alexander bryan johnson (edward johnson · 2014. 7. 5. · when “ alexander bryan johnson ”...

ALEXANDER BRYAN JOHNSON (EDWARD JOHNSON)

Although Henry Thoreau was substantially influenced by otherpeople in the philological/philosophical movement, such asArchbishop Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D. in 1853, we have beenas yet unable to uncover evidence that he studied any of thenumerous publications of Alexander Bryan Johnson, Americanbanker con-artist and member of that movement.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

A. B. JOHNSONEDWARD JOHNSON

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Edward Johnson

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EDWARD JOHNSON ALEXANDER BRYAN JOHNSON

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May 29, Monday: Alexander Bryan Johnson was born in the port town of Gosport, England, in a family that when it relocated to America would abandon its Jewish heritage and surname. The father was a broker who handled the wages and prize money of sailors and officers in trust while they were at sea. (Until the age of 31 the son would live off the father’s money.)

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1786

Edward Johnson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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ALEXANDER BRYAN JOHNSON EDWARD JOHNSON

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When “Alexander Bryan Johnson” (not his name at the time) was 11 the father left the mother and son behind in England. Landing at New-York during a yellow fever epidemic, he abandoned his Jewish identity by becoming one “Bryan Johnson” and made his way upstate to Old Fort Schuyler (now Utica), where he began a store.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1797




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Abigail Louisa Smith Adams was born, a granddaughter of President John Adams.

1798

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Mother and son made their way from Gosport, England toward Utica, New York in pursuit of the absent father, abandoning their Jewish identities and becoming Leah Johnson and Alexander Bryan Johnson, embracing the surname the father had assumed in the New World.”

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1801


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At the age of 16 “Alexander Bryan Johnson” disembarked in the United States along with his mother “Leah Johnson.”

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1802




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Zanesville became the Ohio state capitol.

Abandoning his new glassmaking business in upstate New York, the young Henry Rowe Schoolcraft made a journey down the Ohio River to Missouri with his friend Alexander Bryan Johnson.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

1810




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Alexander Bryan Johnson’s AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE OF VALUE AND OF CAPITAL: AND INTO THE OPERATION OF GOVERNMENT LOANS, BANKING INSTITUTIONS, AND PRIVATE CREDIT (published for the author by John Forbes).

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1813




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At the age of 28, the idler Alexander Bryan Johnson got married with Abigail Louisa Smith Adams, who was quite a catch not only due to her social standing (being a product of the presidential Adams family) but also because at the time she was barely 16. She would guide him from the Episcopal church into the Presbyterian church.

1814



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July 30, Wednesday: In Utica, New York, Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson, wife of Alexander Bryan Johnson, gave birth to Alexander S. Johnson.

At the age of 31, Alexander Bryan Johnson began to make his own living rather than live off his father’s money. He did that not by labor, but by tricking the state legislature into believing that he was wanted to found a bank — when what the fine print of the license he wrote for himself enabled him to do was what he actually intended, to deal in insurance.

Per the diary of Aaron White, Harvard College’s commencement exercises made a jolly fair:

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

1817

Commencement day pleasant and fine as usual Town allalive. The People crowding together. Tents creatingshows, many-headed monsters, Negroes, Sailors,Coaches, literati, Peddlars, rope-dances, pies, cakes,melons, eggnog brandy rum and confusion on confusionall muddled together announced Commencement.




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Boy With Rooster, painted in 1815

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf"Boy with Rooster," painted in 1815


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Alexander Bryan Johnson was forced to close his Utica Insurance Company when state legislators became aware that he had secured the license for this through legislative trickery.

Alexander Bryan Johnson wrote short stories for Knickerbocker Magazine.

1818



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In about this timeframe, upon hearing the preaching of the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney, Alexander Bryan Johnson got religion big time. He would serve as head of the Union Tract Society and the Oneida Evangelical Society.

Winter: Alexander Bryan Johnson delivered a series of 12 lectures on language before the lyceum of Utica, New York (these would be published in 1828).

