to what extent does language limit our knowledge

photo of Pirahã tribeswoman from the New Yorker by Martin Schoeller

My recent meditations have focused on my frustrations with the limitations of linguistic communication, and specifically:

• How competently and easily wild creatures seem to exist able to communicate, and understand, with minimal use of vox.
• The cultural presumptions of what is true and what is of import and how to retrieve, be and do that seem to be embedded in our European languages, both the etymological origin of words and especially their modernistic connotations and Lakoffian framings, and fifty-fifty their syntax — they seem to exist: about conveying facts rather than feelings, lacking in dash, abstruse rather than representative, conceptual rather than perceptual, constricting rather than expressive, prescriptive rather than descriptive, and analytical rather than narrative.
• The debate among linguists and others nigh the link between language, formulation and knowledge — tin can nosotros conceive of things we cannot put into language, and does our language therefore restrict what and how nosotros think and feel?
• Show that the neural patterns in our brains (that affect what and how nosotros think) co-evolve with our learning and linguistic communication development equally immature children (so "wild children" who are not taught language earlier adolescence become incapable of learning it, apparently because the way their brains have formed evolved to suit their not-exact learning, so they are amazingly intuitive and perceptive, but 'impaired' at abstract conceptualization).
• The knowledge that fine art and music have been part of human culture at least twice as long as linguistic communication, and speculation that vox/language first emerged not as a means of communication but as a means of artistic cocky-expression, and was then adapted/coopted for advice and information transfer.
• The discovery of an Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, whose linguistic communication is totally unrelated to other human languages, and which appears to be related to birdsong in its structure, and which lacks any 'words' for time, quantity, or the subjective and objective.
• The nonsense that some indigenous peoples were unable to 'run across' the ships of European invaders considering their linguistic communication had no words for such massive and destructive vessels.

I've been discussing this with Tree Bressen, Melanie Williams and Chris Corrigan, and doing a bit of online research on the subject. There is some compelling evidence that indigenous languages are significantly different in the worldview they represent from European languages, and that the language that we first learn affects and reinforces our worldview in a mode that reflects the civilization backside the language and which permeates and perhaps constrains the way which nosotros henceforth call back about everything. D'Arcy Rheault, in his book about Anishinaabe philosophy, writes:

Anishinaabe Mino-Bimaadiziwin [philosophy or way of living] does not objectify the world creating artificial divisions of subject and object.  It is difficult to empathize this since nosotros are constantly inundated with this subject/object dichotomy in the English language language, simply Anishinaabe [language] is not noun-based merely verb-based with the subject area and object already encoded in the verb; meaning it is action- and relationship-oriented rather than subject area/object oriented….

[in explaining how a baby learns] We must be cognizant that [the baby's] apprehension of the outside world happens concurrently with the development of language for the baby.  A child that is raised in an environment with a language that differentiates between subjects and objects will thus develop these categories in her/his lived-anticipation of the earth.  A child raised in an Anishinaabe surround will not develop these subject field/object categories in the same way as western people perceive them since they exercise not exist in the aforementioned manner in Anishinaabe worldview.

This idea that language affects (and limits) what we can think and imagine is attributed to linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. In John Colapinto'southward commodity on the Pirahã in the New Yorker, he explains:

Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we call back. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, [linguist Peter] Gordon wrote, they take a limited ability to work with quantities greater than that. "It'southward language affecting thought," Gordon told me. His newspaper, "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia," was enthusiastically taken up by a coterie of "neo-Whorfian" linguists around the earth.

[Linguist Dan] Everett did non share this enthusiasm; in the ten years since he had introduced Gordon to the tribe, he had determined that the Pirahã have no fixed numbers. The word that he had long taken to hateful "one" (hoi, on a falling tone) is used by the Pirahã to refer, more generally, to "a pocket-sized size or amount," and the give-and-take for "ii" (hoi, on a ascent tone) is frequently used to mean "a somewhat larger size or amount." Everett says that his earlier confusion arose over what's known as the translation fallacy: the confidence that a word in i linguistic communication is identical to a word in another, simply because, in some instances, they overlap in meaning…

Everett concluded that the Pirahã'due south lack of numerals was part of a larger constellation of "gaps." Over the form of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Current Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he avant-garde a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by [linguist Edward] Sapir'due south cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that information technology has afflicted every aspect of the people's lives. Committed to an beingness in which only appreciable experience is existent, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not apply color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the give-and-take xibipío every bit a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett divers as annihilation that they tin can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. "When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone abroad but xibipío—'gone out of feel,' " Everett said. "They utilize the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light 'goes in and out of experience.' "

The tardily Dan Moonhawk Alford, a colleague of David Bohm and David Peat and a linguist who made a lifelong report of ethnic languages, explained the primal difference between ethnic and European languages (I can sense my friend Andrew Campbell grin every bit he reads this):

Indigenous languages are the key to indigenous thought and worldview — and…they are as different from our European view of reality every bit breakthrough is from the classical view of reality. Recently Leroy Little Bear told the participants in the 7th Bohmian/Ethnic Science Dialogue that there is no Blackfoot language, or Navajo language, in the European sense of vocabularies and wordlists — instead, at that place are nearly lxxx roots in Blackfoot [each of which stands for a kinesthetic prime of animate movement, as far as I tin tell], which are combined and recombined on the fly to describe what-is as accurately as possible.

