Bird song

Some linguists from MIT took Darwin's observation of an analogy between bird song and human language further along to propose that language could have developed from the "grafting" of  two aspects of communication modeled from birds and other animals. From birds, language got its "expressive" side, and from the rest of the animal kingdom, its "informative" side.

Through a maligned form of association, this hypothesis suddenly reminded me of Zaum, which more or less divided the world of literature into the poetry of known and unknown words, or between known and unknown languages. Or, more precisely still, between recognizable and unrecognizable signs, or between signs that have and do not have "definite" meanings (i.e., semic and asemic texts).

I don't mean to say that Zaum was simply an evolution in the other direction. Whatever its legacy is today would begin within the possibility it opened up stylistically, as a generalized parole in libertà that decenters the dominance of "lemmatized" signs. Any grammatological project we may venture into hence would no longer involve a search for a more authentic, trans-rational, between-men-and-gods kind of language, ornithological or otherwise.

Definitely, conlangs like Esperanto or Lojban and other formal or fictional languages are continuously created because of different technical, technological, social, or literary reasons, but not all without the need for the illusion that any of them has some Edenic or Rousseau-like import. Lojban, for example, was invented to circumvent the ambiguities in meaning that we find in natural languages. This is not a new ambition since analytical philosophy and the development of formal logic. Whether any similar ambition succeeds or fails is an issue now only second to the fact that inherited "natural" languages are somehow always seen to be missing the mark somewhere, and that some kind of supplementary code needs to be created.

These issues make me ask many questions that won't be answered swiftly. Does ambiguity exist among animals and birds when they communicate? Another question: what is the relationship of asemic and aleatory versions of cross-evolutionary machine-style writing like Kervinen's with the world dominance of cybernetic languages (a kind of cyber-Zaum)? Given that languages limit human thought so much, why do we still write or compose as if we can find some semiotic architecture exceeding the combinatory semantics (or logic) of all languages (and thought)? Is there a perfect configuration of signs, known or unknown, that will supersede the limits of all human thought? An angelic or alien language, glossolalia, post-Babel or post-babble? Through here, indeed, we now enter the realm of fiction and fantasy.