1825

ALEXANDER B. JOHNSON

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Alexander Bryan Johnson’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE; OR A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE. A COURSE OF LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE UTICA LYCEUM (New-York: G. & C. Carvill, 108 Broadway), a monograph on philosophy and philology that seemingly at first would be attracting no attention whatever.

1828



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Alexander Bryan Johnson was again discovered to have perpetrated a trick — similar to the manner in which previously he had founded an insurance company by pretending this was to be instead a bank.

1834



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The formula “Entities should not be multiplied...” which had been created by John Ponce of Cork in 1639 and improperly carried forward through Tennemann’s GRUNDRISS DER GESCHICHTE DER PHILOSOPHIE into Ueberweg’s HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, was apparently in this period assigned a descriptive term “Occam’s Razor,” by Sir William Hamilton, the scholar who was responsible also for changing the label “Law of Frugality” to “Law of Parcimony” (spelled thus).

Publication of a volume that David Henry Thoreau would study in college, and would have in his personal library, William Smellie’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURAL HISTORY.... WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND VARIOUS ADDITIONS AND ALTERATIONS, INTENDED TO ADAPT IT TO THE PRESENT STATE OF KNOWLEDGE. BY JOHN WARE, M.D. (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and company).1

The 2d edition of Alexander Bryan Johnson’s 1828 book on philosophy and philology appeared under a new title, A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE: OR, THE RELATION WHICH WORDS BEAR TO THINGS, IN FOUR PARTS (Harper & Brothers). It had been greatly expanded, for instance from one lecture series of 12 lyceum lectures to four lecture serieses amounting to a total of 29 or 30 lectures.

In this year his wife Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson died; after a decent interval he would remarry, with Eliza Masters.

1836

1. Although Google Books does not offer this exact 1836 Boston edition, it does present this 1851 Boston edition.

WILLIAM SMELLIE

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A series of five lectures by Alexander Bryan Johnson was published as RELIGION IN ITS RELATION TO THE PRESENT LIFE.

1840



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Alexander Bryan Johnson’s THE PHILOSOPHICAL EMPEROR, A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT, OR, THE PROGRESS OF A FALSE POSITION: DEDICATED TO THE WHIGS, CONSERVATIVES, DEMOCRATS, LOCO FOCOS, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY OF THE UNITED STATES (Harper).

1841

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Edward Johnson’s NUCES PHILOSOPHICÆ; OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THINGS AS DEVELOPED FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF WORDS (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Company). This monograph, ostensibly by an “Edward Johnson, Surgeon,” refers several times to “A.B. Johnson.” It is asserted at the conclusion of the preface that in summarizing what is being offered, the author “cannot do better” than provide “an extract from A.B. Johnson” — and what follows this is the final four sections of Lecture XX of Alexander Bryan Johnson’s 1836 American monograph A TREATISE ON LANGUAGE. Since there seems not to be any record of the actual existence of an “Edward Johnson, Surgeon” (no date of birth, no date of death) presumably the British “Edward Johnson, Surgeon” would be this banker and lyceum lecturer of Utica, New York pseudonymously quoting himself.

1842

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Henry Rowe Schoolcraft dedicated his THIRTY YEARS WITH THE INDIAN TRIBES, 1812-1842 to his friend Alexander Bryan Johnson. In this year, also, Schoolcraft and the US Army artist Captain Seth Eastman began issuing, in six volumes, their HISTORICAL AND STATISTICAL INFORMATION RESPECTING … THE INDIAN TRIBES OF THE UNITED STATES. (The series would be completed in 1857.)

(Henry Thoreau would be checking out this volume from the library of the Boston Society of Natural History on July 26, 1852.)

In about this year Thoreau copied into his Indian Notebook #4 from Schoolcraft’s ONEÓTA, OR CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RED RACE OF AMERICA FROM ORIGINAL NOTES AND MANUSCRIPTS.

Isaac Smith Homans’s, Alexander Bryan Johnson’s, James William Gilbart’s, John Barnard Byles’s, and John Ramsay McCulloch’s THE BANKER’S COMMON-PLACE BOOK (Phillips, Sampson & Company).

