35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
hich in turn divides the twenty-two consonants (body/vessel of the monistic goddess) at the Gemini Gate, with the end product generating that magical/mystical number pi — 3.14 (see Pellar, 2009). The idea of the consonant as the vessel/body of the vowel/light/understanding god within, is seen in the Ugaritic alphabet, which is composed of thirty letters, symbolizing the days of the moon, which was the vessel of light, and which contained in it the twenty-two letters of the solar zodiac (see Pellar, 2009). In Hinduism, the word vāk is “the mother of knowledge, the seven vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet are still called the seven wombs, being the seven mothers of speech” (Chevalier and Gheerbrant, 1996: 1122). According to Demetrius (Godwin, 1991: 22) of Hellenistic Greece, the Egyptians had seven sacred vowels that they used in singing in praise to the gods. Along with the alphabet, these seven sacred vowels were carried into the Phoenician/Hebrew and then Greek alphabets. This concept of the seven vowels is further seen in the number seven being the gate of the goddess in the astro-alphabet (see Pellar, 2009), and mirrors the seven stars of Ursa Minor in the womb of the Great Goddess/Bull. Godwin also notes that Eusebius of Caesarea (260–340 AD), quoting Porphyry, remarks that Apollo, the sun god, is the “King of the seven notes, known to all” (Godwin, 1991: 21). Furthermore, Godwin, quoting Eusebius, remarked that … it was with the seven vowels that the Jews sought to express the name of God which cannot be spoken, but that they reduced these to four for the use of the multitude. He draws a parallel with a saying he remembers from one of the Wise Men of Greece (who may well be Porphyry again): “The seven vowels celebrate me, the great imperishable God, indefatigable father of all. I am the imperishable lyre, having tuned the lyric songs of the celestial vortex.” This is a formulation of the beautiful doctrine of astral paganism, according to which the Sun is the leader of the choir of planets, and Apollo’s lyre a symbol of the harmony of the spheres. It is Franz Dornseiff, however, who again cautions against too cut-and-dried an interpretation of ancient correspondences. He cites an invocation in one of the magical papyri of “α ε η ι ο υ ω that rise in the night,” heavenly bodies which evidently do not include the sun; they must be the seven stars of the Great Bear, he says, which, in a tradition that goes back to Babylonian times, are confused with the seven planets and even called by their names. This ambiguity — which is the same as that between the Hyperborean and the Delian Apollo — was recognized by the Sabaeans of Harran, that mysterious Hermetic sect which survived into Muslim times. They had seven temples dedicated to the planets, and seem to have originated the correspondences of planets to metals, but their worship also included a liturgy addressed to the Pole Star, around which the Great Bear turns. (Godwin, 1991: 21–22).
It is important to note that, though unknown to Dornseiff at the time, the seven vowels that rise in the night could indeed correspond to the seven planets, the sun, and the seven stars of Ursa Minor or Major, for the monistic goddess as the Great Bear/Bull, as previously noted, gave birth to the sun as the logos/seed/son via the action of the celestial pole. They are not mutually exclusive. The “opening of the mouth ceremony,” the most important ritual in ancient Egypt, which uses an adze in the shape of the seven stars of Ursa Major, and which also used a bull’s leg (which, again, is none other than the front leg of the Great Bull, Ursa Major, Meskhetiu, as discussed in Part One, with references to the research of Relke/Ernest) to open the mouth of one who is deceased so that he may speak, hear, breathe, see, etc., mirrors the importance of the seven sacred vowels as the seven sacred stars of the god (possibly referring to Ptah, who created all things via the word) in that they form the Word behind the words of the deceased. As the Egyptian[...]
s nested seed shape in the form of the bull, which matches the bull god Osiris as the bull wheat, is also seen in several other Celestial diagrams, such as Ramses II, Pedamenope, etc.). Those nested seeds, which are connected to, and arose from, the new head of the wheat plant (thus Aries, the vernal equinox at the time, is visually shown as a sheep in Senemut — the new “head” of wheat just prior to the more mature bull head of wheat of Taurus) are akin to the “three powers” and are thus the nested seeds of sound, of the nested “invisible mystery” within the vowel/breath that is in turn, within the Word as seed/sun/son that will be born from the Gemini Gate at the harvest of the wheat, which the sequence in Senemut clearly shows (as discussed in several of my papers, this link between the “son” and “seed” and “sound” and the zodiac is also demonstrated in the Chinese ganzhi in the start of the Earthly Branches, the Rat, which is equivalent to the start of the earlier Western zodiac, as Aries, and like the Western zodiac, it symbolizes the new head of wheat, or rice in China, that emerges in spring. For the character Zi, Rat, not only has the shape of Aries, but, like earlier Western symbolism, is linked in meaning to “child,” “seed,” and “word.” See SPP 328, p. 87).
