The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility

theparisreview.org

54 points·diodorus··6 comments

Sometimes occurs to me with song lyrics. It's beautiful to understand part of a sentence after listening to a song ten times, while some parts remain unrecognized. Makes me want to keep listening to the song until I reveal more of its mysteries. If it's a sufficiently obscure recording there might not even be the possibility to look up the lyrics online.

Some musicians play with this deliberately. Sigur Rós sings some or part of their songs in Hopelandic, a kind of glossolalia that vaguely resembles Icelandic. The album booklet for '( )' contained blank pages for listeners to write their own lyrics into. Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins sings in a form of English that is almost but not quite comprehensible. And Lisa Gerard of Dead Can Dance sings pure, invented glossolalia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJhVM930YXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtBr5JKSuks

https://vimeo.com/3977534

Have Googlers ever tried running this through Google's language learning and translation tools?

I like XKCD's take on it: https://xkcd.com/593/

It is plausible that the plant imagery in these texts is unrecognisable because these have changed beyond recognition. Take a look at this[1] to see how the fruits we know today looked very different in the past.

[1]: http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-fruits-and-vegetable...

Fascinating. If not a hoax - perhaps an early example of schizophrenia? A rare case where an educated schizophrenic had access to bound calf skin, creating a book with their own invented language and theories?

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