A friend of mine told me the German word for tortoise is shildkrote. This literally translates to shielded toad. Apparently it is quite common in German to form conjunctions of this nature, combining two (or more) ideas to make a third. This happens in English as well of course, but the idea of a tortoise being a shielded toad made me laugh, and it also got me to thinking about the nature of names and naming.
I grew up around New England. The first snow of every year was a thrilling moment that every child looked forward to. I’m not sure it’s something that ever gets out of your blood – waiting to see those first flakes swirling down out of nowhere, melting away the instant they hit the ground – more flakes falling – then suddenly the torrent begins and soon the flakes no longer melt, but begin to accumulate, blanketing everything. It is a transformative experience to watch the world remake itself.
I’ve heard the Inuit (the ethnic group most people are thinking of when they say, “Eskimo”) have a hundred words for snow. So I went to look them up on the internet. Apparently that’s a myth. A quick investigation shows that the Inuit have what is called a “polysynthetic language”. This means that their language is structured in such a way that they have a few base words they join together into longer words that can take on the meaning of whole sentences in English. For example, they might say something like “snow-blowing-around” or “snow-falling-thick-wet”. So instead of a hundred words for snow, they have hundreds of combinations of modifiers that go with snow. When I was a kid, we had a word for the latter kind of snow – we called it “snowball-snow”.
We’ve only had two snow storms this year in Virginia. I happened to be studying on campus when the last one hit. It hit fast and dumped a couple of inches on us in a few hours. When I came out, everything was storybook white. I snapped this picture of a statue that I walk by every day when I go up to school with my cell phone. It’s called “Three Sisters” or something like that. I think on that day we could have renamed it “Three Sisters in Kufis” which would have been something related to, but completely different and unique from "Three Sisters" and "Kufis".
I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about sculpture. I especially don’t know much about modern sculpture that is about space and light and movement (even when the sculpture doesn’t have any moving parts). Sometimes it’s fascinating to look at and makes you ponder the nature of shape. An interesting sculpture can make you think about curvature in a whole new way, or texture, or, well maybe even movement. (By the way, if you do know a lot about sculpture, feel free to provide me some education). I do know effective sculpture does this like any other work of art - by reference to things we already know. A work without a reference point is not art.
I like the way the German’s named the tortoise. A name made of a conjunction gives you reference for understanding how you’re supposed to relate to a thing. When you look at a tortoise, you have to think of a toad and a shield, and how those two things came to be synthesized together in this very slow-moving animal. Its tortoiseness is captured in that relationship in the German language, despite the fact that I don't think there is a very close biological relationship between tortoises and toads. A unique name loses it’s precision. What does “tortoise” mean, except by reference to something else? A synthetic name gives you so much more to go on. Is it possible to know anything without knowing it's relationship to other things?
Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, “A thorn-handled-woman-charmer by any other name would still smell as sweet” – or something like that?
