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Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

From:Peter Bleackley <peter.bleackley@...>
Date:Monday, March 30, 2009, 13:14
staving RoseRose:
>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
OK, here's a slightly weird one for you. Khangaþyagon is spoken by wizards, who because of their magical gifts, are all synaesthetes. I'm not a synaesthete, but recently I was trying to think up words for herbs and spices. I spent a lot of time in my kitchen, sniffing at jars and trying to find a word that fit - or thinking up words and then searching for something that smelt right for the sound. My thought processes at one point went something like this. "zurvin... Is that cloves?" <sniff> "No, definitely not cloves. How about thyme?" <sniff> "Yes, that's right, zurvin is thyme." Pete

Replies

andrew <hobbit@...>
RoseRose <faithfulscribe@...>