Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

2009/4/2 Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bowman@...>

> I was intrigued by some of the earlier discussion about verbal and
> pre-verbal (sub-verbal?) thought.  I've found that when I'm actively
> creating my conlang Angosey, there seems to be more than just superficial,
> verbalized reasoning going on.  For example, changes in my grammar rarely
> happen due to foresight.  In other words, the grammer changes "on its own"
> and I'm left scrambling around trying to figure out how it happened.  The
> emotive aspect suffix is the best example I have: it just appeared out of
> nowhere, and I have had to figure out how it works and why it does what it
> does after the fact.  It's like I have to study my own language sometimes.
>
> Just out of curiousity, has that happened to anyone else?
>
> For me, the process of language creation is not to test a particular
> philisophical idea or alternate history.  It just comes to me, and I write
> it down.  It has a certain life of its own.  Ironically, it backs up the
> argument that we do a lot of our thinking subverbally, else otherwise how
> could ideas come to us without us "thinking" of them beforehand?
>
In the two conlangs I have invented in more detail, I often had this, that
some nuance would come to me, and then I invented words or structures to
express it, after which I tried to describe them. The result is, reading
those descriptions so many years later, I have no idea what I meant with
them...
I also sometimes have this when I'm writing stories, and I have heard of
other people with this. Before writing something, one makes a plan of
everything that will happen, and then you start writing and the characters
decide you can put your plan where the sun never shines and they do
something else. Usually, that's when the best pieces of writing are created.
I know of someone who once rewrote a piece countless times, because she did
not want a certain character to die, and he kept doing so. The poor boy was
eaten by crocodiles, then he was killed by rebels, killed by robbers, he
died in a stupid accident... Finally she let him die as seemed to be his
destiny.
Coming back to non-verbal thinking, I recently found some article about
research done in the direction of gesturing. They asked people to describe
the way to somewhere, and the subjects did so very well. Then, they were
told to hold a chair, and give directions again. They suddenly had a much
harder time doing so. The conclusion was that people use their hands to
orient themselves in space, and that's why people make gestures even on the
telephone -- not to better convey information, but to better order their own
thoughts. It's like non-verbal thoughts are still conscious, just not in
your head.

Greets
David


--
Migh foghgl adzankh edung, vonglerung.

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