All thought (that is to say linguistic thought) is shaped during our waking hours, our waking life, by languages of culture-society-existence. This is the litany of contemporary waking life. In a society where vast bodies of knowledge are readily available (at once one can consider side-by-side the real-time world news, YouTube videos of John Searle discussing Wittgenstein, the smashup oil paintings of Leonardo Zhang, Conspiracy theories about reptilian blood cults of 13 bloodlines uniting to take over the world and worship a thirty foot cement owl statue on the east lawn of the White House, Walt Whitman on a Levi’s commercial beside an eCopy of The Fascist Manifesto on Project Gutenberg) it is easy to get into the mode of litany overload, into a state where all signifiers are looking for their signified, the referents for their references.
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Let us being with the creation poem then as metaphor for the pre-linguistic womb-garden: In a garden began a game we will never be able to end: The Game of Language.
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Just as it was once a given that the atom was the basic smallest container to hold all the necessities of bio-life— let us feign for a moment that the smallest whole linguistic sign unit mankind can encounter (be whatever it may of the abstraction) is by its very minute nature the building block of complex linguistic thought, the orderly language of thought.
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Let us be clear: linguistic clarity is the aim of all thought which we prepare for interpersonal communication (be it conscious or subconscious): “There will be time, there will be time. To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create…” T.S. Eliot “Love Song of J. Alfred”
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When we communicate effectively, we always arrive in the simplest of forms available. Else we do not communicate effectively. On the Use and Abuse of History for Life I can think of no simpler expression of thought.
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The notion that every experience is, by our own nature alone, a completely and totally and firstly a private one, assumes that we wait in the womb until Mother dies, then we build ourselves a little recluse’s shack inside and begin writing a language we’ll never learn to read. Simply put: what we experience in our waking life (& to some degree in dreams) is in itself communal; since we can only know experience through a shared common language.
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It is necessary to understand that language in this sense extends beyond the realm of the spoken/written. We must consider the bases of all things even capable of being possessed of language, if only through our own by our kind. When we contemplate the subtle variations of tone and hue on a frog’s back, we must consiuder the thoughts that correlate with our sensual perceptions thereof, the language itself, which we have attributed to that which sits before us as ‘frog.’
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When we define a thing, we perform in ourselves a correlated act— so in fact we do not define precisely that which we see before us; we locate in ourselves the common form (which is the lacunae within) to sustain the language and create a living context for that thing which did not exist there before then. We surrender to a common form that the object locates in us for the sake of the language. We allow language the room necessary to find what it needs to preserve itself, while still evolving with us. We are mutual protectors of the other, not for the sake of the other but for the sake of self-preservation. It is a symbiotic life with language. Otherwise when the frog was first named only that exact frog could possibly carry the word-name frog, since only it possessed the qualities that define frog. If language was as such that every single physical object or being and everything else got its own self-defining word-name, it would not have survived or even existed at at all. Since surely to give everything its own word-name would quickly exhaust the little human mouth and even quicker overload the feeble mind-memory.
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By nature birth must be violent enough to traumatize the newborn into total amnesia of the sense memory. Else we will ever remember the comfort of eternal black water of the womb, never teaching ourselves (by the will of the senses) to say “take a deep breath.” If we remembered the womb-time, we’d never learn to breathe, no matter how hard the nurse tried to slap us into the horrors of this life. This is her revenge for being born. After that first breath, if all goes as planned, we won’t remember to blame her. We will already be immersed in the languages of existence.
Language Games (Notes from a work in Progress)
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Khayaam Ravenhurst
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Re: Language Games (Notes from a work in Progress)
Dear Khayaam Ravenhurst welcome or should I say welcome back, and thank you for an exceptionally interesting post which is most certainly worthy of diverse responsive comment from the http://www.973-eht-namuh-973.com global tribe.
For my part, while as site we communicate in English, I would like to introduce the debate that individual languages may well shape the way that we think! Studies, I recommend you read Lera Boroditsky’s work on this topic from the noughties, reveal that languages spoken do indeed shape the thinking process. In fact grammatical accidents within can be equally influential in terms of how the speaker sees the world.
