Re: Thought and Language

I have thought a great deal about this question. On the one hand, it is clear
that language is just a silly veil. What is is, directly and completely.
Something flies at you out of the blue and you catch it. No language is spoken
within you. Much of life is just like that. This is one of the essential
lessons of Zen.
On the other hand, the waterfall of internal sounds, remembered speech and
sounds, one's own mind, talking to itself, is greatly affected by language.
For example, I know some Russian. And at work I wash my "ruki". To the russian
the idea of hand includes the front half of the forearms. I used to work in
the UGa Library. There I picked up a word from a NW Amerindian language, that
meant to come around (hinting, as for something to eat.) I have since become
conscious of the act, and even practise it myself. Without these contacts,
these ideas would be strange to me.  Finally, one cannot read through a
foriegn dictionary without getting a sense of an entirely different way of
looking at things. There are words left out, or possible only in phrases, that
are essential  in English. There are words elaborated upon, where in English
one word would do. In Simla's Sense of Snow, by a Danish author whose name
escapes me, something like 18 different words for "snow" were used and
explained. Going forward with this idea, the difference in literatures between
nations leaves no possible doubt that language is highly determinative of
thought. Tibetan is a fine tool for describing Buddhist ideas. Spanish is a
romantic tongue, the German analytic to an extreme.
American English is chock full o' idiomatic speech, the tongue of the
democratic ones. French is an artistic sounding language, it forces the mouth
forward, full of vowels and nuances.
               Yet the question is, how important are these differences?
A rose would be a rose by any other name, as the Bard said. Though the speech
of a Hotentot have no name for it at all, his language might be far richer
even than ours had they swallowed a continent in their coming to be, or, in
the case of the English, and maybe a few others, a globe
               Much of the value of language is that it provides a
nomenclature for technology.From the cosmos to chaotic computers,
>From cooking cakes to cooking chess problems, if we didnt have the words for
it we could not get it done. As, for the nonce. I am.
                Sincerely yours, Dan Baisden.