Re: OT: What is your qualia of consciousness / thought? (WAS: does conlanging change your sense of reality?)

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets
<tsela.cg@...> wrote:

> I am definitely in the "abstract" category. My thoughts are strongly both
> non-verbal and non-visual (although I can think words and pictures, that's
.....

> This has some interesting effects:
> - I learn languages easily. People often say that they constantly have to
Wow, that's counter-intuitive.

> "translate in their head" from their native language to another language and
> back when they speak to someone else in a foreign language. I don't do that
> (except in the first stages of learning a new language, when I still need
Right; I suppose most people who are really fluent in a secondary language
have gotten past the need to mentally translate, whether by learning to think
in the secondary language directly, like myself and other primarily
verbally-thinking people, or by learning to convert their nonverbal thoughts
directly into the secondary language, like yourself.


> - I am very bad at translating from one language to the other. Since I go
> directly from my thoughts to whatever language I need at the moment, I have
> very few "bridges" between the languages I speak. When asked to translate a
> sentence from one language to the other, I need to get the meaning of the
> original sentence back into my "fog of thoughts" before I can reformulate it
> in another language. The result is usually more an explanation than a
> translation, as I try to capture a specific thought into a language that
> doesn't always have an exact equivalent.
Hmm.  This actually sounds a lot like my own mental translation process,
at least between languages that are extremely dissimilar.  (I can often
translate between English, French and Esperanto without conscious,
deliberate thought; but going to or from gzb, or Greek, takes more
reasoning and experimenting until the "semantic feel" of the translated
sentence is about the same as that of the original.)

> - On the other hand, I can code-switch extremely easily. I can say the same
> thing to three different people in three different languages without batting
> an eye, as long as the original abstract thought is in my head and ready for
> language conversion. I also tend to mix and match languages, often without
> realising it, or start speaking realising only half way through that I am
> speaking English when I should be speaking Dutch and Dutch when I should
This is partly similar to my own experience; I spontaneously
code-switch frequently while thinking silently to myself, but
*deliberately* code-switching when a social situation requires it
(e.g., at a meeting where there is a mix of Esperanto-speakers and
monolingual English speakers -- or interrupting a conversation in Esperanto
with a table-mate to talk to the waiter in English) takes some effort
and sometimes goes wrong.

> ..... There's nothing
> more annoying than having 5 languages available and still being at a loss
> for words. My thoughts just don't often fit the nice pigeon-holes that the
> languages I know provide.
That happens to me occasionally; it sometimes leads me to coin a
new word in gzb.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/

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