Brunnen

Phyguistics

This is an irrational story that I was inspired to write at 4 am last night.

"Ja, vi elsker dette landet
som det stiger frem"

...so begins the Norwegian national anthem. In English it is: "Yes, we love this country, how it rises forward".

Last night I was just about to fall asleep when suddenly these lyrics come to my mind and I started to work on them on the cusp of dream and consciousness.

Poetry might not be rational, words don't necessarily make sense, art is free to express thoughts in a non-systematic, weird, strange, funny, confusing, absurd way.
Nothing can really rise forward, can't it? But so do the lyrics state. The anthem is beautiful poetry, full of powerful words. Most people would agree that the lines I wrote above are a poetic expression that above all refers to growth, try, development, hope, and respect. As long as the lyrics transmit the message they were meant to, rationality is not important.

But what I did last night was a sudden try to set the lyrics into a scientific model.
After hours of vector calculations in the afternoon, my brain probably had gone into overdrive and I saw mechanics everywhere.
At 04:15 I stood out of bed, fumbled for a piece of paper and a pen since I didn't want to turn on the light, wrote my idea in the darkness hoping that I could understand my handwriting the following morning and went back to sleep. My idea was saved and I hopefully would remember all the thoughts behind it next morning.

Nothing can rise forward. An object can either - according to my understanding of physics and maths - rise upwards or move along the x-axis or do both but then the movement should be described differently, eg. rising upwards the angle being 30 degrees. Thinking this way, the actual movement of the object (or the country) would be -- as weird as it sounds -- the resultant vector of the vertical movement and the horizontal movement.

Wow, the composer of the anthem has been genius!
The lyrics don't express the movement and change in terms of the real movement but take advantage of its components x and y. They are not real forces or real movements but they can help to understand how long and in what direction the actual development is (going to).

Dividing a part of a national anthem into vectors is certainly a ridiculous idea. But linguistics does it all the time. When I talked with a professor of linguistics from the UK, he actually told me that the most useful subject to study in order to succeed in linguistics is mathematics.
Look at the study of syntax, grammar, audio-linguistics and speech research - they are all very scientific. Messages, our words full of what we think cannot be measured including emotions and standpoints, - they can all be recorded, analyzed, put into a chart, into calculations. Ratios between vowels and consonants, intonation and wave length, length of words, diminutives, and basically everything that relates to languages, and any way of communication between two or more individuals... it's all pure science. It can be, at least.

So, Norway might not be rising forward. It is moving towards something in between these forces. The resultant depends on the ratio between these two, which one has a stronger support of the people and in which angle they want to go for the future. Straight up so that the vertical, stable development is forgotten and rapid growth wins? Quick profits in a short term, an economic boom and consumerist times? Or modest, safe and socially equal development onwards along the x-axis with a very few peaks along the y-axis? We'll see. And now I need to keep going with dynamics...

posted by Anicko @ 8:22 AM