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Das Capital, or, a different take on capitalism
Just a short note about a peculiar type experience I had recently.
I was laying out an academic journal, which is published in English,
but one article in the current issue used Arabic words written in
Arabic script. I do not read Arabic nor understand the alphabet. So I
very assiduously copied the Arabic words in the authors manuscript
letter for letter into the layout. For technical reasons, the
editor's software did not preserve the Arabic words from the original
ms, but fortunately, the editor send the author's hard copy along
with the file, so I could mimic it.
Shortly after wading into the task, I realized there are no capital
letters in Arabic. The text referred to many proper names, which in
English are capitalized. But Arabic does not use that convention. I
had the oddest feeling typesetting the words, just a weird sense of
something not being right, gravity being weak, the magnetic poles
reversing--something. I realized shortly thereafter that part of my
reading skills is the awareness of such things as the use of
capitals, sort of a specialized form of Hrant Papazian's bouma effect.
So, the upshot of this brief reminiscence is that a lot of
perception, knowledge, and understanding is mediated by feeling and
emotions (q.v., Antonio Damasio's books), so that we 'know' some
things intuitively by feeling, otherwise unmediated by cognition. In
this case, the 'feeling' that something in the Arabic text was
'missing,' not unlike the awareness that you've mistyped a letter
because something in your fingers' movements 'didn't feel right.'
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
www.michaelbradydesign.com
----
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I was laying out an academic journal, which is published in English,
but one article in the current issue used Arabic words written in
Arabic script. I do not read Arabic nor understand the alphabet. So I
very assiduously copied the Arabic words in the authors manuscript
letter for letter into the layout. For technical reasons, the
editor's software did not preserve the Arabic words from the original
ms, but fortunately, the editor send the author's hard copy along
with the file, so I could mimic it.
Shortly after wading into the task, I realized there are no capital
letters in Arabic. The text referred to many proper names, which in
English are capitalized. But Arabic does not use that convention. I
had the oddest feeling typesetting the words, just a weird sense of
something not being right, gravity being weak, the magnetic poles
reversing--something. I realized shortly thereafter that part of my
reading skills is the awareness of such things as the use of
capitals, sort of a specialized form of Hrant Papazian's bouma effect.
So, the upshot of this brief reminiscence is that a lot of
perception, knowledge, and understanding is mediated by feeling and
emotions (q.v., Antonio Damasio's books), so that we 'know' some
things intuitively by feeling, otherwise unmediated by cognition. In
this case, the 'feeling' that something in the Arabic text was
'missing,' not unlike the awareness that you've mistyped a letter
because something in your fingers' movements 'didn't feel right.'
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
www.michaelbradydesign.com
----
Message sent by The Graphics List.
Want to be removed?
Send blank email to graphics-off-AT-lists.graphicslist.org
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