As discussed in the recent Language Log posts on the Dodecahedron, the Gnostic texts also discuss the idea of the “Monad” and the unfolding the cosmos from the “silence” (the idea of the monad, once again, comes out of Greece, and most likely, Egypt. It’s also interesting that word “monad” is also a “Greek feminine noun” — thus, there’s a possible residual connection to the earlier Great Goddess, the creatrix, of the Neolithic and Upper Paleolithic, that is still seen in the Rigveda of India. According to the Devi Sukta (10.125), the “eternal and infinite consciousness” is feminine — “I created earth and heaven and reside as their inner controller. On the world’s summit, I bring forth sky the Father. . .” But more importantly, she is also associated with Word, and she alone speaks it from that eternal and infinite consciousness: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that Gods and mean alike shall welcome”). Furthermore, like the 12 sides of the dodecahedron being linked by Plato to the 12 constellations of the zodiac, as well as to the Gods of the Aeons (see LL post Roman Dodecahedra Between Southeast Asian and England, Part 4), the Hebreu Primitif also links the 12 zodiac signs to gods (12 gods of Greece-Rome, and the one Hebrew god Jehovah) and to numbers and sounds — the letters of the Hebrew (Phoenician) alphabet that contain the vowels/breath of divinity.
But more importantly, in the Gospel of the Egyptians, note the focus and emphasis of “silence”: “Three powers came forth from him; they are the Father, the Mother, (and) the Son, from the living silence, what came forth from the incorruptible Father. These came forth from the silence of the unknown Father.” That is, there was first “silence,” and then non-silence — sound (the vowels and then the Word), with the gods themselves, the Aeons, being composed of both “numbers and sounds.” Those Aeons also form male/female “pairs” that are called “syzygies,” which, might be correlated to the male/female couplets that compose the 22 consonants of the alphazodiac. That is, the Aeons form 15 pairs of 30 each, which might be correlated to the 30 earlier lunar houses (28 lunar mansions in China). As mentioned in several places in my published papers, the solar alphazodiac is merely a later subset of that earlier lunar one.
Some similar ideas regarding sound and the Word into flesh/matter are within my paper SPP 263:
Zodiac/Alphabet (Word into Flesh) [pp. 117-118]
a.) Figures of the constellations of the zodiac are extensions of the same astro-theological processes within the circumpolar region (Pellar, 2009). Thus, the arrow of Sagittarius is symbolic of the axis mundi, as is the arrow of the hu[...]
Language Log
Logos: The sacred phonology, mathematics, and agriculture of the alphazodiac
[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]
. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. — Hebreu Primiti
The Consonants of Command
Dear Professor Mair,
In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,
the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].
In that endnote, I did not elaborate much at all. But looking at it again, what’s particularly interesting regarding this particular passage, which is a subset of “the holy book of the Egyptians about the great invisible Spirit,” are the elements of Pi: 22/7 = 3.14 (22 repeats of 7 powers, 3 powers), which, in turn, is part of the structure of the alphazodiac (22 consonants joining at the 7th letter/Gemini Gate = 3.14), which also comes out of Egypt (i.e., its roots, as I have tried to show in my work, are in the Egyptian Celestial Diagrams of the Pharaohs. Furthermore, this Gnostic text is based on Greek ideas, which, when taken in context of Pythagorus’ Solids, appear to also have their roots in Egyptian ideas — as Pythagorus and other Greek scholars studied in Egypt). To speculate a bit, the three powers of the Gospel of the Egyptians, thus, could correlate to Osiris, Isis, and Horus, who, no doubt, praise the “hidden invisible mystery” within the Word/Sun/Seed. Thus, it is their “praise” or breath that brings forth the seven “sacred vowels” that give rise to the “Word” itself. But critically, as I mentioned in SPP 263, p.117 (and below), the Hebreu Primitif, states,
The Hebrew letters are the ciphers or signs of the zodiac, from which the words of the Hebrew language itself are formed; the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. The constellations of the Zodiac formed the twelve great gods of Graeco-Roman antiquity, corresponding to the twelve stations of the Sun, and these constellations were distinguished by the letters from Aleph to Thau; attributes or energies of the same divinity, they are so to speak the pearls which have formed the necklace of the Zodiac, and the vowels corresponding to the seven planets which surround the Sun are the voices which give sound or color to the consonants; they form the word, and the word is the Divinity itself. The priests of Abydos would recite the myst[...]
Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Language Phrase Day 12: Bore Draw
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 12): Day 12, and the football language post for Euro 24 today is bore draw which is conneted to the England versus Slovenia match. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of football cliches. If […]
The post Euro 2024 Football Language Phrase Day 12: Bore Draw appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
jolly (someone) along
To encourage someone (to do something), especially in a positive, cheerful manner. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
old man
father, husband, boyfriend
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Language Log
Acronymity
Abner Li, "Google Messages adopts double FAB to promote Gemini", 9to5google 6/26/2024:
Gemini in Google Messages exited beta at I/O 2024 last month and now features a double FAB design.
In a rather prominent push, the “Start chat” floating action button now has a smaller Gemini FAB just above it. When you’re dealing with the rectangle, the square looks misaligned. Everything is visually correct upon scrolling.
There’s some precedent for this look in Google Drive where the “New” FAB is paired with a scan shortcut. However, the camera disappears when scrolling.
I guessed after reading this passage that FAB is an acronym for "floating action button". Or rather, it can be. In a tech context it might also be (an abbreviation for) "A manufacturing plant which fabricates items, particularly silicon chips", which is how I first tried to interpret that article's headline. And it could also be at least 73 other acronyms, initialisms, or abbreviations, according to acronymfinder.com — a list that doesn't yet include "floating action button".
In fact, most 3-letter sequences have already got several interpretations Out There, as discussed in "Ambigous initialisms", 7/21/2019. Here are 10 chosen literally at random, following by the number of interpretations available at acronymfinder.com:
MVX 2
XJR 1
IMC 143
FUH 0
WAW 19
ZXW 0
RVD 24
AVB 26
JJI 4
ESQ 9
And acronym-finder is far from complete, so that its 0 counts are often actually Out There — in this case FUH and ZXW.
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Language Log
Franklin (1773) on colonial obligations
A couple of days ago, I did a web search to find out how late the King of Prussia mall was open, and landed on the Wikipedia page for the "census-designated place" King of Prussia, which (as I knew) includes lots of stuff besides the mall. Reading the article and following links, as one does, I learned something new, namely why in the world an "edge city of Philadelphia" was named after Frederick the Great.
It all started with a tavern:
The eponymous King of Prussia Inn was originally constructed as a cottage in 1719 by the Welsh Quakers William and Janet Rees, founders of Reesville. The cottage was converted to an inn in 1769 and did a steady business in colonial times as it was approximately a day's travel by horse from Philadelphia. Settlers headed west to Ohio would sleep at the inn on their first night on the road. In 1774 the Rees family hired James Berry to manage the inn, which henceforth became known as "Berry's Tavern". General George Washington first visited the tavern on Thanksgiving Day in 1777 while the Continental Army was encamped at Whitemarsh; a few weeks later Washington and the army bivouacked at nearby Valley Forge.
Exactly how and when the name changed is apparently not entirely clear. But the reason for the change is clearly connected to Benjamin Franklin's 1773 satirical essay "An Edict by the King of Prussia", prepared "For the Public Advertiser" (and perhaps published there?).
That document argues that just as America's colonial ties to Britain give the British the right to impose taxes, duties, and regulations, so the Germanic origins of settlers in Britian gives Frederick analogous rights:
WHEREAS it is well known to all the World, that the first German Settlements made in the Island of Britain, were by Colonies of People, Subjects to our renowned Ducal Ancestors, and drawn from their Dominions, under the Conduct of Hengist, Horsa, Hella, Uffa, Cerdicus, Ida, and others; and that the said Colonies have flourished under the Protection of our august House, for Ages past, have never been emancipated therefrom, and yet have hitherto yielded little Profit to the same. And whereas We Ourself have in the last War fought for and defended the said Colonies against the Power of France, and thereby enabled them to make Conquests from the said Power in America, for which we have not yet received adequate Compensation. And whereas it is just and expedient that a Revenue should be raised from the said Colonies in Britain towards our Indemnification; and that those who are Descendants of our antient Subjects, and thence still owe us due Obedience, should contribute to the replenishing of our Royal Coffers, as they must have done had their Ancestors remained in the Territories now to us appertaining: WE do therefore hereby ordain and command, That from and after the Date of these Presents, there shall be levied and paid to our Officers of the Customs, on all Goods, Wares and Merchandizes, and on all Grain and other Produce of the Earth exported from the said Island of Britain, and on all Goods of whatever Kind imported into the same, a Duty of Four and an Half per Cent. ad Valorem, for the Use of us and our Successors. — And that the said Duty may more effectually be collected, We do hereby ordain, that all Ships or Vessels bound from Great Britain to any other Part of the World, or from any other Part of the World to Great Britain, shall in their respective Voyages touch at our Port of KONINGSBERG, there to be unladen, searched, and charged with the said Duties.
[…]
We flatter Ourselves that these Our Royal Regulations and Commands will be thought just and reasonable by Our much-favoured Colonists in England, the said Regulations being copied from their own Statutes of 10 and 11 Will. III. C. 10. — 5 Geo. II. C. 22. — 23 Geo. II. C. 29. — 4 G[...]
