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
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