Skip to main content

more fun with etymology

From the Greek Wiktionary definition for φατικός,

Ο Πολωνός ανθρωπολόγος που εισήγαγε τον όρο το 1900, ορμόμενος από λέξεις όπως εμφατικός και αποφαντικός, θεώρησε ότι η λέξη που προτίμησε προέρχεται από το φαίνω (καθιστώ φανερό, φέρνω στο φως), ενώ άλλοι θεωρούν ετυμολογικά ότι η λέξη είναι πιο συγγενής με τον τύπο φατός (και φατειός) του ρήματος φημί, όπως το αποφατικός.

Which Google translates to:

The Polish anthropologist who introduced the term in 1900, ormomenos words as emphatic and deliberative considered that the word preferred from the seems (I make clear, I bring to light), while others consider etymologically the word is more akin to the type fatou (and fateios) and the verb fimios, like apophatic.

That's interesting, and mostly confirms what we already know.  The one hint at the end that's a bit new is the term αποφατικός, which Wiktionary says "expresses refusal."  The antonym of that term is καταφατικός, which affirms, says yes, or agrees.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Extra channels

In the following, I would like to clarify the connection between channel and context and concomitantly the difference between metachannel and parachannel . Paul Kockelman urges us "to notice the fundamental similarity between codes and channels" (2011: 725) but instead of that purported fundamental similarity points out the contrast between them. I argue that context , or objects and states of affairs (Bühler 2011[1934]: 35), demonstrate a closer relationship to channel than to code. This is largely because the first three fundamental relations, sender or subject , context or object , and receiver or addressee , belong to Bühler's original organon model while code , contact and message , which were previously implicit in the organon model, are made explicit as additions to the model by Jakobson (1985[1976c]). Thus the most productive approach would be to pair a component from the original organon model with an additional component in the language functions model.

Metacommunicative cues

In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a

RJ schematized

I schematized Roman Jakobson's definition of the phatic function, and upon looking at it for a while thought that I either drew a fish or a side-view of Jakobson's face, the left column being either a back-fin or Einsteinian scientist-hair, and the upper triangle in both cases serving as an eye. I'm slowly making progress with the paper on RJ's phatic function.