Complex Numbers

Cunning Linguists

One left to do after this... entry #7 of 8 for

Journalistic Intentions  [18+] #2213121 This is for the journal keeping types that come to PLAY! New round starts July 1! by Elisa: Snowman Stik

How language shapes the way we think

This harks back to a post I made in the Before Times, way back on March 1: "It Doesn't Count" . It's something that's long been fascinating to me, so I'm glad this one came up in my random walk through the prompts.

Now, I can't be arsed to look it up, but the idea that language shapes thought has its detractors -- or, at least, that it's as pronounced (pun intended) as this speaker asserts. Me, I'm no expert; I'm just drinking from the fountain here.

Part of my own cognitive problem is that I've never bothered to dive deep into any language except my own. My knowledge of idioms and grammatical constructions is very English-oriented, and American English in particular. I can play with it, twist it, and hopefully get my points across even if I don't hew to standard grammar and phrasing -- but it's definitely English.

What little I've learned of French in this regard has been enlightening. For example, we Yanks might say something like, "I have a headache" or "My head hurts." Well, the equivalent French phrase, strictly translated, would be something akin to "I have bad in head" or "I have wrong in head" (the bad/wrong word being mal). If I told someone I had a wrong in my head in English, they'd assume I need to be committed somewhere. I should note that I'm far from fluent in French, so I could have mal about all of this, but that's what it comes across as at this point in my learning.

Point is, that's a language that, as these things go, isn't all that dissimilar from English. I mean, obviously most words are different, English is less inflected, and the French syntax is often scrambled from an English point of view (ours is scrambled from their point of view), but for the most part, there are parallel parts of speech; things are countable; there's a left and right, up and down; colors are recognizable; and so on.

But that makes me pose a different question: why are there different languages in the first place? Language, obviously, evolves in communities that are separated. In that sense, it's similar to, but much faster than, biological evolution. But language also has a feature not usually found in (eukaryotic) evolution, which is cross-pollination. In biology it's known, as far as I understand it, as "horizontal gene transfer," and apart from genetic engineering, you just don't get a lot of that in nature (for the purists out there, it happens a lot in bacteria and other prokaryotes, but I'm not talking about them). But with language, horizontal meme transfer (using "meme" here in the sense that Dawkins originally coined the word) happens all the time.

Answering that question is above my pay grade, though the one thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is that it wasn't God's punishment for building a fucking ziggurat. (If it were, then why did language keep on evolving long after Babel?)

I can only hypothesize that it was groups of people who separated themselves and started thinking independently of each other. In which case, which is more true: that language shapes thought, or that thought shapes language?

I suspect there's a bit of both going on. Our ability to think in new ways   when learning a new language is, well, very human.