Nonsense and Unmusic

Abstract

First thing. Without nonsense there is no sense. Without sense there is no nonsense. Without sense there is no sense. Without nonce there is no once. Without out end there is no begin in. Without redundancy the waves would surge in one direction only. Second thing. I want to play a language game with you, a game that starts with a passage from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, concerning a man with an absolutely perfect memory: Me dijo que hacia 1886 habla discurrido un sistema original de numeration y que en muy pocos dlas habla rebasado el veinticuatro mil. [...] En lugar de siete mil trece, decia (por ejemplo) Maximo Perez; en lugar de siete mil catorce, El Ferrocarril; otros eran Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, azufre, los bastos, la ballena, el gas, la caldera, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. En lugar de quinientos, decia nueve. [...] Yo trate de explicarle que esa rapsodia de voces inconexas era precisamente lo contrario de un sistema de numeration. Le dije que decir 365 era decir tres centenas, seis decenas, cinco unidades: analisis que no existe en los numeros El Negro Timoteo o manta de carne. Funes no me entendio o no quiso entenderme. He told me that in 1886 he had thought up his own original numbering system, and that in a very few days he had gone past the number 24,000. [...] Instead of 7013 he would say, for example, Maximo Perez; instead of 7014 he would say The Railroad; other were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, sulfur, the saddle pads, the whale, the gas, the cooking pots, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. Instead of 500 he would say nine. [...] I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of disconnected words was precisely the opposite of numbering system. I told him that to say 365 was to say three hundreds, six tens, five ones; an analysis that doesn't exist in the numbers The Negro Timoteo or meat blanket. Funes didn't understand me or didn't want to understand me. The game is to reverse Borges's premise: to imagine a language that consists entirely of numbers, by taking the Oxford English Dictionary and assigning to each of its more than 200,000 words. (171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words, in the second edition.) So aardvark would be word number 10; zymurgy would have a very high number. If a new word were added to the language we could place it with decimal point 1, or 2, and so forth, added to the number of the word preceding it in the alphabet. Plurals and verb tense and and moods could be indicated by pronouncing a suffix such as plus or tilde or backslash after the word-number. So speech would consist of a string of numbers. It would take a long time to say a sentence, but if signifiers are perfectly arbitrary, it would be as easy to use as our normal version of the English language, for two people with a lot of time on their hands. And it would have the advantage that you write could poems with indeterminate words, such as 86, x5y, thereby creating a new form of discourse unavailable in standard English. But normal forms of nonsense, in the Jabberwocky or Finnegans Wake manner, would be impossible: you couldn't create a portmanteau between lithe and slimy, because you can't elide two in the way that you can elide two words. And there is no reason why the phonetic aspect of the word couldn't erode away into almost nothing: as became the common medium of speech, you would need no sounds except those needed to pronounce the numbers. Eventually the word aardvark wouldn't exist; there would only be 10, meaning an ant-eating snouted African beast. But ant, and eating, and snouted, and African, and beast, would also exist only as numbers. Maybe all connection between the and the concepts they were designed to represent would ultimately become wispy to the verge of non-being, and language would become Jacques Derrida's dream system, self-enclosed, hermetically sealed. …