Talking To Myself
June 7, 2022 7 Comments
Yesterday a good friend of recent acquaintance – a retired senior executive from corporate sector, erudite, penning short stories on amazingly various themes and in profusion – called from US. They, he and his wife, were having a discussion on “Would you experience a feeling at all if there was no word for it in your language?” This was part of a larger theory that language is a trap to thinking, precluding a lot of untrodden paths just because there are no words to describe. Just like the allegation against search engines.
Felt honored and nervous at being drawn into the discussion. My reading is limited to PGW and Vyasar Virundhu, nothing more sophisticated. Far from anything in linguistics, philosophy, etc.
Nevertheless, I have this propensity for not reading the signs, treading where others wisely back off!! (I don’t drive!)
It was refreshing to contemplate on something more than the stream of mind-numbing posts on WA and FB dwelling on politics, aanmeegam, etc. Here I must think and put things together. Am I up to it? Wanted to know.
Well, decades ago, our dear late Prof J R Issac at IIT, Mumbai often threw at us, intellectual midgets, curved balls like this one. Once he had brought up the very same question: is language an enabler or impediment to human thinking. Those were infant-days for us in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
I still remember his example: an image or a thought of an animal, a cross between an elephant and tiger, never comes to our mind simply because there’s no word for it. It has nothing to with being unreal. While, it is not difficult to imagine a unicorn, perfectly mythical, simply because there’s a word naming it, describing it.
So, language, a disabler to human thinking?
Now, for the other way around.
Would words make one experience (not a mere articulation) that otherwise may not be perceived so?
Actually, examples are aplenty. Isn’t that what a photographer does with an assortment of objects, a musician with his notes, a poet with his thoughts….and so with a language. What they put together creates a feeling of happiness, sadness, excitement, intrigue…not perceived otherwise.
Take for example the word “godhuli” in Hindi. It is the dust cloud raised by cattle returning from the fields at sunset. Doesn’t the word evoke and lend an enchantment to a scene what we normally perceive as too common place, to be rather irked than awed by it?
In short, words in a language work in both ways.
End
Kaleidoscope 
Reblogged this on Sanmargam.
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First, thank you for opening up a line of thinking unthinkable earlier. Let me think about it😁.
In the mean time a question (vidhandavadam?).
With age related memory loss, I am out of words many times in all languages, to describe some feelings I get🥺.
Don’t we store some images without attaching a name to it? Don’t we recollect them?
What about dreams?
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“I am out of words many times in all languages, to describe some feelings I get” Because we have mixed feelings in a given situation? Or, we do not have too many precisely labelled shades of our positive, neutral or negative feelings? And our feelings are never a solitary line in the spectrum, but a continuum? Cant but think, in a lighter vein, of PGW, running out of words, managed with: “he felt like a cat just hit by a half brick and expecting another shortly!” (unable to recall exact words).
“Don’t we store some images without attaching a name to it? Don’t we recollect them?” Interesting question. I thought u cannot store/retrieve unless there’s a key. But a bulk operation like a scan, dump…may not need a key. Also random picks.
“What about dreams?” Shd dreams be such that we can always find a way to describe and see a meaning in them, in the dreaming state? I suppose it depends on if it is a orderly retrieval or if its random.
Thanks.
Not sure if its related or not and I haven’t looked it up yet, a colleague of mine pointed me to some “The Sapir–Whorf” hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis – refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.
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Wonderful subject…
1) Imagine standing by a cliff and looking over a vast expansive ocean as the sun is going down, a silhouette of a sailboat visible at a distance; How does our cognitive system assimilate this experience;
2) Musical tunes, compositions and their impact on our imagination.
3) We remember some of our dreams generated during the REM state of sleep. What are they and how are they composed? Some of them magically seem to make sense in a nonsensical way;
4) What is the essence of creative thinking?… Drawing a clear distinction between pure creativity, lateral thinking, analytical thinking and constructive thinking.
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Well, my amateurish attempt unencumbered by any formal knowledge of the subject: Perception is purely sensory where objects are seen for what they are or it is meaning-seeking. Here the objects and their inter-relationships are more than what is sensorially seen. The ‘parallax” could be real, as in case of all kinds of thinking, or imagined as with creative thinking. Am sure i have gone foul of the specialists!
Thanks for chipping in.
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At times we just feel where we do not need words !
And then at times cascades of words come gushing forth!
So indeed we find ourselves between a qualm and a calm!
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Very interesting question, I too have never thought about it. Now, the tricky argument is the moment you will read the translation of that feeling in your word you most probably will be able to feel it, even if not fully. There are so many english words in my favorite genre that have no actual psynonym in Bengali yet we can feel it quite well.
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