(In this publication, the contribution of “A.B. Johnson, Esq., President of the Ontario Branch Bank, Utica,” to wit “A Treatise on Banking, the Duties of a Banker, and his Personal Requisites therefor,” is foregrounded, and provides the basis for the various other contributions by the various other authors.)

After 17 years of marriage to Alexander Bryan Johnson, Eliza Masters Johnson died in a fire, whereupon the husband resigned from the Utica branch of the Ontario Bank of Canandaigua after 36 years as its president, and sailed to Europe. Eventually he would marry a 3d time, with Mary Livingston.

1851

THE INDIAN TRIBES, I, 1851

THE RED RACE

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The 1st edition of Alexander Bryan Johnson’s THE MEANING OF WORDS ANALYSED INTO WORDS AND UNVERBAL THINGS, AND UNVERBAL THINGS CLASSIFIED INTO INTELLECTIONS, SENSATIONS, AND EMOTIONS (D. Appleton and Company).

1854



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When it was discovered that his son-in-law James Lynch had embezzled nearly a million dollars (equivalent, in today’s money, to about a hundred million), Alexander Bryan Johnson’s bank collapsed.

In this year, his AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INSTRUCTION; OR, APOLOGUES AND BREVIATS ON MAN AND MANNERS (Derby & Jackson).

1857



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Also in this year, his A GUIDE TO THE RIGHT UNDERSTANDING OF OUR AMERICAN UNION, OR, POLITICAL, ECONOMICAL, AND LITERARY MISCELLANIES: DEDICATED TO THE YOUNG MEN OF AMERICA (Derby & Jackson).

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The 2d edition of Alexander Bryan Johnson’s THE MEANING OF WORDS ANALYSED INTO WORDS AND UNVERBAL THINGS, AND UNVERBAL THINGS CLASSIFIED INTO INTELLECTIONS, SENSATIONS, AND EMOTIONS (D. Appleton and Company).

Johnson’s work may be said to “anticipate” many of thephilosophical positions later taken by Mach, Vaihinger,Bridgman, Dewey, and the logical positivists. Johnson’s TREATISEeven foreshadowed Wittgenstein’s TRACTATUS when it warned thatlanguage could not express its own limits.

— pages 244-245 of THE CULTURE OF THE MARKETby Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber

1862



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September 9, Monday: Alexander Bryan Johnson died. An obituary pointed out that the deceased had been “aware that he had the reputation of being mainly devoted to making money.”

1867



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CENTENNIAL CONFERENCE ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF ALEXANDER BRYAN JOHNSON, edited by C.L. Todd and R.T. Blackwood.

1969



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Charles L. Todd’s and Robert Sonkin’s ALEXANDER BRYAN JOHNSON: PHILOSOPHICAL BANKER (Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP).2

1977

2. Johnson created a 1,200-page manuscript autobiography which may be inspected at the library of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.



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Edward Craig’s article on Alexander Bryan Johnson in ROUTLEDGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (pages 120-122).

1998



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Kenneth Walter Cameron’s THE TRANSCENDENTAL INDEX HELPER: ON THOREAU, EMERSON, SANBORN AND THE NEW PHILOSOPHY (Hartford CT [Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126]: Transcendental Books).

Cameron’s COMMENT ON THE VARIORUM WALDEN OF 1998 (Hartford CT: Transcendental Books).

Cameron’s THOREAU, SANBORN, JOHN BROWN, AND SLAVERY (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Michael West’s TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY: AMERICA’S ROMANTIC PUNSTERS AND THE SEARCH FOR THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE offered a chapter on Alexander Bryan Johnson.

