Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai

Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 11 NAGLIS KARDELIS The University of Vilnius Research areas: Ancient and medieval philosophy, reflection of classical philosophy in contemporary philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, ancient culture, ancient literature, history of ancient languages, civilizations. Lithuanian language The SPARNAI1 For us Lithuanians, the native language is not a burden, a burden of destiny on our shoulders and bending to the ground like a heavy stone. No, these are easy wings that lift us higher than the wings of other languages that we learn later in life. The wings of the native language are lighter because they do not have to be worn on the hands like Icarus […] they give us our own nature and grow on our shoulders, and when we rise high they do not melt like wax. It is our natural wealth wings that lift us to spiritual heights and carry us to the farthest horizons of meaning. Unfortunately, we often forget that we have these wonderful wings of the spirit, and we drag our mother tongue through the field of life like a heavy stone. Not only ordinary mortals, oppressed by the pressures of everyday life, but also scholars of language and writing - those who must fly on the wings of language - often think too much about language, saying that language is the simplest means of communication, because that is its main function. What is nykus and seklus is a representation of the nature of language, because it's hard to grasp when you consider that the word "communication", which comes from the Latin verb communicatio, which means "to share, to communicate, to pass on, to convey", reveals that communication is a formal sharing of what we are not obliged to do to others: it's a sharing of something that can be shared, but most often it's a formal, unconscious relationship. In addition, it would be too little to recognize or overemphasize only the cognitive, cognitive, function of language: the meaning of language should be limited to the field of knowledge alone. This article was published in the journal Metai, and its fragments should be read in the morning of May 8, 2017. NAGLIS KARDELIS 12 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI we would not properly understand the nature of language and underestimate the value of these wings of the spirit for the person and the nation. When we think of language from an ontological point of view, when we emphasize its rootedness in being, we are no longer talking about communication - a communication based solely on the transmission of pure information - but about communion - a true and complete communion, a communion of people on a level that commits us to the fullness of our being and our spiritual self. These are the real tiriama dvasinė bendrystė, apie kurią tyliais išmintingais žodžiais, be įmanttheoretical concepts of the native language, according to authors of old Lithuanian literature and contemporary Lithuanian poets and prose writers. But I have in mind not only writers […] in the heart of every Lithuanian that language, as in the language of all our communion and the field of meaningful fellowship that brings us all together, the perception is very alive, very close. Our esteemed philosopher Antanas Maceina has mentioned that each language opens up a unique view of the world, a corner of seeing the world in its own right. This idea was first expressed by the German philosopher and thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt and later developed by A. Maceino, who started the professional tradition of Lithuanian language philosophy. It was A. Maceina who, in his works on the philosophy of the Lithuanian language, showed how original and profound it is possible to think about the Lithuanian language from a philosophical point of view, highlighting the peculiarity of the Lithuanian language's view of the open world. But this time I would like to think about another, albeit equally philosophical, subject - the proximity and distance of our native language to the non-verbal, rather than the verbal, reality, as well as some other, particularly pressing, problems related to the fate of the native language. I'll start by noting that language […] is a natural (natural) and cultural organism at the same time. The connection between language and nature is clearly seen every time we say the infinitely sweet and precious Lithuanian combination of words "native language" to all of us. Birth is an essential characteristic of the native language. At the same time, it is also the most universal medium for the existence of all cultural meanings. The uniqueness of the native language and, we would say, its unique ontological characteristic, vital to the existence of every human being, is that the native language combines in the experience of the speaker the natural and cultural plots […] combines in a way that no non-native language would have to do, coming into our world only from pure culture and only through culture. At the same time, however, it is important to realize that not only all that we traditionally associate with culture, cultural impulse and cultural effort, but also the things of nature themselves must be regarded not so much as duties of existence taken for granted, but as tasks […] what, having received from nature and having from nature, we must continue to cultivate and live by our own Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 13 (English translation by the Lithuanian authorities) Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai personal efforts, wisdom and perseverance, in order to give the work of Lithuanian nature to our developed Lithuanian cultural institutions. The nature of