The computer expects the instructions conducted in the manner it was designed to receive it expects the algorithms to be aligned in their stylistic way and expects the logical flow to be sequential and expects the rules and regulations and models of the language we’re interacting with it to be followed to the teeth. It cannot run it won’t run it will simply refuse to obey our commands if they aren’t issued in the grammar that it understands. The human mind is different though. There is no formal grammar that we need in place for us to construct sentences and words they don’t have to flow they don’t need a specification checklist to be adhered to no rules no limitations that restrict the flow of thought were can interpret even the most absurd lines and still make some sense out of it. We can get away with it and which the computer cannot do by as The Words and semantics we construct may not always be logically connected or sound may not be in their sensible order the paragraphs and glyphs and ligatures we use may not be of any rational sense and yet we alone can derive meaning from it the human mind doesn’t have a formal grammar for it to be able to interpret only in the ways it can understand there are no limitations to the flow of thought no oppressive restrictions on the flow of the stories and information that we narrate and we share no such external factors influence or restrict/control the processing of information and is interpretation in the mind. What of the same lines that you read at different stages and different times of your life can be interpreted so varied so different from each other that we derive myriad meanings at each different juncture of an instant, what of words themselves that are open to contrue meanings of variety? it’s just that open isn’t it, understood in our own unique weird ways there are no rules to be followed no instructions no semantic grammars not even logical flow or rationality necessarily at all times but can still infer or deduce a bit of meaning out of the inane absurdities, which is sui generis idiosyncratic to the mind alone. Take for instance this passage from Finnegans Wake:

Talis is a word often abused by many passims (I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really most tantumising state of affairs). A pessim may frequent you to say: Have you been seeing much of Talis and Talis those times? optimately meaning: Will you put up at hree of irish? Or a ladyeater may perhaps have casualised as you temptoed her à la sourdine: Of your plates? Is Talis de Talis, the swordswallower, who is on at the Craterium the same Talis von Talis, the penscrusher, no funk you! who runs his duly mile? Or this is a perhaps cleaner example. At a recent postvortex piece infustigation of a determinised case of chronic spinosis an extension lecturer on The Ague who out of matter of form was trying his seesers, Dr’s Het Ubeleeft, borrowed the question: Why’s which Suchman’s talis qualis? to whom, as a fatter of macht, Dr Gedankje of Stoutgirth, who was wiping his whistle, toarsely retoarted: While thou beast’ one zoom of a whorl! (Talis and Talis originally mean the same thing, hit it’s: Qualis.)

With the written word, on the other hand, which is probably the among the most complex of mediums to deconstruct, one couldn’t also capture an entirety of a reading without them being familiar with th historical, sociocultural settings of a time that is long past their generation which throws the onus of a literary, or scientific text on the author to not only construct their writing in futureproof methods by the usage of generous exposition which would or might seem a lot turgid that might even capitulate the beauty of their art or work, which is an altogether different ballgame, that is laregely specific to art, and mostly to the written word though not necessarily restricted to it. I also see it as a method of communication. Or it might just end up being a Rorschach test. Sure, it can be used to express an individual’s unique view of the world, but it can also be used to build common ground, to promote understanding, and to create change. One may also run the risk of running into contextual barriers, wherein the lack thereof adequate background knowledge and the context in which an event or time is being discussed is lost to the reader due to their incapacity to perceive the reality of the time that is left to the ability of the interpreting reader to gather enough informational context around a topic to sufficiently understand its underlying truths. Some texts are—complex and uneasy also withhold enough layers to produce meanings that come with rereadings of multiple times, therein lies their enjoyment of it. Now one could barely infer anything if they hadn’t been acclimatized to the diction of Joyce’s generous employ of Irish puns and accents—a cadence he developed in tandem with the English language in order to convey his rather paradoxical exegesis of dreams and imagination conveyed here with the argument of a Latin word: Talis which is said to constitute a number of meanings, from moth to such, with tallith (prayer shawl) in the near distance, whereas passim is Latin for … allusions or references in a published work … to be found at various places throughout the text. v. Google online dictionary — Latin, from passus ‘scattered’, from the verb pandere; The above passage is part of the argument where a professor espouses on the nature of time when the word ‘Talis’ is used for ‘such as’ here in the vein of time as itself, to end with ‘Qualis’ which is meant here as being of ‘space’, is to drop the mic on the both its etymological treatise and shine the light on the ontological premise of condition of existence where time was fallaciously used to mean space itself to argue that both cannot be seen separately going against the grain of which the artistic world who viewed spatial and temporal realities being divergent whose inability to articulate the nature of space without the reference of time was critiqued, and during the early twentieth century when Einstein came to the fore to unify them together, Joyce attempts to parody via critique of a professor’s polemics of the reversal of time in antithesis to the spatialist philosphies of the time; just as one may require the agency of more than one language at their disposal to fully understand it, one may also have several interpretations of this passage, and yet it is okay in that same vein as they are held equally valid. Which is probably also the reason why there are entire fields devoted to the study of such textual semiotics using deconstruction and the various structural analyses of phenomenological forms were invented and practised.

