Re: What's going on here?

[HACKER G N <c9709244@ALINGA.NEWCASTLE.EDU.AU>]

On Sat, 25 Oct 1997, Chris Bogart wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Oct 1997, HACKER G N wrote:
> > Incidentally, I'm not entirely convinced that the "ser"/"estar"
> > distinction is especially objective.
>
> Fair enough.  I wonder that myself -- but take it as an example.  Another
> example might be learning the names for subtle color differences: taupe
> and tan, cream and eggshell.

Yeah, I gave the Welsh colour word 'glas' as an example a couple of
letters ago, I believe. The boundaries of different colours can be
EXTREMELY subjective, language for language.

>  Someone who knows the names might be a
> better judge of color than someone who doesn't, although it would be very
> hard to say whether the chicken or the egg came first.

That's what I think. Learning to use a word PROPERLY will by
definition train you in the distinctions necessary to use that word.
Nevertheless, you can make that distinction in principle whether there is
a handy word for it or not in your language, I think.
 >
> > In cases where a concept is especially difficult to express briefly in a
> > native language, we generally just borrow the word or phrase that
> > expresses it from the other language.
>
> OK, but I think borrowing is useful for more than just interpersonal
> communication.
>
> Although you say in another message that you don't believe you think "in"
> any language, I'm not decided on that issue regarding my own thoughts.
> Maybe I switch back and forth between thinking-in-words and
> thinking-in-gestalts-or-whathaveyou.

Well, one reason that I don't think I think "in" any language, is that
when there are words in my head, I am always aware of the thought I have
BEFORE I construct the language for that thought in real time. My thoughts
seem gestalt, but my language seems linear. They seem like different
things.

> But I do know that when I'm trying
> to clarify a concept in my own mind, I typically have a running dialog in
> my head with an imaginary skeptic, with whom I have to be pretty precise
> because he'll pick nits and poke holes in my arguments.  Is that just me
> or does everyone do that?

I do that too, and I started it at university when I first started
studying philosophy and sociology and I learned about dialectic. I
thought, "Yeah, that's brilliant! I'm going to use that to evolve my
thoughts more!" There can be a lot of theatrical linguistic commentary
that goes on when you think like this, yet I am still aware, especially
when arguing with someone else in real time, that a very CLEAR intuitive
apprehension of the situation comes to me before the words do. First comes
what Robert M. Pirsig called the Quality, and then comes the linear
mapping of that Quality into specific boundaries and domains. That's where
the logic and the language comes into it.

Also, let me clarify: I think that consciously studying a language like
Lojban that makes distinctions that some people are not used to making,
can sharpen your thinking skills - but I don't think that that comes from the
language directly, but rather about the THINKING and analysis of the
language. I think that language doesn't shape thought so much as thought
shapes thought. And then I think thought shapes language. :)

> Anyway, a borrowed or coined word might help
> that process along, and thereby help in my thinking, not just in my
> external communication with other (real) people.

Maybe. But the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis sounds to me like the tail wagging
the dog. A borrowed word can make you more confident about an existing
thought in your head, and you might even make the word a focus of your
thought. But if language placed some kinds of restrictions on thinking,
there is this further problem that gets raised: Take a language that
has clear grammatical ambiguities like English. I still know perfectly
well what I MEANT to say, even if someone can come along and give it a
different, albeit crazy, interpretation, like mountains flying over Zurich
with dove wings, or something, to take a much earlier linguistic example.
Yet even though I might have to think to reword the sentence so it avoids
overt alternative interpretations, I still don't have to think to know
what I originally meant. So there's still something going on there
independently of the language, I think.
 >
> (.i da'i no drata be mi cu pensi ta'i la'edi'u .inaja ba'a .o'unairo'a do'o
> jinvi ledu'u mi fenki zo'o)

vau u'i i mi na jinvi ledu'u do nitcu lenu xanka la'edi'u It reminds me of
when I did postgraduate research in philosophy. It sometimes involved
inventing new terms so I could describe better what I meant. If you use
language at all, to yourself or someone else, you tend naturally to use
terms that concisely convey your thoughts, and I think that this close
supervenience of language with thought can cause confusion about the
relationship between the two things. Language is of course extremely
important, but I cannot say that I have ever felt caged by it, hence my
skepticism about the SWH.
 >
> > But in terms of actually making the distinction at all, you don't need a
> > language to do that, you just make the distinction. What a language can do
> > is find a convenient way of expressing that distinction to others.
>
> For me at least, though, it could help me think about the matter more
> smoothly, and therefore more quickly or more often, at least within a
> certain category of thinking.

Well, words do pick up intuitive and emotional associations with time.
Possibly the use of a word will trigger some associations within you
faster. I suppose that is possible. But then again, this seems more
something that occurs when you think consciously about language, to me,
because a native speaker is not really very aware of all the different
characteristics of the grammar and vocabulary that they employ; it is in
the BACKGROUND, not the foreground. Hence, the languages that will
influence more what you think, if this happens, will be the second
languages more likely than the first ones. There was somebody who was
saying this a while ago on this list, that it was a problem with Whorf's
work on Hopi. The people who reported influences in their thoughts were
learning Hopi as a second language, where Hopi's characteristics were in
their foreground. But the thoughts of native speakers are not thus
affected because those linguistic features are in their background.
>
> This is all very theoretical -- I have no idea how I could ever prove this
> to myself for sure, much less anyone else.  But I suppose that's an
> inherent problem when discussing something as immeasurable as "thought".
>
Yeah. Well, I'm good at Lojban, and I think my thinking improves with the
more material I learn, linguistic or otherwise. I also always use terms
that concisely convey my meaning, from wherever one normally gets them.
But one thing to remember is that all a new term needs to represent a new
thought is to be DIFFERENT from different phrases or words that represent
different thoughts, and in any natural language, this is fairly easy to
do, whether it be through slang, or figuratively, or in technical terms
that are coined for journals. And the concepts build on the concepts just
as the terms build on the terms, ad infinitum. What I find
thought-provoking about Lojban is that it is different, and studying it
does make you look at other things that you might otherwise not have given
much thought about. It just all seems to me to amount to something weaker
than Sapir-Whorf, 'cause I can still say that philosophy did a helluva lot
more to improve my thinking than any set of linguistic study. So my hunch
is it's thinking that tends to improve thinking. Anyway, there you have
it.... :)

Geoff