
The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility - diodorus
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/12/01/the-pleasures-of-incomprehensibility/
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nuclx
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.

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atdt
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=QJhVM930YXY)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtBr5JKSuks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtBr5JKSuks)

[https://vimeo.com/3977534](https://vimeo.com/3977534)

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buro9
Have Googlers ever tried running this through Google's language learning and
translation tools?

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booleandilemma
I like XKCD's take on it: [https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/)

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tapan_k
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...](http://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-what-fruits-and-vegetables-
looked-like-before-we-domesticated-them)

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thaddeusmt
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?

