This might get your intuition moving a little bit . So... I recently found a site (blueletterbible.org) that lets you look up the Greek and Hebrew words in the bible and see what else they could be translated as. er... don't worry, this isn't meant to be any sort of biblical-thread.

What I found interesting, though, was that a whole lot of words in Hebrew had extremely interesting multiple meanings, and I thought you Ne's would get a kick out of it. For instance, the word translated "formless" (as in, "the earth was formless and void") also had meanings of nothingness/empty space, wasteland, place of chaos, and vanity. Now... if you look at these ideas in English, there's really no hint, in the more-precise wording that we have, that vanity and nothingness are similar. Yet I've asked people now from the US, Germany, and Mexico (living in a Mayan village), and every single person from each of these wildly differing cultures (though they were all INTP) said "oh.... yeah. I [I]can[/I] actually see some similarity between vanity and emptiness."

This sort of thing happened more often than I would have guessed--way more than to make me think it's any sort of coincidence. The word translated "on the face" (like, "on the face of the waters") can mean both a person's literal face, as well as "in the presence of." Again... there's no real reason to think that the front of a person's face carries any "more" of them, but it is sort of implicitly assumed that someone's face is where they are ("stop looking at my breasts! Eyes up here, instead")

"Spirit" ("Spirit of God hovering over the waters") is the same word as "breath." Now I doubt anyone in the US connects these two, but I do know that controlling your breathing is extremely important in most Eastern philosophy/meditation techniques--like by controlling the breath, some spiritual part of you changes, too.

"Light" ("Let there be light"), of course, was a huge list... including daylight, lightning, lamps, fire, etc... but also "light of instruction" and "light of prosperity." Looking at the actual lexicon, I found that "light of instruction" actually means something closer to "the knowledge/illumination gained from following wise instruction." So the light is connected to knowledge and understanding--another connection that I think everybody "sees", even though our language doesn't capture the similarity.



Anyway... I got the impression, on reading these, that the Hebrew language (if not all ancient languages) were concerned much more with essence than they were with distinctions. While English seems to divide up concepts that our intuition tells us are connected, Hebrew sounds more like these connections were so well understood that people used the same word (or slightly different forms of the same word) to represent the heart of these concepts.

So my question is: which do you guys think is more profitable... a language with greater precision, leaving quicker and easier communication, or a language whose structure deeply reflects the connections between the things that are?

I like the deep connections better, of course, but you INTPs tend to think I'm imprecise when I try to express the deeper concepts using multiple related words interchangeably that you consider separate.

That's because they're artificial connections, dear, and vague communication and imprecise definitions worked together with the crowd to let the pink fish eat its counterpart.

(er... everyone else can just ignore that :p)

No, actually vague spirituality did that. The inclusive language that connects language on a deeper level has very little to do with the destructive potential of a permissive, subjective perception of morality.

Well... that's half true. It's the vague and imprecise expression of language that lets them claim that they're bible-following by doing it--substituting "bringing people together in friendly ways" and calling it love, for instance, and suggesting it's all the same thing. I don't think it does it itself, but it definitely opens the door to concept-thievery being done.

but: oops. I was looking down at this section, and didn't realize which thread this was in, when I posted it. I had the wrong topic, lol, sorry about that.

Yeah, though. My looking into these languages made me really wonder whether I was just flat-out wrong about precision being a good thing. I'm beginning to think that in a word of perfectly good intentions, and where the peoples' instincts were more closely aligned to reality, this intuitively-connected type of communication would be a lot better. Maybe the precision is just the way our language developed, as a coping mechanism to prevent ideas from masquerading as different ones, but back then, when ideas couldn't be written down and passed on that way, that defense was unnecessary?

I'd believe that. So, innacurate attempts to fuse things that shouldn't be considered similar on a deeper level now tend to cause a lack of clarity, but the lack of clarity in expression usually stems from a preexisting lack of clarity in perception. Supporters of the pink-fish mentality usually attempt to use language to justify what is already believed. In such cases, in the wrong hands, it allows for deception, but when properly applied to Spirit-inspired discovery, using language this way has the potential to spark Ne connections that bring a valid, deeper understanding of the ideas that truly are interrelated.

you'll get an accurate meaning if you follow all the context before the word/word with prefix/suffix (agglutination). in an ancient language an auxiliary toward the end will almost always be refering to the first object/noun in a sentence, paragraph or even book when in the indicative.