You seem to be using the words mentalese and thought interchangeably.
How does this separate “mentalese” become language which others can comprehend?
Are you saying that language does not limit imagination partly because we have this other “mentalese” that we employ?
I have thought that language initially expands one’s world and how they function in it but eventually has a compromising effect on further creative potential. It becomes a prison in which one cannot think the unthinkable, even though it may not be unthinkable. Can we think without language?
If you could think in Morse Code would you be able to engage thoughts that you wouldn’t otherwise.
Or would you loose the some of the capacity you now have?
When you look at an object, say an apple , there isn’t an apple in your mind in addition to the one >out there<. There is only one apple. The perceived object is the percept. The apple is a kind of externalized thought. Is that thought prior to language? I think it is. If so is it possible for a human to mature yet have no language? Would that languageless world be smaller considering that our world increases as meaning increases.
Some have said that earlier humans perceived their thoughts as external to them. They heard voices in the environment and eventually those voices become internalized as we know it.
We don’t know what a thought or an idea is. So can we really say we know what language is?
I was thinking much the same thing. But, like I said in my earlier post, is it not also true that at least some animals without language (e.g., dogs) are able to identify/see certain objects (dog biscuits, cats, people) that we ourselves identify as discrete objects? To me, it would seem that they have some capacity, analagous to our own, to see “sets” of things as well.
This is not to say that the world (Universe) is already conveniently divided up into sets of discrete objects, just waiting for us to come along and assign names to them. If this were the case, I don’t think there would be as much linguistic variation in the world as there is. But perhaps it is consciousness, even without something akin to human language, that enables us to experience a world of “things” distinguisable from one another.
I guess this is where the mystical/spiritual element would come in. Some people would certainly argue – have faith – that there is transcendant meaning to the Universe, period. I myself don’t much care one way or the other, which is why I don’t normally bother to get involved in this kind of discussion beyond a certain point.
You know, wrapping up your English language statements in morse code instead of the Roman alphabet doesn’t really have a lot to do with the subject of this thread.
you missed my point, in 1984 they arent trying to keep people from comunicating with one another they are trying to restrict What can be comunicated. fiction or not has no relevance other than to say that noone(to my knowledge anyway) has ever actually tried that experiment.
heres possibly a better example, theres a native american tribe (Navajo I think but I am not sure) that has no present/past/future tenses at all, to hear them talk about a relative thats 20 years in the grave as if they were here a few minutes ago is pretty strange.
or the way different groups use language to establish a common way of thinking like the military, lawyers, I.T. techs, and countless other groups. if you don’t speak their version of english they may as well be talking a different language, and when you are a part of one of those groups the unspoken can say as much as the spoken because of the things only implied by the words.
try it, surely theres a group you belong to that has its own twist on english that outsiders can’t follow. its not because they don’t speak or understand the words you are useing, its because they don’t have the background/context to follow the train of thought involved.
i.e.
friend: Fookin BARDS!
me: lol back in faymart so soon?
friend:yeah the irritating little bastard got a snare to stick
me: heh
I could translate that but it would take Pages to do so before you understood it at anywhere near the level that I do. and its something that any everquest player could grasp some of but only the player vrs player population would really get it. its still english but because I posses a frame of context to grasp his “Fookin BARDS!” statment it speaks volumes to me, enough for me to know what happend and what the result of the event in question.
a brief translation,
friend: I just ran into a player from another team and his class is irritating to the point of lunacy! the bard class cant kill anyone who isnt significantly weaker or just plain stupid but they insist on trying anyway.
me: lol, so you cast a spell taking back to the same city you just left a few minutes ago rather than deal with a class of player equivilant a persistant moquito?
friend:yeah, he cast a spell on me that got past all my defenses and made it so I could barely move while he ran circles around me.
me:heh
I don’t know, I could be just talking out my ass here, or maybe its all the Herbert I have read but I see some very strong reason for thinking that language plays a strong role in our thoughts.
and of course languages will be mostly interchangeable as far as translating them goes, we are after all ALL human so we have human needs that are universal meaning that all languages will have a large percentage of words with exact or near exact equivilant definitions in each.
Well, actually it wasn’t that germane. The fact that sign languages operate in a visual medium instead of using sound is certainly very interesting, but doesn’t have a lot to do with the relationship between language and thought. To the brain, sign language is pretty much a language just like any other language. For example, the parallels between children acquiring sign and children acquiring a spoken language are much more striking than the differences, because the same modules in the brain are being employed in the acquisition. And use!
Again, while it’s fun for a native speaker of a non-sign language to try and conceive of having an inner dialogue without words, that doesn’t change the fact that thinking is actually separate from using language, whether that language is signed or not.
Now I’m not claiming there is no relationship between language and thought, but before you can combine the two you have to understand that they exist separately, and that is what is wrong about the OP. I’ll happily defer to everyone on questions of epistemology, but there are certain facts about language that invalidate your language-based philosophies if you contradict them.
Morse code is not a language, it’s a cipher of a writing system. The alphabet is not a language either.
