Umm.....why are tabernacle and chalice funny?
kate Sullivan
-----Original Message-----
From: caldwell-brobeck <[email protected]>
To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, Feb 12, 2013 11:09 pm
Subject: Re: "If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a
different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."
I'm glad this conversation has bubbled up again, I'm quite bad at
keeping up with email conversations...
Cheerskep - that bit about Inuit words for snow, or more specifically
frozen precipitation, is a bit of an urban legend, but Finnish does
have quite a few, and Sami is even worse. Here's a link:
http://everything2.com/title/Finnish+words+for+snow
or (tinyurl)
http://tinyurl.com/a8jojnk
Michael - I guess someplace to start is to look at how a change of
labels in a single language affects perception. For example, I was
eating supper with my German relatives and I thought one of the side
dishes was a somewhat overcooked cauliflower glop with toasted
breadcrumbs. I was rather enjoying it (being 18 and seriously hungry
after hitchhiking around Europe). My cousin Ernst looked over:
Ernst: You like that?
Me: Hmm, yes it's good.
Ernst: Most Americans don't seem to like calves' brains.
Needless to say, I almost gagged, and getting through the rest of it
was rough going....That one word changed how I perceived what I was
eating.
Now obviously this kind of effect is intimately tied up with culture -
after all, the Germans were perfectly aware of what they were eating,
and enjoyed it, whereas I (once I knew what it was) did not. But I
don't know if one can be reasonably fluent in another language without
picking up significant aspects of the cultural baggage. I know in my
own case it took awhile to learn not to laugh when (talking in French)
someone said "tabernacle" or "chalice", and only be amused by "merde"
(shit).
Cheers;
Chris
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 4:31 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
In a message dated 2/7/13 6:10:15 PM, [email protected] writes:
"If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different
language, we
would perceive a somewhat different world."
*(from: Recent Experiments in Psychology* (1950) by Leland Whitney
Crafts,
Thiodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson)
Agree/disagree?
This would-be profundity is far too vague to yield fruitful
discussion. The
phrase "we would perceive a somewhat different world" is bound to
occasion
all sorts of different notions, hazy "interpretations", in the minds
of
various readers. Off this little evidence of what the writer had in
mind, I'm
inclined to say we don't have to hypothesize a "different language"
to make a
point here. The very same phrase in English can occasion innumerable
different notions.
But I can imagine the writer responding by saying, "No, no -- I'm not
talking about notions. I'm saying we perceive a different
mind-independent
world." But readers might then claim that "perceptions" are
themselves mental
entities, notions; we never find pieces of the non-mental world in
our minds,
etc.
Or perhaps the writer means, for example, that the Inuit (eskimos)
see snow
differently by virtue of the very fact that they have sixteen
different
words for sixteen different kinds of snow. (Although, the last I
heard,
scholars who know the Inuit language say it's baloney: they don't
have sixteen
different words for different kinds of snow.) Oy vey. What a faulty
sieve
language is!
