Limits of language
17/04/16 04:45
For generations, our people have taught that language and theology grew up together. In the Old Testament tradition, it has been assumed that theology led language - at least written language. When the time came for our people to have a system of writing down their stories, the stories that they most wanted to record were the stories of the covenant with God and the things that God had done in the lives of the people. As a result, it was necessary for Hebrew to develop a written language that was different from the Egyptian hieroglyphic form. God is a more complex idea demanding a vocabulary that reaches beyond direct depiction in a sketch or symbol. In fact the Hebrew texts of our Bible are filled with many different words for God - even different names for God.
Theology and language grew up together and for most of the journey, theology stayed ahead of language. We were able to pray, talk and sing about God before we were able to write, and when we learned to write the first things that we wrote down were our stories, songs and prayers. It seemed natural that the things we had said would find expression in written language.
That was millennia ago. Much has changed in our use of languages. Much has changed in our ability to read and write. Much has changed in our notions of God and the role of God in our world. Much has changed in our theology.
There was a time when theology was considered to be the queen of the sciences and a study worthy of the highest and best of our thinkers. It was believed that of all the things to study, God was the most difficult and the most important. In the Middle Ages, theology and Sophia (wisdom) were the twins at the top of the definition of a fully educated person.
That also was a long time ago. Much has changed in our understanding of the process of teaching and learning in the intervening years. We have mixed our desire for income and a higher standard of living with our pursuit of an education. We have used financial scales to measure the worth of a person. We have come up with theories of cost-effectiveness and earned income potential. These days the study of theology is often judged to be somehow less rigorous than science or engineering or economics.
Times change. People change.
So it is interesting that the emerging language of our time is not a written language. But to tell that story, it makes sense that we understand a bit about the language of mathematics. Arabic is a supremely logical language. Crafting a sentence in Arabic is similar to making an equation. Every word is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. It important to understand this because much of what we call science and engineering and mathematics was worked out by the Persians in the first century of the common era. Hailed as saviors because they allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem, the Persians were very powerful, very logical, and very interested in numbers. It was a stark contrast to Hebrew, which used the same characters for numbers as the first letters of the alphabet. It was the Persians who developed what we have come to know as Algebra. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Arabic texts containing the basics of Algebra finally made their way to Spain where an attempt to translate them and share the information was undertaken. There was tremendous interest in the translation. There was a problem. The word, Alshshan, for the unknown quantity in an equation, couldn’t be pronounced by Spanish Speakers. The blended “sh” was a foreign sound. So they instead turned to the Greek, which has a “k” sound which they used for a substitute. The letter Chi was used for a substitute for the words Alshshan. When the texts were translated into Latin, the language of scholars, the Roman letter “x” was used as a substitute. Ever since that time, we’ve used “x” to designate the unknown in a mathematical formula.
It is the language of mathematics that has paved the way for the technological innovations of our time. The formula or procedure for solving a problem in our time is known as an algorithm. That word also has Arabic roots. It was derived from the name of Mohammed ibn-Mus al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician who was part of the royal court of Baghdad from 780 to 850. (I realize that it is a long stretch from “al-Khwarizmi” to “algorithm” but words do strange things when translated through multiple different languages. Suffice it to say that Al Gore didn’t invent the algorithm.
Algorithms, however, are the language of our contemporary computers. They are essentially very long and complex formulas. Computers having the ability to make many computations in very short amounts of time can even be programmed to extend or make algorithms themselves. For example, amazon.com programmers developed algorithms in an attempt to use a person’s purchasing history to predict what might interest that person. As the person makes more purchase choices, the algorithm becomes more complex. It doesn’t have the ability to predict the future, but it does have complex ways of remembering the past and detecting patterns.
The language of algorithms has developed a need for incredibly huge amounts of data. Storage of data is a big business.
All of this data, however, is written in a language beyond computer code. It is written in the algorithms used to sift through the data to find specific information.
The reality is that humans have created a language that humans cannot read. We need our machines to know what it means.
Our theology, however, continues to move at an entirely different pace. In the same millennia that mathematics was developed and we learned to build and program machines to speak the language of mathematics our concept of God has not kept pace. There are more than a few people who retain notions from the early centuries of the common era when it comes to theology.
Our language, however, still is a vehicle for conveying meaning. Understanding God continues to be a basic human need. It is not something that will be solved with an algorithm. In fact algorithm may not even be the best language system for talking about God.