Thus, the role that language plays in building our mentality cannot be underestimated and in truth helps us to understand our humanity. For example, the burning question do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? I was fluent in a second language once upon a time and dabbled to varying degrees of competence in a three others, and my own experience is that there is more than a grain of truth in that thought. Which logically leads to another question, does learning new languages alter the way you think?
In fact looking at our own site community, a large proportion originate from countries spread around the world, many of you I’ll wager are at least bi-lingual (mother tongue and English) if not tri- or even quadric-lingual, so you too undoubtedly have an observation to make on the subject. Good evening to you all and we look forward to a deluge of words.
The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)
What would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Even the loss or absence of other senses like sight and hearing does not prevent this? Could you still make friends, learn, and perform a job of work. We would be in a poor way if we had no way of communicating, other than in a series of grunts accompanied by stick drawings, yet perhaps this is a more than credible theory as to how language came into being.
According to the story behind the etiological myth of The Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis in the Tanakh (referred to as the Hebrew Bible or The Old Testament), a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar. Upon their arrival they agreed to build a city and tower which could be construed as a centre of international government; potentially removing scope for omnipotent decision resting with a single a higher power. Upon becoming aware of this plan, the tale goes that God decided to confound their speech so that they suddenly overnight spoke in different tongues which then prevented them from understanding each other and scattered the different speech groups around the world. A much later example was that of ancient Greek became the common language of communication amongst the traders and the standard language for literature across the Mediterranean and beyond.
The next question is, are languages merely tools for thought expression or do they physically shape our thoughts? At this juncture I’ll add some of Lera Boroditsky’s in situ research extracts:
'Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre thinks differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?
[Lera Boroditsky’s collaborator Alice Gaby had come to Pormpuraaw to find out.]
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time."
There is much more evidence besides the story so far, but I've decided to segment the information into bite sized chunks rather than risk the eroding the attention span of the reader.
For my part, while as site we communicate in English, I would like to introduce the debate that individual languages may well shape the way that we think! Studies, I recommend you read Lera Boroditsky’s work on this topic from the noughties, reveal that languages spoken do indeed shape the thinking process. In fact grammatical accidents within can be equally influential in terms of how the speaker sees the world.
Thus, the role that language plays in building our mentality cannot be underestimated and in truth helps us to understand our humanity. For example, the burning question do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? I was fluent in a second language once upon a time and dabbled to varying degrees of competence in a three others, and my own experience is that there is more than a grain of truth in that thought. Which logically leads to another question, does learning new languages alter the way you think?
In fact looking at our own site community, a large proportion originate from countries spread around the world, many of you I’ll wager are at least bi-lingual (mother tongue and English) if not tri- or even quadric-lingual, so you too undoubtedly have an observation to make on the subject. Good evening to you all and we look forward to a deluge of words.
What would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Even the loss or absence of other senses like sight and hearing does not prevent this? Could you still make friends, learn, and perform a job of work. We would be in a poor way if we had no way of communicating, other than in a series of grunts accompanied by stick drawings, yet perhaps this is a more than credible theory as to how language came into being.
According to the story behind the etiological myth of The Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis in the Tanakh (referred to as the Hebrew Bible or The Old Testament), a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar. Upon their arrival they agreed to build a city and tower which could be construed as a centre of international government; potentially removing scope for omnipotent decision resting with a single a higher power. Upon becoming aware of this plan, the tale goes that God decided to confound their speech so that they suddenly overnight spoke in different tongues which then prevented them from understanding each other and scattered the different speech groups around the world. A much later example was that of ancient Greek became the common language of communication amongst the traders and the standard language for literature across the Mediterranean and beyond.
The next question is, are languages merely tools for thought expression or do they physically shape our thoughts? At this juncture I’ll add some of Lera Boroditsky’s in situ research extracts:
'Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre thinks differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?
[Lera Boroditsky’s collaborator Alice Gaby had come to Pormpuraaw to find out.]
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time."
There is much more evidence besides the story so far, but I've decided to segment the information into bite sized chunks rather than risk the eroding the attention span of the reader.
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