I don’t think language limits imagination. If it becomes a prison for someone, I would attribute that to an extra-linguistic belief the person is suffering from. I say that as an artist, not a linguist. If language was a foundation for thought, you would expect all imaginative people to be excellent with language. This is not the case. We can think without language, because people without language can still think, and aphasiacs who have suffered brain damage that destroyed their language abilities did not have their ability to think impaired. Before you ask how they were able to tell us this, non-linguistic tests can be administered and also some of them recover and are able to speak about their experience of living with language functions badly impaired.
Language extends our reasoning ability because it facilitates acquisition of knowledge and allows us to keep more concepts straight in our minds. It’s like velcro for bits and bobs of complex thoughts. Which, as I have been maintaining, are not represented in our minds as language. This is probably going too far off topic, but don’t underestimate the value of language in giving us a convenient method for storing knowledge outside of our minds. This also facilitates reasoning by many orders of magnitude.
Apples exist whether or not we perceive them. It is possible for humans to mature yet have no language. You must be exposed to language at a critical period during childhood or you will not acquire it. The case studies of people this has happened to are depressing because they involve astonishing cruelty by terrible parents. But it has happened and it has been documented. I’m not sure what you are referring to when you make these size comparisons. The size of the world is the size of the world, general relativity notwithstanding. Our knowledge of the world would be much smaller without language for the reasons I stated above about how language allows knowledge to increase dramtically.
This belief stems from the same common sense assumption that most of us hold today in this society, namely that because we perceive our thoughts as dialogue that our thoughts really are dialogue. This assumption is not correct.
It’s time for you to find a good bibliography of linguistic and cognitive science books. Refuting your statement and answering that question are too difficult to summarize with supporting examples here. So I’ll just say I disagree that we don’t know what a thought or an idea is, with qualifications, and I do know what language is, with qualifications.
Actually plenty of governments have experimented with diverting the natural course of languages in areas they ruled. It doesn’t work. Or rather, the most effective method is wholesale slaughter of the speakers of the language use you are trying to eliminate which is most definitely a pyrrhic victory. Other methods may achieve limited success, but always at the cost of turning that part of the world into a complete disaster area. Consider Belgium, the bad marriage of Europe which only stays together for the sake of the UN. Consider Quebec and the despised and ridiculed language police. Then there is the Language Academy of France, which few French take seriously and makes people of every other nation on Earth just laugh their asses off. Consider Sri Lanka, Turkey, the Basques in Spain… people do not like it when you try and tell them how to speak. Something tells me any attempt at enacting Newspeak would follow the same path Politically Correct speech has… mixed anger and derision, and a backlash that is much larger and farther reaching than what it is lashing out against.
It would be a good example if it wasn’t an urban legend. The tribe you’re thinking of is the Hopi, and while it is true their language does not have tenses analogous to English tenses, it is most emphatically not true that the Hopi language has no way of placing events in time. This error resulted from a lack of fluency in Hopi, which is totally unlike any Western European languages. It is as if you told an airplane mechanic you were going to drive to New York and showed him your car, and he replied “but your car has no wings!” In language, there is more than one way to skin a cat, and there are many syntactic options for placing events in time. In the end we all get where we want to go, and in fact my car/airplane analogy is bad because with language, we all get there at about the same time regardless of the method we use to get there.
Again, not a language problem, but an experience problem. The language is not establishing a common way of thinking. The behavior of the group is what the common way of thinking arises from. Their jargon comes about because they are continually expressing thoughts that arise from the common way of thinking. Other people’s inability to understand that jargon is not a result of alien thought processes of the jargon speakers. It just means they don’t have the knowledge required to unravel the cultural shorthand that jargon contains. We are saying pretty much saying the same thing, except I’m saying the thought is what affects the language. A crucial distinction, for me anyway.
Experience certainly does. And we gather a lot of experience through the medium of language. But this is not at all the same thing as saying that language dictates thought or limits it.
You’re preaching to the choir. I probably wasn’t clear though… I was using the qualifier “pretty much” because while sign languages are undeniably equally fit compared to spoken languages, the fact that they are gestural and not spoken means that they are not exactly the same in the mind. However, for the purposes of how language relates to thought, they are just a language like any spoken language.
Cool! Actually, the idea that Signed languages aren’t languages is prevalent and I’m definitely on a mission to eradicate that misconception. In case you didn’t notice, of course.
Yep. The only difference between vocal and Signed languages is that one set’s oral and the other set’s gestural. The mind appears to process whatever language as a language, regardless of its medium.
Another thing: I’m a budding Linguistician (Junior year, majoring in Linguistics) and I got a big kick, entertainment-wise, from that Kabbalarian site about the names. Of course, I view that the same as I view Astrology–entertainment, not Science.
Although I should add, TerryW, that your link provides excellent support of my position, because I haven’t come across a better example of language so totally disconnected from thought in a long time.
** hazel-rah**
You have made many interesting points to think about.
But a few more comments, if I may.
You write
That’s an assumption on your part, a guess: that the perceived and perceiver are separate.
Thoughts and ideas are intangible, and we no more know what they are then we know what consciousness is. If you take the hardened materialist position and claim they are some kind of gas [matter] given off by materials then that is just another guess. The basis or stuff that make up a thought is a mystery.
