Re: does conlanging change your sense of reality?

On Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:15:46 -0700, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>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.
[...]
>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.

As far as I know, how this works on the consciously perceptible level is
actually a point of variation between people, though maybe not a commonly
acknowledged one.  Some do think in language, i.e. have a linguistic
internal monologue, some don't.  I don't (outside of special cases), and
being aware of the possibility of the distinction this is just plainly
obvious to me, not something that requires deep meditative introspection to
ascertain.  (Granted, there might be some uniformity at a deeper level which
does require that to perceive).

The obvious questions then are whether and to what degree affectedness by
Sapir-Whorfian factors, or for that matter just belief in Sapir-Whorf,
depends on this distinction.

Sai's interested in this distinction, p'r'aps he has more to say.

Alex