the native language is also determined by the fact that it is the only one capable of revealing to us the absolute authenticity of the linguistically mediated experience and the naturalness of the personal existential situation of each of us. It is the mother tongue, being the most universal medium for the birth and existence of all cultural meanings, that is the only one capable of giving us the tencijos ir visos tikrovės interpretavimo kontekstą, kurio jau neįmanoma – ir ultimate human existence […] to be further developed by any means. By giving us this ultimate context for the interpretation of all reality and of our own being, along with the naturalness of our existential state, the mother tongue also gives us a sense of the fullness of being - a sense that no other thing in the world can give us. It is this accompanying feeling of fullness of being that we can consider to be the essential feature of the fulfilled authenticity of being. When we think of the ontology of language, we have in mind the philosophical connection of language with being, but we should not think of being as a being whose burden bends us to the ground, or as merely a physical existence or some kind of banal, vegetative human existence: we should think of it as a way of being in the world that opens up a horizon of ultimate meaning, which, once reached, would no longer require another, more distant horizon, another, wider horizon. Language - above all the mother tongue - opens up to us a perspective of our being and self-image that makes sense to us to the end, fully realizing the possibilities of our spiritual development to our final teleological limit, and it is precisely because of this that at the moment of fulfillment we feel that we no longer need a wider context. This is what we call the experience of happiness, fulfillment. Although, on the one hand, the context of language is the whole world, which we naturally perceive as broader than language and as encompassing it from the outside, on the other hand, if we look a little differently, we can see that in a certain sense the language itself - especially the mother tongue - is the context of the rest of the world. The boundaries of language are sometimes wider than the boundaries of the world, so it can make sense not only of our existence, but of the whole world. The native language is the final limit of the horizon of our meaning. When we think about the relationship between language and the world, we have to take into account the nature of language and the dialectic of culture, which reveals that the mother tongue, which we have by nature, naturally, we are able to continue to develop with the conscious cultural efforts of our spirit and use it as a powerful weapon to defend our being against the invasions of ignorance. But can our mother tongue really be our weapon? Let us try to examine this question in as much detail as possible, recalling our earlier suggestion that it is precisely the native NAGLIS KARDELIS 14 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI language gives us the greatest opportunity to get closer to the world and, if necessary, the greatest distance from it; to make the closest friends with the world and, if that becomes inevitable, to make the closest acquaintance with it. Language can bring us closer to the world when it seems sweet to us, and that's why we want to get as close to it as possible. On the other hand, language manages to keep us at a safe distance from the world when, in its brutal form, it suddenly becomes unpleasant to us. We are protected from the horrors of the world by poetry […] the poetic word stichija, the moment of trial that overwhelms us as if it were a new language that allows us to walk a jaukūs namai, tampantys mums nauju pasauliu ir nauja tikrove. Ypač gimtovery different distance from the world. In other words, it allows us to get closer to the non-verbal reality […] the things of reality […] closer than any other language, because by saying the words of our native language, to which we have become accustomed since childhood, as if they were separate things of the same real world, completely coinciding with the things of the non-verbal reality, we no longer see in our minds the words we say, but the words themselves. We could say more radically: when we pronounce words in our native language, we are not really pronouncing them, but the very things they are pronouncing. For example, the word "tree", to which we have become so accustomed since childhood that we do not notice it and therefore instinctively identify it with the living thing "tree", we immediately see a tree in our mind or imagination and not the word "tree". When we say a name in our native language, we immediately put it in our imagination, and the thing it's called. The words spoken in the native language open up to us the most authentic non-human perception of reality, which is only generally possible for a human being. Speaking in any other […] non-native […] language, the distance to non-human things and the non-human world made up of them is always greater. By using foreign words, we can't get as close to the non-human world as we'd like. On the other hand, we can think of speech as a medium for poetic creativity. Just as no poetry is possible without language in general, so indeed authentic poetry is impossible without the mother tongue. Poets often create not only in their native language, but also in various foreign languages, but the deepest poetic insights, the deepest emotional nuances are revealed only by saying the words of their native language. The world of poetry is indeed very peculiar and unlike any other. Josip Brodsky and Tomas Venclova have repeatedly observed that the worlds of language and poetry are absolutely autonomous or even autarchic. Words are capable of creating an alternative reality, and this can become a counterweight to the "real" world, which at one point or another in life, especially when faced with difficult trials, often turns out to be unkind, meaningless, brutal, repulsive. If the world annoys us, we have the opportunity to retreat to another, alternative, which poetry gives us. Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 15 (Linguistic Act of Lithuania) was adopted by the Lithuanian Parliament. Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai So every time we have the existential necessity to withdraw from the world at a safe distance to another, alternative, world, we can again turn to our mother tongue. But the poetry that is created in another language, which is lacking in authenticity, which is characteristic of poetry, which is written in a language that is endowed with its own nature, is no longer capable of creating such a radical and such an ontologically autonomous alternative to the existing world, and therefore it is not able to distance us from the brutal world as much as we would like. It's important to think of language as a living, ever-growing organism. In order to better understand the relationship between the nature of language and the power of language-specific growth, it is worth noting that the nature of the ancient Greeks itself was perceived not as static and not as a thing, as somehow suspended in its development and completed for all time, but as a process of growth at the same time, and as the result of growth constantly renewed during the process of growth itself. It should be noted that the Greek word for thing is phusis ‘prigimtis; nature is derived from the root phu-, from which the Greek verb phuō […]to grow[…] and its passive form phuomai […]to grow[…] are derived; to grow. By the way, we recognize the same Indo-European root in the Lithuanian verb to be and to be in the dictionary […] this is a very important circumstance that we must keep in mind when considering the ontology of language, the foundations of the Lithuanian language. So the wisdom of language itself tells us that the semantics of growth are very important when thinking about any […] as well as the nature of language. Language is a living organism that has survived for thousands of years, and each word is an impressive living fossil with not just a few thousand years of history, but an unbroken history of living evolution that goes back thousands of years. Although the Lithuanian language itself did not yet exist at the time when the roots of Indo-Europeanism appeared, they are perfectly preserved, so to speak, in some kind of linguistic paleontology preserved in Lithuanian words. In this archaic native language, words must be perceived not only as certain organisms of linguistic nature that have already ceased to grow, bearing witness to a certain thought and the result of its linguistic formation, much less as frozen and hardened stones that once resembled hot magma and the rock of such a linguistic mass, but also as continuing to grow and all of us continuing to grow. The words of the native language, which are still growing and being cultivated by us as organisms of their own linguistic nature, are still burrowing with their life and oblige us to defend and preserve them. Together they stand before us as one living linguistic body […] as a command to further develop the mother tongue, because it is neither dead nor our ancestors completed for all time […] it is constantly growing and developing, because of the powerful Lithuanian spirit […]. Language is characterized by a complex dialectic of statics and dynamics. If we think of language from the point of view of its system, its synchronously fixed cutting, we are undoubtedly forced to perceive it as static, but we must not forget that such NAGLIS KARDELIS 16 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI The momentary fixation of the development of a language, which turns the gaze not on the living tree of a growing language, but on one or the other of its cut stones (obviously cut not in reality, but in the mind of the theoretician of language) through the fixation of only one synchronous branch of one's language system, is essentially a purely instrumental action that facilitates the theoretical perception of real language processes, but has little in itself. Language, thought of as a static synchronous system, is more of an abstract theoretical idealization than something that actually exists in reality, because, as we have already mentioned, language in its natural essence is more dynamic than static. In addition, language, especially native language, must be thought of not only from the point of view of language as an object of theoretical analysis, but also from the point of view of the subject of language. On the one hand, language grows as if by itself -- in a sense, we don't grow the language, it grows us, and it doesn't speak to us as much as we speak to it (which, paradoxically, sounds like it). On the other hand, […] looking at it a little differently, […] it is necessary to recognize that in a certain sense each of us is the creator and cultivator of the native language, who has no right to free himself from this difficult but very practical work. So language, although it grows as if by itself, nevertheless has its own breeder - not just one person, but the whole nation, as a collective breeder of language, although this does not negate the conclusion that we can and must all contribute to the work of breeding our mother tongue - after all, we are all, as appointed responsible persons, breeders of our mother tongue. We are responsible for words whose roots