k3 and k4 grammar

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boomly
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k3 and k4 grammar

Post by boomly »

k3 - I am angry.
k4 - I have anger (about something).

k3 - I am Catholic.
k4 - I hold Catholic (beliefs).

I wonder what change might be accomplished simply by teaching the former(k3) is improper grammar. If you possess a baseball as an object, you wouldn't say "I am baseball". If you possess an emotion, belief or perspective as an object, you wouldn't say "I am that".

jacob
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by jacob »

boomly wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:20 am
I wonder what change might be accomplished simply by teaching the former(k3) is improper grammar. If you possess a baseball as an object, you wouldn't say "I am baseball". If you possess an emotion, belief or perspective as an object, you wouldn't say "I am that".
Maybe the Germans can weigh in? They have a lot of "I have [sensation]" grammar.

Kegan1 or people with dissociative disorders might just say "I am a baseball" or at least not see themselves and their world as an ego within the world. Conversely, kegan2 is all ego, whereas kegan3 subordinates their identity to the group-identity ("I am what they say I should be"). Kegan3 seems to have a lot of problems doing personality testing due to an inability to identify whether an impulse comes from themselves or their "tribe", e.g. "Of course I'm extraverted, because I work in sales and I'm fun and outgoing like society wants me to be".

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unemployable
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by unemployable »

It obscures meaning and doesn't help anyone a goddamned bit.

"I am Catholic" means you have been born into the religion and have not left, and/or you have performed the requirements to be recognized as a member by the Church. Going to Mass a few times does not make you Catholic any more than showing up at a synagogue makes you a Jew.

You can "hold anger" over something you heard on the evening news or because your neighbor won't trim his bushes or because your parents wouldn't let you go out on Friday night back when you were 14 because they punished you for sneaking a cookie. That's very different from saying "I'm angry", which implies something you feel strongly enough about in the here and now that you want the source of your anger to know about it.

Words mean things.

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unemployable
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by unemployable »

jacob wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:35 am
Maybe the Germans can weigh in? They have a lot of "I have [sensation]" grammar.
So do Spanish speakers. Tengo hambre, tengo dolor and the like.

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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by chenda »

Enlightenment seekers in the non dualistic schools sometimes refer to themselves in the third person, to break the illusion that they are an individual person.

'Chenda is angry, she is frustrated, she is disturbed...but I am not her mind, I am not her body, her suffering is an illusion. 'I' is the eternal witness behind Chenda and all sentient beings.'

I don't necessarily recommend this though. Some people find it disturbing to realise/believe they are not a person anymore.

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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by jacob »

unemployable wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:40 am
Words mean things.
Depending on how strong Sapir-Whorf is, words or grammatical constructs also limit ideas. E.g. cultures with gendered language correlate with gender inequality. (Dunno if this is causative.) One of the challenges in talking freely or easily about Kegan5+ is that there are no words or grammatical constructs for meaningful conversation about this level of social complexity. Most languages will have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person grammar, but which ones have 4th and 5th person w/o having to apply sentence-long abstractions?

"He sees..." implies that there's someone seeing something and it isn't me or you. (3rd person perspective). However, there's nothing grammatical for describing how seeing a different groups of people differently. "He4th thought about he4th's various customs in society" or "He5th thought about how language influences how these customs influence each other". There's no easy way of communicating whether I'm talking a 5th person perspective or whether it's just my personal 1st person experience beyond how convoluted my sentences are getting. Yet, we don't need convolutions to talk about the third person in English.

Add: Also this can get complicated real fast! A 2nd person perspective is like a 2-body interaction and so a 2nd-person grammar would require 4 grammatical constructs---I on me, you on you, I on you, and you on me---some of which may be contracted, e.g. English uses "you" for a lot of different perspectives. So 2nd person = Two 1st persons + Two 1-2 persons. Whereas third person requires: 1-1-1, 2-2-2, 3-3-3, 1-1-2, 1-2-1, ... so 27 plus the previous 2 and 2 for 31 exhaustive perspectives. Fourth person has 256 + 27 + 2 + 2. Caveat: I don't spend too much time thinking through the exact combinatorics... but it's clear that it blows up real fast. It also means that each Kegan is quite a bit more complex than the previous insofar all perspectives are taken into account---which in practice they probably aren't.

