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
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