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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Emergence Of The Ego

I am brief in this note. Current events upset me so greatly that I find it hard to concentrate at times.
My morning nausea at being in this place at this time has passed, however.
It is like living a curse: may you live in interesting times!

(This is more notes for me rather than an essay for you...)
Anyway, there has been some research on languages dealing with those that have the structure S-V-O, or subject, verb, object, such as English: Paul kicked the ball, and those with the structure S-O-V, or subject, object, verb, such as Japanese: Paul the ball kicked.

Languages such as Japanese often have some way of marking the object, in order to clearly distinguish it from the subject which immediately precedes it.

Fair enough.
What interests me is situations where the subject is not needed to be expressed.
For example, if there were a situation where there was a herd of communicators (not necessarily human beings... other animals communicate) eating and there was a distinct possibility of predators being present, the alarm could be sounded and could be construed as "(I spot) cougar! Flee!"

There could different expressions to flight for differing predators, depending on their method of attack.

So we have verb and object:  (I) spot threat-of-some-type!

The "I" or the "we" if there are many sentries is not expressed in lower animals.

When the "I" or "we" begins to be distinguish from "you" or "he/she/it/they", then the ego and self consciousness arises. The emergence of other egos forces the "I" and "we" to be expressed:  I have spotted a cougar! Flee!

If there is an award for cougar-spotting, even more reason that the subject must be clearly differentiated from the rest of the possible communicators.

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