More add: Yes, the math above is wrong. E.g. 3rd person would be 1-1-1, 2-2-2, 3-3-3, ... but also 1-2, 2-1, 2-3, 3-2, 1-3, 3-1 for 6 2nd order perspectives (and not 2), ... and 3 first order perspectives in the form of 1-1, 2-2, and 3-3.

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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

So, is lack of appropriate language the reason why it may be difficult to have a meet and greet dinner with your married polyamorous lover, his wife, and your good friend/f-buddy? I guess I answered my own question, because in order to phrase it I had to make use of 3 words/phrases only recently entered in OED.

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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by unemployable »

jacob wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:54 am
Depending on how strong Sapir-Whorf is, words or grammatical constructs also limit ideas.
I think you're talking language structure there rather than straight vocabulary, but I've never bought into Sapir-Whorf. When needed we tend to invent words, use additional words for distinction or simply take them from other languages. The Japanese may have the same word for blue and green but when they need to distinguish between shades of bluegreen they have words for that.

Personally I do believe English and speakers thereof can clean up their pronoun use -- this is a far deeper issue than the current fad of millennials having their "preferred pronouns" -- and I often find myself asking people in conversations who he and they are.

horsewoman
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by horsewoman »

I can only think of one sensation that Germans "have" that English speakers have not - we have hunger.
It's more in my native Bavarian dialect, that I have things instead of being them.

Recently I've done a few units of Irish on dulinogo, there is a lot of having going on!
I have sadness on me - I am sorry. They also have clothes on, which Bavarians do as well (as opposed to English speakers, who wear them).
Lots of other examples but this language is so weird that I've given up on learning it.

Gendered language is causing kind of a culture war at the moment here in Germany. The patriarchy is clinging with all their might to the masculine while feminists fighting for a more inclusive language. In this regard I strongly see a connection of evolving ideas and language. The old way of speaking is no longer enough to encompass new ideas and realities.

chenda
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by chenda »

Yeah the absence of noun genderisation is one of the few good things about English grammer (aside from the occasional use of feminine pronouns like for ships) And the absence of all the tu/vous nonsense.
horsewoman wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:35 am
Recently I've done a few units of Irish on dulinogo, there is a lot of having going on!
I'm impressed you gave it ago! See:

https://youtu.be/ydSNgr97gSY

boomly
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by boomly »

jacob wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:35 am
whereas kegan3 subordinates their identity to the group-identity ("I am what they say I should be"). Kegan3 seems to have a lot of problems doing personality testing due to an inability to identify whether an impulse comes from themselves or their "tribe", e.g. "Of course I'm extraverted, because I work in sales and I'm fun and outgoing like society wants me to be".
My basic question is - Would a different grammar, which treats emotions/perspectives/beliefs as objects separate from subjects (instead of as attributes of subjects) change the percentage of the population who are like this?

chenda
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by chenda »

I was musing yesterday if linguistics impacts mental health diagnosis. Russian for example has numerous untranslatable words to describe certain emotions which would take a paragraph or two of English to even vaguely describe. Maybe one can be diagnosed more specifically in Russian than English, with its vague anger/depression/sadness stock words which lack a lot of nuance.

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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by jacob »

boomly wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 12:22 pm
My basic question is - Would a different grammar, which treats emotions/perspectives/beliefs as objects separate from subjects (instead of as attributes of subjects) change the percentage of the population who are like this?
I suspect it's better if the language has the capacity to hold both perspectives. Otherwise it risks a pre/trans-fallacy around k3.

Alifelongme
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Re: k3 and k4 grammar

Post by Alifelongme »

If I may…
In Russian, these expressions usually use verbs representing an action right here and now (present continuous) rather than a mental/emotional state. It could be rephrased to represent an emotional state but that would change the meaning of it to something corresponding to perfect present tense in English.
Interesting.

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