are at least six or seven thousand years old […] this is only an approximate estimate of their age, because Indo-Europeanism is able to reconstruct such a time horizon. For example, if we look at a star in the sky, we see a light that left its star a few thousand years ago, if the distance to that star is a few thousand light-years. We are amazed to see giant trees in foreign lands, redwoods, cryptomeres and thick bushes, which are already several thousand years old, and we cannot believe that, despite such an incredible age, they are still alive and still growing, but we hardly realize or simply do not understand that the words of the Lithuanian language are as old and as alive as ours, and that they are the peculiarity of all of us, which now we ourselves owe to our ancestors. ginti ateičiai, ateities kartoms. Ir būtent jie – tūkstantmečiai gimtosios kalbos The words of the native language are to be, they give us a final horizon of meaning - one that no longer needs a wider horizon, and a broader context of interpretation of reality - one that no longer needs a wider context to explain it. Language pushes the boundaries of our authentic being and defines the contours of our own being. As the property of the entire language community, it is also the greatest personal asset of Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 17 (Linguistic Act of Lithuania) was adopted by the Lithuanian Parliament. Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai each of us. The dialectic of community and personality that is characteristic of this language is also very important: because language not only expresses abstract thoughts that can be clearly perceived by the mind and precisely transmitted […] communicated […] to other members of the language community, and not only whose concrete words indicate the usual physical referents that can be experienced by the senses, but also expresses the most subtle feelings that we do not necessarily convey to each other […] nonverbal […]. Of course, we are not able to feel another person's feelings directly (or, to be more precise, although not quite correctly, to feel another person's feelings indirectly) - we can only observe the person who feels them from the side, and the other person's feeling itself remains directly imperceptible to us. Yet man, by speaking, by speaking, especially by birth, communicates these feelings to us, and not only does he communicate them, but he also shares them with us, so to speak, in a secret communion of feelings, at least in part conveying his pain and his joy, his lack of meaning and the fullness of meaning. So language is not just a means of communication (ordinary information communication), but also a means of feeling, so to speak, a sense of fellowship, a sense of communion. This is an extremely important function of language, and in this respect language is a unique phenomenon in the whole of reality: paradoxically, the uniqueness of the mother tongue is determined by the fact that it, being the property and common property of the entire linguistic community, is at the same time the most precious personal property of each of us. Apparently, I'm not going to lie when I say that the Lithuanian language is the greatest common wealth of the entire Lithuanian nation, and the greatest personal wealth of every post-Lithuanian. The possibilities of language in the spiritual realm are endless. Each language has a multitude of words, and those words have a multitude of meanings and an infinite number of even more subtle meanings, which in turn can be perceived very differently by different people speaking the same mother tongue and all the more so by members of the community who speak all other languages, trying to speak in foreign languages and to perceive their own ethos. Various cultural connections and semantic associations create an extremely diverse world of language, which, being so diverse, can best convey the outline of our souls, expressing our deepest essence and our authentic self. At the komunikuoti kitiems žmonėms – ar net dalytis su jais bendrąja prasme ir drausame time, this world of language allows us to experience our thoughts and feelings in the fullness of being together in a meaningful way: by speaking the language, especially the native language, we become participants in a hidden communion in the sense of communion in the fullness of meaning and communion in the fullness of meaning. When considering the philosophy of language, we should not think that such theoretical questions should concern only philosophers and linguists. Non-philosophical considerations about the nature of the mother tongue and its further cultivation should be of importance to the entire linguistic community, to all members of the nation and especially to politicians. NAGLIS KARDELIS 18 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI whose shoulders are very heavy with responsibility for the future of the nation, the future of language and the future of literature created in the native language. Finally, the responsibility is not only for the welfare of the persons assigned, but also for the establishment and preservation of the orientation of the entire nation's existential meaning. constantly hearing that the Lithuanian language is the language of peasants, the language of men, or that it does not contain terms that could be used to express complex scientific concepts; forced to listen to instructions allowing scientists to write serious scientific texts in foreign languages in the humanities […] to create, or, in the jargon of the rulers, to produce (like in a science language factory) the so-called prestigious scientific production, intended to be published in prestigious journals abroad, we, Lithuanian