On the other side, rhetoric is a tool to achieve something, in this case, presumably, convincing someone of something. Sure, it can be used to entertain, but that’s a side effect, not the goal. I’ve never thought of rhetoric as a tool to achieve something. It’s a tool to persuade, to create an effect in the listener. Whether that’s convincing them of something or entertaining them is beside the point. As much as literature is an art form, I also think that rhetoric can be used to argue in bad faith or to mislead an audience, but I also think that it can be used in good faith to make an argument or to inform an audience, the misuse of rhetoric is not an argument against rhetoric as an art form, any more than the misuse of literature is an argument against literature as an art form, for the most part though it has to be conceded that literature and art are indispensable in understanding ourselves and others finding meaning in life, and generally learning to be better people though it may run the risk of being categorized as ‘useless’ — people who appreciate it are more likely to appreciate life for all its complexities, whether it be in the moral scruples that it evokes in us even after one has devoured a piece ages ago, its ability to linger on or generate new thinking patterns informing us on unheard regions of the world or enlightening us to invoke something dormant and provide assistance or offer (dis)comfort during unforeseeable times makes it ever so important, despite its uselessness it can also have many practical applications as it can be used to communicate ideas and bring people together, being as it was intertwined with religion since the aeons of time — in ancient Greece and Rome, the main function of art was to glorify the gods and in the medieval era, it was used to teach religious stories and doctrines while in the modern era, art serves a variety of purposes primarily though, to celebrate the human experience, to make social commentary, to raise awareness about important issues, and to provide a means of self-expression. One may wonder what constitutes as art though? That just language in general and speaking to each other and everything we do for other humans to understand is performance, art. It is as much dependent on the consumer as it is on the creator, a mutual relationship that is consubstantial in their exchange.

But it isn’t foolproof which is why code was never able to be interpreted by the machine using natural language, at least not yet which seems insuperable, words we use and string together are never free of their own shortcomings. Where the existence of a—where linguistic freedom was theorised and synthesised to formalism—Chomsky’s regular grammar that is understood by humans is greatly undermining the scope and expanse of mere human syntactical capabilities, which could be better adopted as being formalising just a subset of such limits of understanding, viz. computing based defining of a finite automata and its grammars governed by its own finitude of memory. This language has an infinite number of words, however, any given word in the language has a specific, finite length; regular languages do not contain words of infinite lengths; the formalism for languages with infinite words as being ω-languages. Regular expressions can define a subset of infinite languages called regular languages and there are other kinds of infinite languages that can be defined by more powerful representations such as context free grammars, context sensitive grammars, all the way up to Turing machines à la computer programs. But in the end, no set of finite expressions can define all infinite languages, due to cardinality; supposing we wanted to make a machine that determines if a string is in a particular language i.e. ‘recognizes’ the language—it’s going to be a lot harder for some languages than for others. Strings containing an ‘a’ is a regular language, while English is not. With the advent of AI, this also raises the question of what natural language is and isn’t.

