Language and its influence on thought

[JMJones0424]

I have no experimental data to support this theory, just personal observations.

I was trained as a Korean linguist at the Defense Language Institute in the Unites States. This is unimportant, except that it exposed me to a culture that I would likely never had encountered on my own.

I have noticed that besides the obvious differences in vocabulary and grammar between different languages, there is often a fundamental difference between how concepts are expressed. For instance, if I where to say that "I am going to the store" in Korean, it would be assumed that I was not coming back, where in English, it is obvious. in Korean, I would have to say that "I am going and returning from the store".

I have a hypothesis that language is necessarily abstract, and its learning of expression of abstract thoughts influences not only the expression of those thoughts, but how those thoughts themselves are created and expressed. The often quoted yet incorrect reference to thirty some odd names for snow by "eskimos" comes to mind.

I no longer consider myself a "linguist", as I never cared much for rote memorization, but I think the observations I have made in regards to a culture and its language have some merit. So, how does one's language affect not only one's ability to describe the world around them, but also how one perceives the world around them?

[Pyrotex]

Hello JMJ

I think you have raised an excellent question here.
If I may be allowed to paraphrase you, it seems to me that you are asking:
"How does the structure of a specific language affect our ability to conceptualize, understand, or even to model Reality?"

I've been involved in a similar discussion at What is Reality?. You might want to take a peek at that to see if anything there corresponds to your inquiry.

I would tend to agree with your premise. Language comprises the "building blocks" with which we construct our internal model of Reality. Make a big enough change in the Language, and you may find that some concepts are no longer easily expressed. And if you can't express them, what makes you think you can understand them?

I'm reminded of a book by Daniel C. Dennett, called "Freedom Evolves". His point was that there's this word, "freedom", and we have analogs for that English word in all languages, even those dating back thousands of years. And yet those ancient people had a completely different meaning or understanding. For example, in ancient Hebrew, "freedom" meant the state of not being a slave. Period. Their ancient language, at that time, evolved to reflect their cultural history (as all languages are), simply did not have enough words, associations, events, experiences or sub-concepts required to construct OUR concept of "freedom".

If you went to an extreme, and chose a 1000-word language consisting of only 200 common verbs (each with only three tenses) , 390 common nouns, and 10 prepositions, it would be pretty obvious that sophisticated concept-building was out of the question. In fact, you might not even be able to construct the meaning: "out of the question"!!

[Galapagos]

I think you would very much enjoy the work of Stephen Pinker. His book "The Stuff of Thought" was about how through understanding language we can understand how the the mind works(which is the title of another book of his).

Here's a couple videos of him discussing his ideas:

YouTube - Authors@Google: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker on language and thought | Video on TED.com

Amazon.com: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a...
Amazon.com: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a...

You may also want to check out his "The Language Instinct" for more on the mind, evolution, and language.

[Pyrotex]

Cool beans, Gala Pag! I just put two of Pinker's books on my Amazon Wish List.
Thanks!

[JMJones0424]

Thank you for your responses, I have so much to read. I love this site, I feel like I finally found a home.

Pyrotex, it appears your link is invalid, I believe that this is the correct link http://hypography.com/forums/philoso...tml#post247259

[Pyrotex]

You are correct. I fixed the typo in my [url] link. Thanks!

[lemit]

I think that language, like law, results from experience. I believe that it facilitates thought, but not on the level of food-gathering. I was thinking and remembering before I learned language. The relationships of objects and beings and the changes in those relationships cause cognitive questions and thought. Movies would lose much of their ability to make us think if we could only think by means of language, but don't tell linguists that.

I wish I had known that about the Korean language when I had a lot of Korean friends. I've lost contact with them. But, if my premise that language follows experience is correct, I wonder what there is in the Korean experience that would lead to the necessity of adding what seems to us like a joke. If I told someone, "I'm going to the store and also I'm coming back," I'd get a laugh.

Also, how many words do we have for snow? Slush? Snowpack? Powder?

Any other suggestions?

--lemit

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by lemit

I think that language, like law, results from experience. I believe that it facilitates thought, but not on the level of food-gathering. I was thinking and remembering before I learned language. ...

I am very curious to know just what do you mean by "thinking" before you had language. What were you thinking? How did you remember it without creating a "story" of what happened?

We know that much of our memory is composed of linear sequences of sensory "images". (I include smell and pain, etc, in this broad use of "images".) We all have multitudes of these "image-clips" in our brains. But merely recalling them (remembering) is not what I would call "thinking".

"Thinking" involves, at even the most primitive level, the assignment of "meaning" to a memory. And meaning is constructed entirely out of the elements of language -- what I have called elsewhere, "syntactic structures".

[lemit]

Before I had language, I understood that things involving pain or pleasure were going to happen to me, that I was experiencing pain that other humans thought was amusing, that I was leaving or losing things I loved, that there was indescribable beauty in the world, and that adults could be loving and cruel, sometimes in very close proximity.

When my cat was very young, she watched a PBS nature show about lions attacking gazelles. In the show, one lion would push the gazelle over and a second lion would grab its throat. The next day, my cat went outside, ran up to a squirrel, and pushed it over. The squirrel jumped up and ran away. My cat looked around briefly, became puzzled, and then came to the house where she spent some time looking at the squirrels with a puzzled expression. I didn't need language to see what was happening, and she didn't need language to create her own version of the nature show.

We do not need symbols to understand complex relationships, develop predictive capabilities, and create effective responses, all of which, when taken together, are a pretty good definition of cognitive thought.

Having said that, for those of you who watch American television, I did not do stock trading when I was a baby. If I had, I might have got us into the mess we're in now, but probably not.

--lemit

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by lemit

...she didn't need language to create her own version of the nature show.
We do not need symbols to understand complex relationships, develop predictive capabilities, and create effective responses, all of which, when taken together, are a pretty good definition of cognitive thought.
...

Thanks for the kitty cat story.

As for your definition of cognitive thought, I would have to disagree.
Kitty cats can play with squirrels without having to have any 'language'.
But 'cognitive thought' is light-years beyond playing with squirrels.

Do you have any other source for your statement? A book, perhaps, that explains how 'cognitive thought' could occur without languaging?