Pitt professor parses puns off as researchBy Patricia Lomando White

University of Pittsburgh English Professor Michael West alwayshas paid attention to language, and that attention has paid off:Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) has given West the 2001 Christian GaussAward—PBK’s highest honor for a published scholarly work—for hisbook TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY: AMERICA’S ROMANTIC PUNSTERS & THE SEARCH FORTHE LANGUAGE OF NATURE. The judges called West’s book, publishedlast year by Ohio University Press, “a classic” of literaryscholarship and criticism. The Gauss Award comes with a $2,500honorarium.West –who said he didn’t set out to write a book but to researchwhat he had noticed in American literature– knew that Thoreau’sWALDEN contained more than 100 puns, and West discussed many ofthem when teaching Thoreau. West had even discovered a pun inWALDEN that no one had noticed before.“I thought I would write a little note, a page or two,explicating this unnoticed pun in WALDEN,” he said. That littlenote became a 25-page paper. “For 10 years I thought I couldexplain the pun satisfactorily just with reference to Thoreau,and I got a fellowship to do that. Then it began to dawn on methat I could not isolate Thoreau from society and his fellowauthors of the American Renaissance, and it took another twodecades to write the book.”Trained in the New Criticism, West sees the interaction ofliterature with society as intriguing and important. “There arecertainly many limitations in the view of literary studies thathas been called the New Criticism, which prevailed in the 1930s,’40s, ’50s, and ’60s,” he said, “but it did pay attention tolanguage, and I think that current criticism could relearn someof the lessons that were taken for granted by New Criticism’sattention to language.”

2000

TRANSCENDENTAL PLAY

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According to West, TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY, written in a style thathe thought would be amusing and attractive to the generalreader, was never conceived entirely as straight scholarship.While it is hyper-scholarly in many respects, it has a satiricside, mocking contemporary literary academia.That satire is evident in West’s own puns. “Many people thinkthat puns are the lowest form of humor,” West said. “But thecapacity for punning is an index of verbal sophistication andis linked to other verbal abilities. Punning has been somethingthat great authors from Shakespeare and Milton to Thoreau andJoyce have indulged in, and I enjoy it without apology.” He notesthat punning is discouraged by scriptwriters for TV sitcoms asrequiring too much intelligence of the audience.West calls the pun an epitome of all literature, insofar asliterature is the art form that uses language as its medium. Aswith all literary art, so especially with puns — the medium tendsto shape what gets created.“It’s the nature of bronze or marble or wood that determineswhat you can make as sculptors or as architects,” he said. “Youcan’t have a wooden skyscraper, because the nature of thatmaterial will not support anything that high. Well, the materialwith which writers work is language, and I think the linguisticmatrix of literature has been slighted in much recentcriticism.”One review of West’s book says: “West rides no narrow thesis butfollows the evidence where it leads.” West particularly likesthis description because he mistrusts starting with a theory,as is done in much literary study. “I think the process is muchmore circular,” he said. “I looked at a lot of books aboutlanguage in the 19th century to see if there were connectionsbetween them and the major writers of the period — how were theyin fact taught in school, how might this have affected the wayin which they wrote? And ultimately I came to believe that punswere one important offshoot of 19th-century American educationalpractices.”West’s interest in punning and style helped increase hisappreciation of Thoreau, who, he said, is depicted in highschool classrooms as “a dreamy nature mystic who talked to thetrees, fed the chipmunks, and was a sort of crackpot. “Sentimental is the last thing that Thoreau was: He was sharp,he was satiric, and he was a social critic,” West said. “Hisrelation to nature was partly a way of beating society over thehead with its shortcomings.”Nevertheless, not all punning in the 19th century involved theroots of words. “Thoreau’s did so to an unusual degree, becausehe was a fine classicist, the best linguist among the majorwriters of the American Renaissance,” West said. “But peoplelike Melville, who also puns a great deal, don’t necessarily putthe same emphasis on etymological punning.”According to West, American theories of humor reflect a notioncalled “romantic irony” that was first articulated and definedin Germany. The Schlegel brothers distinguished etymological



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punning from homonymic puns, where two words have the same soundbut no historical connection.West describes TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY as a three-legged stool: oneleg rests on Thoreau, one leg on the other classic writers ofthe American Renaissance, and the third leg, the wobbly one, isplanted in the subsoil of the mid-19th century, when all thehalf-baked linguistic theorists and educators urged students toapproach language quite differently than we do today. Thedescendants of these theorists and educators may still presideover modern classrooms with the same dogmatic conviction ofcertainty, according to West.