It is among the infinite languages that regularity makes an interesting distinction. Finitely languages are almost trivially regular, since the language can be represented outwright syntactically:

L = {cat, dog, …}

is generated by,

cat dog …

Here, a finite expression generates a finite set; no surprise there. But does it require an infinite expression to define an infinite set?

L = {a, ab, abb, abbb, abbbb, …}

is an infinite set that can be defined by the finite expression,

$ ab* $

So, regular expressions, finite expressions of a particular kind, can define infinite sets. Can they define all infinite sets? Nope.

L = {ab, aabb, aaabbb, …}

Cannot be defined by a regular expression. It requires a mechanism to count the number of a’s and b’s as equivalent.

Whereas when it comes to human boundaries with their informal minds—it might be multitudinous if not infinitudal. Here’s one of the thunder words invented for its own amusing sake in the Wake and its posited meaning,

Ullhodturdenweirmudgaardgringnirurdrmolnirfenrirlukkilokkibaugimandodrrerinsurtkrinmgernrackinarockar

Occurs later in the same extended sequence, in the argument between Shem and Shaun. McHugh: Ull: Norse patron god of skiing and archer; Hoder: blind god, killed Baldur; N todenveir: thunderstorm; Midgaard: Earth in Norse myth; Urd: a Norse Fate; Fenrir: son of Loki; bogeyman; Grimnir: Odin; Gungnir: Odin’s Spear; Mjollnir: Thor’s hammer; Oddrun: sister of Stli; Surt: ruler of the Norse fire world; ONRagnarøkr: destruction of the Norse Gods

With other languages, their varied morphologies, such as agglutinative ones things tend to get murkier, where morphemes can be used to chain together strings of words that go the length of sentences, Tamil or Japanese for example, and might even have easily deductible meanings, due to very few irregular verbiage, suffixes are used to mark noun class, number, and case, verb tense and other grammatical categories. As a result, a large number of inflectional variants for each word exist, with their own syllabic morphologies. Though words themselves are limited in their capabilities we understand their arrival wasn’t too early in our evolution, for the subconscious always preceded it and many other facets of the development of the brain, the restrictions of conscious thought are often only superseded by subconscious ones, for conscious thought might have burgeoned only later in the evolutionary stage, whereas subsconscious ones don’t really understand language at all, nor the rules of it, as it is always receiving and generating abstract thought, the words we use to express our feelings thoughts and everything else in between can only accomplish so much when it is limited and curtailed by the boundaries of language therein, as whichever language being employed has it sown set of rules, boundaries and scope for expression, each one has its own length and breadth to traverse, each its own flexibility its semantic gravitas, and manifold ways of human linguistic space. When we may not be fully adept at even language itself, since some of them evolve and still are evolving along the years; but rather an ineffable something we feel so deeply about to want to express it in our own tongue, find ourselves being unable to accomplish whatever we long to actually say. Formal grammar, linguistic didacticism all of which attempt to grapple with the evolution of our intuitive understanding of language are and have been under the lens of linguistic analysis, research and interpreted by the increased attention given to the variety and usage of language for the development of computing, and the internet with the advent of Unicode and other methods of allocating bytes to suit the eclectic mix of language for their usage in the internet, and beyond, the computer though never understands the words themselves, they are merely fed in their way of byte arrangements by way of their own tongues are then transliterated from one to another for their need to tend to the needs of people using them, only we could ever make sense of the varied permutations and amalgamation of words and strings of sentences to infer meaning from what they exhibit to us. Despite the limitations of our languages, we know that there is no other at least no better way to express our minds, and our internal thought process can only think in their myriad visual and monologuing manners until they have to be able to even informally vent them out into a form that we ourselves can then understand later when we might go back and rehash ourselves.