Idiom of the Day
Johnny One-Note
Someone who repeatedly expresses or maintains a strong opinion on a single or a few particular subjects. Primarily heard in US, Canada. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
grinding
dancing in a sexually arousing way
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still taught in American schools.
At that point, the text comes to a close. It is followed by a gallery of fourteen sentence diagrams gathered from the works discussed.
Visualization is a key component of Buddhist thought and practice, e.g., here. "Visual metaphors, visionary literature, and visualization practices are pervasive in Buddhist traditions. Vision and seeing are dominant metaphors for knowledge, awakening, and insight." Perhaps Western grammarians were also inspired by becoming familiar with this aspect of Eastern thought as well.
An added treat are links to eight visually oriented "related collections", several of which I find highly attractive: Mnemonic Alphabet of Jacobus Publicius (1482) A Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909) Growing Things: A Film Lesson in “Nature Study” (1928) Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition) Punctuation Personified (1824) The History of Ink: Including its Etymology, Chemistry, and Bibliography (1860) Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880) Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein's Monster
Until I set about preparing this post, I had never heard of The Public Domain Review. Now I must say that it has found a soft spot in my heart. Selected readings
* "Sentence length and syntactic complexity" (3/29/22)
* "Sentence diagramming" (1/1/14)
* "Personal and intellectual history of sentence diagrams" (10/14/04)
* "Diagramming Sentences" (4/14/13)
* "Putting grammar back in grammar schools: A modest proposal" (12/25/13)
* "School grammar, Round two" (12/30/12)
* "Diagrammatic excitement" (3/27/12)
* "Defiant diagramming" (10/5/08)
* "Not just Oxford commas" (6/25/24)
* "Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Vietnamese dictionaries" (2/7/22)
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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distance from the major section. Playing a kind of grammarian god, Brown uses John 1 to demonstrate how his system can cleave sentential flesh. (In the beginning) [was the word] (and the word was) (with God) (and the word was God).
Barnard's presentation is so highly logographic and isolating that it almost makes me feel that he was influenced by common misunderstandings of the the Sinographic script, which puts him quite at odds with the formidable (pronounce it in French, please) lawyer and linguist, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (born Pierre-Étienne du Ponceau, June 3, 1760 – April 1, 1844), whose revolutionary A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese Writing System, published in Philadelphia by the American Philosophical Society in 1838 (almost the same time as Barnard's tome), focused on the sounds and words of the Chinese writing system, not on its alleged universal, ideographic nature.
Whereas Brown sought to reform an educational system plagued by “simplifiers”, “plagiarists”, and “new modellers”, Frederick A. P. Barnard’s Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (1836) reported from the classroom on syntactic techniques “advantageously used in the instruction of the deaf and dumb”. His system for diagramming sentences is mildly pictographic, based off of six principal symbols for marking substantive, attributive, assertional, influential, connective, and temporal words and phrases. Each symbol, in turn, can accommodate a host of diacritical marks to further specify its function. In the sentence “A man goes into a house”, for example, “man” is marked with a vertical line, signifying the noun’s substantive property. Two feet are added to the line since “man” is the subject of this sentence, “the supporter of what follows”. Because the word is in the nominative case, it also receives a diagonal, accent aigu–like appendage, pointing the action forward. “Goes into” necessitates a confluence of connected marks that resemble the Eye of Horus. First, we start with a horizontal line, the attributive verb. Since it contains an intransitive assertion, it receives a v-shaped hat, whose right arm curls in on itself, signifying “the attribute exists merely in the agent himself, without regard to any outward object”. Interlocked to this arm is a spiral-like symbol that accounts for the preposition “into”, “a connecting link”. “House”, in turn, looks a lot like “man” — built on a substantive vertical line — but with a grave accent instead of acute, symbolizing the objective case: receiving the action thrown forward by the nominative subject. Curiously, whereas Brown turns toward scripture for his corpus, Barnard’s examples frequently express physical violence or categorical division, mirroring the two-fold sense of “articulation” that his system embodies: both a means of expression and a form of dissection at the joints. “The victor exceedingly rejoices in his conquest”; “He is about to tear a book”; “Negroes are habitant in Africa”.
Goodness gracious! Barnard's "mildly pictographic" system even has six principal symbols for marking different types of words and phrases. This reminds me of the liùshū 六書 ("six writings", i.e., six types of character composition) of the Chinese lexicographer Xu Shen (c. 58–c. 148 AD): pictographic, indicatives, ideographs, phonetic compounds, mutual explanatory, and phonetic loans (source). Of course, Barnard's six principal symbols for types of words and phrases and Xu Shen's six types of character composition are quite different in their referents, but so uncannily similar in their application it's possible that, if Barnard had looked into what was known about the construction of the Chinese writing system at his time, he might have been vaguely inspired by some of the basic concepts of Xu Shen.