humanists, have no right to remain silent, because we […] dramatically recognize […] the position of the bureaucrats who would not be given the right to educate and pay science in general. Speaking about this, it is worth recalling that the deeper nature and nature of the humanities is related to the birth, perception, interpretation and sharing of meanings. And this is the main difference between the humanities and the natural sciences, which, based on empirical facts, make our existence on this earth physically possible, and the humanities would have to make our existence not only physically possible, but also meaningful. Thus, humanitarianism speaks of entirely different things - the discovery, establishment, preservation of the horizon of the meaning of being and the conditions for its discovery and preservation. Humanitarianism operates with meaning, not bare facts. It's true that in the humanities, we often have to deal with facts, but they never become -- or at least they shouldn't become -- things of their own, only as important as they contribute to the search for meaning. The status of the naked empirical fact in the humanities is entirely different from that in the natural sciences, which are concerned with finding out the exact values of constants, the specific parameters of physical, chemical and other natural states and, in general, a large number of various empirical facts, which are of great importance for the development of technology, and technology, as we all know, provides tangible jie neteikia, jų neįmanoma panaudoti technologijoms kurti, be to, patys savaipractical benefits. In the humanities, facts are of secondary importance - of no practical use to me, until attempts are made to interpret them, these facts say nothing about meaning, which is precisely what the humanities care about or should care about. Because it doesn't matter when a writer was born or when he died, or when he wrote this or that work, the essential thing is that the meaning of the author's work is revealed, which at certain moments of our lives, for various personal reasons, can unexpectedly reveal itself to any of us as existentially unimportant and later help the soul after years of reading the work. Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXVI 19 This Regulation shall enter into force on the twentieth day following that of its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Lengvi lietuvių kalbos sparnai And that meaning cannot be grasped in any other way only in the native language. Writing not only the beautiful texts themselves, but also scientific works on literary works created in the native language, in other […] non-native […] languages is no longer possible adequately, without losing the essential meanings and nuances of meaning, to convey those scientific insights that are intended to reconstruct the horizon of the meaning of the texts being analyzed. It is impossible to write a truly good scientific text in a foreign language, neither about the beautiful literature created in the native language, nor about the authentic, from the depths of experience arising philosophy […] the more original to think philosophically. Returning to the idea of language-specific nature and cultural dialectics, it is worth recalling the hypothesis of the acquisition of linguistic abilities: according to this hypothesis, each newborn seems to "grab" his parents' native language and "establish" it in himself. What we see here is an obvious connection between nature and culture: what was given to us in the first place, not culturally, but almost biologically, so to speak, given by the very biological nature of man, must later, in the conscious phase of life, be completed by an active cultural effort, the cultivation of a new culture. I think of the mother tongue as a natural gift that, sooner or later, when we become conscious human beings, we have to turn into a cultural task. Therefore, it is a very important task for all of us, the humanitarian, I would say, a matter of our direct responsibility and even our self-esteem, to explain to politicians and scientific bureaucrats that writing scientific works in the humanitarian field is something other than natural science texts. Facts in the natural sciences are not only far more important than in the humanitarian sciences […] they are first and foremost impersonal, in no way indicative of the specific place in which one or another people live, national identities and the fields of meaning associated with them, are therefore cosmopolitanly universal, and all cultural meanings interpreted in the humanitarian sciences […] even universally ([…]cosmopolitanly[…]) are always the place where they are established, and it is precisely in this respect that local meanings are important. All cultural meanings, even those that later become universally significant, are born and originally exist precisely as local meanings of specific cultural communities established at a suvokus tampa aišku, kad parašyti gerą fizikos, chemijos ar molekulinės bioloparticular time, living in specific geographical locations. Only the mother tongue is sufficiently sensitive to the localization of a culturally established meaning, being able to convey what we would call the peculiar "wisdom of the place". It is a completely different and different task - of a different nature, nature and cultural purpose - than to write a good scientific text about any object of the humanities. This conclusion is evident from the fact that some of the more subtle meanings perceived by the humanitarian researcher - especially those that have grown up with their very place of origin and convey the "wisdom of the place" - cannot and will never be properly conveyed in any foreign language.