Semantic Conflicts and Orthographic Anarchy

After reading about the social grammar of change (see Theory U by Otto Scharmer) I had an encounter with the semantics of social conflict today.

I was hiking with colleagues and the day was a bad choice as the weather was a variation of heavy rain, mist and just a few spells of sun. Finally sitting in the Panoramarestaurant on mount Wallberg, we did not get to see the scenic mountain panorama. But we got something more mystic and enchanting, at least this is how the view of the rising fog, crawling up alongside the mountain and rising into the sky, looked to me.

Was it really fog or should one speak of clouds? This is the question that led to a dispute between two of my colleagues: One insisted that what barred our view was fog, the other was convinced that in reality, the mist outside was a cloud. While the two discussed this, I realized that they actually had slightly different interpretations or semantics behind the same words. For the one, “fog” was what could be around you, while a “cloud” was further away (typically up in the sky, or potentially down in the sky when seen from a plane). For the other, “fog” was what materialized itself above surfaces while a “cloud” always formed in the sky. Down in our office, the two men would not even notice the uneven meaning they attribute to the same sequence of sounds. Up in the mountains, this slight distinctness became apparent (the mist was around us but appeared to have formed in the sky) and hence, a conflict arose.

Not a serious conflict, of course, but it brought home the familiar wisdom that much of the disputes and quarrels in our everyday life are actually about different uses of words and unnoticed misunderstandings. If we are able to go from dispute to dialogue (e.g. by applying the rules of nonviolent communication), we could probably more often than not uncover the deeper reason for conflict: Diverse meanings are associated to words or whole texts and we are not very conscious of this, we make vague assumptions about the intentions or interpretaitons of the other without asking for verification. Once these deeper layers of communication can be identified and laid open, finding “a common language” would be a lot easier.

Language and also how we use and understand it is fuzzy by nature and constantly evolving. It is only the dictionaries and grammar rules that make language look like something fixed. At school, pupils are trained to believe in these rules, they are taught that a sentence or a word can be used and written either correctly or incorrectly. Different contexts or different learning paths behind the word that an individual uses, play next to no role.

Which makes me wonder if Civilization 2.0, if we make it to this advanced level, would have a need to write down language rules. For the future society, it would be more important to foster communication “rules” or rather communication practices which allow people to lay open their semantics and interpretations as soon as they notice signs of misunderstanding. Probably there would be less mindless talk and more appreciation of diversity, as a result. Orthography might become an indicator of the historical context of a text. And individual orthography may be just as acceptable as the individual message of an author - any author, starting with the pupil in elementary school. (Written words may not even be as vital as we believe them to be today. Who knows, writing may be totally optional to learn...)

Come to think of it, signs for the end of orthographic rules can be found easily already today:

• Many authors have developed an individual way of expressing their thoughts also through an individual orthography. That makes their texts harder to read. That also means a reader will automatically pay much more attention to every single word and its contextual meaning.
• We hear that orthography of young people is getting worse because of texting. Txtng forcs U 2 rite n reed creatively. No rules, just be short.
• I have read and heard time and again that more pupils leave school and more students leave university without proper basic reading and writing skills. Maybe this lack of internalized rules can translate into freemindedness or creativity? A radical thought, but hey...
• Already today, keyboards are being replaced by touch screens. And when futurists say that we will stop typing or writing as everything can be controlled or communicated with spoken language or directly with thoughts, they may be talking of a very near future. Sensors and software that can comprehend language is already in use today, and also tools that can read the mind or respond to emotions already exist.
  

When written language becomes less important, so will grammar and orthography. This has implications basically for the way we learn foreign languages, but not for learning the mother tongue. (Sigh of relief ... no collective aphasia!).

On the other hand, semantics – the study of meaning - will become a lot more important, but not as a set of semantic rules, but rather as an awareness for context-based semantics and personal semantics.

The semantics of social conflict is replaced by a semantics of dialogue and awareness.