Three years later, Oliver B. Peirce’s The Grammar of the English Language (1839) came on the scene with a fervent rhetoric that reads as hyperbolic even among hot-headed grammarians. “On this imperishable foundation — this rock of[...]
Language Log
Eggcorn of the week: "checks every block"
"Significant energy source found under US-Mexico border", KXAN 6/23/2024 [emphasis added]:
Researchers have found a significant source of geothermal energy underneath the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, which could lead to promising clean energy developme
nt in the rural region. […]
“There’s a thin, 10- to 15-mile-wide region that runs parallel or along the Rio Grande that has very high heat by at least by most standards, and even in the interior part of the county, which is probably two-thirds of the county,” Ken Wisian, head of the research team, told NewsNation. […]
“Geothermal has a lot to offer rural communities, underserved communities, something like Presidio checks every block on the very large federal investment in production in tax credits on renewable energy,” Wisian said.
Wiktionary has an entry for tick all the boxes, with the gloss "(idiomatic) To fulfill all the requirements, especially as itemized in a list; to have all the needed characteristics; to complete all the steps in a process in an orderly manner", and cross-references to the source of the metaphor checkbox or tickbox:
1. A space on a paper form that can be optionally filled with a check mark.
2. (graphical user interface) An on-screen box that can be optionally filled with a check mark, to enable or disable a setting.
The 19-billion-word NOW corpus has 342 hits for "checks every box", all of which are consistent with the Wiktionary entry, e.g.
That nickel position is obviously a starting spot in today's NFL, and he checks every box teams are looking for in that role.
If you love being able to stretch out on a sectional-style sofa but also want the option of a pullout bed, this sleeper sofa checks every box.
He checks every box in general manager Andrew Berry's "tough, smart, and accountable" mantra
That same source has 0 hits for "checks every block" — though the 14-billion-word iWeb corpus, along with its 24 hits for "checks every box", has 2 hits for "checks every block". But neither of those connects to the same check-box metaphor — rather, they're references to "blocks" as digital units in computer systems:
What you want is to make sure that all of the features of the hardware execute the software correctly. Go through the PCB and develop a test that checks every block. First, check that the device powers up.
During null block compression, RMAN checks every block to see if it has ever contained data. Blocks that have never contained data are not backed up. Blocks that have contained data, either currently or in the past, are backed up.
A web search for {"checks every block"} adds links connected to blocks in Minecraft. Like Process Control Blocks and file-system blocks, Minecraft blocks are a quasi-metaphorical abstraction from material blocks of ice or stone, but there's no easy metaphorical path from there to a "fulfill all the requirements" idiom.
But the metaphorical basis of idiom gets bleached out over time, so maybe the the quoted researcher has substituted block for box in his mental lexicon for the check-box idiom. Given long experience with similar journalistic episodes, I think it's more likely that the journalist misquoted him, either because of their own mental lexicon, or through a slip of the fingers in writing the story. Either way, it's a case where an eggcorn-ish word substitution has taken place, even though the original version retains an accessible metaphor that the substituion lacks.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pull over
If you're driving a car and you pull over, you move over to the side of the road and stop.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day
deference
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 28, 2024 is:
deference \DEF-uh-runss\ noun
Deference refers to respect and esteem that is appropriate to show to someone, such as a superior or elder. Something done in deference to, or out of deference to, someone or something is done in order to show respect for the opinions or influence of that person or thing.
// The children were taught to show proper deference to their elders.
// In deference to those who voted against the change, we'll be having another meeting to discuss how we can mitigate people's concerns.
See the entry >
Examples:
"The new bridge over the Colorado River linking Bullhead City and Laughlin officially has a name. It will be called Silver Copper Crossing.... The formal name was chosen in deference to the two states the bridge connects: Nevada is the Silver State and Arizona is the Copper State." — Bill McMillen, Mohave Valley Daily News (Bullhead City, Arizona), 21 May 2024
Did you know?
As you might have guessed, deference is related to the verb defer, meaning "to delegate" or "to submit to another's wishes." But we need to be specific when we tell you that both these words come from the Medieval Latin verb dēferre, which means "to convey, show respect, or submit to a decision," because there are two defers in the English language. The defer related to deference is typically used with to in contexts having to do either with allowing someone else to decide or choose something, as in "I'll defer to the dictionary," or with agreeing to follow someone else's decision, wish, etc., as when a court defers to precedent. The other defer traces to the Latin verb differre, meaning "to carry away in varying directions, spread abroad, postpone, delay, be unlike or distinct." That defer is typically used in contexts having to do with delaying or postponing something, as in "a willingness to defer the decision until next month."
