imprecision

this was inspired (partially) by Fr Kenson's RCIA session last thurs. he was supposed to lecture about the order of the mass (think GIRM), but when he touched on the Eucharist, he kinda side-tracked into this tirade against English.

"English is a very poor language. it is simply unable to capture so much of the meaning that Greek, Hebrew and Latin expressed." he then proceeded to tell us how in English, the sentence "A is B" is a much weaker expression of 'being' than the Latin "A est B". "A is B" could mean that A is like B, or B is an attribute of A, or A is a symbolic representation of B. but "A est B" is precise: A is equals to B - in its entirety. so when Christ said "This is my Body" He did not mean the bread is like His body, or the bread is partly His body, or the bread represents His body. He simply meant the bread is equal to His body. which makes the Eucharistic celebration all the more profound!

anyway. i pondered over this exposition of English's one major flaw - imprecision - and realised that this multimodal form of expression is really quite innate; hence the problem of imprecision could actually be underlying the least scrutinised expressions! are we even able to mean what we say when the combination of words allows for 3 different readings? and have these 3 different meanings become so conflated now that we are no longer able to even distinguish them when we wish to? how has this affected our communication?

and when you think about it, English being the most widely used language these days, especially in academia and politics, could it mean that all the cool theories and so-called advances we've made so far in understanding various ideas (in fact, any idea!) have been tempered by this level of imprecision? did we misunderstand anyone somewhere along the way? is that why so much human suffering has dominated modern history since the English empire? or has the conflation of similar meanings actually led to a less rigidly one-track world able to enjoy more satire and parody? is that even a good thing?

language lies at the heart of all communication. communication lies at the heart of all understanding. understanding lies at the heart of all learning. if the language is poor, then the learning cannot get much richer. is that why the Church had resisted translation of the bible for so many centuries? is that why the Protestant Reformation has led to cafeteria Christianity? have we lost our heart in all this mess? learning is the best way for a sinful person to move away from sinfulness - are we failing to utilise the most important advantage of learning?

good stuff for a theological thesis eh? throw in bags of literary criticism, sociolinguistics, and dialectic historicism - poof, you have a complete historical commentary which challenges its very own basis of exposition. how about that.