To assistance you empathize this, take the word /Se?Se/ in Cheyenne, which by itself can mean 'duck' in English language. But when yous add /-novote/ to the stop of it, meaning 'goes down into a hole,' you don't accept a logical connexion of "duck goes down in pigsty" but rattlesnake! That'south because /Se?Se/ doesn't really mean 'duck' at all — information technology means the combined dry scraping audio and zigzag movement both the duck and the rattlesnake make as they're going away from you. Information technology's an issue of breathing motion which uniquely characterizes both the duck and the one that goes down in the hole that makes that same racket/movement.

This is a unique fashion of using man linguistic communication — a kinesthetic base of operations closer to Sign Language than to our more visual/verbal base. Amethyst First Rider has said on numerous occasions that when she says the simplest thing in English, like "The man is riding a horse," she gets pictures coming up in her head. Simply when she says the equivalent matter in Blackfoot, no pictures come up upwards in her head — but trunk feelings of motion!

I'm certain this is connected somehow to her other oft-made claim that no affair what it sounds similar when it's translated into English language, when they're speaking their own linguistic communication they're NOT using metaphor. Really, this is true considering the Indians are using categorization itself (like George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things as a part of speech in Dyrbal), while metaphor is a unlike kind of categorizing used extensively — some might say nearly exclusively — in Western European and other languages, and which they like to fancy is universal.

While all of us accept been subtly conditioned/brainwashed/socialized by our European language/culture complex to believe in the "things" of reality as beingness more than existent than the invisible connections betwixt them, valuing the dancers over the dancing, it'due south a highly important antidote and weigh to know that Native American and other indigenous peoples value the dancing over the dancers, believe that processes and interrelationships are more existent than the 'things' that grow out of them — that the concrete is an epiphenomenon of the not-concrete, and that cyclical timing is more than real than linear time.

Moonhawk wades into the Whorf/Chomsky debate and the whole issue of the connection betwixt language, culture and cognition in a set of pages online that Chris pointed me to. He moves beyond Whorf'southward linguistic relativity to define what he calls "quantum linguistics" — analogous to (and Moonhawk says, Einstein's inspiration for) the jump from Euclidean/Newtonian to relativistic quantum theory of matter. Citing Cheyenne instructor Sakej Youngblood Henderson he says:

Long ago, people and spirits and animals and plants all communicated the same way. Then something happened. Afterwards, we had to talk to each other in human spoken communication. But nosotros retained the Erstwhile Language for dreams, and for communicating with spirits and animals and plants.

Glenn Aparicio Parry, in his book based on the Bohmian Dialogues on meaning that involved several ethnic thinkers and linguists, wrote:

In the Blackfoot language, there are not nouns or verbs at all equally we usually describe them in relation to each other. Instead, linguistic pregnant is something like to events emerging out of a fluid, constantly moving interconnected flux, rather than discrete interactions between subject and object. The Blackfoot worldview of synergistic, interconnected human relationship is beyond the imagination of a Newtonian worldview, but much closer to a worldview of quantum entanglement or non-locality.

So where does all this become us? Some thoughts:

1. When we teach young children our European languages, are we doing them the terrible and irreversible disservice of imprisoning them in fourth dimension, by neurologically encoding in their brains a concept of scarce, death-fearful linear "clock" time that will forever lock them out of the present, out of Now Time?
2. As intrigued every bit we might be by the idea (concept) of a linguistic communication based on flow and relationship and not on "things", are nosotros adults, with our brains already fixed by the language/worldview we were brought upwardly with, deluding ourselves to believe we tin really imagine what that other language/worldview might be like? Is this like trying to understand a world with 13 dimensions (none of them temporal) fabricated of strings that accept no mass and just the probability of existence?
3. What tin can nosotros acquire of the commonality of indigenous and European language from the 8 agreements of the multi-cultural Bohm Dialogues?:
   1. Everything that exists vibrates.
   2. Everything is in flux.
   3. The office enfolds the whole.
   4. There is an implicate ("folded-in, entangled with itself") social club to the universe.
   5. The ecosphere is basically friendly.
   6. Nature can be taught new tricks. "Reminds me of Alan Watts talking virtually how the universe has had to learn how to go ever smaller and ever larger equally we probe information technology with microscopes and telescopes, receding ever further in the altitude as cocky observes itself."
   7. Breakthrough potential is spirit.
   8. Much of what exists is yep-yep both/and complementary.
4. If our modern language hobbles our ability to be part of, and appreciate, all-life-on-Globe, to be "the space through which stuff passes which we bear upon (as it passes) in hopefully useful ways" (with the "passing" and the "touching" being the essence of our living, not the "stuff" or the "we") — then how can we set aside that language and its terrible conceptions, and learn to simply vibrate, "flux-tuate", enfold, cocky-entangle, exist-a-office, complement, cocky-spirit-ize, and in so doing use linguistic communication every bit wild creatures (and to some extent ethnic human cultures, poets, musicians, artists and dreamers) do — to self-express our joy and discovery and curiosity, in useful and interesting means, without obsessing almost what Eliot called "the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings"?

Field of study for an interesting "dialogue" (which means etymologically "a speaking across" and opposite to popular misconception has nothing to do with "two"), perhaps. What do you think?

"What nosotros feel most has no name merely amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds."
— Jack Gilbert, The Forgotten Dialect of the Eye

ferrellcouspit1953.blogspot.com

Source: https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2010/04/29/does-our-language-restrict-what-and-how-we-think/

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