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nter Orion, who lifts his hand up into the Gemini gate/horizon of the goddess within the Milky Way/celestial waters on the ecliptic (the birthplace of the sun/son/seed/Logos).
b). Figures of the constellations correlate to the letters of Phoenician/Hebrew alphabet, which in turn is an extension of the twenty-four uniconsonant hieroglyphs of Egypt. Unknown to me until just recently, Adolphe Lethierry-Barrois (died 1863), no doubt following up on the same seminal idea in the Sefer Yetzriah, wrote in the opening of his posthumous Hebreu Primitif,
The Hebrew letters are the ciphers or signs of the zodiac, from which the words of the Hebrew language itself are formed; the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. The constellations of the Zodiac formed the twelve great gods of Graeco- Roman antiquity, corresponding to the twelve stations of the Sun, and these constellations were distinguished by the letters from Aleph to Thau; attributes or energies of the same divinity, they are so to speak the pearls which have formed the necklace of the Zodiac, and the vowels corresponding to the seven planets which surround the Sun are the voices which give sound or color to the consonants; they form the word, and the word is the Divinity itself. The priests of Abydos would recite the mystic hymn of the seven vowels, or the name of Jehovah which unites them. It is through the word or Son of God that all creation was made, for the voice and the vowel give life to the consonants, just as the sun gives color to bodies, to matter; and the consonants or radical letters, animated by the vowels, form the roots that compose the primitive, monosyllabic language, just as the koua contain the system of the Chinese language. (Godwin, 1991: 63).
c). Plato in Timaeus noted that the Demiurge created the universe from two circles that he joined “in the form of the letter X” (quoted from Ulansey, 1991: 47). As noted in my paper “On the Origins of the Alphabet,” the alphabet is composed of two loops (circles) that form an “X” at their intersection, and has two letters with an “X” in them, Taw and Teth, both symbolizing the solstices (the winter/Capricorn and summer/Cancer solstices respectively), and thus the reversal of the direction of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet at those two letters (mirroring the reversal of the sun on the horizon when it hits the solstices). The “X” referred to by Plato is the “X” formed by the intersection of the circle of the celestial equator and the circle of the ecliptic (the two poles at their center: the north celestial pole and the pole of the ecliptic, the latter having a “center,” by definition, in the center of the sun).
And also from SPP 263:
Thought as Spiritual Text [pp. 153-159]
Breath/Vowel/Logos. The Word behind the word. The idea of the god or divine wisdom within the spoken word must be as old as humankind itself, and must have informed its early rituals and astro-theological constructs and images. This is seen in the written record, at least, from the ancient god Ptah in Egypt who created all things via the word, to Thoth, “Lord of the Sacred Word,” to Hermes, the messenger of the gods (the Greek counterpart of Thoth), to the Christian Gnostics, such as the Ophitic Christian sect, the Perates, who, as earlier mentioned, believed that the cosmos consisted of the Father, Matter, and the Son/Logos, or Marcus, who said that the seven vowels, uniting in harmony, rise to glorify God as the world builder, and that echoes of this hymn ascend to the Divine Logos and then “descend to earth to model and generate the souls of men” (Godwin, 1991: 25). It is not an accident that those seven vowels, which are cradled within the twenty-two consonants as vessels (like the horizon symbol Ahket cradles the sun/head), symbolize the seventh letter of the astro-alphabet, Zaiyin, w[...]
ic hymn of the seven vowels, or the name of Jehovah which unites them.”
Thus, not only does this directly link the gods and the zodiac to the Hebrew alphabet (and, thus, the earlier Phoenician), but, more importantly, it links the Hebrew letters to the earlier priests of Egypt (where the Phoenician alphabet was ultimately derived. Note that in my first paper, SPP 196, I discussed important connections between the Zefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, and the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabet/alphazodiac, and in my latest paper, SPP 341, I strengthened those connections by showing a strong relationship between the Phoenician alphabet and the zodiac by way of the Phoenician author Sanchuniathon, etc). Those Egyptian priests, like the three powers in the Gospel of the Egyptians, give praise to divinity, as they recite the “seven vowels” that compose the “name of Jehovah which unites them,” the “word” or “divinity itself. Thus, like in the Gospel of the Egyptians, from the silence of divinity, the “hidden invisible mystery,” comes “sound” — the vowels, which unfold into the “Word” of God.
