Thinking about a larger question, which I won’t bore ou with, question arose: is there any human group/tribe/nation whose language contains no word for “ghost?”
You’re driving me crazy, trying to figure out what the “larger question” could be, and how it could bore me. The existence of ghosts? The etymology of the word “ghost”? The “three men and a baby and a kid in the window” thing?
Won’t you please put me out of my misery? I promise not to be bored.
My thought is if there was a language with NO word for ghost how would you know it as if there is no such word how can you ask for it?
And as soon as you did they would adopt the word into their language so there would be a word for it.
It makes sense to me but after typing it I’m lost. But maybe someone knows what I mean and how to explain it better
OK, I’ll bore you with it. It has occured to me that belief in a “spirit world” may be a universal human phenomenon. If we take the assumption that there is no such thing, anywhere, the question then becomes why would such a response to a non-existent phenomenon be universal. Put another way, if there is nothing to induce the response, then at least some, if not all, human groups would have no description of the phenomenon. But I think the opposite is true, from Neandertal on down, humans have been talking about ghosts, spirits and gods. Why?
We like to ponder the unknown. Ghosts, spirits, and religion all tie in with death and the afterlife, topics that us mortals find intriguing.
No group/tribe/nation wanted to believe that life was it. Therefore, they all developed myths around being able to cheat death. Ghosts tie into those myths. The universiality of a myth has nothing to do with its veracity.
It seems to me the answer to the original question (a very interesting one) might lie in the fact that linguists have demonstrated that the numerous modern languages we use, as well as extinct ones, all evolved from extremely few, or possibly even one, ancient one(s). Since ancient people must have had a word for “ghost”, as Derleth points out, this word would be passed down and modified in later languages. Even if later cultures entirely dropped the belief, they would still need to retain the word to name the thing as something their ancestors believed in.
I don’t think you’ll get any argument from anyone that all human cultures at least start out with belief in spirits, ghosts, etc. (at least, until they get “scientific” about it and go around debunking them).
The best explanation I ever heard for this was that homo sapiens is basically a visual predator, and when it gets dark and we can’t see what’s out there, we get very uncomfortable. Things go “bump” in the night, and we don’t know what it is, so we make up explanations for it. Also, a lot of other nocturnal predators like hyenas really do make weird noises, noises that our ancestors would have recognized as belonging to a dangerous “sharp-tooth”, so all in all, the night became an unpleasant thing.
One of my favorite movie scenes is in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the hominids are huddled together in the cave, while the weird night noises carry on around them. For some reason I can really dig that.
As far as believing in life after death, nobody really knows why at some point in history, humans began burying their dead, with artifacts and red ochre paint, etc., instead of just leaving the dead bodies for the scavengers.
Jung’s collective unconscious really implies the opposite, but don’t bring that up to the post-modern cynics that frequent this board.
I think the ‘collective unconscious’ can be explained by experiences almost all of us share (falling when learning to walk, getting burned on a hot stove because you fail to connect ‘red’ with ‘hot’, all the other mishaps we fall prey to before the age of 6) and our few remaining ‘instinctive’ fears of being alone and high places. I heavily doubt that anything beyond those mechanisms is needed to explain the fears we all share. As for working as a group, and mob psychology, we have evolved to be group predators, and living in groups requires things like a ‘herding instinct’ and some mechanism of communication (the ultimate origin of human language) to coordinate efforts like the great bison hunt and the berry-picking.
Like an earlier doper I have problems with you trying to prove the negative. It’s in like Julian Barnes’ book “History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters” when he asks, “Is there a language without the words for I LOVE YOU or did they all die out…”
It should also be pointed out that dreaming is a big factor here. How many of us have had vivid dreams about people we knew well who have died? Surely nearly everyone will at some time in their lives. This could be, IMHO the universal phenomenon that leads to the universal belief in spirits. What say you?
Sorry I don’t see how early childhood memories, most of which are forgotten can create the consistancy of ideas, themes, and myths that characterize the collective unconscious.
Feel free to keep rationalizing it away.