects from serious attention by musicians. This makes sense, in that the denotative functions of language have always seemed the least likely to translate into music. On the other hand, what hope is there for creating a language without nouns? Jorge Luis Borges once imagined a language consisting entirely of impersonal verbs:

For them the world is not a concurrence of objects in space; it is a series of independent and incommensurable acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and dialects proceed: there are impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word that corresponds to the word moon, but there is a verb that would be in Spanish lunecer or lunar [“to moonrise,” “to moon”]. They would say The moon rose over the river as Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö … Xul Solar translated it succinctly: … Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned. [“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 1947; ellipsis in the original]12

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