Randall Conrad in the Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 231 (Spring 2000), page 5:Readers who have encountered Michael West’s often-cited 1974study of Thoreauvian pun-making probably remember its elevatingitinerary. Beginning in the bog of an excremental vision heascribes to Thoreau, West argues persuasively that Thoreau’shorror at his own consumptive constitution led him to developstrategies for purifying body and spirit, for living life “as aheroic game” in the face of death. His foremost strategy, ofcourse, was to write. Forging an idiom to sustain his undyingvoice was the culmination of Thoreau’s “ascetic heroism againstdirt, disease, and death.” Viewing language as “the mode ofman’s immortality,” Thoreau would re-create American English,extending its resonance with an extraordinary seasoning ofetymological joking.Transcendental Wordplay is a double feature-length version ofthat influential article, now expanded to account for the wide-ranging wordplay in all American Renaissance authors (core,fringe, pre- and post-). Joining Thoreau in the lineup areEmerson (the “gentle twists” in his prose were “not quite punsin themselves but akin to satiric wit”), Hawthorne, Melville,Whitman, and Dickinson, with cameos by Poe as well as Irving,Cooper, and others.Yet if this extraordinary book has a central figure, it is stillthe philosopher of Walden and the masterwork he wrote. (In fact,West’s 1974 piece reappears, updated, as the concludingchapter.) West argues, and few will disagree, that “Waldencannot be fully understood except as the chief literary monumentof the etymological fervor that permeated the AmericanRenaissance.”Beneath that monument, West’s patient excavations uncover afoundation. To sample the full “etymological fervor” sweepingthe nation, Transcendental Wordplay devotes exhaustive,sometimes exhausting, pages to the eighteenth-century Europeanphilosophers who originated modern linguistic thought. Even morepages are dedicated to the minor philologist-pedagogues whoflooded early-nineteenth century America with competingspellers, grammars, dictionaries, thesauri, joke books,lexicons, “synonymies,” etymologies, and modest proposals toremake the mother tongue or invent a new one. (I will not soonforget meeting James Ruggles, an Ohio thinker whose proto-



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esperanto –“Viszpxns langzdxr hcktyonpxs skriptzport spegszbxrfelhxr”– never caught on.)Established criticism tends to discount these rustic bookworms,whose speculations on words and their origins fed faddishphilologies far and wide. To the contrary, West insists that itwas precisely the degree of fantasy, of illogic, in their pre-scientific theories of language that opened American Renaissanceminds to the poetic potential of American speech.America’s decades-long “pundemic” originated, West explains, ina fertile matrix - the mechanistic language lessons inflictedon schoolchildren; the new republic’s impulse to create a freshnational language (variously imagined); philologists’“unscientific yet imaginative” (and theologically tendentious)search for the Ur-language of humankind; vivid folk etymologies;and a consuming passion for wordplay shared by citizens in everywalk of life.“Shall I not have words as fresh as my thoughts?” Thoreaupondered during the revision of Walden.3 Exploring Thoreau’sfascination with comparative philology, West documents thestrong influences of Scottish common-sense philosophy, FrenchEnlightenment intellectuals like Charles DeBrosses (“Thoughmany of his etymologies were erroneous, just as many were trueand illuminating”), and the British philologists Tooke, Trenchand Whiter. (Whiter’s 2,700-page demonstration “that languages... are derived from the Earth and the operations, accidents,and properties belonging to it” influenced Thoreau’s treatmentof the clay-and-sand railroad cut in Walden.)This hefty book offers none of the usual checklists, makes noeffort to systematize system-resistant domains of verbal fun.Larded with authorial drollery, Transcendental Wordplay is anorganic, dynamic summa punnologica that practices what itanalyzes.West shows us Whitman rummaging in a midcentury etymologicaltextbook to come up with the raw stuff of his poem “There Was aChild Went Forth.” He shows us Thoreau following trains-within-trains of thoughtduring revisions of Walden’s famous pickerel passage4 until itreaches its final crystalline density. In the latter case, West acknowledges the lead of pickerelpassage pioneer Gordon Boudreau, whose 1974 explication5 iscredited in the book’s copious endnotes. (West is grandly openabout acknowledging specific debts to pun-dissectingpredecessors.)Did I mention humor? TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY offers puns, squibs,jokes, and every so often an unruly set-piece. For readingaloud, try West’s word-perfect imitation of a sportscaster’splay-by-play narration as quarterback R.W. Emerson fields awinning touchdown for America. West’s most focused satire,however, is reserved for the bookworms he knows best -twentieth-century Homo academicus. With sly humor, he depicts

