Re: B. Cthia and Nom Saul Epstein Mon, 21 Apr 1997 14:44:22 -0500 From: Rob Zook Subject: Re: B. Cthia and Nom >At 10:42 PM 4/19/97 -0500, Saul Epstein wrote: >> >>Cthia refers to reality which, expressing my Structuralist leanings, >>I understand as a set of logical relationships. Or to put it another >>way, reality consists of things defined in terms of each other. >>Beyond reality, beyond what we experience and understand, there are >>no things but there are possibilities, undefined and unrelated. It is >>this set which I have previously referred to as Chaos. Rob used the >>wonderful sign, < >, though he may have meant something slightly >>different by it. > >Yes, I did mean that. I like to think of it as chaos as well, >but that also has certain associates with it which restrict >the perception of what actually exists, behind our perceptions. >So I call it < >, since that means nothing in any form of >transcription I know of, and free of any pre-existing >associates. > >One cannot speak of, or ascribe anything to < >, so I will >not try. Whatever one says it "is", it "is' not. I'm glad I understood properly. < > reminds me of the null string, "", and of the brackets meaning "this is a word as its language spells it." But the brackets surround nothing. "This is not even the Idea of Emptiness: there is no sign for it." >>I intend to construct a Vulcan word for this as well, if I don't >>settle on Duane's "a'Tha" as being sufficiently appropriate. >>Previously I have equated chaos with nom, but in my drive to more >>carefully make certain distinctions I'm going to have to reject that. >>Nom means "all," and so I should like to use it to refer to the union >>of cthia and chaos, what we understand and relate to combined with >>what we do not, either because it has no significant intersection >>with us or because we simply lack the [per/con]ceptive capacity. > >Hmm..,my conception of chaos, or < > includes all our conceptions >of it as well. So saying Nom includes cthia and chaos, seems >rather redundent. The sets can't be mapped properly. Everything that participates in cthia also participates in chaos. If I know something you don't, it's my cthia and your chaos. And always of nom. It's a shifty, overlapping mess, is what it is. And all words distort. I just meant that nom includes the real and the unreal, while cthia and chaos are one and the other, respectively. As for conceptions, I'm classifying those as real, no matter how vague, which puts them in cthia. Our conceptions of chaos are actually part of cthia, which is why the moment you say something about chaos you've missed. "The Dao that can be spoken of is not the Dao." >>Note: Duane does not use an apostraphe to spell "cthia," so I've >>stopped doing so. It is also likely that a ZC transcription would be >>"kthia" or "qthia." > >If you assume the letters in cthia use the ZC transcription >method then one would pronouce it ts't'hia. I think. Right. That's why I suggested a ZC transcription of "kthia" because for some reason I think Duane meant a /k/ sound rather than a /ts/. >I still feel >confused by aspirated consonents and what makes an aspirated >t different from "th" sounds in "the" and "thought". If you are a native speaker of SA English, chances are you pronounce an aspirated /t/ every time you say..."time," for instance, or "talk." To really hear it, say such a word but blow hard, much like making an /h/ sound, immediately following the /t/. That's exagerated aspiration, but you may get the idea. /t/ is what's called a stop consonant because at some point during its pronunciation you completely stop the flow of air, allowing pressure to build up which is released when you move on to the next sound. The initial sound of words like "thing" is a fricative consonant: air is never completely stopped, but forced to pass through a space narrow enough to cause audible friction. What makes /t/ and the English "th" sound alike is that the narrowing is caused in both cases by the front and sides of the tongue being raised just inside the upper teeth all around. The stop sound is produced by making a momentary seal with the tongue in this position while the fricative is produced by allowing air to pass through a narrow space between the tip of the tongue and the front teeth. (A similar fricative can be produced by allowing the air to escape instead over the sides of the tongue, as in the Welsh .) Aspirated stops are stops in which the seal is released with noticeable force, which can sound like a following /h/. This is not really anything like the initial segment of "thing." Just because we write a consonant as <_h> doesn't, in English, mean it has anything to do with /h/. >But it >would definitely sound like ts't'hia, or ts'thia if transcribed >using the ZC method. Two apostrophes? Perhaps we should consider using something else to indicate glottal stops, if we're going to use apostrophes to make consonant clusters look more pronouncable. -- from Saul R. 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