Millions,
So, I was chatting with my boss on one of our many leisurely, work-avoidance cigarette breaks and he told me that people whose languages are iconic, symbol-based languages (Japanese, Chinese, the old egyptian hieroglyphics) dream in black and white. I was floored. He claims that he has a bilingual Chinese friend who reports that her dreams in English are in full color, whilst her Chinese dreams are in black & white. I was floored twice.
But, color me skeptical.* Can anyone confirm or deny this, through evidence or anecdote? And if confirmed, why in the hell are we wired this way? Boss claims that it has to do with sections of our brain; to wit: people who read letters & sound out words use a totally different part of their brains in regards to language than those than read symbolic texts. This makes sense. But why would that translate to black & white dreams?
Just what was it exactly that your boss was smoking?
I’ve quite a few Asian friends and co-workers and never have I heard this. Were it true I believe we’d all have learned such a interesting tidbit by grade school. Many dopers here of Asian ancestry will I’m sure be along quickly to comment as well. Google also has noting to support this.
I know ther’s been discussion on whether, seeing, remembering seeing and imagining were liked to parts of the brain that were subdued during dreams so physiologists wondered if we dreamed in color at all but never have I read how this included a racial/ ethnic/ genetic/ language component.
God. I thought it was probably horseshit, but the boss is usually pretty spot on regarding his little factoids. As for what he was smoking, well, it looked like a Malboro…
Add me to the people who wonder what your boss was smoking. My SO is Chinese, albeit second-generation, and he certainly dreams In Living Color, as it were.
For the record, he claimed that dreams IN CHINESE are in black & white, not that chinese people only dream in black & white. Still horseshit? Almost certainly. But, I thought I’d clarify in case you were curious as to the make, stench, and overall consistency of said poopie.
Can you find out where he got this info? Just from one friend? Because it irks me a little that he should
a) think Asian people are so foreign to himself
b) extrapolate from one Asian person to the entire Asian subset.
I mean, I think it would be an interesting topic, to discuss what the differences in mindset are between a mind raised on an iconic language and a mind raised on letters. I’m sure there are some differences, since language is basic, but then again, you (usually) don’t really learn the written language until 4 or 5, and I should think most of the most basic hard-wiring in your brain is done before that.
I’ll ask him. He’s sitting right across the cubicle wall.
(beat)
Ok. He’s trying to get information, which, as our combined powers of google-fu have failed, I doubt he’ll find. But, I’ll keep everyone updated. And I agree with Anaamika–agree might not be the right word----but I’m intrigued along with him/her as to how letter-based versus symbolic languages affect the way we think. Apparently the dream-part is unadulterated hogwash, but, any info on the real differences would be thoroughly appreciated.
Anyway, I screamed “cite” at my boss, who could not find one. He’s now resigned to the fact that he’s been propigating an urban legend with specious, anecdotal evidence to back it up.
It’s not a one way street. On the flip-side many Asian people sincerely believe that westerners are quite physically different from themselves. IIRC one Japanese government justification for the protective agricultural rice import tariffs some years ago was that Japanese had “different stomachs” and couldn’t handle the imported western rice.
This doesn’t make any sense. My dreams, like my life, isn’t in any particular language. Sometimes people speak Swedish to me in my dreams, sometimes English, just like they do in real life. The very thought of the dream going from colour to monochromatic and back as the language currently being spoken shifted is nonsensical. What would happen if someone spoke to a Chinese and an English person simultaneously in a dream?
As a linguist and someone with a slight command of Mandarin, can I take a minute to disabuse you of some notions about Chinese characters (and by extension, Japanese, which uses a writing system based upon Chinese)?
All languages use symbols - that is, in any language, the great majority of words are symbolic rather than possessing any kind of iconic representation of their referents. The exceptions are onomatopoeic words; clearly “boom” attempts to suggest a booming sound. Chinese and Japanese are certainly not exceptional this way.
You’re conflating writing systems with language as well. Chinese is not “based” upon Chinese characters; like every language, it was spoken long before it was written; writing is a mechanism for encoding speech on a permanent medium. A language’s writing system is separate from the language itself - in fact, many languages have changed to new writing systems. Rumanian, for instance, abandoned Cyrillic letters in favor of Roman ones in the mid-nineteenth century; Turkish switched from Arabic letters to a modified Roman alphabet early in the twentieth. In fact, the People’s Republic of China developed a system of “simplified” characters (though they are by no means simple by any stretch of the imagination) that require fewer strokes to write in the mid-twentieth century (the older traditional characters are still used in Taiwain, Singapore, and most overseas Chinese communities.)
None of those changes reflects any change to the language - a writing system is a separate entity from the language or languages it’s used to represent. After all, some people are illiterate but still fluent in their native language - it’s simply mistaken to try to conflate a writing system with a language.
Secondly, Chinese characters are not “iconic” except for a tiny minority. They developed out of pictographs once upon a time way back when, as most or all writing originally did. But now only a tiny number of the characters in use nowadays are based upon pictures - and even those are rarely very easily recognizable as what they represent; for the most part, it’s only when you know the word a character stands for that you can recognize any resemblance. Most Chinese characters are formed through compounds of radical and phonetic - the radical being one of 214 or so characters that hint at the meaning of the word, and the phonetic being a character that has (or at least had, once upon a time) a similar sound to the word represented by the new compound. They are based, then, upon very vague representations of sound and meaning, and not on pictures of objects. While Chinese writing is quite different from what we’re used to, it’s in no way basically or largely “iconic” at all.
Japanese combines Chinese characters with the native kana, which are purely phonetic in nature, representing syllables, mostly in order to represent things like verb inflections, which Chinese doesn’t have and thus doesn’t represent in its writing system. Japanese is thus even further removed from being “iconic”.
And of course Roman characters are based originally on pictures as well. Before A got flipped upside down (damn Phoenicians), for instance, it represented an ox’s head - that was the origin of the character. You can see it if you know to look for it - well, with very, very few exceptions Chinese characters aren’t any more similar to what they’re depicting than our letters are to pictures of oxen and houses and camels.
