My apologies on misattributing the prior discussion. What's another Josh? ( more or less)
Quote:
Joshua Reyer wrote:
That's fine for Osensei. But he's not my guide here, and on the whole I don't think he should be used as the arbiter of semantic meaning. The word "aiki" preceded him; he did not coin it.
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I think there is our disconnect. I do not view language disconnected from the stories we use it to tell or the stories we tell about it. It is one thing. I have cause to believe O Sensei was also of a similar opinion. I know there are large schools of thought in linguistics and language going the other way, but I am not in agreement with them, and I am in good company in this perspective.
Your earlier point is that interpretation given may properly vary according to use. My focus is O Sensei's interpretation for this art. The thread is, after all "defining aikido" not the "defining aiki," and analytically breaking the "aiki" from O Sensei's expressed understanding is of value only to provide context, and only denotative context, at that.
In the Kojiki-den, O Sensei's necessary source material for reading the Kojiki, the significance of things like "folk-etymology" to the context of O-Sensei's literary underpinnings in that text is plain. Kotodama is very much a process of the assocational and transformational aspects of sound and its meaning. Kojiki-den is a running argument about how the various kanji in the book should be read in Japanese. Even Motoori has been criticized for his "reach" in making some associations that fit his avowed political interest, and language is more subject to manipulation in view of present interest than in view of unchanging truth.
Meaning disregards history when other usage and understandings (even fanciful ones) are preferred or become associated. In American English, as example, "liberal" is a very dangerous word to try to apply, from historic evidence of its semantic boundaries, that same limit to its present semantic range.
O Sensei was a visionary, not a scholar, although he valued scholarship. It is more critical in understanding O Sensei's interpretation to have the concepts and relationship he COULD reasonably have associated with those meanings (scholarly-correct or not) than any far more accurate and historically sound etymology. The correspondence with his literary usage as a whole reveals the truth of it. .
As disclosed in his lectures, kotodama associational riffs and mythic imagery formed his visionary process, and folk-etymologies are of a piece with that kind of use of language. They are basically capsule stories about how we mean what we mean.
Lewis' Humpty Dumpty was at least half right. (See, if you get the literary allusion you know exactly what I mean, even though I didn't say it in so many words. If you don't, it is utterly opaque.)