Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

Beautiful rant, indeed.Whether one puts attention on emphasizing likeness
and universals, as I think you are getting at, or differences, as I was
trying to tease out with my question, both are real aspects for me at least
of viewing languages.  I base sameness on what Charles Laughlin, in his book
Brain, Symbol, and Experience, calls neurognosis--the basic neural setup we
are all endowed with as human beings.  Accounting for differences also seems
traceable in many matters to genetic presets.  But there is also wiggle room
built into the system--neural plasticity, for instance, that permits
variations for adaptive purposes.  These are what Laughlin would call *
structural* matters.

My question was aimed, however, at the experiential level, call it
phenomenological or what you will--not so much either the structural or the
behavioral--though all three--structure, behavior, and experience are what
Laughlin would call the three windows into a view of reality--and they don't
always agree.

RR

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:39 AM, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>wrote:

> 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)
>