Publicação
The silent voices of the past and the abstract thought on the agricultural landscape: a dialogic reading of Sumerian and Latin literatures
| Resumo: | Many authors devoted to the study of ancient social systems pointed out the great dependence on farming and herding for complex society’s genesis. In that sense, such dependence must have had an intrinsic influence on the cultural matrix of cultures sustained by agriculture, as the entire Mesopotamian and italic regions. Farming and herding regulated the daily activities, interfering with the conceptualization of the surrounding cosmos. The natural world was reflected in the abstract thought and that inevitably stated the basis for linguistic creativity an expression based on signs of meaning inspired by the agricultural landscape. A variety of media often shows such potential ‘metaphoric’ language, which surpasses the simple expression of literary telluric feelings; it is the manifestation of obvious images to an interlocutor who recognizes meaning in signs culturally transmitted by empirical experience within the agricultural cosmos or by traditional preconceptions. In this sense, through the identification and crystallization of what modern semiotics call ‘signs of meaning’, the empirical visualization of fertility, abundance and quality of production would work as source for the creation of imagery constructed upon the common sense and upon the experience of rural life and natural phenomena. Those images compounded by cristalyzed signs of meaning would be converted in linguistic symbols, which semantics would reflect the symbiosis of three conceptual planes: rural life, natural phenomena and welfare. The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the way the prejudgment on meanings from nature, based on common sense, is constructed and maintained in a defined cultural context, far behind the exclusivity and artificiality of literary expression. And, at same time, how can such prejudgment help us to understand better an ancient culture and help to approach the thoughts of the silent people of the ancient world. In order to interpret how the allegorical images and mechanics on crystallization of traditional bias are built, I intend to identify possible traces of ancient traditional linguistic thought in Sumerian literature and Latin instructions on farming, which matrix was formed by the contact with the natural world and goes back to pre-historical times. The objective is to identify meaning in images transmitted by literary language applying the same method to two unrelated cultures, in order to attest that different cultures may have the same mechanisms of building abstract meaning, with similar results, when agriculture and nature are the main background context. |
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| Autores principais: | Ferreira, Nelson Henrique Silva |
| Assunto: | Literatura Suméria Literatura Latina Linguística cognitiva Agricultura Tradição popular Culturas antigas Sumerian Literature Latin Literature Cognitive Linguistics Agriculture Folk Tradition Ancient Cultures Tradición popular Culturas antiguas |
| Ano: | 2019 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso embargado |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Coimbra |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | Estudo Geral - Universidade de Coimbra |
| Resumo: | Many authors devoted to the study of ancient social systems pointed out the great dependence on farming and herding for complex society’s genesis. In that sense, such dependence must have had an intrinsic influence on the cultural matrix of cultures sustained by agriculture, as the entire Mesopotamian and italic regions. Farming and herding regulated the daily activities, interfering with the conceptualization of the surrounding cosmos. The natural world was reflected in the abstract thought and that inevitably stated the basis for linguistic creativity an expression based on signs of meaning inspired by the agricultural landscape. A variety of media often shows such potential ‘metaphoric’ language, which surpasses the simple expression of literary telluric feelings; it is the manifestation of obvious images to an interlocutor who recognizes meaning in signs culturally transmitted by empirical experience within the agricultural cosmos or by traditional preconceptions. In this sense, through the identification and crystallization of what modern semiotics call ‘signs of meaning’, the empirical visualization of fertility, abundance and quality of production would work as source for the creation of imagery constructed upon the common sense and upon the experience of rural life and natural phenomena. Those images compounded by cristalyzed signs of meaning would be converted in linguistic symbols, which semantics would reflect the symbiosis of three conceptual planes: rural life, natural phenomena and welfare. The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the way the prejudgment on meanings from nature, based on common sense, is constructed and maintained in a defined cultural context, far behind the exclusivity and artificiality of literary expression. And, at same time, how can such prejudgment help us to understand better an ancient culture and help to approach the thoughts of the silent people of the ancient world. In order to interpret how the allegorical images and mechanics on crystallization of traditional bias are built, I intend to identify possible traces of ancient traditional linguistic thought in Sumerian literature and Latin instructions on farming, which matrix was formed by the contact with the natural world and goes back to pre-historical times. The objective is to identify meaning in images transmitted by literary language applying the same method to two unrelated cultures, in order to attest that different cultures may have the same mechanisms of building abstract meaning, with similar results, when agriculture and nature are the main background context. |
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