Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

My views are likewise Whorfian, but nonlinear; the best analogy of the
relationship between language and thought, IMO, is the relationship between mass
and spacetime in General Relativity: mass determines the shape of spacetime, and
spacetime determines the paths that masses travel. It's an imperfect analogy; but
think of mass as language and spacetime as thought.  Language cuts the grooves for
thought, so to speak, while thought tends to reenforce these grooves.  It's a
mutually reenforcing relationship.  Some years ago, in the introduction to the old
Noyahtowa grammar, I wrote about this, in the guise of a medicine tradition:

It was told among the elders and medicine men of the West that when all living men
communicated by the Shadow Language, the ancient Language of the Heart and Mind
and of all Spirits, they were not far removed from their physical surroundings.
Their thoughts had yet to be tied down and solidified, to be habitually guided
along one path at the expense of all others; and so a man’s thinking could
easily follow a stream of perceptual phenomena on its own terms, and he had no
need to impress his own beliefs upon what he beheld in order to comprehend it.
But spoken language changed this, so that words became the principal way by which
man experienced and interacted with his brothers, his world and even himself.
When the Ozolotaahko taught men to speak with their mouths and not their hearts,
individual spoken languages began to develop, and these languages grew organically
from varied possible ways of symbolizing and categorizing the world; and in turn
the
languages solidified the thought patterns from which they sprouted into distinct
worldviews--i.e., habits of thinking about the world, ingrained ways of
interpreting and ordering its phenomena.  There was room for language to diverge
from worldview, and vice versa, but the fit between the two was always tighter
than it was loose.  And when a language and worldview on the one hand, and
physical reality on the other, came into an inevitable relationship, a separate
world-of-words was born, or an imitation of the real world built of words; and it
was in these worlds-of-words that men came to live almost to the exclusion of the
true one.  Man had segmented unitary existence, and though his intellect may have
retained knowledge of the segmentation, he forgot in his heart what he had done;
thus he was placed at one remove from physical reality.

Natlanging and conlanging both are associated with varying worldviews and thinking
patterns for me.  One of my goals with the Central Mountain languages is to
capture and use a certain worldview--in this case, an animistic one.


--- On Mon, 3/30/09, RoseRose <faithfulscribe@...> wrote:

> From: RoseRose <faithfulscribe@...>
> Subject: does conlanging change your sense of reality?
> To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
> Date: Monday, March 30, 2009, 8:57 AM
> 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
>

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