Language

To me, the Canvas post is a way to think outside the box and crush those preconceived notions that a drawing is to be expected.

So what do I consider art? (I don’t mean art as in drawing).

And that’s when the answer struck me!

Language is art.

And for context, let me just say that a person I know, who says “whatever” all the time, was pestering me to write about strawberries. I gotcha next time fam.

Anyways. This is (ancient) Greek. It looks so foreign, but it looks so cool to me. Did I really write this???

The past few weeks I’ve taken the liberty of learning a new language. I’ve been reading over transcripts of the ancient Greek language, then transcribing the writing onto paper, then translating the language phonetically, making notes of the Latin derivations the words may or may not have, and all the different meanings the word had in Greek.

The thing is, as I found myself doing this, I started to recognize certain letters and the different ways they can be read in conjunction with the surrounding letters in the word.

(FOR EXAMPLE, the letter V as we know it in Greek is the letter N.)

There’s something artistic about the letters connecting with one another – forming the words that then form the sentences like neural pathways that connect with another (developing from single neuronal cells that branch into one another) – forming the architecture known as language.

Here’s another sentence I thought of! It’s not as grand as Kumquat for Emily but still.

But transcribing full sentences is not something I have been doing the entire time. I tend to focus on specific words that I relate to more.

I end up looking at individual words and apply them to things relevant to me.

I was looking at the video game Bloodborne, one of my favorite video games of all time. While playing the series, which is notorious for lore-crafting (lore-crafting is basically when the video game developer doesn’t spoon-feed the story to the player, instead letting the world that they’ve crafted provide the player character with all the information they need to critically analyze the content. The way the developers of Bloodborne build lore is they purposefully withhold as much information from the player as possible, providing certain key pieces of information that the player must critically analyze, think about, and make sense of in context to the world they’re provided), and while critically analyzing the game, I began to notice words which were central to the overall themes of the game. I jotted a couple of them down, and discovered so many interesting facts about the words.

For example, there is an enemy called “Kos, the Great One,” who is a creature that was ransacked and experimented on to produce artificial Great One’s. The Great One’s are mythological gods based off of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. Kos, quite literally, is referenced to as Kosm, which stems from the word cosmos. It’s interesting because of how the word cosmos in ancient Greek refers to Pythagoras’ idea of a structured and ordered world. Cosmos literally refers to the universe too. In the world of Bloodborne (AND Lovecraft), the cosmos also refer to the Great One’s, who are said to be the universe. For one thing, this blows my mind because the character Kos is literally an empty shell, used to create an artificial Great One called “Rom, the Vacuous One,” which literally means an empty, stupid shell, something contrary to the natural world. Kos is symbolically contrary to the etymology of his word, and I believe that the translators were well aware of this fact.

Adding another layer of meaning to this conversation then is the fact that this game is originally Japanese. The word Kos comes from Kosu, which means “to go over” in Japanese. That opens up the conversation on Kos even more, allowing for lore hunters like myself to unravel even more sections of the game. Bravo to the studio FromSoft for crafting an excellent piece of art.

γλώσσα είναι τέχνη

Language is art.

Onur A. Ayaz