It is evident, however, that now that we have developed a language that we ourselves cannot read, we find ourselves in a place where we often fail to find meaning. For that we need to relearn the language of prayer, poetry and story. Those ancient languages definitely require a human touch.
We have learned much. There is still much that remains to be learned.
Theology and language grew up together and for most of the journey, theology stayed ahead of language. We were able to pray, talk and sing about God before we were able to write, and when we learned to write the first things that we wrote down were our stories, songs and prayers. It seemed natural that the things we had said would find expression in written language.
That was millennia ago. Much has changed in our use of languages. Much has changed in our ability to read and write. Much has changed in our notions of God and the role of God in our world. Much has changed in our theology.
There was a time when theology was considered to be the queen of the sciences and a study worthy of the highest and best of our thinkers. It was believed that of all the things to study, God was the most difficult and the most important. In the Middle Ages, theology and Sophia (wisdom) were the twins at the top of the definition of a fully educated person.
That also was a long time ago. Much has changed in our understanding of the process of teaching and learning in the intervening years. We have mixed our desire for income and a higher standard of living with our pursuit of an education. We have used financial scales to measure the worth of a person. We have come up with theories of cost-effectiveness and earned income potential. These days the study of theology is often judged to be somehow less rigorous than science or engineering or economics.
Times change. People change.
So it is interesting that the emerging language of our time is not a written language. But to tell that story, it makes sense that we understand a bit about the language of mathematics. Arabic is a supremely logical language. Crafting a sentence in Arabic is similar to making an equation. Every word is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. It important to understand this because much of what we call science and engineering and mathematics was worked out by the Persians in the first century of the common era. Hailed as saviors because they allowed the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem, the Persians were very powerful, very logical, and very interested in numbers. It was a stark contrast to Hebrew, which used the same characters for numbers as the first letters of the alphabet. It was the Persians who developed what we have come to know as Algebra. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Arabic texts containing the basics of Algebra finally made their way to Spain where an attempt to translate them and share the information was undertaken. There was tremendous interest in the translation. There was a problem. The word, Alshshan, for the unknown quantity in an equation, couldn’t be pronounced by Spanish Speakers. The blended “sh” was a foreign sound. So they instead turned to the Greek, which has a “k” sound which they used for a substitute. The letter Chi was used for a substitute for the words Alshshan. When the texts were translated into Latin, the language of scholars, the Roman letter “x” was used as a substitute. Ever since that time, we’ve used “x” to designate the unknown in a mathematical formula.
It is the language of mathematics that has paved the way for the technological innovations of our time. The formula or procedure for solving a problem in our time is known as an algorithm. That word also has Arabic roots. It was derived from the name of Mohammed ibn-Mus al-Khwarizmi, a mathematician who was part of the royal court of Baghdad from 780 to 850. (I realize that it is a long stretch from “al-Khwarizmi” to “algorithm” but words do strange things when translated through multiple different languages. Suffice it to say that Al Gore didn’t invent the algorithm.
Algorithms, however, are the language of our contemporary computers. They are essentially very long and complex formulas. Computers having the ability to make many computations in very short amounts of time can even be programmed to extend or make algorithms themselves. For example, amazon.com programmers developed algorithms in an attempt to use a person’s purchasing history to predict what might interest that person. As the person makes more purchase choices, the algorithm becomes more complex. It doesn’t have the ability to predict the future, but it does have complex ways of remembering the past and detecting patterns.
The language of algorithms has developed a need for incredibly huge amounts of data. Storage of data is a big business.
All of this data, however, is written in a language beyond computer code. It is written in the algorithms used to sift through the data to find specific information.
The reality is that humans have created a language that humans cannot read. We need our machines to know what it means.
Our theology, however, continues to move at an entirely different pace. In the same millennia that mathematics was developed and we learned to build and program machines to speak the language of mathematics our concept of God has not kept pace. There are more than a few people who retain notions from the early centuries of the common era when it comes to theology.
Our language, however, still is a vehicle for conveying meaning. Understanding God continues to be a basic human need. It is not something that will be solved with an algorithm. In fact algorithm may not even be the best language system for talking about God.
It is evident, however, that now that we have developed a language that we ourselves cannot read, we find ourselves in a place where we often fail to find meaning. For that we need to relearn the language of prayer, poetry and story. Those ancient languages definitely require a human touch.
We have learned much. There is still much that remains to be learned.