Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

RoseRose skrev:
> I'm personally of the Whorfian persuasion that different languages "cause"
> different forms of thinking and different thoughts therefore arise.  Having
> been so deeply engaged with Glide for 10 years, I've noticed I parse the
> world differently--see process, for instance, more foregrounded than things,
> flow more than form.  This is of course very subjective and not all that
> easy to describe.  I am curious if anyone else sees effects in your
> reality-sense that you attribute to your conlanging activities in any way?
> Diana
>
<RANT length="questionable" irascibility="moderate"
    inflammability="considerable"> <!-- Be warned! -->

I'm of the opposite persuasion that life
conditions and culture shape our perception of
reality and thought- processes, which in turn
shape language. Of course language is part of our
culture and so the process is reciprocal.  Still
in the end most languages, if correctly analysed,
are alike in most basics (i.e. universals) just
because our thought processes of all human beings
are basically the same.  But think about it: if
language and culture determined eachother
unilaterally neither would change! But as it
happens all languages from the time period we have
data from or can reconstruct, 5'000-10'000 years
by a conservative estimate, are typologically the
same, while the particulars of human culture have
changed vastly in that time.  At the same time
even the cultures of the speakers of the most
'divergent' languages are fundamentally the same
as every other human culture, even without getting
down to the basic fact that the ultimate point of
every culture is the control of nutrition and
procreation!  I don't think you have to be a
Buddhist (though I am) to think that what
ultimately conditions thought, language and
culture alike is the condition of being human.

Whorf was guilty of the error of not correctly
understanding how polysynthesis and hierarchic
alignment work, and so he over-analysed, because
he had to bend his ways of analysing language to
understand the languages he studied. That doesn't
prove that the thought processes of those speaking
those languages were 'bent' compared to his. His
other mistake was to not distinguish between
thought and perception themselves and the way they
are expressed.

Everyone has experienced the conflict between what
one wants to say and what one is able to say in a
foreign language; it does not come from the
structure of the foreign language being weird, but
from one's insufficient command of the foreign
language.  I'm pretty sure that both Whorf's
informants' command of English and Whorf's command
of the informants' languages were insufficient to
express/impress what they wanted to say, and that
Whorf made exaggerated conclusions about the
impact of language structure on thought from that.

Basically you can express anything in any
language: what differs is the compactness of the
expression, and what can be expressed compactly in
a language is conditioned by the culture of the
speakers, not the other way around.  To use the
degree of weirdness of an over-literal English
translation of an expression in any other language
as an index of or exponent of the weirdness of the
thought processes of the speakers of that language
strikes me not only as fallacious but also as
supremacist: somewhere in there lurks an
assumption that you should expect an 'alien'
culture, its language and the thought processes of
its bearers to be all weird.  When talking about
'the others' "weird" is usually synonymous with
"inferior". An over-literal English translation of
anything I say in Swedish will sound like Cletus
in "The Simpsons".  To conclude from that that I'm
anything like Cletus, or indeed the assumption
that a person like Cletus is inferior, is cultural
supremacism, and that's that.

</RANT>

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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