Tonight, I was having a discussion with my daughter to whom I was explaining the design, logic, and reasoning behind her given name. It occurs to me that this might be something I wish to capture in writing; particularly since I don’t think I have ever explained it to anyone.
The basic premise deals with the reality that language is based upon our cerebral and psychological interpretations of the words we hear; this in turn is based upon our prior experiences, expectations, and preferences in relation to culture, society, meaning, and meaningfulness.
Research demonstrates that our thinking patterns are affected and shaped by the language we use. It is reasonable, therefore, to infer that we are similarly influenced by the sound, shape, and feeling that we have upon reading or hearing or speaking a given word.
When one considers this in relation to a name, it becomes apparent that the choice of word, spelling, “shape”, and similarity to other words may (and likely does) have influence, potentially great influence, upon the visceral feeling, assumption, reaction, and response to a person immediately upon meeting them… Well before any direct, personal experience can be generated from which a more empirical impression or judgment can be made.
To the extent this may be the case, it was important to me that my daughter have a name that encapsulated the best possible elements of aesthetics, design, elegance, familiarity, aural simplicity, and the meaning.
[[Past research has suggested that neurons may not be privileged as a unit of computation. In particular, there may be polysemantic neurons which correspond to multiple semantic concepts. While our explanation technique can and often does generate explanations along the lines of “X and sometimes Y”, it is not suited to capturing complex instances of polysemanticity.]]
In linguistics, philology specifically, there is a layered landscape wherein the dialectic, historical, national, regional, religious, cultural, societal, and familial environment of language rests, and from which variants of language (and thus, its meaning when used) grow.
The seed/soil analogy is well suited to framing this as, to the degree that neurons exist, they are strands of encoded information effectively synthesizing the perspective of the human using the language.
Polysemanticism is a close descriptor, but the more accurate neologism would be polysemanticencoding, particularly to the degree that language derivations are classifiable in each of the previously mentioned contexts and, when mapped, allow significant, additional data relating the human language user.
In each context, underlying every case, there are additional data being communicated in the language that are unique to the author of the communication.
Neurolinguistics as well as psycholinguistics are the best targets in the sciences for models and concepts that can demonstrate these elements and their behavior.
An aligned model that incorporates all three (philology, neurolinguistics, and psycholinguistics) is, therefore, hypothesized to be the proverbial ‘fastest path’ to express, map, and understand the behavioral economics underpinning the use of language (and potentially sound itself) in humans.
(This is the moment in which life-long exposure to pattern and thinking about it snapped into focus the theory behind Lensing©; I began developing and defining how to assess and confirm elements of empathic and parasympathetic design for programmatic encoding of anything from idea to feeling. The theory is currently at v4.0 and reliably performs across its framework. Music demos are our chosen output for proof of concept. As this constitutes my lifetime legacy of praxis, I will not be detailing further without significant funding/resourcing and support to do so fully and well.)
