Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

--- Samuel Rivier <samuelriv@...> wrote:

>
> Or my own hypothesis, which I held throughout my
> Cultural Linguistics class, much to my professor's
> dismay, which is that Sapir and Whorf are dumbasses
> and language has little to no influence on thought.
>
> I'm a physics and math and linguistics major, and I
> will testify that every engineer thinks First with
> his
> senses (images), Second with numbers and logic, and
> Finally with what little logic we can convey
> linguistically.
>
> Oh wait, I'm sorry, he thinks First with his penis,
> and then the rest comes a few minutes later.
>
> The corollary to my hypothesis is that language is
> very limited in its ability to express thought, much
> less be the machine through which thought is driven.
> Thought is first and foremost empirical - we imagine
> the abstract--what was and what might be--through
> our
> senses first. The language part comes along to
> organize it later.
>
This is a question that always deeply puzzled me. I'm
afraid your examples about engineers delaing with
maths and logics is not the most fortunate one, since
this a the kind of things that most likely would be
treated in a much similar way in most of languages.
When it comes to usual people and common language,
things might be a little different.

To me, a proof that language influences thought comes
from the traditional grammar books. A grammar for
French, for ex, will include concepts, definitions,
explanations, well a whole philosophy of language that
is closely related to French (see word categories, for
ex). It wouldn't be bad if it sticked to mere
syntactic concepts (after all, it's a grammar for
French !), but the trouble is that there are always
semantic concepts pointing their nose here and there,
and then the description is not satisfying. Or the
problem can be that the meaning is so to say not
discussed.

For ex, it took me a very long time in my life to get
to the concept of modals, because sentences like:
- Je crois que le train est parti (I think the train
has gone)
were always analyzed like:
- Je crois: principal proposition
- que le train est parti: object subordinate,
introduced by conjunction "que"

But what interests me is an analysis like:
- le train est parti (main predicate)
- je crois (modality applying to the predicate)

and this would be much more evident to a speaker of
another language, like Turkish, if I'm not mistaken.

I don't say that the traditional syntactic analysis is
false, I just say it brings you to a certain way of
thinking; and the day you look at this sentence from
the other standpoint (the modal one), it's just like a
lightning in your mind.

If I had read different grammar books when I was at
school, I would have thought differently much earlier.
If the authors of the grammar books I read had
compared more languages before writing their books,
they would have written their books differently, and I
would have been enlightened earlier. But they were
French, apparently little interested in other
languages, and thus they presented the whole thing
from a French point of view, and it made me think the
way they thought for a long time.





=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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