I had a lot of stuff that needed to be done today, partially because I didn't do any of it yesterday because I was writing a monster of a post. But I'd feel guilty if I left you all with nothing, so I'll just leave a little blurb about something I've been thinking about.
How much does our language affect the way we think? How much does our language affect the way we perceive reality?
I wrote in my last post "Words are shadows of our world, shadows of reality that extend into and affect reality." It got me wondering to what extent exactly that statement was true.
To those of you who have read 1984, this may not be a totally alien concept for you. (For those who haven't, in 1984 the government is creating a new language called Newspeak that actually cut out more and more words of the English language. The idea was that, by cutting out the words for things like anarchy or injustice, the very idea that a state without government, or a ruling that could be somehow not morally correct would vanish. "In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible," a linguist (or, more truely, a language engineer) in 1984 says, "because there will be no words in which to express it"
Most people don't believe that language really affects your mind so drastically. We've all experienced (and if not, I envy you) the moments where we know exactly what we're talking about, a concept that we totally understand inside and out except that we just can't remember its name. Even though we don't have the word for it, the idea still exists. And many of us, or at least I, have just made up a word to describe an idea I didn't know the name for.
Yet, there are some ways in which scientists have found that language does affect our perception of reality. In Greek, for example, there are two separate words for our word blue, ghalazio, which is sky blue, and ble, which is a darker blue. Now, this might not seem like too much of a difference to us, until you think about two things. First of all, scientists found that people who spoke Greek natively had entirely different brain activity when confronted with the colors than an English speaker after as little as 100 milliseconds. (http://www.physorg.com/news154865165.html)
Secondly, our labels of colors are completely arbitrary. Why is red a primary color and not some other on the rainbow? Why isn't Green a primary color? Why is Yellow? And what the hell is Indigo? (Ignore that. Unless you have the answer. Because I really want to know.) On the color scale, from Red to Purple, humans could arbitrarily denote some colors as the same and other colors different. Just as some of us couldn't tell the difference between mauve and purple if it smacked us in the face with a frying pan, maybe some people who spoke a language that categorized both yellow and orange under the word Sunni might not even recognize a difference. And maybe they'd see two shades of red where they only see one.
Yes, that was an absurd hypothetical. I apologize now. But there is another valid point, that I will bring up again when I find out what language this is. My linguistics teacher mentioned that in a certain language (I just can't remember which one) the word for waterfall literally translates as "arc made real by falling water."
When we think of a waterfall, we think first of water falling. It seems evident to us that the water falling is the most important part (except maybe if there are sharp rocks on the bottom, and if you're going to fall over it) of the waterfall. Yet for the people who speak this language, maybe the most important part is the arc of it, the curve of the waterfall through the air.
Are we still speaking of the same concept? Or is one of us saying pineapple and the other pomegranate? The two are both fruits and both ridiculously difficult to eat but they are different things.
That's all I have for you today. I'll try and get something longer out tomorrow.
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