For dialogue to take place, speech must function.
For speech to function, linguistic communication is required.
For language to express discourse and establish dialogue, there must be the need and intention of relationship, of society.
Parallel monologues are not dialogue. The venting of selfishness is not speech.
The subordination of words, concepts and syntax to methods of constructing impressions negates the prerequisites of linguistic communication. Language is an instrument of relationship, an expression of society.
A society that does not communicate, that does not have collective goals, common visions, what language will it speak? It is limited to an elementary code of understanding and the rest of linguistic expression is commodified, becomes advertising, professional idiom, party sloganeering, literary fabrication, ideological boasting. It is no exaggeration to say that we stutter.
Because we have created a society of unsociable individuals. We say one thing, we mean another, our interlocutor understands another, the resulting clarifications are often inevitable, necessary, indispensable. We live in an explosive inflation of diverse expressiveness within a perfect vacuum of absence of relationships.
The language of television, the press, and advertising neither communicates experiences nor communicates as a participant in real relationships. The same goes for the language of politicians, trade unionists, and vested interests. It is a marketing and management of impressions, a manipulation of illusions.
Sometimes the phenake of speech is confessed in practice: When public discourse is for the most part unreliable, commercialized, and naturally adapted to the production of illusory impressions, then there is no means or instrument for evaluative hierarchy, realistic assessment – not only of books, ideas, intellectual creation, but also of political action and social behavior – to function.
When the prerequisites for critical discourse are eliminated, social criticism, the evaluation of scientific, artistic, and business activity, is impossible. And when critical filters do not function in a society, primitivism and the dissolution of all cohesion inevitably occur.
What is appropriate? I think a proper educational reform should address the language problem in particular with real awe.
I believe that our modern Greek language is the living and natural evolution of our centuries-old linguistic tradition,
I also believe that language progresses with the successive "readings" of the previous written tradition, and the only grammar that ensures this living continuity is the grammar of the ancient language.
Photo Leonhard_Niederwimmer, www.p Pixabay.com