But more specifically, it is the son, Horus, who is the culmination of that mystery — the sound and light/color and matter. Thus, Isis and the dead Osiris (via a pre-Christian immaculate conception) are needed to couple to produce the son, who is none other than the sun itself, as well as the new select wheat that rose from the body of the harvested father/Osiris as wheat. Horus is also the new Pharaoh of Egypt, who, as king, carries within “his bosom” those seven sacred vowels/breath from which to issue his edicts to Egypt. His breath, composed of those 7 vowels of light, will be carried within the consonants of his commands, and will thus manifest in the divine and eternal “Word” (i.e., the “hidden invisible mystery” at the center is nested within the father, who is nested within the mother who is nested within the son, which is akin to the “hidden invisible mystery” at the center being nested within the breath/vowel, which is nested within the consonants, which is nested within the Word). The impotent and mortal Seth will nourish the bodies of Egypt (“he who causes to live”) as the seed that is eaten, but Horus, the living Pharaoh, via the Word as seed/sun, will nourish the minds of Egypt as the select ruling power and eternal Word/sun/seed of Egypt.
But what’s vital in regard to this is that the myth was enacted in the sky first — as above, so (w) below. Thus, from the northern womb of Nut in the circumpolar region was born the sun/seed/Word at the southern Gemini Gate, the 7th letter out of the 22. As the exit to the Duat/Heaven/Womb, it is a symbol of the birth of the eternal sun as the Word as the seed passing through all 22 consonants (the 11 couplets that comprise the 11 houses of the zodiac) during the course of the year and the cycle of the wheat (with the animals of some of the those houses of the zodiac comprising the various stages of the wheat, as discussed in SPP 328 and SPP 341). Thus, it makes sense that each of the seven vowels of the “hidden invisible mystery” are repeated 22 times. This is due to the vowel symbolizing the sacred breath that passes through the consonants. As it all mirrors the cycle of the sun and the cycle of the wheat during the year, this means that all seven vowels/breath of divinity must pass through all the 22 couplets of the alphazodiac. Those seven vowels are then born from the Gemini Gate (Duat), the seventh Phoenician consonant Zayin, as the “Word” — the son, Horus, as the sun/seed that will then give rise to, and nourish, matter — flesh. It’s also relevant that the Egyptian Celestial Diagram of Senemut (see Figure 16B, SPP 328, p. 51) shows a seed-like shape at the heart of the hidden bovine on the south wall that I’ve shown to be the Hyades in Taurus — the Phoenician letter “Aleph.” That seed-shaped “A” (which is the head of Taurus, which itself is shaped as, and forms the origin of, the letter “A”) is composed of three “nested” seeds (thi[...]
Learn English Through Football
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 16: Whimper
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase (Day 16): Whimper The knockout phase of the competition has started and day 16’s Euro 24 football language is ‘whimper’, from the Italy v Switzerland match. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of football cliches. […]
The post Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 16: Whimper appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go off (1)
If something goes off, it stops working because of a power cut.
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Word of the Day
delirious
Definition: (adjective) Marked by uncontrolled excitement or emotion; ecstatic.
Synonyms: excited, frantic, mad, unrestrained.
Usage: A crowd of delirious baseball fans cheered the home team to a shutout victory.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Everyone Was Grinding (Bless These Braces) #shorts
"It felt like too much" says Joanna Hausmann.
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eo. I. C. 11. and from other equitable Laws made by their Parliaments, or from Instructions given by their Princes, or from Resolutions of both Houses entered into for the GOOD Government of their own Colonies in Ireland and America.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
number among
to include something or someone in a class or group of similar things or people
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Word of the Day
farcical
Definition: (adjective) Broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce.
Synonyms: ludicrous, ridiculous.
Usage: The clown, with his farcical exuberance, rainbow striped hair, and poorly timed gags, drew enthusiastic applause and laughter from the audience.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Playing With Dolls In Middle School (Bless These Braces) #shorts
"Everyone else was like, 'I'm going to try to have sex this year‚' and that was not on my radar."
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eternal endurance — I rear my superstructure, the edifice of scientific truth, the temple of Grammatical consistency.” Far less systematic than Barnard, Peirce arranged his sentences with a chain-link structure: assertives and relatives (verbs and prepositions) connect larger subject and object circles whose articles are attached to these nouns like keys on a ring. The visual conceit is apparent and didactic: appendant clauses are literally appended one onto the next; if one link grammatically falters, the whole chain of meaning becomes undone.
Such overwhelming confidence in the truth value of grammar is breathtaking!
God (the trunk of der Grammatikbaum) hath spoken.
Before “syntactic trees” became common parlance for linguists, Solomon Barrett’s Principles of Grammar (1845) used a similar metaphor and added bark. The frontispiece displays Hebrews 1 as an old-growth hardwood: “God” is the trunk, the predicates “who spake” and “hath spoken” form solid boughs, while prepositional phrases are figured as finer twigs, pruned of all foliage. Ranging beyond his peers into Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and German grammar, Barrett’s arboreal figures suit his interest in language’s branching connections, the root-like structures of etymology and inheritance.
