Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

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

> I'm personally of the Whorfian
> persuasion that different languages "cause"
> different forms of thinking and different thoughts
> therefore arise. 
My experience, after many years of serious meditation and reflexive observations
of my own consciousness is that my thoughts form, whole and complete, BEFORE they
are translated into language.

Observing my inner dialog, if I stop myself from reeling off some mental sentence
before I have completed that sentence, halt the process mid-word, I find that I
already know what thought the sentence is going to express. But that knowledge is
NOT verbal. It is pre-verbal. It is knowing without words of any kind.

To first learn this skill took me many weeks of practice at catching myself at my
inner dialog and turning the dialog off. To really get good at it took many years
of practice. But once it is mastered one can easily demonstrate to oneself that
thinking and knowing are both non-verbal. Nor do they require images or mental
pictures.

When I became truly fluent in German about 40 years ago, I found that I could, if
I halted my inner dialog, first think the thought, independent of any language,
and then express that thought to myself in either German or English. The thought
itself, however, was fully formed long BEFORE the choice was made as to which
language to use to express that thought.

The inner dialog, in other words, is NOT the thought, but is how we REPEAT the
thought to ourselves AFTER we have formed the thought non-verbally.

For someone who has not performed this experiment of halting the inner dialog this
claim seems to violate common sense. It is assumed that thoughts exist only as
mental words or images. For anyone who has tried this experiment for a few weeks
or so, however, it becomes blatantly obvious that thoughts are NOT words or
images, but that we are in the habit of TRANSLATING our thoughts INTO words or
images AFTER the fact.

If this were not the case, then how would a per-verbal baby think? And anyone who
has spent time with a baby knows beyond a doubt that they DO think. They just
haven’t yet formed the habit of talking to themselves ABOUT their thoughts, so
their thoughts exist only in their pure, non-verbal form.

Thus, it is demonstrably true to anyone who takes the trouble to learn the skill
and demonstrate it to themselves, that thought comes first, and language comes
after, and that language cannot effect what can be thought, only which thoughts
can be expressed and which thoughts remain ineffable. However, as long as we
remain fooled by the illusion that our inner dialog IS our thoughts, then we are
also fooled into thinking that the language of our inner dialog molds our
thoughts. It does not. It only molds our inner dialog, but not our pre-verbal
thoughts.


--gary

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