3. JOURNAL, September 7, 1851.4. WALDEN, “The Pond in Winter,” 5.5. Gordon V. Boudreau, “Thoreau and Richard C. Trench: Conjectures on the Pickerel Passage in Walden,” ESQ 20, page 120.



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Perry Miller eternally obliging American Studies scholarship bygrafting the American Renaissance onto New England Puritan rootsin place of its natural European ones: “At a stroke the terrorsand icy beauties of Calvinism were decorously muted forundergraduates, while by marinating that old-time religion intypology and [Jonathan] Edwardsean aesthetics Miller made itpalatable to literati leery of church.”The humorless we shall always have with us; for the rest, thereis West’s verbidextrous contribution to literature.

Professor Michael West’s TRANSCENDENTAL WORDPLAY: AMERICA’S ROMANTIC PUNSTERS AND THE SEARCH FOR THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE (Athens OH: Ohio UP, 2000).

In all the dissertations –on language –men forget the language that is –that is really universal –theinexpressible meaning that is in all things & every where with which the morning & evening teem. As iflanguage were especially of the tongue. Of course with a more copious hearing or understanding –of what ispublished the present languages will be forgotten.

How Enlightened French Savants Enlighten Thoreau’s Wordplay“In all the dissertations — on language — men forget the languagethat is — that is really universal — the inexpressible meaningthat is in all things & every where,” complained the youngThoreau (23 Aug. 1845). He was familiar with Enlightenmentspeculation, when savants spawned such dissertations by thescore. Like most other literate Americans he owned a copy ofHugh Blair’s LECTURES ON RHETORIC AND BELLES LETTRES (1783), a

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Michael West’s _Transcendental Wordplay: America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature_, (Ohio UP, 2000, page 32ff).


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massively influential work that saw Fifty American editions by1865. In the two lectures “Rise and Progress of Language” Blairsingled out the Frenchman Charles de Brosses as “the Author, whohas carried his speculations on this subject the furthest.”Thoreau no doubt read the summary of de Brosses’s theories withclose attention. Very likely he accepted Blair’s invitation toconsult the two-volume TRAITÉ MÉCHANIQUE DE LA FORMATION DES LANGUES ETDES PRINCIPES PHYSIQUES DE L’ÉTYMOLOGIE (Paris: Saillant, 1765).De Brosses sought to show that “the basis of universal languagealready exists” (I:xxii, my trans.). Downplaying Condillac’sgerminal language of action, he argued that names were firstattached to things by a process neither arbitrary norconventional but rather through “a true system of necessitydetermined by two causes. One is the formation of the vocalorgans, which can only render certain sounds analogous to theirstructure; the other is the nature and property of the realobjects that one wishes to name. This obliges us to use for theirname sounds that portray them, to establish between the word andthe thing a rapport by which the word can excite an idea of thething” (I:xii-xiii). The result was a classic bow-wow theory,for according to De Brosses the essence of all language isonomatopoetic imitation. Since “there are few things that do notmake noise,” they acquired their original names as the cuckoois called from its cry (I:7). This primary principle accountedfor most names in aboriginal speech, De Brosses believed(without realizing that it left primitive man inhabiting apastoral pandemonium fit to drown out the hubbub of Paris).As for noiseless objects, “the organ assumes, as much as it can,the very appearance of the object that it wishes to paint withthe voice: it gives a hollow sound if the object is hollow, orrough if the object is rough; so that the sound that resultsfrom the natural form and movement of the organ put in that statebecomes the name of the object, a name that resembles it by therough or hollow sound that the chosen pronunciation carries tothe ear.” Thus the voice employs organs that properly represent“either the thing or some quality of effect of the thing thatit wishes to name” (I:8). De Brosses concludes that “thereexists a primitive language, organic, physical, and necessary,common to the entire human race, which ... constitutes the firstfoundation of the language of all countries; a foundation thatthe immense superstructure of accessories built upon it hardlylets one perceive” (I:14-15).Devoting nearly a thousand pages to this theme, de Brosses wasjust erudite enough to make it plausible, for his knowledge ofEuropean languages let him buttress it with examples while hisrelative ignorance of non-Indo-European data left him serenelyuntroubled by doubts. He held that sounds have inherent semanticmeanings. A rapid global survey of several score languagesconvinced him that similar labials and dentals were always usedfor the first childish words Papa and Mama. After this atypicalparadigm case he confined himself largely to the Indo-Europeanfamily, providing lengthy lists of European words supposedly



