There are no handles upon a languageWhereby men take hold of itAnd mark it with signs for its remembrance.It is a river, this language,Once in a thousand yearsBreaking a new courseChanging its way to the ocean.It is mountain effluviaMoving to valleysAnd from nation to nationCrossing borders and mixing.Languages die like rivers.Words wrapped round your tongue todayAnd broken to shape of thoughtBetween your teeth and lips speakingNow and todayShall be faded hieroglyphicsTen thousand years from now.Sing—and singing—rememberYour song dies and changesAnd is not here to-morrowAny more than the windBlowing ten thousand years ago.
Good point, Carl. However, poetry may be a particularly bad way to make points about language change, as Paul Valery says in The Art of Poetry, "poetry can be recognised by its ability to get us to reproduce it in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically."
On the other hand, although poetry has a small transmission error in terms of phonetic reproduction, the fidelity of conceptual interpretation may be a different story. Show me a class of high school English Literature students, and I'll show you eleven different, badly written interpretations.
On the other hand, although poetry has a small transmission error in terms of phonetic reproduction, the fidelity of conceptual interpretation may be a different story. Show me a class of high school English Literature students, and I'll show you eleven different, badly written interpretations.
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