Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

I went down the mass and spacetime path with you a way, thought about that
formula of Einstein's:  the mass of a moving body = the mass of the body at
rest over the square root of 1 minus v squared over c squared (or something
to that effect) where it doesn't really make too much difference until you
get really cranking up toward the speed of light. Then things really
change--relativistically speaking--at least from one viewpoint.  I speculate
that where this seems to come in with language would be when the speed of
thought increases enormously, which effects time sense.  Time dilation is a
frequent observation in the psychedelic sphere.  How does this effect
language?  Very open question.  For me, natlangs seems like very slow
software sometimes.
Love the mythology.

RR

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 11:37 AM, J. Burke <rtoennis@...> wrote:

> 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
> >
>
>
>
>