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explaining why N, the most liquid of letters, designatesanything like navis that acts upon liquid; why FL naturallydesignates fluid motion in air, fire, or water; and why otherphones and consonant clusters like SL, SW, R, G, SR, H, S, andSM have various inherent meanings that form the basis of theprimitive universal language.Though many of his etymologies were erroneous, just as many weretrue and illuminating. What might Thoreau have learned from him?Consider again Thoreau’s remarks on the language of our parlors...

While sporting with the French root of parlor, palaver, andparliamentary to demonstrate that our words are fetched too farfrom the kitchen, he interjects, “The dinner even is only theparable of a dinner, commonly.” Why this slightly strainedlocution? As de Brosses admirably explained, “the French parlerand all its derivatives come from παραβολή and παραβαλλω, wordscomposed from the primitive βάλλω which itself derives from theroot Bal, which has produced numerous other branches verydistant from this one and itself has no connection of any kindwith the idea expressed by the word parler” (2:436-38). Even agood classical scholar might not recognize that parler andparable both derive from Greek paraballein = throw together, viamedieval Latin parabola = discourse (cf. such Romance cognatesas palabra and parole). Standard English dictionaries availableto Thoreau traced our Romance derivatives to the French parler,then gave up the chase. That Thoreau could consciously exploitthis recondite etymological connection corroborates thelikelihood that he had read de Brosses; it certainly testifiesto his interest in comparative philology.When de Brosses derived parler from a primitive root BAL, he wasrelying on the work of his friend Antoine Court de Gébelin,Franklin’s collaborator in publications urging Americanindependence. Influenced reciprocally by de Brosses, Court deGébelin conceived the ambitious plan of his MONDE PRIMITIF ANALISÉET COMPARÉ AVEC LE MONDE MODERNE. Its prospectus appeared in 1773. Hepromised subscribers what we call an anthropologicalencyclopedia. All knowledge about primitive culture fell into

WALDEN: It would seem as if the very language of our parlors wouldlose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our livespass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors andtropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far fromthe kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable ofa dinner, commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough toNature and Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar,who dwells away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man,tell what is parliamentary in the kitchen?



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two divisions: the first embraced words, while the second dealtwith things. Envisioning etymology as the key to prehistory, heproposed first to elucidate the development of languages bycomposing an introductory treatise on the physical Principlesof Language and Writing, a Universal Grammar, a Dictionary ofthe Primitive Language, and a bevy of comparative etymologicaldictionaries introducing his analysis of primitive arts,science, and folkways. Today his huge quartos seem artifactsmore remote than the primitive world. Few read them now; indeed,few subscribers read them then. But one who did plunder thisstorehouse of misinformed wisdom was Thoreau.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY




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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at .

Prepared: July 5, 2014

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdfmailto:[email protected], tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.


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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.



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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with . Arrgh.

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdfhttp://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdfmailto:[email protected]

Alexander Bryan Johnson (Edward Johnson)17861797179818011802181018131814181718181825182818341836184018411842185118541857186218671969197719982000

alexander bryan johnson (edward johnson · 2014. 7. 5. · when “ alexander bryan johnson ”...

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