The central role of the tree metaphor is noteworthy in many of these 19th century presentations on grammar visualization.
It is not until Stephen Watkins Clark’s 1847 work, A Practical Grammar, however, that we find a system that strongly resembles sentence diagramming in its modern-day — though quickly fading — guise. Combining the divisional schema of Brown and Barnard with the visual style of Peirce’s scalar links, Clark’s method uses word balloons that resemble, in the words of Kitty Burns Florey, “elaborate systems of propane storage tanks — or possibly invading hordes of Goodyear blimps”. There are twelve general rules and scores of definitions that resemble mathematical proofs. A sentence’s principal elements occupy the highest row. Subject, predicate, object — there is a fixed order of operations. Adjuncts are placed below the words they limit or modify, conjunctions between the terms they join, and pronouns dangle from their antecedents by umbilical cords. Clark’s enduring innovation was attributing properties to “offices” rather than individual words — offices that could be occupied by words, phrases, or even entire sentences. Grammar thus becomes a system of scalable relations rather than a paint-by-numbers tool for classifying parts of speech. “Major grounding ideas still present in modern IC [immediate constituent] analyses and PSG [phrase structure grammar] were already present in Clark’s syntactic conception”, writes Nicolas Mazziotta. Comparing grammar to “the foundation of a building”, Clark gave his students a toolbox for dismantling faulty foundations and properly assembling sentential edifices of their own.
Now we come to the "modern" diagramming with which many of us are familiar.
Like the twisted balloon animals that they resemble, Clark’s annotations floated into his contemporaries’ linguistic consciousness. In Higher Lessons in English (1877), Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellog deflated his bubbles into lines but preserved many of their predecessor’s innovations. Returning to Enlightenment preoccupations, Reed and Kellog begin their treatise with a discussion of the natural language that “we never learned from a grammar or a book of any kind”: “the language of cries, laughter, and tones . . . the language of gestures by the hand, and postures by the body”. While this form of human signification is purely innate, they claim, spoken language (or “Word language”) must be governed by a grammatical “science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language”. Their system and subsequent companion volumes were so popular that, for a time, the pair’s books sold a half-million copies per year. As Richard Hudson notes, the Reed-Kellog system for diagramming sentences is[...]
Language Log
Diagramming: history of the visualization of grammar in the 19th century
Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences. Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review: "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century". This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.
The works collected are the following:
James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).
Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.
Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).
Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).
Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)
Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).
Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).
When I was in high school, we were still doing diagramming like that in Reed and Kellogg (1880), and I loved (almost) every minute of it, although sometimes it was vexatiously challenging to make everything fit in neatly and rigorously.
The text, by Hunter Dukes, is both entertaining and edifying, although the introductory quotation is rather impenetrable:
“Once you really know how to diagram a sentence really know it, you know practically all you have to know about English grammar”, Gertrude Stein once claimed. “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. . . . I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves.”
In my estimation, Stein's sentences would have benefited from the addition of a few commas.
Dukes follows thus:
While one student’s lexical excitement is surely another’s slow death by gerund, Stein cuts to the heart of the grammatical pull. Is grammar prescriptive and conventional, something one learns to impose on language through trial and error? Or do sentences, in a sense, diagram themselves, revealing an innate logic and latent structure in language and the mind? More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.
The collection then proceeds, one book at a time. It is interesting to observe how the explications and illustrations become increasingly clear and sophisticated through the years and decades.
Some highlights:
The history of diagramming sentences in the United States begins with James Brown’s American Grammar (1831). “Language is an emanation from God”, he writes. “As a gift, it claims our servitude; as a science, it demands our highest attention.” … It was in American Grammar that Brown debuted construing as a method for parsing sentences using a system of square and round brackets to isolate major and minor sections. Major sections are “mechanically independent”; minor sections are “mechanically dependent”. Brown called this form of analysis close reading, but construing was only one half of the system. “As construing is a critical examination of the constructive relation between the sections of a sentence, so scanning is a critical investigation of the constructive relation between the words of a section.” Scanning involves ranking minor sections in ascending numerical order based on their relational[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: imperative
This word has appeared in 390 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
Jill of all trades(, master of none)
A woman who is skilled in or adept at a wide variety of tasks or abilities (i.e., the female equivalent of "Jack of all trades"). If used with "master of none," it implies that while competent in a variety of things, she is not highly skilled in a particular one. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
prostration
Definition: (noun) An abrupt failure of function or complete physical exhaustion.
Synonyms: collapse.
Usage: The weakness of the young missionary became so extreme that they had to lay him again on the bed, where a prostration, lasting for several hours, held him like a dead man.
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